The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  What has given me most joy over the years is when new generations of children discover the poem, and the number of children who have performed it, many of them posting their performances online. This happens all year round, all over the world, but there’s always a noticeable spike around Christmas.

  The poem lives through them for sure.

  43

  MAYBE BABY

  Amina and I started to discuss children, but as far back as my rude boy days I’d realised I wasn’t making babies, so I told her I was pretty sure I couldn’t have any. Back in Birmingham there were times when me and my friends seemed to exchange girlfriends, or looking at it from the other side, our girlfriends were exchanging us, and many of them were getting pregnant, but none of them were getting pregnant by me. I told Amina all this and we decided I should go and get tested.

  Over the course of a couple of months I went through many tests and, sadly, all the results came back negative. I knew of men who had a low sperm count, but I had a no sperm count. Even though I was expecting it, it was still an emotionally difficult time. I was keener than Amina to have a child, I had always loved children, but now I suddenly felt a big-time urge to have my own. I would walk in the park and watch men playing with their kids and feel a kind of paternal jealousy. It wasn’t rational; I knew I shouldn’t be feeling jealous, but when I watched men passing on skills to their little ones I wanted someone to pass mine onto as well. I wanted to recite my poems to my babies.

  I started visiting friends who had kids just so I could play with them; I even began to fantasise about Amina and me living in some kind of domestic bliss in a revolutionary household with a large family. I remembered people saying when I was small how special our family was because we had two sets of twins. I used to say then that I wanted nine kids, but with just three pregnancies; three sets of triplets would do it. I grew out of that idea when I learned now much childbearing takes out of women, but still, the need to be the daddy was urgent. Actually it was overwhelming and it dominated my thoughts. Amina wasn’t feeling the same, but I warned her that her time would come.

  We began looking into adopting, and when we first made enquires the agencies were over the moon that we’d approached them. It’s always a struggle for them to find homes for kids; it’s hard for white kids, hard for black kids, hard for kids who have dual black and white ancestry, but even harder for kids who are mixed black and Asian, so agencies welcomed us and at the same time wanted to use my public profile to publicise the need for people to come forward and adopt these kids.

  In the end we went with an agency in north London. Our social worker, an Australian, was a great guy. He began to take us through the process, which is a long, difficult rigmarole that involves lots of probing questions and checks to make sure the couple are suitable to be parents. As part of the process the social workers had to look at our police records. I told them I had a long record – one that listed violence against police officers and other such serious offences, but he said because my years of offending were such a long time ago, the offences would be wiped.

  He sent off my details to be checked, but when the results came back there was one conviction that meant I wouldn’t be able to adopt. It all went back to that time when Trevor walked free from court and I teased the cop who’d had a grudge against me and who’d framed me using the sex worker. The one I’d called a dirty Babylon and a loser. Yes, that case had come back to haunt me.

  The Home Office had wiped all my other offences, but the reason they couldn’t wipe this charge was because they needed to prove that the girl I’d allegedly robbed was over eighteen. If she had been under eighteen at the time of the offence, it would be seen as a crime against a child. Of course, there was no record of her.

  We tried to find her from the court records, but we couldn’t find any record of anyone who had lived in Birmingham with her name, and the street where she was supposed to have lived did not and had never existed. I also found out that the two officers involved in my arrest were now in prison for importing marijuana.

  I spoke for a long time to Lenny Henry and Dawn French, who around this time adopted their child, and they recommended a solicitor who they thought might be able to help me. He suggested I go back to court and challenge the original conviction, get the case reviewed and recorded as a miscarriage of justice. He warned me that it would be a long, hard process that could take a couple of years, and his charges were in the hundreds of pounds per hour ballpark. We thought about it and I decided not to pursue it. My social worker told me he had to drop the case; we could not be given approval, and that was the end of that.

  Not long afterwards, at the end of 1995, Mark Fielder, a BBC producer, approached us asking if we would participate in a TV programme about couples that couldn’t have children. I said yes. Amina hesitated – she was never keen on being on screen with me – but eventually she agreed and the BBC asked me what I’d like to do in the programme. My answer was immediate. I’d seen Professor Robert Winston on TV and had heard he was the best in the country when it came to reproductive medicine, so I said I wanted him to work with me. He came on board straight away and we started filming.

  It was the kind of documentary that followed me as I went through the process of exploring why I was infertile. Camera crews followed Amina and me as I did my tests and interacted with Robert who, by the end of the programme, only confirmed what I already knew – I had what I called a ‘no sperm count’, or what he called azoospermia. I would never have children.

  I’d been put through the emotional wringer again, this time in front of the entire nation. It caused me a lot of distress and ended our hopes of ever having children, but it got a lot of other infertile black men talking. Many of them wrote to me, many of them cried to me, and I realised I had touched on something the black community was unwilling to confront. Not only did I become a champion for that cause, I also started a campaign to encourage black men to donate sperm, something I had never dreamed I’d end up doing when I was performing poetry on the streets of Handsworth.

  There was no change in my condition, but the documentary was very informative and did help a lot of people. But there was a rather sour ending. At the end of the programme, before the credits rolled, Robert Winston said he was doing research and that I should get all my notes sent to him because he thought he might be able to help me further along the line. This began to give me renewed hope. Straight away I got my doctor to send my notes over to him, but there was no reply. I tried to call him, but he didn’t return my call. I got so desperate that the BBC producer wrote to him, reminding him that he’d made a promise to me that had broadcasted to millions of viewers, but still no reply.

  I never heard from Robert Winston again. I was told by people who knew him (and an ex-member of his staff) that he was very good at getting publicity, and he probably made the promise to impress other people working in this field. I don’t know, and I probably never will because he wouldn’t let me get near him. At the Radio 4 Woman’s Hour fiftieth birthday party in 1996, I made a point of finding him and standing next to him, but he took his champagne, and his meat on a stick, and slid away from me. The programme gave hope to others, but it ended up causing me more distress by offering me false hope.

  Most of the letters I received after the broadcast started with the person begging me not to reveal their identity – such was the fear of them being ‘found out’ by people in their community. They would then go on to outline how they grew up thinking everything was okay, until they noticed they weren’t fathering children when their friends were. Very few suffered silently; most took drastic measures or simply told lies to cover up their infertility.

  I was horrified by what some of these men had done to appear ‘normal’, and I was surprised at the diversity of people contacting me. They ranged from gangsters to religious people, and from poets to well-known television personalities. Most thought that as black men who looked fit and healthy they had to live up to the image of the v
irile male. Although most of them functioned normally physically, they would still associate fertility with virility.

  Men stopped me in the street and took me into shop doorways to talk. They waited for me at stage doors after concerts; they pretended they had poems they wanted me to see in order to get access to me, and one even flew from England to Finland to see me when he heard I was performing there. In terms of negative feedback from the community, there was but one. Shortly after the programme aired, a well-known black personality said I should be ashamed of myself; black men should not talk about these things in public.

  44

  A NOVEL IDEA

  Like most people in the English-speaking world (and probably beyond), I’d heard that everyone had a novel in them. I too may have had one, but I wasn’t thinking of writing one. When I won the BBC Young Playwright of the Year Award in 1998, the producer Jeremy Mortimer kept telling me I must write a novel. I said yes to keep him happy, but didn’t think seriously about it until Emma Matthewson came into my life.

  Emma had been my editor at Puffin, and through her I learned how important editors are. She could read a poem with a child’s mind, and she taught me how to use constructive criticism to my advantage, but she also taught me how to stand my ground when necessary. Emma was a rock. I had by now done three books with her at Puffin, then suddenly she went to Bloomsbury. She was going to a job she wanted, which was cool, but I was losing her, which was bad. After working with Emma I felt that my key relationship with a publisher was with the editor, rather than the contracts department. This was before I had an agent. So when my editor moved, I felt my partner in rhyme had deserted me.

  But it wasn’t long after Emma joined Bloomsbury that she asked me if I would consider writing a novel for teenagers. She had spent many hours listening to me tell her stories about myself as a teenager, and she knew I had a strong empathy with young people, but I wasn’t sure that meant I could write a novel for them. I told her I’d think about it.

  A few weeks later I found myself in Ramallah, in Palestine, where I was touring with a great Palestinian poet called Mahmoud Darwish and other poets from the region. With us there was a British poet and translator called Sarah Maguire. Sarah had been a friend of mine for years, and over that time we had given each other advice on various matters, so I trusted her. She was one of a large group of poets who think we should stick to poetry, and that writing a novel is like selling out.

  I told Sarah about Emma’s offer and asked what she thought. She said: ‘You go back there, Benjamin, and stand in front of her, stamp your feet and tell her you’re a poet and not a novelist.’

  So I did. I went back to see Emma, and although I didn’t stamp my feet (I just placed them gently on the ground), I said, ‘I’m a poet, not a novelist. I write poems, not novels.’

  Emma heard me out and then smiled. She said: ‘Okay, Benjamin, here’s a cheque. Go away, write a couple of chapters, and if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry, keep the money and forget it. But if you like what you’ve done, then carry on.’

  I’d often been told I had it in me to write a novel, and other people had watched me entertaining their children, but what really persuaded me wasn’t the lack of black authors generally, but the lack of black authors writing for young people. I felt there was a need to write about issues concerning black youth, and more importantly that young people needed to see black writers on the bookshelves of their school libraries.

  I had nothing to lose, so I decided to give it a try.

  Word began to get round that I was doing this, and I became acutely aware that many people were expecting me to write a ‘black novel’ – one set in Brixton, Moss Side or Handsworth; one that would have obvious connections to my poetry and was at least a little autobiographical, but I wanted my first novel to take me into a different world. It didn’t need to be immediately identifiable as having come from a black writer, and it didn’t need to be set in the black underworld.

  However, I did want to write about discrimination, so instead of writing about racial discrimination or sexual discrimination, as I had been doing for most of my life, I came up with the concept of facial discrimination, and the story slowly developed. The main character in the book, called Face, is Martin, a good-looking fourteen-year-old white boy who wants to be an actor and model, and seems to have everything going for him until he suffers severe injuries in a car crash and is terribly scarred. Then his life and outlook change forever. His face is no longer what the acting world needs; he isn’t going to work as a model, for sure, and his friends change. Most importantly he learns not to judge people by their looks.

  Normally the time spent writing a poem from beginning to end isn’t too long, but I suddenly found that I was living with characters I’d invented. I might be standing at a bus stop and I’d start wondering what a character would be thinking. A woman might smile at me (that happens from time to time), and I would ask myself, would she have smiled if my face was disfigured? I would go into a shop and wonder what a particular character might buy. I began to inhabit the world I was creating.

  Before I started writing Face I used to listen to white, middle-class writers on Radio 4 talking about how their characters would take over and walk into rooms and places without their permission. I would mock them and think them deluded, but then it started happening to me. I became my book, obsessed with everything from the way my characters thought to the way they breathed. It was a beautiful torment, a creative madness I would come to crave.

  Officially my novels were for teenagers – well, that’s how they were marketed – but deep down there was a lot in them that I also wanted to say to adults. Teenagers knew a lot about what I was writing about, so I wanted old adults to look into the world of young adults. I’m amazed at how quickly adults forget they were children. It’s as if after they’ve outgrown their childhoods they get envious of the next generation and so blame them for all society’s ills and curse and scorn them for having young fun.

  In twenty-first-century Britain it’s unacceptable to say, ‘I hate black people’ or ‘I hate white people’; you cannot go around saying you hate someone because they are disabled, gay, straight, dyslexic or even eccentric, but somehow it’s okay to say, ‘I hate kids.’ Posh people say it at dinner parties, sexy people say it to sound forever sexy and comedians say it to sound funny. We can’t all be black, white, gay or straight; we can’t all be posh, sexy, funny, dyslexic or eccentric, but we were all once kids. Can we really hate our young selves that much?

  The response to Face exceeded expectations – well, they exceeded mine – and the publisher was pleased too. When I began to write it I thought it would be my one and only novel, and when it was done I thought, Cool, I got away with it! But an excited Emma came back to me with the sales figures, others began comparing me to all these big names in children’s literature, and my readers started asking for more. Emma said I should get an agent, so I did, and then I got to work on my second novel, Refugee Boy.

  Again, I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old. This time I created the character of a young man who has just left a war situation in Ethiopia and moved to a strange country called England. It struck me that most people thought of refugees as adults, and I could understand why. In news reports the cameras usually focus on the grown-ups, and the big questions are always about whether they are ‘real’ or bogus, and what to do with them. But I would watch the children they had in tow, and I’d always wonder how they coped with what was happening to them.

  I knew what it felt like to go from city to city, but what would it feel like to go from country to country? Kids need friends and family; they like to play, and they like stability, so what would it be like to have those things taken away, or to have seen war and brutality at such a young age? These were the questions I wanted to explore in Refugee Boy.

  I didn’t turn my back on poetry, as some people feared; I began to appreciate it even more. I read a lot more, and even f
ound myself doing a residency. It started with a guy called Chris Mead, who was the director at The Poetry Society. He had the idea of placing me with the International Red Cross. I was asked to do an interview with them, which I did, but during the conversation I began to interview them. For me, the biggest issue was about neutrality. When I asked them how far they took this principle they told me it was absolute.

  I understood how they needed to assure all parties they would stay neutral if they were to be allowed to work in war zones, but I told them that if I saw an atrocity being committed, or knew for sure who had committed any such act, I would have to speak out. I understood them as an institution but I also knew me as an individual, and so I said, ‘This is not going to happen.’

  Chris Mead wasn’t put off by this; in fact it inspired him to think again. We talked about the possibility of me being a writer in residence in a police station, which I thought was a good idea, but we went with a residency at Tooks Chambers, a legal firm headed up by Michael Mansfield QC. Michael and his family was already like family to me. I can’t remember how I first met them – I’m sure it had something to do with campaigning work, or trying to get someone out of jail – but I do know that we became very close over the years, and I have a special place in my heart for Freddy, Michael and Yvette’s son. I watched him grow up to become a deeply caring and creative poet, rapper and teacher.

  The placement at Tooks Chambers was just right. I already knew most of the team there, and I was familiar with the work they did, but being attached to them gave me a much deeper insight into legal processes. Having been in court myself a few times, it wasn’t strange territory for me, but being in court as a creative person provides a unique opportunity to express the emotional aspects of what actually takes place.

  I gave a poetry reading to mark the end of my residency. Michael Mansfield sat behind me, Doreen Lawrence stood at the side of me, and many barristers stood in front of me. Most people knew Doreen as the mother of a murdered young black man called Stephen Lawrence, but I knew her as a lover of art and poetry. That other stuff was put upon her by the evil that men do.