When people are poor in the city, there are still things for them to do; there are usually services and amenities, and if they don’t want them they can hang out on the streets with their friends. But in rural areas there is nothing. There may be a village hall, but they would have to share it with their grandparents, and it doesn’t matter how good your grandparents are, that’s not cool. In small villages kids can’t even hang out on the streets because when it goes dark, it goes really dark, and they need to see who they’re snogging.
If they want to head out to nearby towns or cities, well, the bus only goes through the village a couple of times during the day, and at night there are no buses. Young and old can be really isolated, and that isolation can lead to desperation. The week I arrived in the village there were two suicides and one death by accident with farming machinery, which was the major cause of fatalities in the area.
Despite those issues, I’m very glad I made this one big change in my life, even though it was a risk, and plenty of friends and family thought I was crazy. A few black friends thought it was great, but some people, like my mum, couldn’t understand it. She thought it was going backwards.
‘What you going there for?’ she asked, astonished. ‘You don’t know anyone. What if there’s an emergency? There’s no Coop!’ But other people I knew, white people, were also shocked, their disbelief somehow implying that it wasn’t my place – that I should be in a city.
There’s something a lot of people overlook, and that is the majority of people who are immigrants of African, Caribbean and Asian descent are not from cities. We’re stereotyped as city people when in fact most of us originated from rural places. Most Indians are not from Delhi; they’re from villages. If you look at the Punjab, it’s all farming land. Most Jamaicans who originally settled in the UK were not Kingstonians – they were from St Elizabeth, St Ann, St Catherine. It’s only in England that we’ve been put into cities because it’s where we could find work. When most of us go to the countries of our heritage, we go to a rural place.
Gardening – especially growing my own food – is now one of my greatest passions. I didn’t know a thing to start with, and at first I had to get someone to show me how to mow the lawn! But because I’m vegan I’m tapped into a network of vegan organic gardeners. Not long after moving to the countryside I was approached and asked to write a foreword for a book called The Vegan Book of Permaculture, published by Permanent Publications. And, in a nice bit of synchronicity, when I looked at the book I realised it was the one I needed to read.
A friend put me onto an organic gardener, who came and spent a day with me, and I learned a lot in a short space of time. He told me to order some ‘green manure’. Putting energy into your soil has to be your obsession if you are an organic gardener. The green manure plant takes energy from the sun and puts it back into the earth rather than using it to grow itself. It’s a way of giving the land a rest and rejuvenating it.
A lot of organic gardening is trial and error but I love it, even though it takes time. A neighbour who comes from a farming family gives me tips – and the county I live in is the biggest area in the UK for growing veg. So far I’ve successfully grown sweet potatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, garlic, onions, marrows, peppers, pumpkins and loads of tomatoes. I’ve even grown grapes. I like to make dishes like curries and stews, blending my homegrown veg with kidney beans, chickpeas or butter beans. I hardly ever have to go to a supermarket. And I listen to Gardeners’ Question Time more than you might imagine.
I remember the first meal I ate which I’d grown myself. I looked at my plate and was amazed. I got so emotional I had to call somebody. I got on Skype as I was eating. I was exclaiming: ‘See this potato, it was just a seed!’ I picked up something else: ‘I knew this when it was a clipping!’ It was the realisation that I was connecting with the land and nature in the most basic but rewarding way.
I think the way I live now is like a mixture of England and Jamaica, but mostly England. I love where I am. Sometimes I’ve closed the gate and not gone anywhere for two weeks. Normally that would mean a lack of exercise, but not for me. I’ve got a gym, a lawn, a sauna. I can communicate. If I want to be creative, I can go into my recording studio or my library. If I decide I don’t want to go out for three weeks, I can be completely self-sufficient. I’ve even dreamt of going off-grid and having solar panels. When I first moved to Lincolnshire there used to be power cuts, and that’s what gave me the idea. Maybe that’ll be my next step in self-sufficiency.
51
DE BOTTY BUSINESS
Of all my plays, the one I’m most proud of is De Botty Business, which toured in 2008. Most people wouldn’t think it possible to write a comedy about cancer, but when you’re using actors whose characters are speaking in Caribbean dialects, and being very physical and vocal, you cannot help but raise laughs with the target audience – in this case, black men of a certain age.
The play was commissioned by Prostate Cancer UK, a charity rather than a theatre company, and the aim was to get the message out there that middle-aged African-Caribbean men are three times more likely to suffer with prostate cancer than their white counterparts. This demographic is also often unwilling to get themselves checked out, as they fear the medical procedure for testing for the cancer involves digital anal penetration. In fact, a rectal inspection is often way down the line in the list of tests a doctor will do. Before that, there would be blood and urine tests. Research has found that men are more positive about getting checked out once they know this.
Our aim was to tour it in places where people who aren’t theatre-goers would see it – community centres, domino halls and barber shops – although it also played in Birmingham Rep and at the good old Hackney Empire. I wanted to make the central character a Rasta who inherits a barber shop. Now, a barber shop isn’t much use to a Rasta, who doesn’t believe in cutting hair, but the location is a recognised focal point of social exchange and gossip for black men the world over. So it was the ideal location in which to explore the issue. It was set in a barber shop, and would be performed in barber shops.
And it worked. The comedic element comes from the way that one character would repeat a myth about the issue, and then another character would dismiss that myth in true Caribbean style.
I wanted to tackle the issue of machismo. One Trinidadian character thinks having a finger up the bottom is a plot by the white man: ‘Nah man come put him finger up mi botty, choh! You know all dem white men are gay!’
I didn’t want the play to be dry with statistics, so issues and anxieties are thrashed out in a way that’s entertaining to an audience. And of course the play shows what happens if you ignore the warning signs by trying to preserve your masculine dignity. There are statistics, but the delivery is how real people in the community talk about things. So instead of a load of numbers, a guy might say, ‘A whole heap of people get dis.’ I didn’t want it to be worthy; I wanted the characters to be like real people I’ve known, speaking in no-holds-barred language. I wanted people laughing their heads off rather than being blinded with science.
Once I’d written the play, the charity arranged for the first audience to be prostate cancer doctors and researchers. Most were white European, a couple were Asian, all in suits. I watched as they started tuning into the dialect, and soon they were laughing. When it was done, I was told it was perfect. One doctor said, ‘This is exactly what you should be doing.’
I was really pleased. I really didn’t want the message to get bogged down with doom and gloom. And as I’d had it vetted by the doctors and researchers, I was also able to put in the latest findings that certain foods, such as cooked tomatoes, pomegranate and cranberry juice, has been found by some researchers to reduce the risk of getting the disease.
When it performed at the Hackney Empire, the audience included the great and the good of the entertainment industry, who filled the first few rows of the auditorium. At first I was nervous, seeing all those faces from TV, but when I sa
w them laughing I was so relieved. I wanted to put on a play that wasn’t arty, and in a way it was my most satisfying play. There was hardly any money in it, but I did it at a time in my career when I wasn’t writing very much because I was concentrating on touring and radio broadcasting. I’m very proud of it and I know it made a difference to exactly the people it was aimed at.
I later heard about a guy who said he’d started going to the toilet a few times every night and then he ‘remembered seeing Benjamin Zephaniah’s play’, and so went and got checked out and they caught his prostate cancer early enough to treat it.
I’ve come to realise that when you put your message out there as a poet or a playwright you won’t necessarily see first-hand the good you’re doing; your play performs somewhere and the audience sees it and disperses, but people out there can be changed by your work, and in the case of De Botty Business, there might have even been lives saved. You can’t do better than that.
52
FAREWELL, MY FRIENDS
On the morning of 25 June 2009 I was performing in schools around the Portsmouth area. I went back to my hotel at lunchtime to download the vegan chocolate cake that I’d hidden in a cool place. As I put the key card in the wall the room woke up and the voice in the TV set said, ‘Farah Fawcett, seventies pin-up girl and star of Charlie’s Angels, has died.’
I jumped in front of the television, where they were showing the famous poster of her smiling happily and dressed, or undressed, in a red swimsuit. I was never a fan of the programme, or her, but the music and the whole atmosphere of it brought those times back to me. I said something like ‘poor thing’, and then went out to meet up with a friend.
When I got back I put the rest of the cake into myself and lay in bed rubbing my bloated stomach and watching Question Time. That week, Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of France, announced he was setting up a commission to look at ways of restricting Muslim women wearing the burkha in public. For some very French reason he thought wearing such things shouldn’t be done in secular France.
On the show was the Tory Pauline Neville-Jones, who thought that in a democracy like ours the burkha should be banned. She was worried about teachers teaching children who could not see their faces. The other guests were Esther Rantzen, the Liberal Democrat Julia Goldsworthy and Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun newspaper. They were all getting worked up about politicians over-claiming expenses. After a bit of ranting and raving the audience in Newquay clapped and went home. I was about to turn the TV off when a newsreader made an unscheduled appearance, saying he had breaking news. He said Michael Jackson had died. I turned the television off and stared at the blank screen for a while. Then I turned it back on to check, and another reporter was saying Michael Jackson was dead.
I flopped back onto my bed and looked at my ceiling for a while. The first record I ever bought when I was a small kid was ‘Rockin’ Robin’ by the Jackson Five, with Michael taking the lead. For years Michael Jackson was a dependable voice, a solid black image on posters and TV screens, and although he wasn’t political there was something very inspiring about having a family that sang and lived (we thought) in such harmony; a family led by a small boy with a great voice.
I loved Michael Jackson, but I have to say I loved him when he was black. When he started all that monkeying around, having all those operations and strange relationships with women and children, I went off him. And I’m not forming my opinions by things I’ve seen in the media; my knowledge comes from elsewhere.
Three months before he died something came over me. I suddenly had an urge to get some of him, so I bought most of his CDs. I told myself to forget about all the weirdness and just check out his music – most of which was produced by Quincy Jones, and I loved Quincy Jones. I had recently purchased a wicked pair of powered speakers, which greatly enhanced my listening experience, and I was listening to lots of music I had liked in my past. Through these speakers I could hear things I had never heard before.
I didn’t want Jackson’s problems to come between me and the music, and I wasn’t let down. Suddenly I was singing ‘Thriller’ and ‘Billy Jean’ wherever I went, but still, every time I saw Michael I saw a confused drug addict who needed help. I used to feel so sorry for him, but I was angry with those around him that let him slip, slip – so much that he just slipped away.
As I lay in bed with the lights off, a text arrived. It was from a friend in Edinburgh telling me that the poet Swells had passed away. In the mid-1980s I did many gigs and a few tours with Swells, but over the years we had lost touch. From being a radical, angry and funny ranting poet, he had turned into a sports writer, in the US of A of all places – a change in direction that nobody saw coming.
I did a lot of thinking that night. Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Swells all seemed (in their very different ways) to represent my generation, and they all went within twenty-four hours of each other. Swells died of enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma, and the day before he left us he wrote an online blog where he compared the important differences between getting worked up about world poverty and getting angry because you’ve lost pieces of your jigsaw.
He wrote: ‘I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice-cold ginger ale.’ Swells had been ill for some time, and he saw his end coming, but we’re pretty sure he didn’t see the death of Michael Jackson coming. There was no way he could have known that MJ died a few hours before he did. Everyone knows the lyrics to ‘Blame It on the Boogie’. So it was quite spooky to read that Swells had finished his blog by saying: ‘When it comes to poor education, cultural deterioration and moral decline, me . . . I blame it on the sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.’
I grew up around a lot of death. When I was twelve years old a friend called Stephen Riley took a heroin overdose and killed himself. One of my friends stabbed another friend with a knife and killed him right in front of me outside a club. On 21 November 1974, two of my closest friends, Neil Marsh and Paul Davis, were killed when the IRA bombed the Tavern in the Town pub in Birmingham. I had lost other friends because of gang fights and tribal wars. So death was never far from me but, as I was getting older, I began to notice that many of my friends were dying of natural causes.
Musarat Ahmed, a close friend who I had mentored and counselled after a terrible childhood with an abusive father – and who had then been forced to marry her cousin, who had no love for her – was hit by cancer of the throat, then cancer of the tongue, and from the tongue it spread to other organs. She was a lover and writer of poetry, and tried to educate herself even though she was surrounded by people who expected her to be a passive, obedient housewife. She died a slow, painful death, but she told me that her dying was better than the life she had lived because no one was expecting anything of her, no one wanted her to work, and no one wanted sex with her. Most of all she was convinced she was going to a place of peace.
Terisa Meyer was someone I called my sauna partner. We were both addicted to saunas and, because I had one, she would often come round to my place so we could sit in the heat and just talk. Some of my friends were horrified and some were amazed that two grown people could sit in a sauna and chat about food and politics, but that’s all we did. Then one day she told me she had breast cancer. She put up a great fight but in the end the cancer took her.
When it came to British politicians, there was only one person I could truly trust and confide in, and that was Tony Benn. We had known each other since the days of Rock Against Racism; we campaigned together against apartheid, wars and unfair taxes. He was a man of true conviction, a great public speaker, and he became president of the Stop the War coalition from the year 2000, when he was already retired, characteristically saying he was leaving Parliament in order to spend more time on politics.
At first it was an inspiration simply to be on the same platform as him, but he eventual
ly became a great personal friend and mentor. He was always happy for me to talk things through with him, and it was inspiring to be sitting in the same room as him when he was working. For a sense of the kind of man he was, if you think about the lengths people go to, to get gongs and OBEs, well, Tony went to court to get rid of his hereditary peerage.
He was passionate about keeping alive the roots and history of the labour movement and was hailed by all political parties as a great parliamentarian. He never forgot the achievements made for the benefit of the masses by those such as Clement Attlee, when the Tory way would have been to keep them down at heel, begging their masters for handouts.
Last time I saw Tony Benn he was doing a ‘desert island poems’ slot at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2013. He’d chosen one of my poems as one of his ‘discs’. The organisers wanted him to read it on stage and, at that point, unbeknownst to Tony, I would appear. So it was all arranged. He started reading the poem and then I walked on, to the delight of the crowd and all concerned. When I came off stage I kissed him. He was very frail, and I knew it would be the last time I’d see him. He died on 14 March 2014, and when I heard the news I thought, Oh, there’s nobody like him there now, but then Corbyn came along, so there might be a fraction of hope for a non-Blairite future for the party. But there’ll never be another Tony Benn.
53
KUNG FU AND MEDITATIONS ON FUNKY CHINA
Back in the year 2000 I did a tour of clubs and schools in Hong Kong as part of my work with the British Council. When the performances were over I was asked if I wanted to go for a day trip into what people called mainland China. How I hate that term. I won’t go on about how the British stole Hong Kong (along with lots of other stuff) and then did a ninety-nine-year deal that was completely unfair to the Chinese. Or how hypocritical the British were in criticising ‘undemocratic’ China while at the same time denying citizens of Chinese origin the right to vote in the British bit of China.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 23