Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is a British writer and poet, born 15th April 1958 in Handsworth, Birmingham. His father was from Barbados and worked as a postman, and his mother was born in Jamaica and was a nurse. He is dyslexic and left school aged fourteen unable to properly read or write, although he had been writing and performing poetry from a young age and first performing poetry aged eleven at church. As a young man he served a prison sentence for burglary. Zephaniah is a performance poet, and his work is often described as dub poetry, which is a form of oral performance poetry that takes inspiration from Rastafarianism and the rhythms of reggae. Dub poetry is also sometimes performed to music. In an interview with Apples and Snakes, a spoken word poetry organisation, Zephaniah spoke about the desire of some poets to move away from the ‘dub’ label. He said that he sometimes finds this label restrictive and that he has ‘grown into a very diverse tree’ in terms of the scope and style of his work.
Growing up he said he was always interested in poetry, but he didn’t know it as poetry. He would call it playing with words and was interested in rhythm and rhyme. He has talked about how his mother had poetry but would never call herself a poet. She had grown up in an area of Jamaica where poetry had a function, and it would be used to pass down information such as recipes, family histories and political incidents. He has talked about how his poetry never used to be something serious, he was playing with words and found that girls in the playground liked it when he wrote poems about them. As he got older, experiences of racism and police brutality started to inform his poetry, and he would perform these poems in music clubs. He felt that these experiences were not being reflected in the media and that they needed to be told. He would write and perform about issues that were happening in the community. He has compared himself and other poets who were performing at the same time as him such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Levi Tafari to griots, who were storytellers in Western Africa who used poetry to pass down stories and histories. During his performances in the 70’s he would often experience power cuts, and so to keep the audience from leaving he would add jokes, political discussions and even impressions to his routines.
In 1979, aged twenty-two, he moved to London to widen his audience. He has said that at the time there were only a few theatres in Birmingham that would book a Black artist, and he had played all of them. Shortly after his move to London, his first book Pen Rhythm was published by Page One Books, who were a small East London publishing co-operative. They published Zephaniah at a time when larger publishing houses refused, as they felt that his poetry didn’t have an audience that would buy the books. Zephaniah worked and performed with Apples and Snakes, and Alternative Cabaret, a politically motivated collective of performers started by comedians Tony Allen and Alexei Sayle. As Zephaniah gained recognition his gigs were advertised in music magazines such as NME and Sounds, and his shows would range from performances with The Clash and The Wailers, to small sets for the Poetry Society. His poetry was broadcast on the BBC, and Zephaniah has talked about the day after he performed ‘Dis Policeman (Keeps Kicking Me to Death)’ (1982), that he couldn’t walk through town because so many people wanted to come up and talk to him. Zephaniah would use his performances as platforms to talk about political issues such as apartheid, and he encouraged his audiences to attend demonstrations. In 1991, over a period of twenty-two days, he toured and performed on every continent.
His poetry is often inspired by the world around him and his experiences of being British and Black. In an essay on his website, he describes how he lives ‘in two places, Britain and the world, and it is my duty to question and explore the state of justice in both of them’. His poems highlight domestic issues such as institutional racism, for example, poems in his collection Too Black, Too Strong (2001) are inspired by the ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings inquiry and the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He also addresses international issues, such as the occupation of Palestine in his collection Rasta Time in Palestine (1990). His poems are often also celebratory, his collection We Are Britain! (2002) is a portrait of twelve children living in Britain and celebrates the nation’s cultural diversity.
He published his first poetry collection for children in 1994, called Talking Turkeys. The collection was so popular that it had to go into emergency reprint within six weeks. He has since published a number of successful poetry books and novels aimed at young people including Wicked World! (2000) which is a collection of poems about different people, cultures, and nationalities around the world, and Refugee Boy (2017), a novel about a young teenage refugee from Ethiopia who is brought by his parents to live in London.
In 2003 he rejected an offer of appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He elaborated on his rejection in an article in the Guardian, stating that he is profoundly anti-empire. In the article, he wrote ‘Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word "empire"; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised’. In 2015 during his first visit to the National Eisteddfod, a music festival held in Wales, he called for Welsh and Cornish to be taught in schools. He commented there that ‘Hindi, Chinese and French are taught [in schools], so why not Welsh? And why not Cornish? They're part of our culture’.
Zephaniah has now received sixteen honorary doctorates from institutions such as the London South Bank University and the University of Birmingham. He was made a Doctor of Letters by the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) in 1999, and in 2002 he was made a Doctor of the University by the University of Staffordshire. In 2008 he was listed at number 48 of the Times Top 50 Post-War Poets. In 2011 he was the poet in residence at the Keats House in Hampstead, London. He regularly makes radio and television appearances to discuss poetry, art, and politics. He currently spends much of his time between the UK and China, but often travels across the world, working with many different political organisations and human and animal rights groups, and performing his poetry. In 2019 he published his autobiography titled The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah.
Resources~
BBC Article Call for Welsh and Cornish to be Taught in Schools