Poetry politics pride

He’s the new professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Brunel University. But he graduated from a very different type of university. Benjamin Zephaniah talks to Ian Macrae about his poetic and political awakenings

The concept of journey – as applied for instance to every would-be pop star on X Factor – is so overused these days as to have become a cliché.

Even so, it has to be acknowledged that Benjamin Zephaniah’s odyssey from dyslexic boy excluded from school to the professorial chair of Poetry and Creative Writing at Brunel University has something of the remarkable about it. Or rather it would have if Benjamin himself was not so karmic in his acceptance that this just might very well be where he was going to end up.

That’s not to imply that he takes it all for granted, or worse still that he exhibits anything like the sense of entitlement you might find in those who started out from a rather better place.

“I was a rioter once.”

Unsurprisingly with this most political of poets we start with last Summer’s riots.

“But if you asked me why I was rioting, I could tell you. It was the housing conditions we were living in; it was the way we were policed, the way that the police were protecting the National Front; lots of other social issues.”

And for people from his ethnic, class and cultural background, the social melee of the 1970s, followed by the political strictures and economic disenfranchisement of the Thatcher years gave political protest more of an edge then than it has now.

Of the young people who took to the streets earlier this year, Benjamin says: “There are political reasons why they’re there, but they’re not really aware of them.

“Underneath it all there are some serious issues. But one of the [problems] is that different people think there are so many answers to the same question. It’s about absent fathers, some people say. And other people say, no it’s about youth unemployment.

“But if you got ten rioters and put them in a room together, you’d find they were there for different reasons. One could be there because he was hungry or wanted to get stuff. Another could be there because he’s got nobody to follow except his role model who’s the guy who wants to get stuff. Another could be there because he’s just on the wrong side of town and actually wants to be a professor of creative writing. There is no one set of answers”.

He believes that the Blair years have politically anaesthetized growing numbers of people. But for himself, there’s a growing sense of dissatisfaction and disillusion.

“What’s happened to me over the years is that I’ve really lost faith in mainstream politics. I’m getting older. I’m told I’m going to get more conservative and care less about being on the streets and demonstrating. Whereas, actually, I’m getting angrier.”

If asked directly, he now describes himself as an anarchist. But by that he doesn’t mean he’s in favour of chaos resulting from the demolition of state and government. It’s a more subtle form of anarchy.

“Never mind the police, we’ve got to organise ourselves in our own little communities and do what’s good for us.”

In respect of the current place of disabled people, and the political climate within our community, he looks back to the days of direct action.

“I remember those times when disabled people were chaining themselves to buildings, or a gathering of wheelchairs in Trafalgar Square. I just don’t know if those things have gone out of favour. It’s difficult for me to say because I feel that’s the thing to do.

“Disabled people are really going to feel these cuts that are coming through. And I’m someone who thinks we’ve gained a lot from direct action.

“But I’m told that things like e-petitions are big now. And I do notice it in the arts. A long time ago, if something happened, I could call Alexei Sayle and we’d have a demonstration the next day with artists on the platform. Now you call them and they say, ‘Oh email me a petition”. He laughs.

So what about that personal journey of his. How did he get from being a burglar from the Handsworth district of Birmingham to being named by The Sunday Times as one of the 50 most important writers of the 20th century and ultimately to the professorship he now occupies?

“When I used to burgle – apart from the very early days, doing my apprenticeship – I was a bit of a Robin Hood character. You know, rob from the rich and distribute amongst the poor: or certainly sell off at a cheaper rate amongst the poor.

“I was angry with society, and I was certainly angry with the rich.

“Once I realised that robbing houses wasn’t going to change the world, I suppose that was when I got a political consciousness.”

It was in prison that his political consciousness began to fully awaken.

“I realised that my criminal activity wasn’t revolutionary at all. And I started to think about revolution and that I was no good in prison. What I had to do was stay out and become an activist.

“There were two main things that gave him the space and time to reach this conclusion. One was the effect on his ability to read which his dyslexia brought about. The other was a simple lack of material which would have inspired him to even give reading a go.

“In those days we didn’t have prison libraries. We were allowed two sorts of reading, the Bible and porn. And I remember just doing a lot of thinking. Looking at the lifers and thinking do I want to end up like that? Asking, why is this prison segregated into blacks and whites? Why are all the IRA prisoners kept separate downstairs? And I just started to put it all together.”

There was one incident which, for Benjamin, showed the true manifestation of the fruits of that political awakening.

“When you leave prison, some of the officers – the screws, we called them – would play a little game with you. When you were leaving, they’d say, ‘I’ll give you six months, I’ll give you a year and you’ll be back’. One guy said this to me and, this once, I said, yes, I might be back, but next time it’ll be political.”

Once that flame was lit, once his political hunger was established, it wasn’t through reading Karl Marx or Tariq Ali that he found sustenance. It came through music, and, through reggae in particular.

“It was like reading books. I learned about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King by listening to reggae. I learned about problems with policing in Jamaica by listening to reggae. Not reading because I was just so badly dyslexic.”

But there are those who would believe that the seeds of that political appetite were rooted much further back in his earlier encounters with a formal education system which had no time for boys, particularly if they were black boys with a bit of attitude, who showed no ability – or was it inclination – for reading. Benjamin knows that also there was precious little knowledge that a condition such as dyslexia even existed.

“I cannot remember the word dyslexia ever being talked about. I don’t know if it was acknowledged or known but we certainly didn’t hear about it and none of us were tested for it.”

This inevitably lead to frustration and, ultimately, alienation.

“I remember a teacher giving me a poem by Shelley and saying, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes. Tell me what it’s about’. I was struggling to read it and when he came back he just said ‘you silly boy, go and stand in the corner’. It happens to be one of my favourite poems of all time now.”

Other teachers took what they probably regarded as a more liberal, if equally judgemental and unhelpful approach.

“I remember being in class and struggling with my reading, and a teacher coming up to me and saying – now remember, I’m an eleven, twelve year-old boy – ‘Well’, (and I think this is more to do with race than dyslexia maybe), ‘we can’t all be clever people, but you people are really good at sport. Why don’t you go out and play football.’ And I thought I was getting off lightly. But I should have been pushed like other kids. I should have been told to buckle down and think about it.”

But incidents like this didn’t necessarily leave Benjamin with a sense of being inferior. In fact, he’s always seemed to have a clear sense of his own ability and what it could lead to.

“I thought that I was clever and they just didn’t get it. When it came to poetry and teachers telling me that I’m not intelligent because I didn’t read it well, in the playground, or at home, I could perform poems for ever. It was almost as if there were two parallel worlds, a world in school and a world out of school.”

Later on, his political awareness would be sharpened and enhanced by encounters with black consciousness poets such as Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets. Meanwhile his more literary appetites continued to be fed by reggae.

“(Bob) Marley’s music was really a radio-friendly kind of rock-inspired reggae. but I loved the words. That’s why I loved Bob Marley.

“When I was creating my poetry, I was really in a world of my own. But I remember seeing Linton Kwesi Johnson and thinking, wow! He’s just like me!”

There were connections too with the white British so-called punk poets like John Cooper Clarke and Attila the Stockbroker.

“There’s a connection in the same way that punk and reggae are connected. It was almost like a political connection. It was all about the council estates we were living on, the messages we had to say. Because the police were stopping the punks as much as they were stopping black people.”

So on this journey, while Benjamin Zephaniah may have been deflected from reaching his destination directly by taking the path into crime, it was that diversion which would eventually be his route to fulfillment.

A move to London in the early 80s meant he was in the right place for the launch of Channel 4 which would mean a TV appearance performing his work within a year.

Records, live performances and books of poems followed including work for children. And now here he is part of the literary establishment. But it’s very much on his own terms.

So does Brunel University’s newest professor still hold out hope for the revolution?

“Yes, I do. Because in the end, we’ve got to find new ways of relating to each other. We’ve got to start thinking about the value of things, not the price of things.”