In case you were still wondering — no, Benjamin Zephaniah has not changed his
mind about the role of Poet Laureate. After ten years of service, Andrew
Motion stepped down this week; even as we go to press, the Culture
Secretary, Andy Burnham, is gearing up to announce a successor. One thing is
certain though: it won’t be Zephaniah. “They could throw a million pounds at
it, and I would still say no!” he tells me, in his agent’s offices in Soho,
Central London. “It’s an antiquated role, and it’s anti what a poet should
be doing. A poet should be a free agent; free to criticise the Royal Family
even.”
Zephaniah made it clear that he would never be laureate as early as 1999, in Bought
and Sold, a poem about the corrosive effect of “Smart big awards and
prize money”: “Don’t take my word, go check the verse / Cause every laureate
gets worse”. He turned down an OBE in 2003, because of the word “Empire”
still stuck in the medal. But he is such a popular, charismatic poet that
people will not let sleeping dogs lie: “They say, ‘You’re already the
people’s laureate — why not make it official?’ F*** off! Leave me alone! I
just want to be a poet! I discovered the other day that the bookies have me
at 20 to 1 to be laureate, and then I saw somebody write on a website that
he had bet on me. That was crazy — I’ve ruled myself out! I feel like
personally offering this person a refund.”
And yet, if, as Motion suggests, the laureate should be a passionate
ambassador as well as a world-class poet, Zephaniah fits the bill perfectly
— his latest initiative, the poetry reciting championship Off by
Heart, is proof. He is quick to point out, though, that this kind
of evangelism is not the sole preserve of the laureate: “Andrew Motion might
think it’s very radical to bring poetry to the people, but I’ve been doing
this my whole life, since starting up poetry gigs and slams in London in the
1980s. That’s my mission, and I don’t need a royal stamp — in fact that kind
of endorsement would hinder it.”
Judging Off by Heart — which involves contestants from 1,500 schools
and culminates in a public recitation in Oxford and a 90-minute film
revealing the winner, to be screened on BBC Two this month — is part of that
mission. I ask Dr Zephaniah — he holds more honorary doctorates than you can
count on the fingers of both hands — whether he thinks that the memorising
and reciting of poetry is an endangered art. As a matter of fact, he
doesn’t.
“There is a school of thought that says that young people are not memorising
poetry any more, that they’re not teaching it in school like they used to —
and I think that is true, to a certain extent.” His tone is measured and
careful now, as if he does not want to cause offence. But then he becomes
more animated. “But that’s not the end of the world,” he says. “Now more
kids are memorising their own poetry. They may not be doing it in the
classroom, but in the playground they’re rapping to each other, doing poems
for each other, they’re chatting up girls and guys by dropping them lyrics.
“A long time ago, when most people were illiterate, more people memorised
poetry. They had to. The irony is that having education and books made us
memorise poetry less. The oral tradition in Britain has died because of
publishing and formal education. What we should be excited about, and what
the statistics don’t reflect, is the number of kids who say, ‘I want to tell
you about my life in Hackney, and here’s my rhyme,’ the kids who go to
poetry slams. You can go any night of the week to venues in London,
Manchester, Birmingham; you can see them having competitions and freestyling
— and, yeah, some of it’s not great poetry, but it’s their lives. It’s
relevant to them. And out of it you’ll get some good poets of the future.”
Zephaniah is passionate about the causes he believes in — whether literature,
political equality or animal rights — but his conviction is distinguished by
that rare quality, hope for humanity. Born of Jamaican parents in Birmingham
51 years ago, Zephaniah came to public notice at 22 with his first book, Pen
Rhythm — he was one of the poets who flourished outside formal
education, having thrown in the towel at 13. But by that time he had been
performing his own work in public for nearly three years; by 15 he was well
known in his home patch of Handsworth as a young poet who would speak out
about issues affecting his community.
His work erases the boundaries between poetry and music; Tam Lyn (retold),
his version of the great ballad Tam Lin — recorded with The Imagined
Village and Eliza Carthy — won a Hancock Award last year; he was the first
person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley. This was a
musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, who heard it in prison — and soon after
his release he requested a meeting with Zephaniah, which resulted in the
poet working with children in South African townships and hosting the
President’s Two Nations concert at the Albert Hall in July 1996.
Zephaniah has published poetry books for children (Talking Turkeys was
the first) and adults (Too Black, Too Strong in 2001; We are
Britain the year after). Recently his career as a novelist for teenagers
has taken off: Face was the first, in 1999; Teacher’s Dead
appeared two years ago. He has been a campaigner for police reform since one
of his cousins, Michael Powell, died in police custody in 2003. He has
travelled Britain speaking to audiences of all ages and all classes; he has
lived around the world — he now spends part of every year in China. He
believes that anything is possible as long as people are willing to talk to
each other.
When I ask him why he wanted to live in China his reasoning is clear. “It was
wanting to go somewhere that I’d heard so much propaganda about and find out
what it was really like. I remember when I was younger being told that
Russia was our enemy, and I just got on a plane one day and went to Moscow.
I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to talk to housewives and pickpockets
and just everybody — and see why they hated us. And I found out that they
didn’t hate us, they just wanted to get on with their lives. I’ll never
forget talking to one woman, and saying, ‘Come on, what about your bread
queues’ — this was in the 1980s — and she got up and brought back a picture
from a newspaper and I thought it was a bread queue. I said, ‘Yeah, there it
is!’ And she said, ‘No, that’s your dole queue.’
“When I got to China I found I was being challenged in really interesting
ways. For instance, I always believed that everybody in China had only one
child. But I kept meeting people with six children. And it’s challenging
being a vegan in China, like I am — but the best vegan restaurant I’ve come
across in the world is in Beijing.”
But surely we’re all interested in China now? He sighs. “I think one of the
saddest things about the way we’re engaging with China is that it’s all
about capitalism, it’s all about making money. Of course we get a bit
frustrated when they do capitalism better than us! But it’s not really about
trying to understand them. I knew Poland very well and part of the old
Soviet Union, and I saw them going, ‘Yes, we are free, capitalism, wow!’ But
now I see them going, ‘Hmmm . . . not everything in capitalism is so good’.”
Zephaniah is no old-fashioned Marxist. He’s resistant to any ideology, even
multiculturalism. The problem with multiculturalism, he says, is that “it’s
got so tangled up with race, now, and the war on terrorism and Muslim
culture, that we’ve forgotten that multiculturalism was in Britain a long
time before black people got here. The culture in Lincolnshire was very
different from the culture in Devonshire or Cheshire — and then there were
the Huguenots, the Angles and the Saxons and the Celts . . . ”
Lincolnshire is where he lives when he’s not touring or in China. Now it’s a
magnet for people from Eastern Europe. “It’s interesting that people talk to
me about these people like I’m not a foreigner,” he says. “Like,
‘What do you think about all these foreigners coming and working in our
fields?’ You know, they’re like the people of my mother’s generation. My
mother and her sister saw a poster advertising jobs in England — and my
mother said, ‘I’m going,’ and her sister said, ‘I won’t, that country’s too
cold!’ And that’s why I’m here and my cousins are in Jamaica.
“That’s happening now with people in the countryside. The Government is
telling us to eat locally grown fruit and vegetables. But if it’s locally
grown someone has to pick it. Young kids in this country are watching
television, they’re watching people in bands, they are watching people
working in IT, and they want some of that. When you say, ‘Do you want to go
and pick potatoes?’ They go, ‘Do I f***! No way.’ ”
I am not surprised by how incisive he is, whether he’s talking about
immigrants or the G20 protests (“Anyone who’s been on a demonstration will
know that the only thing that’s unusual about what happened at the G20 is
that people caught it on camera”); I am, however, surprised at how
self-deprecating he is. “Let me be really frank,” he says at one point. “I’m
not a very intelligent person. Honestly. I don’t consider myself an
intellectual. What I can do, I think, quite well, is express my experience
and go see how other people are living and say something that will connect
with them — sometimes. And the only way that I’ve been able to learn is by
travelling and by talking to people . . . And the people I most want to talk
to are the people who don’t agree with me. I have no problem in sitting down
and talking to the BNP. When I see somebody who’s a member of the BNP, who
wants all black people to go home, I think, ‘What got you there?’ I suppose
deep down I want to say, ‘I’m as angry as you, you know. You can join me. We
can do this better together, I want to try to get to this point’.”
I wonder what he makes of Barack Obama — whether he thinks we’ll have a black
prime minister. “I find it really interesting when people here jump up and
down and say, ‘Great, Barack Obama,’ and I say — ‘But we couldn’t do it
here, could we?’ We could have a black prime minister; but we couldn’t have
a black head of state, because our head of state is hereditary.” In any
case, he can’t see any likely candidates. “I think a black PM is possible,
but not with this lot. Just like in the States, it wasn’t Jesse Jackson who
made it — it was someone who could get rid of that whole baggage and come
with a fresh perspective. The thing about Obama being black, yes, I
celebrated for an hour or two, but after that I didn’t really care. I don’t
care what colour the person is, what gender they are — I just want them to
bloody stop fighting. Stop thinking they can bomb their way to peace. But
no, I didn’t think in my lifetime I’d see a black president in the States, I
must say.”
There is a restlessness about Zephaniah that is part of his appeal; it is an
expression of his curiosity. “I feel I am a British griot,” he says, using
the West African term for the travelling poet who is the repository of a
culture’s tradition. “I feel my job is to go from city to city being a kind
of alternative newscaster, starting debates, getting people to think.
Connecting with people in a different way to the mainstream propaganda
machine. And trying to do it in a way that certainly, when I’m on stage
performing, is entertaining.
“I know you’re not meant to say that, but I don’t have a problem with it. I
think if someone has paid £10 or £15 to come to see me, when they could be
having sex or ramraiding or committing credit card fraud, I should give them
something that isn’t just standard boring poet reading from a book. I should
be able to make it come alive.”
I leave our meeting simply hoping that the primary schoolkids who learnt Daffodils
by heart will take the next step and see Zephaniah make his own work — and
our sense of possibility — come alive.
Off by Heart is part of the BBC’s Poetry Season and will be broadcast
on BBC Two, May 25, 9pm.
www.benjaminzephaniah.com
