“Poet, writer, lyricist, musician and naughty boy,” is how Benjamin Zephaniah, who died today aged 65, described himself on his website. He was the author of 30 books of poetry, stories for adults, teens and children, and nonfiction, as well as several plays. Then there was his work as a musician and sometime actor. But in his memoir The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, published to celebrate his 60th birthday in 2018, he listed one of his greatest achievements as reaching 30 “without being shot”.
Indeed, it is remarkable that a boy who left school at 13 and ended up in prison should become a national treasure, loved for his irreverent yet often deeply serious and political poetry and performances; such an establishment figure (a phrase he would have hated) that his work is part of the curriculum, he hosted a concert for Nelson Mandela at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996, and he was offered an OBE in 2003, which he declined with characteristic aplomb. “No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire.”
A Rastafarian, teetotal vegan who grew his own vegetables, loved martial arts and music (he made a record with Sinéad O’Connor), as well as a self-proclaimed anarchist and lifelong campaigner, Zephaniah lived a life full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The eldest of nine children, he was born in 1958 in Handsworth, Birmingham. His parents had emigrated from the Caribbean in the 1950s – his father was a postman from Barbados; his mother a nurse from Jamaica. “It was all poverty, even the white people,” he said of his childhood on Desert Island Discs in 1997. “It bonded the community.” His father was violent, beating him and his mother, which he would later write about in his BBC radio play Listen to Your Parents. His mother escaped with her eldest son, leaving eight children behind. For ever afterwards Zephaniah carried a ‘Wanted’ poster of his father in his mind: “the face I’ve got to avoid”.
Although dyslexic, he knew he wanted to do “something with words” from the age of eight, even if writing books was a “white man thing”. When he was 10 he gave his first public performance in church, giving an impromptu rap of the books of the Bible – for a longtime afterwards he was heralded as “the prophet Zephaniah”. But the future was not looking hopeful. He fell in with a gang and ended up in a series of detention centres, borstal and prison. All this time, he was composing “poems” in his head – though he never used the word “poem”. During his last stint in prison, he “got political”, he said. “I realised I wasn’t being a rebel by stealing something. I was playing into the hands of the law.”
He came out for the last time when he was 18 and started rapping (he preferred the term “toasting”, a Jamaican form of rap). But by his early twenties he had witnessed three people die. He decided that if he was going to survive, he needed to get out. So he went to London in 1979, telling his mum that the next time she saw him, he would be on TV. “Yeah, you’ll be on Police 5,” she joked (referring to the ITV crime reconstruction programme). Touchingly, when Zephaniah did indeed become a familiar face on TV as a regular on Question Time, he put his confidence down to the fact that he used to imagine he was chatting with his mum.
In London he got involved with what he called “a gang of poets and painters”. His first book, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980 when he was 22. He couldn’t read or write properly, so he wrote it phonetically and then gave it to someone else to type up, but he was very clear he didn’t want it just to be translated into the Queen’s English. He wanted to reach people like him. The first time somebody called him a writer rather than a poet or rapper, he was alarmed, and took himself off to night classes in Newham, east London.
With Margaret Thatcher just coming into power and the National Front on the rise, there was a lot for the young Zephaniah to get angry about. His first book and some early recordings were sent to Nelson Mandela in Robben Island. After Mandela’s release, on his first visit to London, he called the poet to arrange to meet up before an appointment with the prime minister. During his long campaigning career, Zephaniah spoke out on everything from apartheid to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the treatment of the residents of Grenfell Tower in 2017. For Zephaniah, everything was political. In one of his later interviews, for this paper, he confessed that he might be nearly 60 but he was still “fucking angry”. Just as with poetry, he liked talking about politics and ideas to people who didn’t think they were interested in them.
His writing for children took a similarly subversive and playful line – his 1997 collection is titled School’s Out: Poems not for School. His first for children, Talking Turkeys, published three years before, was such a hit that it was reprinted in six weeks, and remains a firm favourite. Thanks to YouTube we can all sit in on some of his “workshops”. As he writes in his poem Naked, it was a great sadness to him that he wasn’t able to have children of his own, and he was keen to speak out about what this meant in terms of expectations about black masculinity.
For him poetry was not something you would put in a book, it was all about communication. He started writing poetry because he didn’t like poetry, he said in an interview. “Of course I liked using words, but I wanted to change the image of poetry. I wanted to bring it to life and talk about now and what was happening to us.”
