The buzz was going around and people were asking for more gigs, so I obliged. I was big in Stratford. People were starting to look at me differently; they called me ‘the poet’ and my audiences were typically a mixture of alternative types and Rastafarians. One day, a very well-respected and quite religious Rastafarian woman called Claudette said to me, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I was going to be around for a long time. When I asked her why she thought that, she said, ‘I don’t know anything about poetry but I know there is no one else like you. You’ve got intelligence, you’ve got reggae in you; black people and white people and youth can understand it.’ She was a very no-nonsense, to-the-point woman, so I knew she wasn’t just trying to impress me.
My day-to-day life was spent working in The Whole Thing. Helping to run and maintain the housing co-op also took up a lot of energy and time and required members to attend regular meetings. Being very left wing and ethical, there were endless debates and democratic votes. The community was running things for themselves and feeling a sense of autonomy that people these days don’t seem to have, unless they’re rich. It was an alternative existence with excellent principles that empowered people to learn about co-operation. We got paid, although it wasn’t very much, but we all had food and shelter. If something went wrong you could draw from the people around you in that caring, sharing collective.
I was chatting to Derek one day and he told me that most of the phone calls coming into the shop were about me. If someone wanted to book me for a gig, that’s where they’d find me. This is when I thought, I’m busier than the shop. I can be a poet full-time. I looked at my earnings and they were higher than the shop’s. I was wary about leaving the safety net of The Whole Thing – the co-op movement had really helped me – but I had to do it. I was beginning to build a name for myself.
Stratford was a very run-down part of east London back then, with lots of unfinished building projects, or buildings that were falling down. On a wall of corrugated iron on Stratford Broadway someone had spray-painted the words: ‘Beware Babylon, the poet has arrived’. I didn’t feel that Babylon was going to fall in the very first term of the Thatcher government, but it was uplifting to know that the poet was me.
22
FROM PAGE TO STAGE
I managed to get somewhere of my own, a housing co-operative place in Stratford. Although I had been out of touch with my family for some time, my mum started to visit and this gradually eased into her living with me. She would complain about the London air, and that the water wasn’t as good as in Birmingham, but after being abandoned by Pastor Burris I think she wanted a fresh start and some familiar company in the form of her firstborn son.
Around this time I frequently performed at weekend fairs in community centres, in mid-sized venues at African-Caribbean cultural events, at music gigs and at large political rallies. At one particular anti-racist gig, the band Aswad were getting ready to go on stage. I went to the side of the stage and asked their manager, Michael Campbell, if I could ‘drop’ a poem before they played. He asked the band and they said okay, so I went on stage with no introduction.
Most people just carried on talking. I could hear others saying, ‘Who’s this?’ and some saying, ‘I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.’ But I told myself not to be distracted by anything in the crowd; this was punk, so anything could happen. I began to chant a poem called ‘African Swing’ and slowly the background noise faded as everyone started to pay attention to me.
It’s a great feeling when you begin to turn an audience around, but it’s a feeling you must ignore because you are there to deliver the poem and not to congratulate yourself. Then I delivered the last line: ‘And look at me now, I’m an African’, and the crowd went wild. It was time to get off, but they wanted more. I looked to Michael, who was now surrounded by members of other bands who had come to see what all the noise was about, and then they all started to encourage me to do one more. I ended up performing another three poems, and I could have done more. Now I knew I could perform alongside well-known bands, and not just other poets. I’d managed to hold an audience on a big stage and I started to think, Yeah, this is gonna happen. I wasn’t arrogant about it; I just knew.
I began to do this often. I would go along to a gig, stand at the side of the stage and ask a band member or the stage manager if I could do a poem between bands. Or sometimes the bands would hang out in the audience watching the support act and I would have a word with them there. Soon they started to approach me and ask me to go and turn the crowd on for them. This was before rap was big in Britain, and before the appearance of spoken word gigs. Crowds had never seen or heard anybody like me. There was John Cooper Clarke and a handful of punk poets, and there was Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose delivery was more relaxed than mine, but they had never heard the fast reggae version of dub poetry that I delivered.
Not only were the audiences shouting for more, sometimes the bands would encourage me from the wings, urging me on, telling me to ‘give it to ’em’. Bands would never be concerned with me eating into their time; they thought of me as complementing them, and I was easy to work with. I had fire in my belly, and all I needed was a microphone, so roadies could change the bands’ gear as I performed, and I didn’t ask for any money, although many bands were happy to get me a little something for my time.
I felt at home at these gigs. I had admired the Rock Against Racism movement and now I was part of it. I used to watch groups like Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and Matumbi, and Birmingham’s finest, Steel Pulse, and now I was playing with them. Their fans had become my fans.
23
THE PUNKED-UP REGGAE PARTY
My other skill was being able to introduce bands, or being the MC. If I was introducing Black Uhuru, I wouldn’t just say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Black Uhuru’, I would tell them what Black Uhuru represented. I would say why they needed to make some noise for this band, and why this band was making some noise for them. I wanted the audience to express themselves, to join in or chant along.
Rastafarian audiences who liked what you were saying didn’t just clap, they made gunshot sounds or stamped their feet; some would even shout biblical passages that would praise the poet or remind people of the importance of the poet. Punks, on the other hand, would spit at you and throw beer. I was never spat at, and I was never wetted with ale. I think they respected the Rastas and knew they weren’t keen on this kind of cross-fertilisation. Nevertheless performing for them was always a good test. If I could win over the punks, I wouldn’t have much problem with people who were sitting down to listen to me with tea and biscuits.
My poems got angrier and angrier because I was so eager to get my message across; my community was desperate to be heard, and I wanted to politicise my audience. We were living on the edge, and gigs could turn nasty at times. Sometimes, to get into gigs, fans would have to run the gauntlet of National Front supporters hanging about outside. The police wouldn’t get involved; they would tell us to let things take their course and call them if there was trouble. There was lots of trouble, of course, but by the time the trouble started it was too late to call the police.
There were two informal organisations from that time that I had a great love and respect for: Red Action and the Sari Squad. Both would protect our gigs and events when the police wouldn’t. Red Action was almost exclusively young left-wing white kids. Their politics were all over place. I remember two of them having a big argument about what Karl Marx did or didn’t say, but the one thing they were united on was their hatred of racism. Then there was the Sari Squad, who were quite incredible. They were a group of Asian women based in east London – each one a wicked kung fu fighter, each one willing to defend their community to the end, and some of them did actually wear saris. They started by guarding women’s gigs, but would then guard any gig where fans might need protection from racists.
Both groups deployed themselves like a cross between bouncers and police – they would put a couple of people on
the door, others around the building, and then some further away from the event, looking out for any racists or fascists making their way to the venue. If any were seen they would send messages using their then state-of-the-art walkie-talkies, and then go and confront them. There were times when National Front thugs managed to get in to a venue and all hell would break loose. They would smash up equipment and attack artists and audience members, regardless of their size or sex, but most of the time we would chase them off. Red Action and the Sari Squad were life-savers, and I have no doubt that without them the NF and their supporters would have had many more victories than they did.
Performances were part of a mission to recruit militants and make people aware of what was happening on the streets and in the corridors of power. I was aware that, to a certain extent, I was preaching to the converted, but that didn’t matter if some of those converted would bring along non-converted friends. I could then encourage the friend to get involved. Very often I would challenge individuals. I would look into the audience and point people out and say, ‘You, you and you, are you coming to the demo on Saturday?’ They’d invariably say ‘Yeah, we’re coming.’ So I’d give them stuff, like a book, and say: ‘Alright then, read this and then give it back on Saturday at the demo.’ That way I would know whether they had turned up.
I once promised a girl a kiss; she turned up as I was about to do my anti-Nazi rant in Brockwell Park, so I kissed her on stage in front of the assembled multitudes. The word got round that I was up for such exchanges, and I began to get many similar requests, but I always kissed in public, sometimes with the girl’s boyfriend (or girlfriend) present. It was a tough job, but it was all in aid of the revolution.
An organiser I often worked with was a brother called Jah Bones, who was also a great personal friend. He was based at an organisation in Tottenham called RUZ, which stood for Rasta Universal Zion. This was a strictly Rasta group, which would hold regular speaking events and publish a newsletter, The Voice of Rasta. Bones was a lovely, lovely, really large Rasta elder, whose dreadlocks truly resembled the mane of a lion. I became one of their regular poets but you have to look hard to find me credited in the newsletter or on their posters. Very rarely would they call me Benjamin Zephaniah. It would usually be something like Ras Benjamin, Benji Dread, Zephaniah I, Rasta Zephaniah or even Zephy. I spent a lot of time hanging around Tottenham, where the community would hold cultural events in hired church halls, or in parks on sunny days.
Like the hippies of the 1960s, we really thought we were going to change the world for the better, and at that time I would have said my poems were in aid of the revolution. Poems like ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’ or ‘I Don’t Like Mrs Thatcher’ may not have been great examples of creative writing – they were far from what most people would call literature – but they expressed my anger and the anger many others were feeling. Poems like ‘Fight Dem Not Me’ were written as if to be performed directly to the National Front. I was trying to tell them that I understood what they felt about housing conditions, unemployment, poverty and other social ills, and that we had those problems too. I was urging them to see beyond race and to understand that if working-class people could unite we could then deal with the politicians who were exploiting us all.
If you have no understanding of the oral tradition, it’s better to think of these poems as songs rather than literature. People would chant along with me to the best known of them. At Rock Against Racism gigs, for instance, or Anti Nazi League events, thousands of people would be jumping up and down, shouting: ‘Dis policeman . . . dis policeman . . . dis policeman keeps on kicking me to death’. It was an amazing feeling to see all those people chanting my poems back at me. It was probably more amazing because I was doing it with just words and no music. It was just them and me, with nothing in between. What was even more moving was knowing that many of these poems had never been written down; these were people who followed me from gig to gig to learn the poems, or they picked them up from a friend.
The ability to get so many people to chant your words is a sort of power – a power one could easily manipulate. I’ve always loved watching those preachers in the United States that have churches like mini-empires, where it seems the audience doesn’t just worship God, it worships the preacher too. I don’t like them – actually I can’t stand them – but their followers are happy to give them their money and, in some extreme cases, their lives. It amazes me what people can do with a bit of charisma and a well-delivered promise of something better than this earthly existence. I’m astonished by such preachers’ ability to perform, even when they themselves don’t believe the ideas they preach.
When I stand on stage and tell the crowd to shout, or be silent, or ‘say after me’, and they do, I realise the power we have, even more so when they are connecting with an idea I had one day when I was doing something as arbitrary as getting dressed. I’ve never thought of myself as someone with my own manifesto. I’ve never wanted to start a political party or launch any kind of movement. I want to inform people about what’s going on, and I don’t mind throwing in a few suggestions as to what can be done, but most of all I want to inspire people to think for themselves. Even if I say something in my poetry that I believe to be fact, I say it because I want them to think about it and not simply take my word for it. Power can easily be abused, but I’ve never been interested in that kind of power, or the abuse of it.
Having said all that, there was a time when, mainly to shock people (who needed shocking), I would say that I’d started a revolutionary movement called the IRA – the Independent Rasta Army.
24
BABYLON’S BURNING
Another struggle we had was against the ‘sus’ laws, or the law of suspicion. Police officers could arrest you merely if they thought you were suspicious. She or he didn’t need a witness or a victim, a complaint or an order from above – an officer just needed to not like the way you looked and you could be arrested. It was supposed to be used for crime prevention, but the police used it as a way to discriminate against our community, and they didn’t hide the fact that they used it in a racist way. I remember one officer saying that, as far as he was concerned, every Rastafarian was suspicious. If he wasn’t wearing a hat and his locks were out, he was probably high on marijuana, and if he was wearing a hat, he was probably concealing a gun up there.
I’m proud to say I took part in political actions against this law. Yes, I did a few awareness-raising concerts and performances at demonstrations but, it has to be said, our most effective action was rioting. But we didn’t call it rioting; we called it uprising.
In 1981 uprisings spread across the UK, and I travelled all over the country to be a part of the action. In St Paul’s, Bristol, in Brixton, London, in Toxteth, Liverpool, in Chapeltown, Leeds, in Handsworth, Birmingham, and many more towns in many more cities, people had had enough of the injustice, racism and subjugation that was entrenched in police and state.
Tensions between the black community and the police had been a fact of life from the mid-1970s (well, they had been a fact of my life since then), but black history tells us they went back way before then – to the Notting Hill riots of 1958, for example – but when my generation rose up in the early ’80s, the whole country sat up and took notice. The soundtrack of 1981 was provided by the Specials, who had a number-one hit with the brilliant ‘Ghost Town’ – and it still sounds fresh over thirty-five years later.
My first major uprising could be seen coming very clearly months in advance. The police would drive around London in SPG (Special Patrol Group) vans, shouting insults and taunting us. Or they would stop their vans then surround and search us. One night, I was in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, and I heard somebody shout that the talking was over; the time had come for war. We were playing pool in the Atlantic, the big pub on the corner of Railton Road, when we heard some commotion. Somebody ran in and shouted, ‘Man! Babylon’s burning!’ So we went out and were soon caught up in it.
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The frontline in Brixton was a community under siege. There was corrugated iron everywhere, poor housing, and something like 50 per cent of black youth was unemployed. Constant police harassment and Thatcher (along with the then Home Secretary, the aptly named William Whitelaw) talking about people feeling ‘swamped’ only ratcheted up the tension.
I still have a very strong sense of the smell of that uprising. I wrote a poem with the line: ‘Bonfire night in the middle of summer; fireworks smell like burning rubber’. And that’s what I remember – the smell. And the sound of the police sirens, which were different back then – more of a drone and not as high-pitched as they are now.
The air was hot and sticky and the youth were out on the streets arming themselves with bricks. There were so many of us. I remember wondering where all these young people had come from. They just appeared. In those days, if you walked past another black person, you tended to nod to each other. It was like an unspoken knowledge that in the future you might need to rely on that person. Well, that time had come. There was no question over whose side you were on; and in an uprising you found yourself working in co-operation with someone you’d never met before.
There was real solidarity. Me and another guy rescued a youth from the clutches of the police. They almost got me, but there was so much excitement going on that I evaded capture. I got hit in the mouth by another guy aiming at a cop, who immediately apologised, saying, ‘Sorry, brother.’ Basically, when you’re in the thick of it you don’t analyse it, but looking back it was about venting years and years of pent-up anger.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 13
