The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  I wanted my jamming regulars to contribute to the album. Angela Parkinson was a long-time girlfriend, a good organiser (well, she organised me) and a reasonably good singer. Patsy was Angela’s friend, and an even better singer. Together they were known as the Sisters of Rant. Steve Parkinson was Angela’s brother, and a great drummer, and Tony Ash (aka Tony ‘Ganja’ Ash) had been my long-time collaborator. I couldn’t play rhythm guitar, but I could hear what I wanted in my head and then mimic the sound. Tony was always able to recreate that exactly, but in the studio something very strange happened.

  I called Jerome in – it seemed the obvious thing to do, as he knew my tunes inside out, and he knew most of the other musicians I was using. He put on the headphones, began to play . . . and couldn’t. He tried and tried, then he tried again, but he couldn’t feel the vibe. I could feel his frustration, and I’m sure he could feel mine. He was downhearted and shocked. We could only put it down to the studio environment; it was the first time he had been in one. Just like singing in the bath is different from singing in front of a microphone, jamming with your friends, and even playing live, is very different from playing in a studio. You are in a room, alone, with headphones on. It doesn’t feel natural.

  After two days, I had to say, ‘Sorry, man, I really want you on the album, but every hour is costing me money and, let’s face it, it’s not happening.’ He agreed and bowed out graciously and, because I knew the basslines to every track, I took over and played on the whole album. Bass players tell me they look up to that performance of mine, but I’ve never played on any of my recordings since, and I never intend to; I much prefer to pay for a real bass player’s imagination.

  The Rasta album was one of the few examples of recorded dub poetry in existence. There weren’t many of us who had gone into the studio. Linton Kwesi Johnson – the best-known dub poet, and some would say the father of our movement – had recorded, so had Mutabaruka and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, but that was about it. Dub music was all about taking reggae, breaking it down to its minimal elements and adding sound effects – what clubbers went on to call a remix. Then the dub poet would speak on top of the music. Dub poetry combined words and music, but if there was no music the dub poet simply used her or his own sense of rhythm to make the verses ebb and flow.

  To me, music and the spoken word are indivisible. With the album, I took the concept a little further. The foundations were reggae but I also used a sitar player and an oboist, alongside a mandolin player and African drummers. Many years later, one music journalist said it was the first ‘world music’ album, not because it came from somewhere exotic but because the instruments and musicians came from all over the world. But then again, who’s ever listened to music journalists?

  27

  SOLIDARITY

  I’m proud to say that I was involved in one of the biggest British political events of the last century: the miners’ strike. The strike lasted for just under a year, from March 1984 until March 1985, and was a defining event in British industrial relations. Margaret Thatcher targeted the mining industry to try to break the powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Ten years previously, industrial action by the NUM had contributed to the downfall of the Conservative government led by Edward Heath, so she had them in her sights and was determined to destroy them.

  Before the strike I don’t think I’d ever met a miner, I’m sure I’d never seen a coalpit, and I’d certainly never heard of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, but all that changed the moment I understood how the future of mining families would be torn apart as mines – and therefore mining villages – were closed down.

  Roland and other promoters organised benefit gigs around the UK to support the striking miners – many of whom, by the winter of 1984, were going hungry. Creative people were lending their skills to the cause, and a whole army of performers were willing to go wherever they were sent. I was one of them.

  As part of my miners’ solidarity work, I agreed to do a gig in a working men’s club in Scotland. As I walked in, I noticed the women were on one side of the room, talking about children and baking cakes, while the men were on the other side drinking beer. The children were just playing. A man who looked as if he had just come from below ground said, ‘Oh, the poet’s here.’

  He checked the microphone for me and the men began to leave, the idea being that I would entertain the women and the children with my nursery rhymes while the men went and did manly things. Halfway into my first poem I noticed the men slowly coming back. They stood and listened. When I had done that first poem, they all clapped, and one of them said, ‘Bloody hell, this guy’s good, order some more beer.’ They did, and then they sat down and listened to me.

  At another gig in a Nottinghamshire mining village, I got on stage and some of the miners in the audience started shouting racist remarks. One said he wanted to know what a black guy was doing talking to miners; some of his workmates agreed with him, shouting out stupid jokes about golliwogs, but one miner jumped on stage and stood next to me, and he really had a go at them. He delivered a diatribe against racism and urged working-class people to stick together, pointing out that I was the person who in the previous week had sent them a donation of £1,500 (a lot of money in those days) from an African-Caribbean association, and they, the miners, were happy to take the money and feed their kids. He stressed that this money had come from mainly elderly Caribbean people living in a poor part of east London, but they had gone round and collected money for the miners to show solidarity with them, and to help them to victory.

  He told them how I had been travelling around the country doing benefit performances, and that on that very night I was performing without a fee or expenses. The mood of the hall changed immediately as they realised how wrong they were. Then I did a great gig. That type of thing happened from time to time, but I was always able to deal with it by letting them know I had come a long way and that I hadn’t travelled the length and breadth of the country to hear racist remarks or fight against people I should be fighting with.

  The miners’ strike changed white men’s attitudes to black people; it changed men’s attitudes to women, and women’s attitudes to men. A lot of the miners’ wives stopped being people whose only domain was the kitchen; they were no longer subservient or beholden to their alpha male husbands – they became organisers, they became union workers, they were empowered.

  The miners realised they couldn’t win the fight on their own; they needed the solidarity of their wives, black poets, Chinese chefs and Bengali factory workers. They needed all the help they could get, and we were all the help they could get. Alas, even with us they lost, but those who were involved in that strike, many of whom were not even miners, will never forget the picket line battles, the workers’ solidarity, the lessons learned through struggle and the dark forces of police and state that were unleashed upon those workers. And those women will never be the same again.

  28

  TO THE ART OF THE STRUGGLE

  I was fired up with creativity; it was running through every vein in my body. I had completely put my life of crime behind me, and instead of focusing on making money I wanted to make revolution. In London I could have got into even worse trouble – the gangsters down there were much more gangster than the gangsters of Birmingham – but now I had changed the type of gang I mixed with. We are pack animals, so it’s natural to mix with people of a like mind. Gangs are not only made up of young people hanging out on the street, those who follow a particular type of music or ride motorbikes. The most dangerous gangs are made up of politicians. They call themselves ‘parties’, and the problem is, when they argue among themselves they send people who are nothing like them to fight for them. I could operate on my own reasonably well, but now I was dropping it with gangs of people who were speaking out against injustice, and using poetry, music, performance or painting to convey their feelings.

  From time to time I’d hear news from my former life, usually about someone dying or g
oing to jail for a long time, which would remind me that I got out just in time. I was convinced that if I had stayed I would have died. Even though I had an album in the shops, plenty of gigs under my belt, some legitimate money coming in, and people were calling me the new rock and roll, I was still angry. I really felt I had failed.

  My biggest failure was that Nelson Mandela was not free, Palestine and East Timor were not free, and the people of the Chagos Islands still wanted to go home. I felt it was my personal responsibility to free the world. I don’t know where that feeling came from, maybe I put it upon myself, but I was continually saying, ‘We are not free until our family are free.’ I took Mandela’s incarceration personally. My intensity didn’t always go down well, and I probably lost a few girlfriends because of my inability to focus on relationships, but I couldn’t turn my political button off, and so I didn’t allow myself to have too much fun. I was living and breathing politics; it was all-consuming.

  My public performances were coinciding with the fact that apartheid was beginning to be understood and hated around the world. Every weekend there would be a demonstration about it somewhere in the UK. My performances worked in between political speakers just as well as they worked in between bands, and I had a real sense that my poetry had arrived at the right time. People needed someone to express their anger at injustice and racism without then going on to ask them to vote for him.

  I didn’t see apartheid as an exclusively African problem; it was the unofficial reality for many black people around the world, and even for people like me living in England. I lived in east London, and although I was able to walk around Stratford, Mile End, Walthamstow and Leytonstone, I couldn’t cross the line and go to Canning Town or Barking, as these were known National Front strongholds – not only in the political sense, in that the NF were standing in elections there, but in the real sense that groups of these thugs would violently attack black people whenever they had the chance. They would sometimes make incursions into what we considered our territories, and we would defend ourselves and send them home, but crossing the dual carriageway known as the A13 meant risking our lives.

  I was so keen to see what this mystical thugland called Canning Town was like that I once asked a white taxi driver to drive me through it, but he wouldn’t. I offered him double the fare but he still wouldn’t take me. He said he didn’t care about me, and he wasn’t worried about my safety, but he was worried about his own. If certain people saw him with me he wouldn’t be able to work anymore, and he risked his house being torched.

  In 1980 a young Asian man called Akhtar Ali Baig had been murdered by a group of racists on the streets of East Ham, not far from the A13. The police, the local authority and the media thought this murder of little importance, and the family of the murdered youth didn’t know where to go for help. There were marches and protests on the streets of east London, but that wasn’t enough. So a group of people got together to form the Newham Monitoring Project. I admired this organisation so much that after getting involved with many of their campaigns I became their patron.

  When the Newham Monitoring Project was originally set up, our job was to monitor the many racist attacks happening in our area, and see how the police were responding to them, but we then noticed a lot of them were actually being perpetrated by the police. Our remit broadened to helping families of victims, getting legal representation for those who needed it. We had a 24-hour emergency helpline, and we also policed the police.

  A lot of the far left of the time were active within unions and supporting strikers, but more could have been done to take their principles to people who weren’t organising in their workplace. For instance, we’d see them selling their newspapers at train stations on Saturday mornings, but they’d soon be gone – most likely to the pub to talk about Karl Marx. Then I’d go to somewhere like Bethnal Green and find that the NF were setting up youth clubs and pensioners’ groups. They were saying, ‘Nobody cares about you, but we do.’ So you’d get all these kids going, ‘Yeah, National Front. They’re standing up for the white man.’ The far right was penetrating communities where the left wing should have been.

  If you tried to tell people in other parts of Britain about the blatant racism we were suffering, plenty would not believe you. They might have heard about such things in the news but many thought these were exaggerations, or that savage black youth deserved what they got because they were all thieves, pimps and drug pushers, and if they weren’t, then they were still doing what Margaret Thatcher had said they were doing – swamping the country with an alien culture.

  Some actually knew how brutal it was for us, but they turned a blind eye to police brutality, discrimination and racism because they believed that it could never be as bad as in some of those foreign places. It was very bad for us, but the government-sponsored racism of apartheid South Africa was of a higher order. It represented the extremes of what could happen. There were times when, after speaking up for Nelson Mandela and doing benefits for the ANC, the British press and other commentators called me a communist and a supporter of terrorism, but then, during the 1980s, it became very fashionable for educated people to support the anti-apartheid movement. The image of Mandela behind prison bars became a popular symbol, so popular it was on car windows and refrigerators, and people started making records and speaking out. Mandela had quickly gone (after many years of resistance) from dangerous terrorist to the most loveable political prisoner in the world.

  Around this time I got serious about trying to brush up my reading and writing. Ken Livingstone played a big part in that by setting up easy-access adult education services during his time as leader of the Greater London Council (GLC). My classes cost only £1. I was immediately tested for dyslexia, and the woman who ran the test was the first person in my life to properly explain why I had been having trouble with literacy. Her explanation made sense and, from gaining an awareness of the condition, I was able to overcome it. Nowadays the government has indirectly abolished those services, imposing huge budget cuts on councils and closing down the libraries where such courses would take place.

  After she’d effectively destroyed the miners, Thatcher’s next target was the GLC, which she abolished in 1986, making thousands of people redundant and obliterating countless community initiatives and resources that acted as a safety net for London’s disadvantaged people. With the help of the Tory press in the form of the Sun and the Daily Mail, the right wing were able to drip-feed propaganda about the ‘loonie left’ spending rate-payers’ money on ventures they deemed too militant – such as anti-racism concerts or language classes teaching English as a second language. The monetisation of everything was underway and our struggle against the Thatcherite mindset was relentless.

  29

  THE DREAD AFFAIR

  1985, the year of the Cherry Groce uprising, was also memorable for a couple of other reasons. My book The Dread Affair was published – although it was my second book, it was my first with a big publisher – and I also became a star in the Eastern bloc.

  The Dread Affair came about after I was approached by a woman who worked for a publishing company called Arena. They wanted to produce a collection of my poems, and they would give me a real contract and a substantial advance. I didn’t have a manager, so Arena explained to me that if I signed their contract I’d get my advance, and when I delivered the manuscript I’d get paid a second time, and then, on the day of publication, I’d get my final payment.

  I signed on the dotted line there and then and went away to write down all my work as best as I could, by hand. It was easy; I had years of poems in my head. I went back the next day, showed them the contract and the results and, eager to get my payment, I said, ‘Right, that’s two thirds of my money now due.’

  They wrote me a cheque and they published my poems but I think they, and I, made a big mistake. The book was well received but I think it was detrimental to me artistically. Arena published the poems just like that – no editing, no revision
s, no feedback. Looking back now, I needed an editor – someone to help me think about how the poems could work on the page. All I did was write down performance poems, but ‘stage to page’ doesn’t always work.

  I soon ended up not liking The Dread Affair, which is a sad thing to say about one’s own book, but I have to be honest: it’s a book of poems that lacks poetry, and it could have been so different. It reads like a first draft, or worse. I’m writing this in 2017, and all my other books are still in print, but not The Dread Affair. I have been asked to republish it but I keep saying no. As a compromise I have taken some poems from the book and rewritten them, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

  I was later told by an ex-employee of Arena why they had published the book in its raw state. They thought I was some kind of god – the god of dub poetry – and they wouldn’t dare tell a god how to edit his poems. They were scared that if they told me something I didn’t like, they’d get a bad reaction and I wouldn’t let them publish the book. So they left me to my own devices. I’m sure I would have written a far better book if I had received some feedback or criticism, or had someone to talk to.

  All this time there was something hanging over my head. The police were still looking for me. I expected them to catch up with me at any time. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t arrested me yet. I was arguing with police officers all the time on demonstrations, my books were everywhere and I was regularly on television. I could only put it down to a lack of communication between different police forces.

  I would appear live on Channel 4, and I so feared being arrested that once the programme was done I would leave the studio straight away and run like mad. But the fear was getting to me. I knew I couldn’t go on like this. So I went back to Birmingham and gave myself up, but they wouldn’t arrest me. They said they had enjoyed watching me on TV, and they could have arrested me any time, but they’d already found the real killer of the man in the car and they knew it wasn’t me. They didn’t tell me because they enjoyed seeing me in public spaces, knowing I was living in a state of paranoia.