After the reading I noticed that more than half of the attendees were in tears. I spoke to many of them afterwards. I didn’t just come out and ask, ‘Why are you crying?’ I asked in a general way how they felt the reading went, and they all said roughly the same thing – which was (to paraphrase) when they are in court they are so involved in the case and the need to deal with the facts that they detach themselves from what may be going on emotionally. And that’s just what I didn’t do. I had a minor interest in legal procedures, but I was more interested in using the power of poetry to capture what was happening to all those involved emotionally, and that included the judges.
For some reason unknown to me, the judge in the Ricky Reel inquest asked me to sit next to him. Every now and again he would ask me if I was comfortable, and then he would carry on regardless. The residency was the main inspiration for my 2001 collection of poems, Too Black, Too Strong.
45
THINGS FALL APART
In my marriage, it was me who had felt the overwhelming need to have children. I was the driving force behind the hospital treatments, the adoption and the television programme, but when I got the results I gave up. Defeated, I had to come to terms with the fact that I would remain childless for the rest of my life. But then, a year or so later, Amina began mentioning various clinics and treatments she’d heard about. She would do in-depth research into the nature, science and law surrounding the treatments, and then pass her findings over to me at a carefully chosen time.
After all I’d been through I didn’t want to hear any more suggestions from friends and family: the stories about old men in the hills of Jamaica who’d had no kids until they were sixty; the African man who could pray for me and make it all happen, and the woman who would take me into my past lives and clear blockages. I had had enough of the science, enough of the religion and enough of the mumbo jumbo. I was simply unwilling to go through it all again. Anyway, I was touring. Baby time was over. We didn’t have any major arguments but I was beginning to feel some stress, and every now and again Amina made me feel as if I wasn’t quite a whole man. I wasn’t the daddy.
We always took holidays together, mainly to India and Pakistan, but to ease the stress I suggested she have a holiday alone or with a girlfriend, and she did. She went off with a friend to Tunisia, while I stayed at home. When she returned I felt something had changed, but it could have been me, and I didn’t have time to think about such things – remember, the show must go on.
My next tour was to take me to Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. Amina wasn’t coming; even though the option for her to travel was there, she didn’t want to, so I went alone. I was in New Zealand, about to leave for Papua New Guinea, when I got an email from her. She had some information to give me about future gigs. These types of emails were quite normal, but there was something not quite right about the tone of her writing. It was businesslike, it dealt with the issue, but it was like an email from a stranger.
Amina was very professional, but normally when she had done with the business at hand she would end on something personal, but not this time. I called her and asked if she was okay, and she said she was fine, but she didn’t sound fine. I came home a couple of days later, opened the front door, and immediately I could see she was gone. It was sudden; it was out of the blue, but there had been no bickering, and we’d had no arguments. After speaking to friends who had gone through divorces and separations, I thought it would have been easier if there had been arguments, or some obvious deterioration of the relationship; at least then I would have seen it coming, and maybe, just maybe, I could have done something about it.
This was one of the lowest points of my life, not because I’d been dumped, but because it came out of the blue, and at a time when I would have said that life was good.
I closed the curtains and locked myself in the house. I cut myself off from the outside world, only going out once to buy a large can of Guinness. I was never a drinker, so I knew that if I had only a few sips I would get drunk, and I thought that if I got drunk I would forget all my problems. I placed the can in the middle of my dining table but, instead of drinking it, it became the focus of my meditations.
I began thinking about all the people I knew in the world of showbusiness who had drink problems, and all those who hadn’t returned from the dark place drink sends you. I also remembered the actor Timothy Spall telling me that you shouldn’t start drinking if you are feeling down because you will always associate drinking with problems, and that’s not a good way to start a relationship with drink. Fortunately I didn’t drink it. I kept it, and even as I write these words that can of Guinness is in my cupboard with the breakfast cereals, by the bread bin. I guess it’s now undrinkable. Either that or it’s worth millions of pounds.
46
DIVORCED ABSOLUTE
Two weeks after Amina and I parted, and I was still locked inside the house feeling sorry for myself, I turned on the TV and, completely by chance, there was a programme announcing the nation’s favourite children’s poems of all time, as voted through the BBC. The very first words I heard were those of the presenter saying, ‘And in fifth place it’s Benjamin Zephaniah with “Talking Turkeys”.’ Quite taken aback, I sat down as they played a short piece with the children saying why they liked the poem so much and what it meant to them. The presenter then asked if they had a ‘message for Benjamin’, and all the kids turned, looked directly to camera, and said: ‘Benjamin, we love you!’
Well, that went to the core of me. In fact, I was moved to tears. There I was sitting in a darkened room feeling like the most unloved, childless man in the world, and there were all these kids telling me that they loved me. That was the jumpstart I needed to motivate me to get off my backside and do some work. There wasn’t much I could do about Amina, but I thought of the kids on TV as being my kids, and told myself I had to pull myself together for the sake of my children. Those four words to camera, directed at me, gave me focus and spurred me on.
I didn’t know how to tell my mum about our separation; I sensed she would have told me that she’d warned me. It took me about three weeks before I had the guts to say anything, but when I did she said, ‘I knew something was wrong.’
I had no idea where Amina had gone. I tried tracing her by talking to her family, but they were being evasive. Eventually I found out she was at her sister’s house, so I telephoned her to ask why she left. She told me she was fed up being married to somebody famous and fed up with all my travelling – either with or without her – at which point I told her that she knew who I was before we got married.
Whatever I said, I couldn’t win. The only time I saw her after that was when I took some of the few things she had left behind to her sister’s in Nottingham. I was quite emotional, but when I tried to talk to her she flippantly said, ‘Get over it, people get divorced all the time’. I then realised how old and old-fashioned I was.
I’d had some big fallouts with girlfriends in the past but I’d stayed good friends with most of them, and I thought it would be so with Amina, especially because we had been together for so long – thirteen years. We had a couple of conversations, and in one of those conversations – when I realised we really were heading for divorce – I suggested possible terms for a financial split, in order to keep things simple and not involve lawyers and big costs.
A couple of days came and went, and then a few more days came and went, and I heard nothing from her. So I called. Her younger sister answered and told me bluntly that Amina was not going to call me, and the only place I would see her was in court. And so divorce proceedings began. She had spoken to her family and I got the impression they had told her to ‘take me to the cleaners’, because the next time I spoke to Amina I was talking to an angry woman who I felt wanted to talk to me only about money and nothing else.
The divorce was getting messy, and after initially retaining a solicitor, I thought I could do it better and cheaper myself, so I bought a ‘do your own di
vorce’ book and began to take care of myself. The early stages were surprisingly easy – just a process of sending standard letters to her solicitor. I couldn’t believe people paid so much for such paper shuffling. Using this book I saved thousands of pounds. I only engaged a new solicitor when we were ready to go to court, and that’s when I really needed him.
Amina began to claim money I’d earned long before I knew her. She wanted my house, my mother’s house, and she even wanted to claim on future earnings. I thought the claims were outrageous, but she kept on pushing for more, encouraged, I believed, by members of her family. In the end, the day before we were due in court, when I believe she must have felt that things would not go well for her, she capitulated and settled out of court.
It was a very sad way to end our relationship. We both lost out, in that we never spoke to each other again. Moreover she lost out financially because, in the final settlement, she had to pay all the court costs and ended up with less money than I had originally offered her. It’s a nasty business.
I hated the whole divorce process and, since then, if I ever think of marriage, I think of divorce. My solicitor warned me that divorce is not like falling out with a girlfriend. He said, ‘This is war.’ Friends had told me that you never really know your husband or wife until you face them in a divorce court and, I have to say, I now agreed with them.
47
JUSTICE FOR US
On 7 September 2003 my cousin Michael Powell, or Mikey, as we used to call him, died while in police custody. Mikey was prone to very high highs and very low lows, and could be quite an unpredictable chap. But he was harmless and loved by all who knew him. He once climbed onto the roof of his mother’s house – his mother being my Auntie Claris. Auntie Claris couldn’t get him down, so she called the police. A policewoman turned up, smiled at Mikey, and promised to hang out with him for a while. Basically she chatted him up, and he came down. It was all very light-hearted, with the policewoman telling him to try and behave and be nice to his mum, before she went on her way.
So, a few months later, when Auntie Claris was having problems with Mikey again, she called the police once more, thinking that a nice officer would come round and sweet-talk him again. But this time it was different. This time it was 1am, and the police turned up in riot mode. They weren’t in the mood to try to pacify him; they weren’t interested in talking to him. A loud black man on the streets at that time of the morning could only mean trouble, so the first thing the police did when they saw him was run him over in their car. They did that, they said, because they couldn’t see his hands, and because they couldn’t see his hands they presumed he was armed. After they ran him over they took him away. When they took him away he was alive; two hours later he was dead.
I first heard about it on a radio news report that said a young black man had died in police custody in Birmingham in the middle of the night. Sadly the news of a black person dying in a police station wasn’t news to me. I knew about the deaths of David Oluwale, Joy Gardner and Colin Roach, so I cursed Babylon and went to sleep. I woke up very early the next morning with my phone constantly ringing and various members of my family telling me Mikey was dead.
It was difficult for all of us, but at a time when a seasoned campaigner like me should have sprung into action there was little I could do or say. The police and their lawyers watched everything I did and listened to everything I said in the hope I would say something that would prejudice the case. With the case ongoing we were all subject to the law of subjudice, which meant we had to be very careful. Especially me.
For example, we couldn’t say that Mikey was killed in custody; we could only say that he died in custody. We couldn’t say we knew that something had happened, as that would imply we had evidence; we could only talk about wanting to get to the truth. The police carefully combed through anything I wrote in the press, and everything I said in public was monitored. I suspect that much of what I said in private was also monitored.
We fought a long, hard campaign for justice, and in 2009 we finally heard what we’d known for a long time when we got the verdict from the inquest. It found that the way Mikey had been restrained had resulted in his death from positional asphyxia. Our family had always known how he died; it was very sad that it took us so long to get that official verdict. Mikey’s sister, Sieta Lambrias, campaigned tirelessly for justice for Mikey. She was also pleased that the truth came out, even though it took six years.
The factors that led up to Mikey’s death make for sickening reading: being in contact with a moving vehicle; being sprayed with CS gas; being struck by a baton and being restrained on the ground while suffering a psychosis.
If there was any good that came out of this it was that it united the black community in Birmingham (and other parts of the country) and it united my family too. Relatives who once thought I was too political were now getting political themselves. Their front rooms had become campaign headquarters or meeting rooms; they became activists and organisers; they were marching and lobbying MPs, and working with other activists around the country. They were standing in solidarity with other families that had lost loved ones in institutions around the country, and becoming aware of how the issues that affected them were connected to issues affecting other working-class people. They were awake, and I now took pride in the fact that people didn’t only think of me as a campaigner, they thought of my family as campaigners.
Race relations have changed enormously during my lifetime. In 2015 I did a short film for BBC’s Newsnight to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Race Relations Act, which came into being in 1965 to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origins. The Act wasn’t perfect. For instance, when it was brought into being it was all about outlawing racism in public places. That meant it was perfectly okay to be racist at home or at the local pub, as long as the landlord didn’t mind.
I also thought the title was wrong. It should have been called the Anti-Racism Act rather than the Race Relations Act, which was a typically quaint British way of phrasing it. The Act was initially about stopping black people being beaten up after the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 and it’s since been amended and amended and amended.
The Act was worthwhile, but while you can control people’s actions you can’t control their thoughts. We had come a long way and it would have been wrong to say that things were the same as they’d been when I was a boy. Racism in the first decade of the new century was not as bad as it had been in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, but that’s not to say things were great. The new racists had learned to be subtler than they used to be. There were plenty of them out there, but their brand of racism was more insidious, more sophisticated, more institutional. It had to be.
The old racists didn’t all die off; they got jobs, and many of them got jobs in our institutions. So we couldn’t let our guard down. We still had work to do. Most gangs of young black kids weren’t scared of young white kids any more. There weren’t gangs of skinheads going out and beating people up as they used to – well, not as often as they used to – but black kids were rightly scared of the police. They were stopped and searched a lot more often than white kids because they had a different colour skin. If you’re a black kid walking home at 1am or 2am, the last thing you want to see is the police. If you’re stopped and searched, it’s frightening. If you’re seventeen or eighteen and don’t know the law, you might not know what could happen. But these kids now knew they could end up like my cousin Mikey Powell.
The racists had grown up; they had put on suits and ties and formed political parties. They were working in the local council, in marketing, banking and in furniture upholstery. They were building websites. They were blending in.
A couple of friends from Peterborough called me one day and asked me to do them a favour. They had put their house on the market and were going to have an open day. They had a young child called Glory, who I know really well, and they asked me if I would look after her while they cle
aned the house to make it presentable.
So I went over and took Glory to the park so they could get on with the job and welcome their potential buyers. It was a warm spring day and I was probably enjoying the park rides in the play area more than Glory was. At one point I was pushing Glory on a swing when a woman came to admire her, as ladies sometimes do with children in parks. She asked me the age of the baby and I said she was almost two. She waved to Glory, who paid no attention to her, and then walked away. Ten minutes later the police turned up – one male and one female – and asked if the baby was mine.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s my friend’s baby.’
‘What are you doing with her?’ asked the male officer.
‘Playing. Just like all the other parents, grandparents, uncles and child minders you see around you. Is there something wrong with that?’
A crowd was gathering and it was obvious to everyone present that I was getting hassled because I was a black guy with a white kid, but the police refused to say why they were quizzing me.
‘Can you call the parents?’ asked the male officer.
‘I can but I won’t,’ I replied. ‘That would only upset them and make them worried.’
‘Why don’t you know the age of the little girl? asked the female officer.
‘I don’t remember her birthday, but I know she’s about two.’
I was now holding Glory in my arms, when the female officer reached out and asked if she could hold her. Glory was horrified by this. She turned back to me, putting her arms around my shoulders as she clung onto me for dear life. The crowd was getting bigger. They saw this and began to let the officers know via a series of one-liners and groans, that if the baby feared me she wouldn’t be clinging onto me, she would want to get away.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 21
