The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  But the reality was there were now two different systems and, whatever you thought of the politics, Hong Kong was more like London than China, so I wanted to go to China. All you had to do was join an organised coach party, leave your passport at the border and pick it up on the way back. I had never travelled with a tourist group in my life – to be honest, I hated the idea – but it was only for one day.

  China has fascinated me my whole life: the sound of the language, the history, the size of the place and, of course, the kung fu. As a child I’d sat enthralled by the films of Bruce Lee. I first started training at the age of ten, simply copying the moves from a book. I went to various martial arts schools as a teenager, but this was all very on and off; I never stayed at a school long enough to get into a particular style. But I listened to my various tutors going on about the old masters back in China, and I wanted to find the old masters. This trip wasn’t going to put me in touch with any of them, but at least I would be in the same country, and maybe I’d see one walking down the street, all monk-like.

  After a two-hour coach ride from the border, we arrived at a city called Guangzhou and were let out to walk the streets. We went to a museum and then stopped at a restaurant which, from the outside, looked like a pet shop. The front window had live cats in cages that were there to be chosen by customers who would be eating them twenty minutes later.

  I never normally go into a restaurant that sells meat, but this time I followed the crowd, partly because it was important that we stick together, but mainly because I wanted to listen to their conversations about how cruel it was to eat cats. To me, eating meat is eating meat, no matter what the species, so every conversation I hear about ‘strange’ people eating exotic animals sounds to me like racism, plus ignorance. Being with a group of tourists from all over the world arguing about what you should or should not eat is interesting. It reminded me of all the reasons I opted out of meat consumption altogether.

  We didn’t see any monks, and the trip wasn’t that interesting, but it gave me a taste for the place, so not long afterwards I organised my own trip. I didn’t want it to be a normal holiday, and I certainly didn’t want to be a typical tourist, so with the help of some friends I planned to visit Beijing, and from there I would travel to Henan, in the Northern Central Region, to the Shaolin Temple, to train with the real kung fu masters.

  On my return, I quickly realised I loved the place. This was the time when everyone started talking about China’s rapid growth, and I saw it happening right in front of me. The whole city was like a building site. I’ve never seen a country growing so quickly. Before I went to sleep at night I would take a look out of the window because I knew that when I woke up the next day the view would be different.

  I met people who by Western standards were middle class, but one generation ago their families were slum dwellers. Everything on the east coast is so new that it’s difficult to find vestiges of the old way of life. But the Chinese are very unromantic about history. They don’t seem to have the same nostalgia as the West. For instance, when they were preparing for the Olympics in 2008, they didn’t think twice about knocking down a temple that was 3,000 years old. The typical Chinese attitude is to say, ‘What’s the problem? We’ll build a new one down the road.’

  After partying in the city for a few days, I headed for Henan. Henan Province is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilisation, and it’s where a lot of martial arts originated, but it also has a reputation as being like the Wild West. If there’s a theft, people in cities outside the province say, ‘Oh, it must be someone from Henan’, similar to how people in the UK used to talk about Liverpudlians as being scallywags.

  Although much of what now surrounds the temple was created for tourists, I found a great teacher there who organised something I had always wanted to do – something I had seen only in films. He fixed it so that I spent some time training in the heart of the temple itself. Very few people are privileged to experience this. I documented much of this experience in my book Kung Fu Trip, which Bloomsbury published under the Quick Reads initiative in 2011.

  After that first independent visit, I would return to China many times. I was unknown there, and I found it a great place to be creative. I wrote much of my books Gangsta Rap, Teacher’s Dead and Terror Kid there because I was left untroubled. Every day I learned something new about the place. I would go to one area where they ate cats and snakes, then I would go to another part where they were all vegan. One city would look like something from a science fiction film, and a few miles away they would be living as they had for the past hundred years or more.

  I love villages the world over. I love walking through them, meeting local people and listening to elders. I love the oral traditions you hear from people in their seventies, eighties and older, who have seen unprecedented changes take place during their lifetime. In these villages I made a point of riding around on a bicycle, so I was pretty easy to spot and was made very welcome. People wanted to sit down with the black man and talk and share food. Some were surprised when I told them I was vegan; then it was my turn to be shocked (and saddened) when I heard accounts of how rural skies, once blue and full of birds, were now polluted and empty. I also started to learn Chinese, because very few people in these villages spoke English and I needed to have conversations with them as well as with funky Beijingers.

  In 2008 I discovered a small village in Henan called Chen Jia Gou, where the Chen style of t’ai chi originated. I had begun learning Chen style in Shaolin, but I knew the ‘external’ style of Shaolin kung fu had its limits, so I started to visit Chen Jia Gou, where I found a great teacher, the Grand Master, Chen Zhaosen. The place he taught from was typical of martial arts schools around the country – simple buildings where students could train, with a dining room and upstairs quarters for sleeping. The first thing the master said was ‘Show me your t’ai chi.’ I did about three minutes and then he stopped me and gave me the best lesson ever, explaining what I was doing wrong. I’ve now been visiting Chen Zhaosen for the past seventeen years.

  Instead of focusing on external fighting styles, I concentrated on the internal aspects of the practice, learning how to generate power from breathing, balance, meditation and relaxation. With wing chun, instead of blocking punches, you learn to use an opponent’s force by ‘completing the circle’ and never blocking their energy but instead using it against them. Even if it looks peaceful, every movement has a fighting application.

  Along with poetry, the discipline of martial arts has been instrumental in turning my life around. It is a fantastic way of teaching you how to control anger and convert that energy into something positive. Some people recommend boxing as a way of keeping young men out of trouble, but I’d always say martial arts is the better way. You have to learn self-control and how to be humble; you can’t just pile in and start throwing punches. It has helped me to stay focused and grounded when the annoyances of the world make themselves apparent.

  54

  WOT’S RONG WID NORTH KOREA?

  I’ve spent so much of my life travelling the planet that writing about all the countries I’ve visited would take up far too much room, but I have to say a little about one of the strangest places I’ve been to: North Korea. People think it’s really difficult to get there, but it’s not. Well, it wasn’t when I visited in May 2012. There’s an agency in Beijing that specialises in sending Westerners there, and they quite quickly fixed my trip. There’s no visa needed, there were no long forms to fill in, you just go.

  On arrival I was met by a person who would be my minder for the whole time I was there. Of course I was shown only the best bits, and a lot of the time it was like walking around a film set, but it was eye-opening to see a totalitarian state first-hand. Everybody talked about the Great Leader. I asked them who was the first man on the moon and they said King Jong-un. When I asked who invented the typewriter they said King Jong-il. I enquired who were the happiest people in the world, and they answered, ‘North Kore
ans’. It was incredible. I asked people whether they really believed the things they were saying and they said they did. I couldn’t tell if they were acting or if they did really believe it, but I didn’t push them on things. What might have been a little push for knowledge from me could mean death for them.

  After one girl showed me around an arts complex, I shook her hand and, as I did so, I discreetly palmed some money to her and she almost screamed. She thought I was handing her something illegal, and she feared the state so much that she nearly freaked out. I was only giving her a tip. But I must say that visiting North Korea helped me to understand it better than I had before.

  I look at North Korea as an entity that has been abused and is now very paranoid. The country was occupied by the Japanese for thirty-five years, and it was a brutal occupation. And then other people, including the Soviet Union, came in until they felt as though they’d been brutalised and hated by everyone, so they wanted to be on their own. Visiting was important for me because I got to understand the way they thought about the world. That doesn’t mean I agree with them. If an abused child goes on to be an abuser, or has bad behaviour, you don’t condone it or agree with it but you can understand how it happened.

  I was really lucky in that my guide was the daughter of the head of the nuclear programme. She’d been well educated in Austria and had also been to England. She said she knew my point of view, but she wanted me to understand her point of view as well. She knew how worried people were about North Korea having a bomb, but then she went off the tourist route and took me to a place where, using fancy vision equipment, you could see bomb launch sites in South Korea that were owned by the Americans and were pointing towards North Korea. She knew exactly how many bombs there were, and in Japan.

  She said: ‘If they fire at us, we want at least one to fire back. We’re not very advanced, I know, but there are so many pointing towards us that we want to have some kind of reply.’

  I couldn’t agree with everything she said, but I did understand. My empathy is with the people who, like most people in the world, aren’t thinking about history or philosophising about the merits or the ethics of a nuclear-free state. They just want food on the table.

  After visiting North Korea I genuinely felt like kissing the ground when I arrived back in China. It’s strange that in China I have never felt I couldn’t go anywhere that any other Chinese citizen could go. Yes, there are restrictions on what you can read online, and the news you get, wherever it comes from, is government-approved, but the only time I was ever stopped and questioned was at the airport when I was leaving for Tibet, somewhere I’d always wanted to visit.

  I was getting ready to board the plane when the police pulled me to one side. They told me they knew who I was and asked if I was going to write something while I was there. I told them I wasn’t, that I just wanted a holiday. I kept saying I wanted to see all of China. I told them I loved China. Once I’d used the word China, rather than Tibet, they decided I was okay. I’d stuck to the script and was allowed to board the plane.

  My guide was Tibetan and very anti-Chinese. He refused to speak to me in Chinese, so we spoke in English and Urdu. He really told it as it was, insisting it was a real occupation. The Chinese there are much more privileged than the locals; they get all the top jobs and drive around in Range Rovers while the locals have very little and are poor.

  The people are very religious. They pray on the streets, and in town squares, and walk endlessly around, seemingly going nowhere. If I left my hotel and turned right there was a vegan restaurant, but outside this restaurant there was always an old lady standing, massaging her prayer beads. One day as I was leaving the restaurant I offered her some food, which she refused.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  She looked directly into my eyes, and said with a hint of a smile. ‘I’m waiting for the Dalai Lama to come back. I was standing right here the last time I saw him. It was very different then.’

  I later took an internal flight in China, sitting in what was business class. It was a small plane, so business class was just the first three rows of seats, but I guess it must have made me look important. People were still getting on the plane when a man in his mid-thirties came up to me brimming with excitement, holding a pen and notebook.

  ‘Autograph,’ he said in broken English.

  ‘No problem,’ I replied. One of the reasons I took to China was that no one knew me there, so I was pretty surprised by this. I didn’t really want it to happen again, and I didn’t want to encourage others. I signed it and sat down. But the man didn’t go away. At first he stared at me, and then he shouted.

  ‘Give me your real autograph. This is not real.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘That’s my autograph.’

  ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘you must write “Bob Marley”!’

  I burst into laughter. ‘I am not Bob Marley,’ I said.

  ‘You are Bob Marley. You cannot trick me. So now, Bob Marley, give me your autograph,’ he demanded.

  I really didn’t know what to say or do. Then another man, slightly older, came to my rescue.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, in a deep, reassuring voice. ‘Don’t be silly. This is not Bob Marley. Bob Marley is no longer with us. I know exactly who this is,’ he said confidently. ‘This is Kofi Annan.’

  I looked around in despair to see if there was anyone else who could help me, but alas there wasn’t. I signed one autograph as Bob Marley, another as Kofi Annan, and then I sat down to ponder the meaning of me.

  55

  PROFESSOR ZEPHANIAH – AKA JEREMIAH JESUS

  I was happy living in my Lincolnshire village. I had made, converted or constructed everything I wanted at my house: a small gym, a large gym, a library, a recording studio, a sauna, an artificial football-basketball-tennis court and my small plot of land that allows me to be self-sufficient in organic vegetables.

  I don’t believe a poet should ever think of retirement – we should stay creative forever – but I had reached the stage where I was only taking work that was important to me, or of political importance. When I wasn’t working I was spending time in China, or to put it another way, I was spending most of my time in China but sometimes I was coming home to do some work.

  So I was happy with my work/life balance, and I could have carried on like this for years, but then, in March 2011, I received a rather strange email from Professor Wendy Knepper of Brunel University. At the time I had fifteen honorary doctorates and at first I thought this was the offer of another one, but then I read the email and realised they were offering me a job, a professorship, a salary and students.

  For months I thought about taking up the post. I needed to, because for the first time in my life I was going to join an institution, and I had spent my life trying not to be institutionalised. I needed to find out as much as I could about the university. Would it oppress me? Would I become an oppressor? I only really came into contact with universities when I performed at them, and I had performed at Brunel University in the mid-1980s. My support act back then was Julian Clary, before he used that name. Back then he was The Joan Collins Fan Club, featuring Fanny the Wonder Dog. Very weird, very camp, and I knew he was going places.

  It was very important that I make the right decision, so I visited the campus on a number of occasions to see what it was like from the staff’s point of view, and sometimes I went and hung out with the students to see it from their side. Sometimes I went there and didn’t meet anyone at all; I’d walk around to see the lie of the land. After giving it much thought, I decided that my work in the university would be a continuation of what I was doing anyway: mentoring people and helping up-and-coming poets. It would be a formalisation of my creative life, so I took the job.

  It was around this time that tuition fees were raised to £9,000 per year, so I felt it was important to be the best professor I could be. I knew from talking to students that it wasn’t only abou
t teaching; it was also about being positive, making sure students knew you cared about their education and giving them a good all-round experience. They had to leave university feeling ready to take on the world, and brimful of hope.

  Many universities were trying to make their student populations more mixed, but Brunel never had that problem. It was one of the most multicultural institutions in the country. Like a lot of centres of higher education, there were students from all over the world. The Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe were well represented, but by far the most foreign students came from China. But it was the make-up of the homegrown students that was most important, and this group was so mixed that ethnicity was not an issue. So I was surprised to find that as soon as I started the job I would not only have creative writing students, but students from engineering, law and other faculties, who would come to see me simply because they wanted to talk to a black professor. Some would see me almost as a counsellor. They would talk to me about their problems, both at university and at home. They would even talk to me about other members of staff if they felt they didn’t understand their perspective. I thought it was important for them to have someone they could trust, and I realised I could be that guy.

  The writer Bernardine Evaristo started at the university at the same time as me and, soon after, so did Will Self, a writer and public intellectual for whom I have great respect. Some people see us as ‘celebrity professors’, but we don’t see ourselves like that. Students love the fact that lectures might start with a book signing or CD signing, but we take our work very seriously. I love lecturing. I love standing in front of students and seeing their faces light up when I burst into poetry. I don’t enjoy the bureaucracy, though, and I can’t get excited about reaching government targets, but when I’m standing in front of a group of students I come alive.