I have devised a module called ‘Writing Poetry for Performance’, which I’ve been told is the first of its kind. It isn’t a module which has a performance poetry component, or the option to study performance poetry, interview performance poets or write some poetry and leave it at that. With my module you have to perform. Students can look at the work of other poets, they can study the history of performance poetry and the oral traditions of the world, but whatever they do, however they got there, this module comes down to them expressing themselves, using their own, original performance poetry. I encourage them to be personal; I encourage them to be political. It can get quite intense.
Over the years I have performed in universities all over the world but now, as I get older, I find myself lecturing in them. I use the term loosely because my lectures usually involve a lot of performing. I have guest-lectured in universities in South Korea, North Korea, Shanghai, Beijing, Tripoli (Libya), Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Memphis, Ohio, India, various branches of the University of the West Indies, and I also accepted the position of Visiting Professor at De Montfort University in Leicester.
So there I was, in 2012, tending to my students, doing my performances and writing my novels, when I was invited to have a cameo role in a new TV drama – a drama with a difference. It would be set in 1920s Birmingham and it was to be called Peaky Blinders.
The Peaky Blinders were a real gang that once controlled parts of Birmingham similar to Mafia operations elsewhere. I was the first person cast for the programme, and my character is based on a real guy, called Jimmy Jesus, but for legal reasons he is called Jeremiah Jesus in the series. The real guy was a Jamaican who fought alongside Birmingham battalions in the First World War. He got on so well with the soldiers that he came back to England and stayed. He settled and became a preacher-cum-gangster.
We weren’t sure how the series would be accepted when it was first launched – it could have flopped – but after the first three episodes, it was massive. We realised we were onto something. Then the second series felt like a school reunion, with a few new guys who were joining the Peaky clan. By the third series we were on a roll, and we all love the filming, although we all have very different styles. Cillian Murphy, for instance, is so understated that you sometimes cannot be sure whether or not he’s acting. I’m louder and more animated, and as soon as Paul Anderson is in costume he’s in character. We’ve become a team, and we have great fun. Cillian and I are always talking about music and the bands we’re listening to, but the moment those cameras start rolling we get straight down to business.
Peaky Blinders made the production company proud, it made the writer, Steven Knight, proud, it made the cast proud – but most of all it made Birmingham proud. In the first series I was the only person in the cast actually from Birmingham, so when I walked around the city people told me how proud they were. Fans of the show started dressing like the Peaky Blinders, there was a cocktail named the Peaky Blinder, and then a pub. Personally, I really like seeing it in German, Spanish and Mandarin as I travel the world.
56
CRYING IN THE CHAPEL
Due to my hectic lifestyle and constant travelling over almost four decades, I haven’t been in regular contact with family members over the years other than my mum, although I have kept the lines of communication open. I have always been aware of what’s been going on in the lives of my brothers and sisters, and of Pastor Burris’s kids, especially Trevor, who is, in every sense except by blood, a brother.
I know my family are very proud of me, but it frustrates me sometimes that none of them have read my work more thoroughly. I don’t think any of them could do a three-minute lecture on what my poetry or writing is really about – if they had, I would have employed them! I sometimes feel they’re proud because I’m famous, and not because of what I stand for or have created. If I think about that, it does break my heart a little. Still, family is family and sometimes you have to take care of each other and love each other unconditionally.
In 2012 I was made aware of what was happening to Pastor, who was still in the States, and getting older and older. He had started to show signs of dementia, and he needed a carer. His situation was complicated, due to US citizenship issues, but it transpired that he was being ripped off by an unscrupulous woman who was siphoning cash from him but not doing much in the way of caring.
I started calling him regularly around this time and could hear he was fading. In October 2013 Trevor went over and couldn’t believe the appalling conditions his dad was living in. This woman had completely neglected him while helping herself to his money. So Trevor said, ‘We’re going back to England’, and put him on a plane almost immediately.
When they arrived at Heathrow there was a scene, as he was so ill. He was taken immediately to hospital. He was in there for a while, then came out, got very sick again very quickly, was readmitted and then, on 13 January 2014, he died. I visited him before he passed. All his kids saw him. But this is where it gets weird. We began making arrangements for the funeral. There was no autopsy or anything but the hospital had his body and told us, ‘He’s a foreign national – you’ll need to pay the costs.’ The family was presented with a bill for £18,000, which they couldn’t afford.
The hospital wouldn’t give us the body back until they got the money. I was astonished. I went to one doctor and said, ‘This is crazy, you’re holding the body to ransom. What are you going to do? Are you going to bury him? If so, can we come to the funeral?’
They went on about him not being a UK citizen, and how the government was clamping down on ‘NHS tourism’. But he’d been in England since he was a very young man. He was one of those guys who’d worked all his life, never gone sick. He’d worked in security, welding, all sorts of jobs. I explained how he’d become a US citizen only after he’d retired, and that he’d paid his National Insurance contributions all his working life. For a while it was like a gangsters’ stand-off from Peaky Blinders: ‘We’ve got your dad and we’re not gonna give you the body unless you pay up.’
In typical surreal Zephaniah fashion there was a twist to the story. I was actually doing promotional work for the regional health authority, helping to publicise awareness of HIV in the black community in the West Midlands. In fact, it was a doctor from the very hospital Pastor died in who’d got me involved. I calmly pointed this out, and there was much hand-wringing and apologising, with them saying ‘It’s not us, it’s the government.’ A week later, they called to say, ‘It’s okay. You can have him back. No charge.’
At the funeral, Pastor had an open casket, and people were filing around to pay their last respects. Now, I’d been to many funerals in my life, and I’d never cried at one before, but when it was my turn at the casket I looked at Pastor’s face and quickly hurried into a corner – where I just cried and cried. I mean really cried. It took me over – an emotional reaction I could do nothing about. When I composed myself, I expected people to be staring, or that some aunties would come to comfort me, but it seemed no one had noticed. A couple of acquaintances were chatting casually nearby: ‘Yeah man, how you doing? Long time no see. Y’alright Benjamin, man.’
I don’t remember crying when my dad died, but there was something about that last moment looking at Pastor that really touched me. He’d been like a real dad to me and, despite him chickening out on marriage and breaking Mum’s heart, I’d obviously held stronger feelings for him than I was aware of.
Mum came to the funeral, although she hadn’t visited him in hospital, so she never said goodbye as such. She told me after he died that she thought he was the only man who had ever really loved her. When she was in the kitchen he would come up behind her and put his arms around her or cover her eyes, saying, ‘Guess who?’ or give her a peck on the cheek – playful little gestures that meant a lot. She’d never had that kind of affection from my dad. And she said, ‘You know, I’ll never forget those things . . . black men don’t do that kind of thing very often.’
&nbs
p; 57
TALKING ’BOUT A REVOLUTION
I thought by this age I’d be a lot more relaxed about politics, happy to say, ‘I did my bit’, but whenever I have an audience in front of me, I find I’m compelled to really speak out. I feel as angry now as I did in my twenties.
If I look around the world, especially to the US, I’m in shock at the levels of racism still very much in evidence. I would never have predicted the rise of the alt-right, neo-fascists or the KKK, feeling so emboldened, so self-righteous, that they’d be taking to the streets and talking about their rights! And in the UK, I never imagined the EDL (English Defence League) or Britain First emerging, given that we’d seen off the NF ages ago. I knew we weren’t ever going to live in a perfect world, but by the 1990s I thought we’d come too far to ever go back.
I think it’s easy for people like me, who grew up in Birmingham, or for people who spend a lot of time in major cities, to think everyone is cool, but it’s really not like that in the majority of the UK. I believe it’s because politics is driven by fear – it keeps going on about the ‘other’. And it’s in areas where there are no black people that you seem to get the most fear, with people panicking, saying, ‘What if they all start coming here?’
Capitalism needs wars but it also needs a fear industry. It always has to have a new enemy. I was doing an interview a couple of years ago, where the interviewer played a recording of me speaking in the 1980s. Back then I said: ‘We always need an enemy; right now it’s the Russians but I can imagine in a couple of decades it being something like . . . Islam.’
When I think about the political landscape in the not-too-distant future, I believe capitalism will eat itself. The idea of any economy having perpetual growth is ludicrous. It’s like it relies on two big things, and they always talk about them, no matter what else is happening in the world. These are car sales and how the supermarkets are doing. Is Sainsbury’s making a profit? Is Tesco making a profit? And it’s like some big disaster if car sales dip by half a per cent, or Tesco’s margin drops a couple of million pounds. Then you hear: ‘Oh no, the economy’s broke and we’re doomed!’ To deal with that they have recessions and bail out the banks to pump up the bubble; then the bubble floats for a few years before it bursts again. This cycle of boom and bust is unsustainable. One day there’ll be a bust we cannot recover from. Then the most important currency won’t be made of silver, gold or paper – it’ll be made up of the relationships and trust with have with each other.
That’s no excuse to be lazy or to give up, though. We’ve still got to play our part to improve things. People are going hungry, we need to take care of our old folk, we need to provide kids with the best education they can get, but we can’t sit back and rely on capitalism to take care of it. We’ve still got to struggle, because it’s like all the rights and gains made to better people’s lives in the UK over the past sixty years are being chipped away.
I’m convinced the widening social gap started with Thatcher. People always quote her saying, ‘There’s no such thing as society’, but the one thing I recall her saying, which I thought was shocking, was that if a man is taking the bus at the age of thirty he’s a failure. That set the tone. Constant achievement became king, as if taking the bus meant a person was some kind of tramp. And this message fed into the ‘loadsamoney’ culture that’s still with us.
Before the 1980s, I never saw the kind of greed you have now, where people want to accumulate as much wealth as possible, not caring about others and stepping on them. I was listening to a Commons debate soon before this book went to press. Theresa May was hiding behind some statistics, and Jeremy Corbyn said to her: ‘Have you not seen the people sleeping in train stations? Have you not seen the soup kitchens?’ And no, they haven’t. The people who are really rich – or who facilitate obscene wealth – do not see, and cannot see.
One of my well-known poems is ‘Money Rant’. Although financial systems are complex, at a basic level there’s something very simplistic when you strip it down. In effect money is an IOU. It began in China, with people exchanging things. One day someone said, ‘I’ll give you a note.’ Then the ruling system took it over and said, ‘OK guys, we’ll do that.’
The Oxford Book of Money, published in 1995, used ‘Money Rant’ because they said my poem explained the culture of money really well and made that explanation accessible. Money only works because we believe in it. If I’m going to do a deal with you, and I give you money, you will accept it because you know that the person you go on to give it to will also accept it. If I go to a chimpanzee and he has grapes and I have a banana, we could swap. If I went to the chimpanzee and he has grapes and I only have a £5 note, he’s not going to be interested. He doesn’t know the narrative – the one that says: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of . . .’ All the humans know the narrative.
When it comes to labelling me, I would say the closest description of what I am is an anarchist. People always mock you if you say that because they think it’s about going crazy, and I could respond by giving the examples of the Free Territory of Ukraine in 1918–1921, Catalonia between 1936 and 1939, and the many Asian and African communities that survive without help from a central government. But I don’t have to; look at what happened after the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 – the immediate aftermath of that completely avoidable tragedy was an example of anarchy in action. At a time when people urgently and desperately needed their government and their local council, they weren’t there for them. So the people organised themselves. People who had counselling skills volunteered; others worked out where the donations would go; some set up food centres. All that assistance was done without government help.
If we are going to have government, then can we at least have responsible government? If someone asked me what I would do with the structure we have right now, I’d say renationalise the railways and keep the NHS out of private hands. But I come from the Marcus Garvey school of political thought – doing whatever is necessary to achieve something. Some aspects of life actually work well with a capitalist approach. Personally I’m quite competitive; if I’m playing dominoes or tennis, I want to win!
If you really want to mess up the economy, get everybody to grow their own food or do favours for other people. Can you imagine how much it would upset the ruling systems if people started growing their own food? One of the things they really don’t like is people saying, ‘Let’s be self-sufficient.’ But back in Jamaica, that’s how many people lived right up until recently. In fact, the simpler, more self-sufficient way of life is still thriving in parts of the Caribbean.
One time, in about 1987, in Jamaica, I gave my grandmother the equivalent of £60 in cash. And she said it was the most money she’d ever held in her hand in her life. I said to her, ‘But you’ve got a house, you’ve got a farm. You must have needed money for that.’ Her reply opened my mind to a different kind of economy.
‘No, we didn’t need money,’ she said. ‘Mr Baker over there, I gave him some yam, so he laid the foundations . . . to get the brickwork done I went to Mr Lawrence over there, and gave him some dasheen and sweet potato and did some childcare.’ To get to her land, she had to walk through other people’s plots, so it made real sense when she said the most important currency for her was the relationship she had with her neighbours.
When I asked if her garden was organic, she said, ‘I plant something here, then I plant something next to it that tells the flies to go away.’ Companion farming, it’s called. But she didn’t call it that; it was just natural. That’s why it’s so evil that you now have companies like Monsanto wanting to copyright rice or take seeds out of a natural crop so a person can’t grow it without having to buy the copyright version.
And look at the arms trade – something that is evil by definition. As this book goes to print, Saudi Arabia is waging a despicable war in Yemen and the UK government is doing nothing about it. It just keeps selling them more arms. This is an instance when we shoul
d be saying no but, because of shareholders, and how important economically the arms trade is, we don’t.
It’s amazing when you see a country that’s recently had a coup. You walk into a palace and think, This was recently a government. How were they overcome? Just a couple of props pulled out made it collapse. Say there’s ten props; you only need to take out a couple. In China their revolution was initially started by a few people talking in a room. We now know that what Mao in China, and Castro in Cuba, did was revolutionary even compared to other revolutions. Others might have appealed to students and intellectuals, but Mao and Castro, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, went to the poor people; they went to the fields and said, ‘See this land you’re working on, you can take it over. Come with us.’ By the time they got to the cities, they were massive.
These days, a lot of political discussion has shifted from being about class and inequality to being about personal identity. I used to have a simple formula: if you were upper or middle class, then you would inherit a house and/or money when your parents died, and if you were working class, you’d inherit debt. People were always worrying about how they’d pay for a relative’s funeral. But that’s all changed. If I had children they’d inherit my house, but I still wouldn’t see myself as middle class. People are confused about class identity now because those kinds of social markers aren’t so cut and dried. The labour force is fragmented and the concept of solidarity has been eroded by the culture of the individual.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 25
