The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  I was speaking to this old-style socialist recently, and I realised how out of touch he sounded, talking about the rank and file, as if people still worked in factories and were going to down tools and march out on strike. Most of them are stuck behind desks and not even in a union. Exploitation is everywhere. All the factories I knew when I was growing up in Birmingham are now privately owned office spaces and workshops or loft apartments.

  If you want to have a peaceful revolution, everybody needs to undergo a big mindshift and say: ‘We’re not paying for this. We’re not doing this.’ But these days it’s like everyone wants to go shopping. I look at advertising now and think, What the hell?! Do people really believe this nonsense? Capitalism is extremely seductive. It’s why I like to buy clothes that are out of fashion or see films once all the fuss has died down. I want to avoid the hype.

  In China and other parts of the developing world, as capitalism takes hold, more people are getting an obsession with skinniness. Places where anorexia was unheard of thirty years ago are now subject to the same dogmas as the West. You see the obsession on social media with thinness via the craze for things like the thigh gap, or the rib cage; young people essentially oppressing themselves and each other for the fact they’re not skinny enough. It starts out with advertising, but anxiety about body image spreads like wildfire via social media platforms and is so corrosive to the young psyche.

  As dominant as the cult of the individual seems to be, there are also numerous rewards for mediocrity. I was watching a breakfast TV show recently featuring a vlogger who had published a bestseller by writing about domestic stuff. All she was writing about was being at home with the kids. It didn’t sound like she had much of a sense of the world or what was going on politically; she was just writing about the day the washing machine broke down.

  I thought back to my mum in the 1960s, washing all her clothes by hand; nappies made of terry cloth being boiled clean on a stove and seven kids to look after. These days people are being indulged with fame for mastering their kitchen utensils or baking a cake. All I know is that the world has changed a hell of lot since the days of Angela Davis.

  58

  LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL

  I’ve a friend who’s a doctor. He works in palliative care, he sees a lot of death, and he knows when people are dying with regrets. He says the people who are facing it calmly, regardless of how much money they have, are the ones at peace with their families, or those who have lived a full life or have tried things – marriages, ventures of some kind – even if they didn’t work out. It’s the ‘giving it a go’ that helps us feel more sanguine in the end. The ones who are screwed up are the people with regrets about not doing stuff: ‘I coulda been a contender’ – all that.

  I don’t fear death, but I don’t want to be there when it happens. Women and children are definitely tougher than me when it comes to tolerating pain. I’ve watched people die painfully and recently someone said to me, ‘Do you know how boring it is waiting to die?’

  When it comes to the other side – God, the afterlife – I think there’s something there but we don’t understand it, so we make up stories about heaven and hell. Look at the whole of nature; apart from one or two exceptions it’s the female who gives birth. When it comes to the creation story, supposedly a man does it. It seems we need these simple stories for our little brains . . . and it’s the same with death. We can’t imagine it, so we tell a story: you go to a place, either good or bad, and you’ll be judged.

  Orthodox religion says we are bodies with spirits attached, which I reckon is a crazy way of thinking. You don’t have a spirit – you are a spirit, with a body attached, for a time. We are so centred on the material because we’re here, dragging our bodies around, along with all our stuff.

  I’m fascinated by near-death experiences. It doesn’t seem to matter which culture someone comes from – whether Christian, Muslim, punk, anarchist – there are so many similarities. I know someone who was on stage in Spain. It was raining; he touched the microphone, then boom! He was electrocuted. He technically ‘died’. He left his body but when he was finally revived, he said, ‘There is a god – not Jesus or whatever, but there’s something. When I left my body, I could feel my mortgage going; all this stuff, just leaving. It was wonderful. You open like a flower, join the universe. Then you’re sucked back in and you’ve got a backache. And stuff to worry about.’ He didn’t want to talk about it too much because he didn’t want people committing suicide. I did a lot of research on the subject. I wanted to do a TV programme about it but no one wanted to run with it. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by near-death experiences is that I witnessed a profound incident of the unexplained when I was young.

  A few of us guys were at Pastor Burris’s sister’s place one day. Aunt Maud had a daughter called Kay – a teenager, about eighteen or nineteen. She was girlie, chatty, friendly. We were all sitting around the table in Aunt Maud’s kitchen and Kay walked in, then walked out the back door without saying hello, which was strange, so we followed her out and couldn’t see her. Not a trace. She couldn’t have carried on walking; she would have had to climb a fence. We were like, ‘Where’s she gone? That’s not like Kay. She wouldn’t ignore us.’ We were Jamaican guys, trying to be down-to-earth. You can imagine. ‘What kinda ting Kay do, man? Why she a hide somewhere?’

  Very soon afterwards, one of her nephews came rushing into the house, shouting, ‘Kay’s in hospital, she got run over!’

  We said, ‘What?!’ We all looked at each other. We had all seen her, as clear as anything; not only me, all of us. As it transpired, the hospital said her heart had stopped for a short time and they’d had to revive her. We talked to her afterwards and she didn’t remember anything. She was in a coma. She lives in America now. I’m convinced that when her heart stopped she ‘walked’ through the house.

  There’s a group of scientists who believe in a concept they call the Science of Eternity. They’re rational thinkers but they also believe in a higher power and spirituality. The simplest way to explain their theory is to apply the analogy of frequencies, like radio waves. Say we listen to Radio 1; we know there are people broadcasting from a studio. That’s real, but it comes to us through a frequency. Turn the dial a bit and it’s a completely different reality – you could be hearing Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. Human beings operate on a frequency too. We have electricity in us; our brains operate on a frequency, but there are other frequencies, where other things exist.

  We can be here, but right now something else is happening on a different frequency – the past, the future, the otherworldly. The scientists who believe this are not cranks. I think it’s likely that all this sort of thing will be explained through science at some point. I think people can sometimes attach to a different frequency and see something and come back. And I think that’s what happened with Kay.

  If you sit quietly and really get in touch with yourself, you can get in touch with the experience people think of as God. Monks will find it easier because they don’t have lots of possessions. We’ve got all this stuff and all these concerns that make it hard to switch off, even for an hour or so. To get to God, we’ve developed this need for an intermediary – the church, priest, whatever – but I don’t think it’s necessary; we just need to meditate and sit with ourselves. Get in touch with yourself and you’ll get in touch with God.

  If I’ve done something bad, I sit with my conscience. I go over my day and think, Do I need to apologise to anyone? I can deal with my own conscience. But some people can’t. They have to go to the priest and tell them they’ve sinned. And that’s a whole other risky business – being in a closed space with a celibate man, telling him your deepest secrets. It’s never going to end well, is it? (Actually, there’s no passage in the Bible where it says a priest should be celibate.)

  If for some odd reason you want to understand my religion, it’s important to understand this – I have no religion. I have been very religious in the past, but th
en only found more religion, and with so much religion upon me I went on pilgrimages to the holy sites of the world. I wanted to meet as many holy people as I could, but I came back with no religion.

  My name and my upbringing may link me to Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Rastafari, but I don’t want these things to get in the way of seeing the spirit within. I would like to be remembered as someone who really believed in One Love. You can have the love of your friends, your wife, husband, family and your pets. But I have One Love for every living thing, and that includes the earth itself, because it too is alive.

  Sitting silently is what I do. I sit so silently that the noises around me disappear and the loudest thing I can hear is my breath and the sound of my blood moving around my body. I sit some more until these sounds are replaced by the sound of my inner silence, and then I am connected. Why would I need a religion to do that?

  I can understand people not going for this. When people talk or write about these things, they can, and almost always do, sound mad, or at least like they’re tripping. But talking and writing about meditation is not where it’s at; it simply has to be experienced. Words don’t do justice to what I experience through meditation, and I have never read an account to match my experiences in meditation. So I’m not going to attempt that here.

  59

  A YEAR OF DIVISION

  By the time this book is published I’ll be sixty. I can’t believe it. I felt really low on my thirtieth birthday, because although I had travelled extensively, done countless great gigs and met lots of great people, I felt as if I’d hardly done anything. I spent that birthday telling everyone that zero to thirty had gone so fast, and if I did that again I would be sixty, and that’s really old. So now I’m nearly really old, and I’m tempted to look back over the years, like old men do, but that’s a little difficult at the moment because I’m still trying to get over 2016 – a year notable for the number of high-profile people who died. Everyone has their personal list but for me it was David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Billy Paul, Carla Lane, Fidel Castro, Zaha Hadid, Phife Dawg, Muhammad Ali, Jo Cox and Maurice White, to name a few. Then, at the end of the year, I went to China to get away from Christmas, and while I was there George Michael and the Birmingham poet Yussef Ahmed died within days of each other. It was a terrible year in many ways.

  In June 2016, the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union was one of the most divisive times in British politics that I’ve lived through. In the past, politics around race have been divisive; fox hunting, sexual and gender debates have been divisive, but there was something unique about the EU referendum. I think it’s because it was a stark yes or no referendum – two campaigns that led to an event, the vote.

  For all of my political life Tony Benn had been the greatest influence on my thoughts about the EU. I had heard him talking about his distrust of the European project on television long before I met him, and by the time I got to know him his views had not changed. Of course, I thought about it for myself, but after hours of talking to Tony, and thinking it through, I had come to the conclusion that we should leave. Leading up to the vote there was so much misinformation and many – not all, but many – of the loudest voices on the leave side were those of the xenophobes and the racists.

  I really didn’t want them to distort my view of the debate and the debaters, so when asked to do Question Time for the BBC, The Agenda for Independent Television (ITV) and other TV programmes, I was neutral and listening intently to all sides of the debate, but in the end my views changed and I voted to remain.

  I strongly believed there were some really important left-wing arguments for leaving the union, but those views were not being aired. In the end, 48 per cent of people who voted voted to remain, and 52 per cent voted to leave – the Brexiters winning for the most part on a platform of racism and scaremongering.

  Lincolnshire, where I live, had the biggest leave vote in the country, and didn’t I know it. People would start conversations with me by saying, ‘I’m not a racist but . . .’ and anyone at the listening end of a conversation that starts this way knows the person talking will go on to express their deeply felt but cleverly disguised hatred for you.

  Some people used the result of the vote to shout racist remarks at me. One drove by and shouted, ‘The Europeans are leaving, and you’re next, nigger.’ The worst things were finding a note in my letterbox telling me to get out while I’m still alive and having a ‘packet’ of human excrement thrown over my gate, with a note! The extreme right rose up and racist attacks all over the country increased around this time, so it’s difficult to know how far my experiences were representative of other people in Lincolnshire, but I have to say I felt very lonely and vulnerable then.

  If there were another Brexit-type vote held in Britain that asked, ‘Should black people be in this country or not?’ I think we’d be out. I consider myself to be patriotic, because I care about England, and I care about the UK, but I don’t feel the need to wave a flag. If I wasn’t patriotic then I’d leave, like certain sports stars who want to live the luxury life elsewhere since they’ve become famous. I’ll live with my people and die with my people. But it’s impossible trying to explain to a racist how a black man can be a British patriot because he doesn’t see you as rightfully British in the first place. There’s still so much work to do out there.

  Lincolnshire is one of the few places in the world where they still call black people ‘coloured’; it’s one of the few places in Britain that still has a shop that specialises in selling golliwogs; it’s also one of the only counties in Britain where you will find many people living in the house they were born in, and where people will tell you with pride that they have never left the county.

  There’s a part of me that says Brexit wouldn’t be so bad if the government knew what it was doing. But Theresa May is probably going to go down as the weakest and worst prime minister in British history. I want to ask the people who voted leave, ‘Do you think this is going well? Is this what you expected?’

  In universities a lot of students are worried. There’s panic in the research community. A lot of funding for research into things like cancer comes from working across borders, pooling resources across universities. What began as a posh politician’s arrogant gamble was decided by the kneejerk reaction of an electorate who had lost faith in politicians. These people were not interested in the full picture and statistics, and many hadn’t thought it through. They just wanted to give Cameron a bloody nose. They made their decision on a really simplified issue – the Daily Mail version of being English or ‘foreign’. I don’t think I’ve met a university student who voted to leave. Anyone who is thinking about their future is seeing their options closing down.

  60

  KNOW THY SELF

  When I told many of my neighbours about the racism I was receiving around the time of the Brexit vote, most seemed to be saying it was sad, but it was my problem. There was a handful of people who offered to help me by installing cameras around my house and generally being vigilant, but overall it was a very gloomy time, and I was on my own.

  I’ve had gloomy times, I’ve had hard times and I’ve had good times, but most lives are like that. I have known people who outwardly seem to be very successful, but they’ve been extremely unhappy. I don’t believe you can have a completely happy life all the time. We can only have lives that are full of moments, and we have to try to make sure our happy moments outnumber the unhappy ones.

  I remember being in a police cell when I was sixteen and wondering what would become of me. The cell was about the size of a double bed, and the walls felt as though they were closing in. I looked around and thought I would be in and out of police cells and prisons for the rest of my life. For a time I thought that I, and people like me, were condemned to forever be in places like that, but then I also remembered that I once had a dream of becoming a poet and leaving some kind of positivity in the world. Then I shook my head, I mean really
shook it, as if to shake away all those negative thoughts. Yes, I did all kinds of things to survive and stay alive, but even when I did bad, even in darkest moments, I still had a deep belief that I could do better, and that I deserved better.

  I’ve witnessed the thug life, the pimp life, the street-fighting life, because I’ve been right in the middle of it, but I’ve always been an observer. I’d always watch people and think, He’s a character. That one thinks he’s the boss. There were things I did even as a child, such as running away from approved school, where I’d think, This is going to end up in one of my books or poems. I jotted it all down in my memory.

  I needed a chance, and when the chance came I took it. Having said that, just taking the chance is not good enough; I had to do some hard work as well. I wasn’t blighted by the culture of entitlement that affects the social media generation. I don’t believe the glib sentiment that if you simply ‘follow your dreams’ you’ll make it. Maybe if your talent matches your expectations you’ll make it but you might not. There might be cultural or class barriers stopping you. And if you don’t make it, you’ll need your own internal sense of self-worth to fall back on.

  At this age people often ask me what I think is my greatest achievement, and I find it very difficult to pick one or even to rank them in any order of importance. Turning away from crime could be one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, but so could reaching the age of thirty without being shot.

  Every time I visit South Africa I am filled with pride. My part was very small, but being involved with the anti-apartheid movement makes me think that I played a part in changing that country for the better. Actually Mandela told me it did. But my pride is also tinged with anxiety. There will never be another Mandela, but I fear that the ANC and its leadership are not focused on uniting the country and fighting corruption the way he was.