The Life and Rhymes
of Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Zephaniah, honorary university doctor, primetime
television actor, established children’s author, Question Time regular, he
almost seems like part of the furniture these days (so much so that in 2008 someone
thought he might like to be rewarded with an OBE, forgetting that all his life
he has hated and rebelled against the idea of Empire and the establishment). But
he’s more likely to take all the furniture out of your house and pile it up in
the street to protest about something, and then come round the next day and
create some new furniture for you with his bare hands. This autobiography starts
off like a Dickensian picaresque, as Benjamin runs around the streets of 1960s
Birmingham in what seems like a different world. Growing up dealing with
racism, domestic violence and poverty, Benjamin finds poetry, music and friendship
to sustain him. The first third of the book has a gripping, confessional tone,
and it’s clear there are things he has never really spoken about before and
finds difficult to re-live, and you find yourself involved and caring about
what happens to our hero and his mother. The frank revelations of fighting,
borstal and a beckoning life of crime culminate in a sliding doors moment, when
he could have ended up in prison or dead, but instead went to London and listened
to the voice of the child inside him who always wanted to be a poet. As the
sound system roots scene collides with punk and Two Tone explodes around him,
he carves out a niche for himself on the alternative music and comedy circuit
in the early eighties. It’s a vivid reminder of life in Thatcher’s Britain, as
he tirelessly provides a poetical soundtrack to every demonstration from Rock
Against Racism to the miners’ strike, anti-apartheid, Palestine, East Timor and
the Chagos Islands. The power of his words and his commitment to various causes
finds him gaining recognition nationally and internationally, as he makes an
impact in the former Yugoslavia and becomes a regular visitor to China. He sees
no boundaries, and makes connections with people wherever he goes, always
discovering something new musically or delving into Tai Chi, acting or organic
gardening. Reading this section of the book
feels like spending a few hours in the company of Benjamin Zephaniah, but his
easy-going style of writing belies the fact that he is constantly challenging you
to look at the world around you and think or do something different. There’s a
lot to celebrate in his life, and the world has changed massively since the
eighties, but he is far from complacent, and his passion for revolutionary
thinking is undimmed as he keeps working on new material and touring to new
audiences. One thing that really shocked me is he says “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.” This is a
chilling thought and felt at odds with some of his experiences in the book,
where he personally has played such a huge part in overcoming racism and
changing attitudes. But thinking back to the description of his formative years,
when prejudice was so entrenched in Britain, made me wonder where those racists
have gone, have they changed or had they just gone quiet, only to pop up spouting
their bile now on social media. Looking at how the Government got away with the
Windrush ‘hostile environment’ scandal for so long, I wondered if he might be
right. He often is, so we should keep listening to him, and do something about
it. One love.
