Why poet Benjamin Zephaniah is a rebel with a cause to so many youngsters
Reporters from Children's Express, the UK's only news agency for young people, caught up with Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah to find out what makes him appeal to kids and his reasons for turning down the OBE.
| ...its really strange because if I wasn't doing poetry, I'd probably really like to be a teacher. |
For many young people poetry equals school work. And for some young people growing up in the 21st century, school work equals anything but fun.
We know about poets like Oscar Wilde and William Blake because we learn about them in school. It's not that we don't appreciate their poetry but sometimes it can be difficult to understand the language and to relate to what they're talking about. But when a poet like Benjamin Zephaniah performs, we take notice. His words, his recitals and his poetic style are something we as young people, identify with.
Take education: 'I pass thru University, I pass thru Sociology, An den I get a Dread degree, In Dreadfull Ghettology'…
Or going on your first date: 'I have a date with Su Ling Lee. We're meeting at the library, at 5 o'clock by history. I'll show her some mythology. And if we have the energy, we'll check out some theology. And if there is good chemistry, we will dance by musicology.'
And there's crime: 'We know who the killers are, we have watched them strut before us, As proud as sick Mussolinis.'
When Zephaniah recently performed at the GCSE Live Poetry Conference in Central London alongside the likes of Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, it was clear to see we weren't the only young people moved by his work.
Reciting poems like 'Talking Turkey' and 'What the death of Stephen Lawrence has taught us', Zephaniah tells it like it is, pulling no punches. It's his simple language and bouncy rhymes that appeal to us. We don't have to think through what he's saying for five minutes with Dad's dictionary at our sides.
But who is Benjamin Zephaniah and if he's more relevant to us than some of the classic poets, why isn't he given more importance in the national curriculum?
Zephaniah was born and grew up in Birmingham, with Jamaican parents. His first book of poems came out in 1980 after publishers had heard him perform his lyrics at various arts venues. He says he has always had an interest in youth culture:
"I just like to come and give them (young people) a nice time. Poetry is not just a subject, it can be enjoyed as well, and it can be fun, as well as having the messages and being academic."
"My poetry readings start of quite humorous, then in the middle it gets very serious and in the end it lights up again."
Humorous is definitely a word to describe Zephaniah's performances as he often has his audience in the palm of his hands, bringing across the seriousness of the issues he talks about while giving his poems a light hearted feeling.
And it's not just through poetry that he manages to capture our interest. In Zephaniah's latest novel, Gangsta Rap, he tells the story of Ray, a 15 year-old black boy living in East London.
Ray is raised by his hard working mother but hardly ever sees his 'no good' father. The book explores issues to do with young people being excluded from school and youth culture's fascination with hip-hop and rap. Parts of the book offer an autobiographical account of Zephaniah's own life as a teenager. At age 13, he was permanently excluded from school, and had an often-volatile relationship with his father, being raised predominately by his mother.
"I'd be called 'uncontrollable.' I was always challenging teachers, which in them days was just not done," he says.
"I was always uneasy at school, and when I got kicked out at the age of 13, I got excluded permanently. I never went back to school. I didn't cry or anything. My mother was happy, she said, 'school's holding you back,' and to a certain extent it was."
Zephaniah also remembers how difficult it was growing up in a household where his mother and father were locked in physical, mental and emotional battles, often with him in the middle of it, just like the main character in his novel:
"I was raised by my mother. And my father, at one point in their relationship, got very violent and my mother found it necessary to move out. Having said that I had other male role models around me, some good, some not so good. I think that it's important to have good people around you."
Despite having been permanently excluded from school, what is amazing about Zephaniah is that he now spends most of his time going to schools, and reciting his poetry to young people. He often challenges their perceptions of poetry as something that is hard to understand and maybe, at times, boring:
"You know, it's crazy. Now I spend most of my time going to schools talking about life, politics, all these kind of things. I was always a bit of a rebel at school, and its really strange because if I wasn't doing poetry, I'd probably really like to be a teacher."
To Zephaniah education is important and is far more than just going to school to read textbooks and accept what teachers write on the blackboard. It is more to do with how young people approach school life and the attitudes and opinions that they have rather than what they're being taught:
"I think that you can have an education and not be educated. I mean I see a lot of people who come through a really good education system where their family paid thousands of pounds for it and they still got no common sense.
The important thing is to really learn how to think for yourself. If I meet an adult that says 'I'm right, my views are right, that's it,' and I meet a child that says 'why' and questions me, I have more respect for the child because the child is intellectual, is applying their brain, and the adult is just being bigoted."
And Zephaniah does really live by the advice he gives. Later this month he will appear in a BBC documentary about his rejection of the OBE, something not many people find the courage to do. The documentary is called 'This OBE is Not For Me' and will be shown on BBC2.
A lot of people view his response to the OBE as rebellious but he explains he had very good reasons for turning it down:
"I wanted to show the darker side of the British Empire. A lot of people it and say 'oh, the British Empire, it gave the world roles, and we gave India trade,' and things like this. But actually, in my family, my personal family, I only need to go back a couple of generations to when we were slaves.
In my family's house, in Jamaica, we still have memorabilia from being slaves. So we don't celebrate the British Empire - for us it was a curse on our family for generations and generations so we don't know our true ancestral home in Africa, we don't know our true language, we don't know what our true religion was."
Just like his rebellion as a teenager, Zephaniah's rebellion as an adult has led to criticism from all directions. But it is this rebellious streak that endears him to young people like us. He is our rebel with a cause.
Zephaniah has taught us that there's much more to poetry than just reading it in a book. Poetry is at its most best when it is performed, bringing to life real issues. We identify with him because some of what he went through is what some of us go through now. We've learnt that poetry isn't boring, in fact it can be fun, whilst still managing to teach us about life. For those very reasons Zephaniah deserves a place in our schools alongside the great poets of history.
"I used to think nurses
Were women
I used to think police
Were men
I used to think poets
Were boring
Until I became one of them."
About the team
This story was produced by Rhona Ezuma 15, Kamal Akerbousse 13 and Ricky Otusi 12. It was published by New Nation.
