The power of words | 3 May 2018

‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on Saturday afternoons in their house in Hockley, Birmingham, where Zephaniah grew up with his seven siblings, the drinks trolley would come out and the record player be plugged in — Desmond Dekker, Millie Small and Prince Buster — ‘the lyrics of Caribbean life’. The church, too, gave him a love of words and vocal performance, Zephaniah delivering his first gig by reciting a list of the books of the Bible both ways, forwards and in reverse order.

The music and the poetry were part of everyday life, ‘it was how we communicated’. But so, too, were the ‘black bastard’ attacks, being told by a friend, ‘Sorry you can’t come home. My Dad doesn’t like black people’, the need to become ‘a good fighter’. Dyslexic at school before the condition was recognised, Zephaniah was told that he was stupid and ‘a born failure’.