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’. He began truanting and fighting and was arrested for burglary (he ran a gang of thieves stealing car parts). He once opened the boot of a Ford Cortina only to find in it the leg of a man. He put the leg back in, but too late; his fingerprints were all over it.

Before long he was sleeping with a gun under his pillow, and had been close to three killings as well as losing a close friend ‘to a life sentence’. He was also, though, learning how ‘to think like a poet’. By 1980 he had published a book of poetry and was using his gift with words to speak out against the police, the racism, the discrimination. ‘I had fire in my belly and I only needed a microphone.’ Now he lives in Lincolnshire, where he grows his own vegetables and listens to that archetypal middle England programme, Gardeners’ Question Time.