Book Review - The Life And Rhymes Of Benjamin Zephaniah By Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Zephaniah died on 7th December 2023 at the age of 65. His passing was untimely but I’m not going to lie and pretend I was a fan of his and that I knew all his work off by heart. The truth is the only thing I knew about Benjamin Zephaniah was that he rejected an OBE. However, once I saw the flood gates open and the tributes and obituaries came pouring out from seemingly all over the internet, I had an inkling that I might have missed out on something special. I did a bit of googling and quickly realised that was the case. I also found out that he had written an autobiography called The Life and Rhymes Of Benjamin Zephaniah so I got a copy and started reading. What I discovered was a journey through the life of a man who had one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. A voice which I now regret not hearing sooner.

The book starts from Zephaniah’s childhood as he writes about his early days growing up in Birmingham in the 60’s and 70’s. His childhood was a difficult one as it was marred by violence, poverty, and racism which only became harder once he and his mother left his abusive father. It is clear throughout the book that he cared for his mother deeply and credits her for sparking his lifelong love of poetry and rhyme. His experiences of racism started early and left a deep impact on him that would reverberate throughout his life. His time in the educational system was plagued by the subtle racism of lowered expectations. He struggled in school and fell behind but instead of receiving help he was written off by his teachers. When he was expelled from Broadway Comprehensive one of his teachers said so to his face: “As I left the school a teacher told me I was a born failure and that within a short time I was going to be dead or doing a life sentence in prison.” It wasn’t until he was already an adult in his twenties that he was finally formally diagnosed with dyslexia and received help through adult education services. Services which Zephaniah notes no longer exist to help people due to budget cuts to councils.

In contrast with the slightly quieter racism he experienced in school, he was also subjected to much more overt and violent racism at the hands of the police. This was especially as he got older as a teenager and started to have more run ins with them. There were many incidents with the police seeming to act as recurring antagonists through his life. One such incident that stood out to me while reading was after he had been discharged from school, but while he was still a teenager, Zephaniah was arrested and questioned about some robberies which he knew nothing about. At one point a police officer took him into a room where a bunch of Rastafarian style hats with people’s dreadlocks in them were pinned to the wall like the police were collecting trophies: “They were like scalps. The officer stood there and, with great pride, he named the victims one by one and then he looked lustfully at my newly grown dreadlocks, warning me that I’d be up there soon if I didn’t co-operate.” While I was disturbed to read this sadly, I can’t say I was surprised.

Overall Zephaniah’s youth, like that of many young Black boys back then and today, was one in which he was repeatedly failed by the institutions that were meant to protect him because of his skin colour. For his part Zephaniah is open about the fact that growing up he fell into a life of petty crime. He doesn’t absolve himself of responsibility for his encounters with police. He was arrested several times growing up and was eventually sent to a youth detention centre, or as they were known back then borstal. His education was hampered even more there and he ended up leaving at 15 barely able to read. His experiences growing up are a perfect illustration of the damage institutional racism can do from an incredibly early age and the book shows a near perfect example of the school to prison pipeline that so many children have fallen into over the decades.

As Zephaniah entered young adulthood, he got more enmeshed in crime to the point where he had younger boys working for him. Life gradually became more and more dangerous for him, to the point where he feared for his life enough to buy himself a gun. Thankfully after his own personal long dark night of the soul he found the inner strength to break out of a cycle that a lot of people never escape from. Realising he, even after all these years, still wanted to be a poet, and that the alternative was most likely dying before age 30, he got out and moved to London. There he embarked on a long arduous struggle to establish not just himself as a poet, but to establish performance poetry as an artform that could be a financial as well as artistic success. It wasn’t an easy thing to do but gradually he met some good people and made friends with them which led to them doing a thing. The thing was a success which led to him meeting more people which led to him doing another thing with each thing building on the last exponentially opening more doors to more people and more projects. It took a lot of hard work, time, and talent but he was able to defy the odds and avoid the fate that teacher had predicted for him.

His poetry and performances didn’t just lead to a successful career for himself. It led to positive impact in the wider world as he moved more into using his poetry, writing, and performing for social activism. One of the more notable examples of this blending of performance and activism was the work he did for, and the contributions he made towards, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa and the freeing of Nelson Mandella. He’s not so egotistical as to claim full credit acknowledging that he was but one of a lot of people who tirelessly campaigned for years, and that the ending of apartheid in South Africa and Mandela’s release were the culmination of the work many over time. Zephaniah was even able to meet Mandela in person after his release. In a point of pride for Zephaniah, Mandela confirmed that he had read some of Zephaniah’s work in prison. The book consists of a lot of short chapters with 61 in total. Several of them are only a few pages long and focus solely on a single event or project like the release of Mandela and their meeting This approach makes for an easily digestible tour through his life making the book very readable. Everything happens chronologically so it really lays out each step in Zephaniah’s life showing how each thing he did built upon the last and how he became a powerful force for societal improvement. He lived his life within the intersection between art and advocacy and didn’t limit his campaigning to just fighting racism or apartheid but he was an advocate for animal rights, among other causes.

One of the highest compliments I can pay to this book is that it made me want to seek out more of his work. This was the longest it has taken for me to complete an initial read for a review so far because several times it made me stop and look up things Zephaniah had done. For example, he wrote about how amidst a smear campaign from the tabloid press while he was being considered for a fellowship at Cambridge University, he acted in a short film called “Dread Poets Society”. In the book he mentions that it was well received at the time though it’s only been shown on TV once. So, with my curiosity peaked of course I searched for it, and of course I found it almost immediately on YouTube, and of course I watched it. The book also mentioned Zephaniah’s poem “Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death” so I found it online and read it, then I found a video of him reciting it on YouTube and watched it. The same happened with his poem “Talking Turkeys”. This process of stopping and delving into Zephaniah’s work gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of the performance part of performance poetry. The difference between reading a poem written down in a book, and seeing the poet perform it on stage was immense. The cadence and rhythm with which he delivered his poetry brought his words to life in a way that they didn’t when just printed on paper.

To conclude this piece, it is a tragedy to say that with his passing, Benjamin Zephaniah’s oeuvre has been brought to a premature end. There will never be another poem, play, or novel written by him. There will never be another performance filmed and put on YouTube for people to find. What exists now is all that will ever exist, unless some people with too much time and money use AI to resurrect his digital ghost like they recently did with George Carlin, something which I truly hope doesn’t happen. This book is a testament to the power of poetry as a driver for societal change, and the importance of literature as a public good. I’m writing this review from the perspective of someone who just missed the boat by five minutes when it comes to Zephaniah. This has absolutely affected the lens through which I read this book and I can’t pretend otherwise. There’s no way of knowing how different this review would’ve been if I’d written it a year or two ago when he was still alive. Ultimately, I’m at least trying to take some small solace in the idea that his body of work is now complete and available for people to discover. It is my hope that maybe this book can act as a gateway for others as it has for me.

To buy this book please click here: http://tinyurl.com/4xvs57yt