Dub poet raps at bookstore

Benjamin Zephaniah raps his poems at One Way Street Bookstore. Photo provided by British Council

By He Jianwei

Benjamin Zephaniah doesn’t recite his poems: he raps them.

Last Saturday afternoon, the British-Jamaican dub poet was reciting lines from his “Who’s Who” at One Way Street Bookstore.

Poetry must be performed in public, Zephaniah says. His mission is to fight the dead image of poetry as taught in schools and bring the art back to its everyman roots.

The bookstore performance continues for five poems. For the audience, it is impossible not to make a connection between Zephaniah’s poems and music – but that may be because of ragtime.

Ragtime music is a major influence on his poems, though he identifies as a rap poet rather than ragtime.

Born in 1958 and raised in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, which he called the “Jamaican capital of Europe,” Zephaniah was born into rhythm. “British use the English word while Africans use them in their life. Rhythm seems like their native language,”he says.

Zephaniah says even as a baby he was speaking in rhyme: “The first three words I could say were mummy, daddy and money.

At 8 he became determined to become “a poet for the people” like Shakespeare, but his mother discouraged him, saying it was no way to make a living.

“She always answered me, ‘Don’t indulge in a daydream. Shakespeare died a long time ago,’” he says.

His first performance was in church when he was 10. By the age of 15, his poetry was already known among Handsworth’s Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.

He set off for London at 22 to seek his fortune as a poet having promised his mother he would make it to television within two years.

“I appeared on television only in one year,” he says.

Zephaniah’s skill with rap and ballad has made him one of the most popular poets in Britain. He draws on his personal background to discuss domestic and international concerns, like race problems and political issues.

In the Anglosphere, good is white and bad is black. “[Tarzan] happened in the deepest and darkest jungle in Africa, but the hero is a white man,” he says, citing the contradiction as his inspiration for the poem “White Comedy.”

He fuses personal and political messages in his poems. The first book, Pen Rhythm, published in 1980 discussed his life as a bad goth. And his second collection published in 1985, The Dread Affair, criticized the country’s legal system. In 1990, he made an account of a visit to the Palestinian occupied territories in Rasta Time in Palestine.

But Zephaniah would argue those poems were not politics, but an honest response to the times.

In 2003, he turned down induction into the Order of the British Empire by the Queen, stating it reminded him of “how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalized.