THE first time dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah came to Galway he went to a pub where "I watched people singing and reading their poetry. They said to me: `get up and do one.' So I did. That's a very Caribbean attitude. I like it. If you're a poet, you show you're a poet. You don't have time to write a contract. You just get up and do it."
Zephaniah has given several performances in Ireland including the Cuirt Festival in Galway earlier this year and, last Saturday, a reading at the Ross Dana poetry festival in New Ross, Co Wexford. "I'm gettin' Irish," he jokes.
He sees a parallel between the importance of the oral tradition here and in the Caribbean. A performance poet whose readings are often accompanied by a reggae band, he believes that the test of a good poet is whether he or she can hold an audience "by the voice alone": "The oral tradition is older than the written one. Before poems got written down, most people were listening to poetry and experiencing it in a live medium." The audience for poetry has been limited, he believes, ever since it started getting printed in books.
Although he was nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in 1989, Zephaniah is every inch the antithesis of your stereotypical introverted, ivory tower poet. He is informal and unpretentious, laughs a lot, sports long dreadlocks, and adores children (he has just published Talking Turkeys, a collection of poetry for children). Part of his inability to take himself too seriously is the result of his own experience in reform school, and later prison: "I grew up in Handsworth, in Birmingham, where I was beaten up by the police because of racism. There was nowhere you could go to complain. We felt we weren't being listened to. People were frustrated. That's why the riots happened.
"I was a bad boy; I went out and stole. We used to think that rich people were the enemy, and anyone who owned a house or a car was rich." In prison, Zephaniah realised that "it wasn't going to change the world, me stealing. I started to write my poetry and channel my energies in other ways."
Years later, while driving through his old neighbourhood in Handsworth, he was stopped by a local policeman who remembered him: "He said: `I remember kicking the shit out of you, you bastard. And now I see you on television. You know what? I like kicking the shit out of you now, but I don't want to give you any new material.' He was really honest about it. It struck me that he feared me more now than when we were fighting on the streets. As a poet, I actually had a bit of power."
Zephaniah gives a lot of readings in prisons. Occasionally he meets men he recognises: "It's quite depressing. I see someone in the audience, and the last time I saw him, we were in prison together. He asks me what I've been doing, and I say, `I've been touring, I've been to South Africa, I've been in Argentina.' `What have you been doing?' He says: `I've been in Winson Green, I've been in Wormwood Scrubs."'
Prison inmates are "doomed", he feels, unless they are provided with some kind of training or stimulation: "I don't sit around being judgmental. I want to go in there and inspire them to read and write poetry."
HIS own beginnings as a poet came from a love of language and a desire to "tell it to the people": "In the reggae rasta tradition we were desperate for a voice. We only got a few minutes of recording time so we used it to express ourselves politically. We didn't have time to write about our girlfriends walking out the door."
Hence poems like UTurn: "Handsworth, Brixton, St Paul's, Broadwater Farm,/Toxteth Highfields, Bradford, Ladbroke Grove ... History's being made me people hav paid/An innocent woman is dead, shot sleeping in her bed/Words hav been spoken de chains hav been broken/And now we're feeling dread, AN RED./Somebody better mek a Uturn before de fire start burn". Zephaniah has also released several albums, including Free South Africa with the Wailers.
Where he lives, in London's. East End, there are more racist attacks now than there were 20 years ago, so the need to speak out against intolerance is no less urgent. He is outspoken on a of other issues too, including animal rights, the Green movement, and male violence towards women: "Is she de enemy dat yu mus kill?/Do yu tell yu friends how yu get yu cheap thrills?" Nevertheless, he insists he is not "just an angry political animal." Angry Black Poet shows an awareness of the need for a personal life: "So angry... He is unable to feel."
His style includes a welcome sense of irony and a deft capacity for wordplay, as in White Comedy (from Propa Propaganda, just published by Bloodaxe Books); where he turns old associations on their heads: "Caught and beaten: by de whiteshirts/I waz condemned to a white mass./Don't worry,/I shall be writing to de Black House."
Although he didn't have many heroes when he was growing up, he was excited by the cross fertilisation between punk and reggae that attracted huge audiences for poetry readings in Brixton in the late 1970s and 1980s. He pays tribute to other acclaimed Caribbean poets, particularly Linton Kwesi Johnston, the late Mikey Smith, and Louise Bennett. In spite of the stature of such writers, Caribbean poetry is "still not integrated" into the British literary mainstream: "It is here and now poetry, and sometimes it is hard for people to swallow."
He was disappointed that his nomination for the Oxford position was unsuccessful. A similar nomination in Cambridge also fell through: "They couldn't face the controversy. One Cambridge don said that it was alright me performing at the university, but the idea of me sleeping there wasn't on. It was hurtful at the time. But my career has gone uphill anyway.
He has toured all over the world, written several plays, been the subject of two Channel 4 documentaries, and even had a cameo role in Eastenders. Both Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat wanted to meet him on visits to England, and he is particularly proud of his collaboration with Sinead O'Connor on the Bomb the Bass album Clear (Island Records). But most important of all: "People pack out at my readings. I've seen other poets - ones the literary critics really go for and they've only got, a couple of people at their readings. If they are the real poets, then I don't want to be one.
