The interview: Benjamin Zephaniah
What is it that makes a middle-aged Rastafarian dub poet desert the city and divide his time between a remote Lincolnshire village and a flat in Beijing? The man who once turned down an OBE tells Lynn Barber about his traumatic childhood, his infertility, fear of old age - and why, at 50, he still feels like a child.
Benjamin Zephaniah has lived in Birmingham, Jamaica, Newham, Egypt, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and now, at 50, divides his time between Beijing and a village near Spalding, Lincolnshire. I was going to visit him there but I had a cold and he said that, as a vegan, he has to avoid colds (something to do with having less mucus than carnivores) so I had to meet him later in London. We ended up in the stockroom of the wonderful Newham Bookshop, his London base and home from home, where, perched among boxes of books, he talked a storm and recited his poem Rong Radio. You can find it on his website, or on YouTube, but getting a private performance was one of the most thrilling experiences of my interviewing career.
the streets here and ask people if they know who Benjamin Zephaniah is and what he does, and most of them will tell you. Ask them what Andrew Motion does and silence. It's irrelevant." He is not anti-establishment - he does tons of work for the British Council - but he wants no truck with royal flummery.
I made the mistake of asking why on earth he had moved to Spalding and suddenly his hackles were up, scenting racism. Why shouldn't he live in Spalding? "I was born in Britain, I've lived here all my life, I have the right to live anywhere I want to." Yes, of course. It's just that he always says he loves those multi-ethnic urban streets where you find a Mexican restaurant next to a Bangladeshi next to a Lebanese and I don't imagine you get much of that in Lincolnshire. Actually, he says, I'm wrong. Peterborough, which is the nearest big town, has as many different ethnic restaurants as Newham. And Boston, Lincs, is the most immigrated-to town in Britain - all the people who work on the land there are immigrants, though they are mainly eastern Europeans. But it is true, he concedes, that his particular village is not exactly rainbow nation. And although he has met some nice people, he doesn't have any close friends there. His mother and siblings all live in Birmingham, most of his friends are in London.
So why did he decide to move? Until last year he lived in Newham and always said he loved it. It's a question he still seems to be pondering himself, possibly with a hint of midlife crisis. "I felt that I had to move from the house I was living in, that's how I started. No - actually, I felt I had to decorate the house I was living in so I spent quite a lot of money decorating it, stepped back and thought, 'This is really nice. I've always wanted wooden floors.' And then I thought, 'But you know? I don't want to live here any more!' It was really strange - I just got the feeling that I had to move. And I've always loved the English countryside, and I thought to myself - I was 49 at the time - if you want to live in a small village, this is the time to do it. It always upsets me when I hear older people saying, 'I wish I'd done this, I wish I'd done that,' and it's too late. And there was a type of place that I wanted, where I could jog straight out into the countryside - I love jogging, I'm a health freak - far away from the motorway network. And a place came up in
Spalding and it was ideal."
for free. So they agreed to meet in a pub and Zephaniah said, "You'll know me - I'm a black guy with dreadlocks." Whereupon the man said, "I don't do stuff with black people," and put the phone down.
Spalding is Zephaniah's base for about seven months a year; the rest of the time he lives in China. He was led to China originally by his love of martial arts: he wanted to train with the monks of the Shaolin temple in Henan province who he believes practise the purest form of kung fu. He loved it and returned every year till eventually he bought his own flat in Beijing. He has written his last three novels there, although they are all set in Newham.
Writing novels for teenagers seems to have taken over from writing poems for the past few years. And he's always doing something - writing novels, plays, making records, radio programmes, working with musicians, doing poetry readings (he has a new tour starting in February). He also does a lot of unpaid work: campaigning for victims of injustice, or animal rights or whatever. In the past, he used to do beer commercials (although he doesn't drink) to fund his work with children in the South African townships, but now he doesn't need to. Although his income
fluctuates from year to year, he knows he'll never starve. He has no mortgage, no major outgoings; "living all on my own, having nobody to love, nobody to spend money on - though I give a bit of money to my mum - I don't need much to live on." So he can afford to turn down work he doesn't fancy. He has twice refused to go on I'm a Celebrity, and Celebrity Big Brother, and, when asked to act in films, always insists on reading the whole script so, "if I'm the black man who walks in and says, 'Where's my deal, man? What's going down here?' I say no."
The eldest of eight children - but only the eldest by minutes because he has a twin sister, Velda - he grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham. His mother was a nurse from Jamaica, his father a postman from Barbados. When he was nine his mother ran away from her husband, taking Benjamin but leaving the other seven children
behind. It's still a touchy subject. His siblings hate him talking about it. "They say, 'Why are you washing our dirty linen in public? Dad wasn't such a bad man.' They think of him as a hero because he raised seven children all on his own. But my mum and I, we saw another side of him. When my mum left the house, she left because she felt her life was in danger - that's what she felt and that's what I saw. There was something my mum said to me once and I suppose it's true, that when my father started, the rest of the kids ran for shelter - they ran one way, but I ran towards my father, shouting 'Leave her alone!' So when he turned on my mother, he kind of turned on me, too. And I know when I ran out the door with my mother, we couldn't find the rest of the kids - they were all hiding in cupboards. So just me and my mum went. But listen - I went back to my primary school the other day, and my mother was in tears. She said that when she left the other kids, she used to come to the school gate and watch them playing, but know she couldn't get them. And that image, to me, was just so powerful - her at the gate, hiding, looking at her children."
Growing up with his mum, detached from his siblings, dyslexic, and often the only black boy in school, Zephaniah developed a love of animals that made him turn vegetarian at 11 and vegan at 13. "I didn't even know what the word meant. I just knew that I didn't want to eat animals - it was a real gut feeling. At the time I was in a school where I was getting so much racism, I found comfort in animals. A playground can be the loneliest place in the world when all the kids are playing and nobody will talk to you, so when a cat comes along, you play with the cat, you know? And then the cat comes again the next day and brings a couple of his friends, and you form a community. So that's where my love of animals started, and that was when I went vegetarian. And later on I decided that I just didn't want anything to do with any animal product." He is patron of the Vegan Society, and has written some great poems about animal rights, especially the one beginning, "Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas" which brings him a crop of extra royalties every Christmas - although he always makes a point of being out of the country then.
pregnant left and right and centre but my girlfriends never did. So I just had this feeling and then at one point I thought, 'Right, let's go and get tested,' and they said 'You're infertile'. They said that part of me hadn't developed - the water's there but there's no sperm in it." In the mid-1990s he agreed to go on a
programme about male infertility with Professor Robert Winston, hoping that Winston could make him fertile, but Winston confirmed that he had "no sperm count, absolutely none, and it's never going to happen". He consoles himself with the thought of the hundreds of children who write to him, who come to his readings in schools, who chat to him on the streets of Newham or wait for him outside the Newham Bookshop. "So that makes up for it - or that's what I tell myself anyway."
He gets on with children because he still thinks of himself as a child. He freaked out when he turned 50 in April and Saga sent him their magazine. "I couldn't believe I was 50. I still can't. And I don't allow my nephews and nieces to call me uncle - they call me Benji and I'm their mate. They tell me their problems, they tell me things they don't tell their mum and dad. I don't feel 50 - there's still
something very childish or childlike inside me. I ride my bike like a kid you know, I love doing wheelies, I love climbing trees, I love exploring - I still love that stuff."
