Benjamin Zephaniah, the Man, the Writer and the Musician: A Critical Study of the Revolutionary Tone in Zephaniah’s Performance Poetry

 Tapas Sarkar, Akshay Kumar Roy, Delwar Hossain 

Abstract: From the very beginning of literature, poetry has remained as one of the unique mediums of communication between the poets and the readers. It conveys messages of love, morality, philosophy, war, revolutionary ideals and so on and so forth. Over the period of times the form and function of poetry has undergone a drastic change. Different poets in different periods have emerged with their own poetic canons to present their creations to the audience. While talking about British poetry, it too has vast changes both in form and content and its aim from the age of Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to the Romantic period, from the Romantic to the Victorian period and from the Victorian to the present day England. England, of course, in this post-colonial era has become the land of multiculturalism, trade, religion, and so on, especially with the black emigrants from the African-Caribbean continents who had been living in England for generations. But slavery, racism, xenophobia, imperialism have forced them to raise their voice against the brutal systems and established institutions which have been leading the country. In such a situation performance poetry becomes an effective instrument of protest as it needs not the print media; it can be understood even by the uneducated people only by watching the performances; and a protest becomes much more effective when its aim is easily understood by its own community with their own language. In this context, Zephaniah’s performance poetry is highly remarkable in his contemporary British African-Caribbean community. His poetry shows how as a black poet Zephaniah protests against the systems of England, how they have been abandoned and neglected in the whiten world Britain. This paper aims at exploring critically the style, form and content of Zephaniah’s performance poetry and the tone of revolution that has been delineated in his poems.

Keywords: Poetry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Performance Art, Emigration, slavery, Xenophobia, and Revolt.

Introduction: Benjamin Zephaniah, the man in which we going to discuss in the paper on the topic of poetry and performance about his poems. His full name is Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah, a member of the Rastafarian religious movement. He was born on 15 April 1958 in the place of Handsworth, district of Birmingham, England and grew up in city named Jamaica. He is the son of a Barbadian postman and a Jamaican nurse. He is a musician, writer, dub and black poet. At the age of 13, he admitted an approved school but in this school he still unables to read or write because of his dyslexic. During this time, Music and poetry of Jamaica, particularly poetry that have been influenced to him to write his poetry and at the age of fifteen, church is the first place in his poetic world, where he has performed of his poetry and after that time he has known as a poet or dub poet among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. At the young age he also received a crime record and was sentenced for burglary. After released from prison, at the age of twenty he began to expand his audience and leads him to London to make his new world.

Performance Art: The term ‘performance poetry/ Dub poetry’ is now commonly used to describe a presentation in front of audiences particularly among uneducated people that may never be transcribed into volume or a book. ‘Performance’ in this context indicates the interaction of poetry with its audience; the event may often be ephemeral and experiential, such as a slam poem or improvised talk. The focus of this paper is to consider how contemporary poetry may ‘perform’ in a plurality of senses. Drawing from the knowledge of poetic manifestos, we can consider the poetry performance as a form of musicality: poetry, as one of American poet Charles Olson suggested, becomes a score for the voice. Focusing on poets associated with cultural movements and protest writing, poetry can also perform the demands of appealing to an audience and inciting change. Performance poetry in this light allows for textures of call and response, humour, parody and polyphony.

Poetry & Revolt: The Rastafarian Dub poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah one of the most important voices of the contemporary British African-Caribbean community, who uses ‘performance poetry’ to voice against the abandonment of disadvantaged neighborhoods in England and against the establishment leading the country. As a black performance poet in a whitened world, Benjamin Zepha   niah’s case illustrates how a writer may live outside the culture and region of his ancestry and champion the cause of the black races in verse and fiction. His poetry becoming a part of ‘counterculture’ helps fight, the issues affecting the contemporary black community in Britain and, the “dead image of poetry in academia”. He is also prone to mix resistance or critique with an affirmative stance that absorbs class, gender, and race into an appeal to the notion of a universal human reason and compassion in the audiences that attend his performances. Zephaniah therefore employs a contemporary mode called the ‘dub poetry’ to become the best instance of a contemporary voice of resistance where voices are being silenced in an ever increasing world of violence. Zephaniah seeks to empower his own people and heal their colonizers to make our rapidly shrinking world a better place for the generations to come.

Zephaniah, as a poet and Dub poet and also as a writer wrote many poems, plays and novels for adults and for children, and through his words he spreads a message of equality for all, particularly  in his poems he wants to show his revolutionary tone and angers through the performance of poetry  in the contemporary society of his time  in which the black people or poets most of their time ignored from the white, particularly from the England people. Zephaniah thinks that poetry is the only things through which he can able to revolt against the society and the poetry-performance can be the useful medium among the audience, in different place, particularly among the uneducated people. His second collection of poetry, The Dread Affair: Collected Poems (1985) contained a number of poems attacking the British legal system.

Zephaniah’s poetry is mostly inspired by political causes and speaks in favor of a British Republic and the dis-establishment of the crown. In one of his poems “Naked” which appears in Too Black Too Strong, he out rightly says:

Dis is me. I hate dis government as much as I

hated the one before it and I have reason
to believe that I will hate the one to come.
How did these lefties reach dis Tory place?

Dis is me, squeeze me. Let me free me.

I have come to realise that what you can do for me
I can do much better for me.
Let me do for my loved ones what you will not do for them
I want to hold the hands of my loved ones
(Those who have no one to vote for)
and cause a victorious rumble in dis black universe.

       In this poem, causing a rumble in the “black universe”, Zephaniah has represented himself to the task of revolutionary transformation to teach his audience that it is the lowly and inconspicuous who will blast history apart. His poetry speaks of and for the experience of the blacks and the number of issues which plague the black community- unemployment, prostitution, crime, racism, denial of human rights and so on.