Benjamin Zephaniah was a brilliant poet and an incredible human being. He had dyslexia but he ended up on the national curriculum. He grew up in Birmingham and left school at 14 and got into trouble. Before he came to London he used to sleep with a gun under his pillow but he never wanted to be part of that world. Literature was a way out.
The first time I came across his work I was about 17 years of age, on a housing estate in Atherton, Manchester and someone gave me a pamphlet stapled together called Pen Rhythm. A couple of years later I published my own pamphlet, stapled together, called Perceptions of the Pen. He’s been a guiding light all my life.
There was a rhythm to his dub poetry that attached you to its words. The early 1980s were a tough time. Black Britons were attacked by members of the National Front on the street. There were the Brixton riots in London and the Handsworth riots in Birmingham. There’s a poem he wrote called Dis Policeman (Is Kicking Me to Death). His cousin Mikey Powell was killed by the police. He was a warrior spirit who campaigned for justice all his life.
Every 10 years or so he’d be on the front page of the newspapers. There were times when he had to hide before he went onstage at his gigs because he had the press after him. When he went for the professor of poetry role at the University of Oxford he got absolutely slated. But he didn’t care, he was a rebel poet who went everywhere – he became friends with Nelson Mandela and worked with children in South African townships – and broke every glass ceiling going.
I always looked to him to see what was possible in the world of poetry. You know people told me you can’t live off poetry but I’d look at his career: performing, acting, presenting, campaigning, touring. He represented the multiplicity of a poet’s life. He was my hero.
Lemn Sissay is a poet, author and the former chancellor of the University of Manchester
