Zephaniah continues to travel widely for performances once performing on five continents in twenty days , and has maintained a sustained interest in global politics. As a frequent and willing collaborator, one of his most genre-bending productions, Naked , contains authorised prints of Banksy artworks in the poetic liner-notes accompanying a musical record. And why not? A black survivor.
Cite this: Freeman, Robert. Accessed 27 October Benjamin Zephaniah. Tweets by BZephaniah. 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 admits that he feels "very embarrassed" about his lack of productivity.
But poems either come or they don't. Sometimes he'll hear a phrase and think, "That could be a poem," and stop whatever he is doing to write it. Or actually not write it - he is too dyslexic. He composes it all in his head and memorises it. Sometimes poems come to him in dreams. It sounds a bit airy-fairy but it's really true. I woke up and it was just there, the whole poem.
That also happened with Naked. I think some of the best ones, it's like I've got to give birth to it. I can't sit down at the desk with a blank piece of paper. I'd much rather go and play football or run, just do something, and hope it will inspire me. You cannot force poetry, you cannot. But when I'm writing a novel, now that's different, I can sit down with a blank piece of paper and know I'm going to get from A to B.
It takes over for a year or so and I find it very difficult to do anything else. 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. 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? For someone who spent his teens in and out of approved school, borstal, prison mainly for stealing , Zephaniah is almost absurdly respectable nowadays. His body is his temple.
He doesn't drink, smoke, eat meat, use drugs he says few Rastas do , doesn't have any vices. But now I can't find anything illegal to do, I can't get myself arrested! A policeman stopped me the other day and said, 'I saw you coming down the A1 and you were on a mobile phone.
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, he says, hate him talking about it. Dad wasn't such a bad man. 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!
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. Consider what Andy Akinwolere's performance would look like. Think about the words that he emphasises.
Also, consider:. Singer-songwriter, Jem, shows how she can alter the meaning of her lyrics by performing them in a different way.
0コメント