Welcome, everyone, to this special landmark event this evening, a conversation between Benjamin Zephaniah,
poet, lyricist, musician and activist and the writer and editor Malachi Mackintosh.
Our conversation will be vocalised through Benjamin's remarkable autobiography,
The Life and Times of Benjamin Zephaniah, which came out in twenty eighteen.
And we'll be exploring how Benjamin Zephaniah art and activism have gone hand in hand throughout his career.
My name is Ellika Burma.
I'm the professor of world literature in English here at the University of Oxford and I'm director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing,
which is based at Wolfson College. I'm also investigator on the Writers Make Worlds Open Educational Resources website project,
which is hosted in English and which is one of the parties bringing this event to you tonight.
This conversation, which was planned to take place in March twenty twenty, necessarily postponed by covid,
was and is the culminating event in the webinar series Art and Action,
led by Sandra Meor, based at the University of Vienna, and Ruth Scobey here in Oxford.
It is brought to you in association with several different groups to whom we are
all very grateful and I would like to give a shout out by mentioning them all.
To torch our wonderful humanity centre and to the Schwartzmann cultural programme, to the story museum,
where we are meeting tonight to art and action and to the already mentioned self-funded Writers Make Worlds project.
The video recording of this event will be available to everyone to watch again
afterwards on YouTube through Writers Make Worlds and through the Torch website.
Also live streaming. Tonight, we have a live audience, which is really fantastic.
So welcome to everyone out there watching live. In a moment, I'll be handing over to Wes Williams, the director of Torch to chair the event.
But before I do that, I should like to say some introductory words about the two main speakers.
Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain's most eminent contemporary poets,
widely known for his compelling spoken word and recorded performances and award winning playwright, novelist, children's author and musician.
He's also a committed activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights.
He appears regularly on radio and TV and at literary festivals and has also taken part in plays and films,
most famously, perhaps too many, I'm sure, Peaky Blinders.
He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds.
His autobiography, The Life and Times of Benjamin Zephaniah, was shortlisted for the Coster Biography Award.
In that book, he talks about young people making meaningful music that properly reflects their lives.
In the book, he also tells a very meaningful story, reflecting on his own life and speaking in fascinating ways about being a black writer,
activist and media figure in Britain today in the twenty twenties, we so look forward to hearing more about this in the conversation.
Malachi Mackintosh is editor and publishing director of The Amazing was a theory, a black British and Asian arts and cultural journal.
He previously led the Runnymede Trust's Award winning our migration story project
and also lectured in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge.
He's the author of Immigration and Caribbean Literature and editor of Beyond Calypso.
His fiction and non-fiction have been published very widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books and in The Guardian.
With the focus in his work on the potency of art and writing to effect positive cultural change,
I can't think of a better interlocutor today for Benjamin Zephaniah than Malachi Mackintosh.
Just before I hand over to them both, just a final word about art and action with whom we are collaborating today.
It's a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund, and it explores the intersections between authorship,
politics, activism and celebrity across historical periods and across a great variety of media.
The conference that didn't take place moved into a series of really great webinars that you can access on YouTube and through the torch website,
and I, I warmly invite you to do that. They are fantastic discussions.
This is the culminating discussion. So without further ado, let me hand over Benjamin.
You're very welcome to this platform at the Story Museum. And where's Williams and Malachi McIntosh?
A warm welcome to you, too. And over to you. Thank you.
Good evening and a very warm welcome to you all.
Thank you for joining us this evening as we come to you live again from the Story Museum here in Oxford.
My name is, like I said, is Professor Williams. I'm the director of Torch.
And it's my enormous pleasure and honour to be able to be here and collaborate in this wonderful event this evening.
As I also said, this event is also part of the humanities cultural programme,
part of our big tent live event series that's been going on all the way through the pandemic.
And this programme is itself one of the founding stones for the future.
Stephen Schwarzman, Centre for the Humanities. We are, as you can see, socially distancing safely live streaming this event.
And we hope that you're all safe and well wherever you are in the world. Before I hand over to our two speakers this evening,
I'd like to remind you that you can share any comments and questions for them in the live chat just below the image on YouTube.
I'll come back in about three quarters of an hour and mediate the questions back through to the two of them.
Welcome, Malakai. Welcome. Benjamin, you've both been introduced already by Ellika, so there's no need for me to say any more.
And without further ado, I'm delighted really to invite you to begin your conversation.
I'll be back in about three quarters of an hour. Thanks for us.
Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for having us as well. It is very strange to be talking to you in this format,
sitting across each other on a bench with a nonexistent audience when people at home, obviously.
But that said, it's a it's a huge, huge, huge honour to be here with you this evening.
And the focus of the conversation, as I said, is your autobiography mainly.
But it'd be nice to talk around.
And I think given the circumstances in which we're meeting, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, how's your year been?
Wow. Year I begin to feel really guilty when I talk about my year because I've actually had a really good year, um.
I've talked to some friends every day who are talking and talking about mental health during the last year.
It was interesting.
Some of them said, you know, they couldn't take isolation and all that stuff and they were some of it that weren't actually the world was going crazy.
I'm glad it stopped. I just finished doing a tour with my band, a tour with my autobiography.
Both of them kind of going simultaneously as well. I had all these other things going on and I was running all over the country.
And to stop was actually quite good for me to actually stop and focus.
I wrote a book with Rothschild and and I presented the TV series.
You know, I got away from my university, um.
I live in a really nice part of the country, right where I got fresh air.
A family of deer came to live with me in my garden, literally camped out in my garden, a family of their company.
I have a gym at home. I mean, it was cool, but my sister almost died, my brother in law, I must.
I've got about six friends that died.
You know, I've got relatives that live on the 10th floor of council flats in the middle of a city where the list broke and they couldn't get out.
So me, I was OK, but then that's why I feel really guilty, because I hear lots of stories about other people and how they struggled.
But I didn't and I think that if you are a creative person.
If you are doing what you like and you are especially if you're obviously
earning a living from it and you manage to kind of stay sane through the year,
through writing or whatever, and even through other times, you know, when there's no pandemic on,
you know, we must remember that we are doing things that we love to do. We are doing things that we probably would do anyway.
If I were a painter and decorator, I would still be writing poetry. So I never take what I do for granted.
I always remember. But there's people.
There was a study done in the 80s that said, you know, 80 percent of the people going to work are going on the form of transport.
They hate working with people. They hate doing a job they hate.
You know, I mean, we are really lucky in the creative world.
And this is a very long answer to your question, but I remember at my university once talking to cleaners.
And another academic came along and I just arrived, and I'm not I don't have an academic background and I just arrived in academia and they kind of.
And they were kind of showing me the ropes and he said, you know, you don't have to talk to them, Benjamin.
And I was like. You know what's wrong with talking to a cleaner?
This is this is where my family come from, you know, basically, you know, the National Health Service workers,
etc. I just never forget the people that clean the streets, that clean the toilets, that do all that stuff, because I could be doing it.
And so. I had a good luck there and it didn't really bother me, but I really feel for those people that.
It did.
Yeah, yeah, and what you say about, you know, I don't know, the idea that that could very easily have been your path resonates with me, too, I think.
And about the year. So, you know, as you said, you had space, you had the family, you had, you know, the work that you would be doing anyway.
Of course, in the last year, there's been in the broader national context,
if not international context, this huge amount of turmoil, not just around covid,
but I think in England and particularly in the United Kingdom in particular, this political turmoil,
which when rereading your autobiography felt reminiscent of the Times and when your career sort of launched in the eighties.
Really, I just wonder what your thoughts might have been around all of that as that was unrolling Boris Johnson, Brexit happening?
You know, the culture wars, quote unquote, that are taking place at the moment,
we just thought Brexit was interesting, is interesting, because with Brexit, I began to suffer.
The kind of racism that I experienced in the 80s, I wasn't beaten up by any racist, but I had four or five experiences on the street.
I love jogging where people kind of shouted racist things to me as I was jogging and.
And an even threatened once. But actually, when it comes to politics generally, when I say politics,
I mean when it comes to issues about race and gender and stuff like that, I do think that.
I kind of came to all this in the 70s, really, and then the 80s were the real years of struggle,
and in the 90s I thought that, you know, we've dealt with sexism, racism, war, making music together.
It was sold to soul. It was all getting together and jamming and, you know, mixed race children.
You know, if you were said to me, then could you imagine an organisation like the EDL or I would have said, absolutely not.
Look look at the direction we're going in, but look where we are.
And I think that and one of the problems with.
The state of the world right now is not just that. People are some people are showing an ugly side of xenophobic, racist, sexist.
It's about. For people who rule them.
Are the sexist and racist. This is not just me theorising, they've said it when you've got leaders of big countries,
leaders of the free world, boasting about how you can grope women,
saying this is a perk of the job and you've got people like that guy here in Brazil,
you know, just saying covid, it's just it's not that bad and let the people suffer.
The important thing is chopping down the rainforest and having a party, whatever.
I mean. When you've got people at the top, I'm an anarchist, I don't really like any of them.
Right. Right. But when you got them at the top saying that, what do we say to our kids in Putnam and Handsworth and Oxford?
And, you know, we used to say kind of. Look at society, you know, this is the way we've got we know we can't do that anymore.
We've got to actually ignore society. We've got to do better than that. Hmm.
That's weird. Yeah, that's very sad. And it.
When I start my term in university, I as you know, I didn't really go to school,
I didn't go to university, didn't go to college, I ended up in academia.
So I usually say to my students that on paper, you're all more educated than me.
It's quite a strange thing to say to your students at the start of the term, you are all more educated than me on paper from your professor.
How did I get here? You know, with my help, you guys are going to get a good degree or whatever.
But you know what? If you have a good degree and you don't have compassion, you don't have resolve and you don't have empathy.
It's worth not being. So that's, I think, where it is at the moment, really going back to grassroots and educating people across route because.
Really, a lot of the I've got to be careful out there.
There's a lot of the educated classes. And a lot of very powerful people in India and educated classes.
Not leading by example, we really don't want to follow the.
So. That's what I think about the state of the world at the moment,
it seems like and almost seems like you're saying things are worse now than they were in the 70s and.
I remember once I was talking on radio about fighting the National Front in the east end of London.
This is before all the Internet and all that. And I got home in a couple of weeks later, somebody wrote me a letter and he said, you know,
I used to fight, you know, with a national front network, but I'm never a Buddhist monk.
Right. It turned into a Buddhist monk and you could literally see the tears underpaid, you know, and I think he he realised that he's violent.
Well, he said in the letter the violence was wrong and people are just people and that he was a thug.
Well, now you have intellectuals that are racist, are you saying they shouldn't go together, but, you know, you have academic, racist academics.
I've been doing television programmes and I'm going on to talk about my experience.
I'm very sorry for balance. We can have a racist, I mean.
So in one sense, things have got worse, I could meet that guy on the street and I could fight him.
And I could say, you're wrong. Leave me alone because I'm black,
I shouldn't be hitting anything and he can go away and smoke a spliff or whatever and get a confession and turn into a monk.
Right.
But when you got people that say that they have a canon of literature that backs them up, they've got science that backs them up and anything think.
And they teach in the academy. I mean, it is worth I mean.
And I going to make an analogy and I've got to be very careful to say this,
but it's a bit like some women saying that, you know, I've been beaten by a partner, but the mental abuse was worse.
Of course, the physical stuff hurts. But the mental abuse is is is can be worse.
So, yeah, it could be worse. Yeah. Wendy, I mean, weren't there always racist academics?
Are you saying they're been empowered in a way that they weren't before? They were, I guess, but they were really in the margins.
They were really in the margins. Now they're on prime time television.
No, they have parties. You know, I remember I'm going to be very careful not to call names, but I remember doing a TV programme with a well-known.
Xenophobe. And very respectable, you know, he's got a legal political party,
but then I saw his security behind him and I looked at them and I kind of thought, I recognise these guys.
And again, it was the guy that I was fighting in the 70s and 80s.
They put on suits and they got jobs with security. So it's a very difficult question to answer about.
Have we got better or worse? Things have changed. Things have changed.
I wrote a poem called This Policeman Keeps On Kicking Me to Death in 1978.
After the murder of George Floyd and a like being shown on the deaths in custody of people in Britain, that poem became popular.
I hate to use that word, but, you know, people started going back to it and started reading it again and listening to it.
It's a sign of the times we can go back to old stuff about our struggle and it's still relevant.
There's a documentary about the first Coppen rhythm, which is now unitive for everybody who's watching the fight.
I know. I know that one on the street that you hate it. And I can talk about why, but there are some really amazing scenes in it.
And one of them is you reading. I think it might be that same poem.
Yes. In Trafalgar Square. Yes. In front of people.
Yes. So we're doing the Nazi salute, you know, and that's really interesting because it fills me doing this poem actually with them, not me.
Yes. I love that poem, by the way.
And in that poem, all I'm saying to Raices is that when I hear some of these races talking about why they're angry, I agree with them.
Right. What I'm saying to them, it's not my fault. So if you get knocked out and you want to fight, fight them, not me.
If you check out the scene and things ain't right, see them? Not me. I came, I saw I live here and I have my tribulation to be getting uptight.
And you really want to fight them, not me. If you live in a kitchen and you can't afford chicken, bleep them, not me.
I'm pleading with them. I'm saying I agree with you. So let me and you get together and deal with the people who are pressing all of us.
That's all I'm saying. That poem anyway,
I'm doing it in Trafalgar Square and the cameraman is filming and I come to the end of the poem and I think he wanted a clapperboard or something.
You didn't get one. So he kind of went like that because you see the camera goes like that and then it just catches two people.
See Kaylin. Broad daylight, Trafalgar Square, skinhead folks, and that's what it was like then in the middle of the day,
walking around throughout square doing Nazi salutes and nobody did a thing.
And they came to my and. Yes, actually, every one of them is the one that wrote to you.
And that's a good way of kind of moving in this. Right.
Writing something I didn't want to talk about, which is your autobiography, gives us a very detailed picture of that point in time,
some of the 70s, 80s, when you were coming up, when your career started, which we don't really get often.
Right. So there's more and more focus was just this week on the Windrush generation.
So your parents? My grandparents. And there's a lot of focus, I think, in good and bad ways.
And the contemporary generation of young Londoners in particular, and artists, musicians and, you know, especially.
But that moment in time, particularly the expanse of black Britons outside of London, as you are in Birmingham,
I feel like the spotlight doesn't get shown on that very well when I was do my autobiography.
Well, you see how it starts. I really didn't want to do what you know, but I thought if I was going to do one, it had to be not just about me.
Which is quite ironic because I did see a review once, I don't really read review that much,
but a woman was complaining that I just read Benjamin Zephaniah autobiography and he keeps talking about himself.
What do you think? And I really tried to make it about me as much as possible fundamental misunderstanding of the genre.
But I really wanted to be kind of a documentation of what was going on politically and culturally.
And I don't claim to be an expert,
but from what I saw and what affected me and how it affected my writing and it's really interesting because when we get to.
If we came across any any writing like that, it was always American, you know, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, that's what we were read.
And it's interesting, after my autobiography was published, I got letters from America saying at last, you know.
They weren't comparing me to Malcolm X, but they were saying black British experience is being documented.
And I think it was right around that time, around the same time.
Carter's book came out and in and his book came out and a few other things came out, which I thought was just really good.
We are now creating a kind of work that represents us.
And we're not just kind of reading American stuff and thinking that we have nothing to offer.
But yes, it's. I find myself kind of just.
Talking to young cats,
I'm just talking and I think I'm just having a conversation about some music I was listening to and then at the end of the conversation to go,
wow, that was amazing history just about you.
Just a moment ago, I was going to LA. You know, you talk about the range of generation, your parents, my grandparents, I'm old enough to remember.
It is a time when, like, you know, ladies used to come up to me and you think, oh, yeah, I like your work.
And I think, yeah, you're cool enough not to want to go.
Oh, my parents used to read your poetry to me. Yes, I am old.
Well, it's important that we kind of write our document, our history, and we do it truthfully.
And one of my obsessions has been in writing my autobiography or in interviews, as I said to you before we started, you know, there's no no go areas.
I believe in absolute honesty. I like being like.
But I think it's important to be honest about your mistakes. Because that's how we learn.
There's a line in one of my poems that says, I passed the university, I passed through sociology, and then I got a degree in dreadful ghetto ology.
You know, I learnt by meeting people, by making mistakes, I learnt from the streets.
And I think that's important, especially I don't want it to boil down to a conversation about men and race.
But it's true, especially for black men, I think, when I grew up.
There's no other way to put this. I grew up really sexist.
All the men around me were really sexist. And I remember my sisters had a doll once or they had many dolls.
And I started combing their hair and my dad got me and he put me in a room and he said, Stop that man.
I mean, I thought I didn't realise at the time he worried I got gay or something, but he was like, you stop that now and he has a gun.
You play it back. But, you know, that's a light hearted kind of example of.
Attitude to women, but there's lots of other things I could tell you about, which were really horrible.
You may know that my mother was really beaten by my father.
So I grew up really sexist and really strange attitude to lots of things.
But I learnt that from other people. When I started to think for myself and and that's when the change happened.
So I think it's important if you want to understand me,
to understand how I got here and the journey and the mistakes I made, and that's why I'm so open.
People in my family and lots of people, they stop talking about these things, stop talking about the.
Even ex-girlfriends. I can't help here.
You know, people really want to know who I am, I can stand here and could attempt to stand here and lie or sit here and lie and say that, you know.
Well, what happened was I started to love literature and I grew up with literature. I grew up in a house of books.
I didn't when my dad caught me with a book reading One Day in my hand, I said, what you boy, you've got nothing to do.
Something for me to do before, you know, you read when you've got nothing to do.
So, yeah, it's important that we are really honest about ourselves, about our journey and as black men,
about our relationship with our mothers and with our partners, because we have to grow the people and as individuals and as individuals.
Yes. Yeah. On that, there was a particular part, the autobiography,
and I copied out that I wanted to talk about, which is almost the scene of conversion effectively.
So the bit where you are at home, you've got a gun under your pillow.
Yeah. And you're looking up at the ceiling. I might just I might, as you say, said better than I do.
So one summer night in nineteen seventy eight, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling, wondering what life is all about.
The ceiling seemed to represent the limits of my ambitions, but these ambitions were related to the circumstances.
I found myself in some of the bad choices I made and some of the bad people I followed.
It was time to really think for myself.
I recalled my teacher at Broadway Comprehensive, telling me I was a born failure and that I would soon be dead or doing a life sentence in prison.
I didn't have to be a mastermind to see that things carried on. That's where they would go effectively.
I wanted to be a poet when I grew up and there always was looking at the ceiling that belonged to
Birmingham Council with a gun under my pillow are some kind of triad gang mastodon or ghetto godfather,
just as an eight year old me had done. I spoke the words out loud. I want to be a poet.
I want to prove that teacher wrong. And then. That's what you do, which is kind of fascinating.
So they're a couple of things that one is talking about effectively,
like hypermasculinity and the culture and referring to the gang master, ghetto or ghetto godfather really sort of slots into that.
But but bigger than and thinking about change, it seems like such a cinematic moment.
You know, you're embedded like this and the guns are they're coming to get you and you decide you want to be a poet.
Is that how it went down? It's absolutely. True, I mean, it's edited, there's more to it, but it's absolutely true, I did have a gun under my pillow.
Somebody wanted to kill me because one of my guys that shot somebody else,
we had a little crime syndicate going in and then it was just stealing tools from cars, which sounds so trivial now.
But back then, it was a bit of a deal. You know, we crossed over into somebody's territory.
A teacher had said to me when I got expelled from school, I'm going to end up dead or doing a life sentence.
And I got to the point where I thought maybe she's right, you know, and then I said, I can prove a wrong.
That whole piece there is why when I'm in school talking to small children and I say, can you tell us the most important thing you ever did?
And I said it before, Leslie, which was think for myself.
Learn to think for myself. When I was being the ghetto godfather, the Rastafarian Pecky Blinda, I wasn't really thinking for myself.
You know, you have to get status by being big, by being bad, by putting people down.
And I could do really well. But I wasn't really being true to myself, yeah, I can remember doing a burglary.
And again, I say this with a smile on my face, and I'm when I'm performing, especially when I'm performing around Birmingham,
I go on stage one of the first things I do, I apologise to the audience just in case I don't.
Sometimes they put their finger here, you know,
but I remember kind of doing a burglary in Birmingham and going in the house and looking at the bookshelves and thinking these people read.
And memorising the smell of the house and.
I have in my mind, kind of in a literary way, describing the feel of the carpet underneath my feet,
and I think then we got out and then one of the guys who was like the watch guy said, what was it like?
And I started to explain as if I was writing a novel. I said it was a great wall of literature.
Where's the [INAUDIBLE] money? Stop talking like that.
There was a part of me that always wanted to be a writer. I would always there's so many things in my novel,
little snippets from real life when I was young and I remember them and I kind of thought to myself, I'm going to use that one day.
But when I got a teacher, somebody is educated telling me that I'm going to end up dead or doing a life sentence,
I hope she knows more about the world than me. So maybe she's right. And in that one night I said to myself.
I am going to end up dead or doing a life sentence if I stay here.
So I got in a car and I just drove to the car, wasn't even roadworthy, I drove to London and when I tell this story to schoolchildren,
I tell them that I was involved in gangs, you know, and I was doing all these bad things.
And then I went to London and guess what? Boys and girls, I got involved in another gang and the kids got a gang of poets and musicians and writers.
And you can see all the kids are smiling because that's what it is. Yeah, we all need gangs.
I said to an academic everyday that we are pack animals. And he corrected me, said, no, no, no, we are social animals.
I understand there's a slight difference. I understand the difference. But we all like gangs.
And so if you're a writer, you tend to know people who are writers.
If you're a thief, you tend to know people who are you know, politicians are gangs.
You have politicians on opposing sides. You go on holiday together, you know.
Trust me, I've seen. So what is it about finding company?
And I was really lucky. I came to London and the alternative cabaret movement started with direct mail electricity, although in French North people.
And they were like after years and years of racist and sexist comedy and poetry, we said we're going to do something different.
We didn't attack anybody.
Unless they were politicians, you know, we would never laugh at somebody because they never said a word because of their race and ethnicity.
We'd never mock women or anything like that. But Thatcher was OK.
We could do her. So, yeah, it's about finding the right kind and and thinking for yourself is to me.
It's the most important thing that people can do. Be really honest. Trust me, just ask people what they think about a certain issue and then dig down,
because usually they'll start to answer as a British person or as a black man or what do you really think?
And sometimes it takes time to really dig down and you can find a completely different answer to the one they started with.
Because we all have this front and we all have this thing, which is all fakery, actually national or even race is a construct,
but when it comes to nationality and the flag, you fly and all that stuff, it's all constructed stuff.
You know, when you asked people what they really think, sometimes you can take time to dig down, but you can be surprised by the answers.
Sometimes, I guess to an extent, you know, you thought about your dad taking that away from you.
A lot of what we see the world through are those ideas that are projected onto us.
Right. So in that case, masculinity or nationality or whatever, whatever else it is,
don't you think it takes to you encourage people to think for themselves?
And what's the first step in that process? The was the first step is usually reading a good book.
It's just realising that you're important, but you're not the centre of the universe.
And understanding that you're not when we say Black Lives Matter and we don't say all white people are racist,
we say, you know, white people can kind of take on racist tendencies and not realise they're doing it.
And in the.
Workplace, in academia and in the music business, whatever, it doesn't mean that they're are horrible people, it just means look at yourself.
And try to relearn some of your habits, whatever. That's what I realised when I realised that I was sexist.
I said, right, I've got to be very conscious of some of the some of my attitudes and I've got to change my ways.
And and. And the great thing was, I just said, it's going to make me a better person, you know, that might be selfish.
I mean, I'm always going to help with the liberation of women, but it's going to make the person, do you know, and that's it.
Yeah. Yeah.
So finding the good book and also, I guess thinking about the value that that change might bring to the world and yourself at the same time.
Yeah. We're supposed to be talking about you as a public intellectual.
I was going to say not your father, my father, but I prefer to talk about Birmingham.
Do you feel like a celebrity? No, I don't feel anybody celebrating me, but I do realise I mean, at one point in the mid 90s,
somebody said that I was the most photographed and filmed poet in the world, but I'm not sure when the Internet started,
but I think before the Internet and I could understand why they said that, because, you know,
if you said the poet laureate, most people wouldn't know what he looked like a new name.
But you didn't know people. I mean, I was probably the first poet that was on prime time television that was on Top of the Pops,
you know, and that was also involved in political debates and stuff like that.
So people would know me for different reasons. But I don't feel like a celebrity.
I tend to shy away from doing things on media that have the word celebrity tagged onto them.
I have done some and I'll be doing some in the future. But on every one of them, you can see it as a charitable cause.
So I did Mastermind, which I made a complete fool of myself, but I'm done, you know, celebrity, antique roadshow and stuff like that.
But that is just for the love and just for the raising money for for charities.
They try to get me to go into Big Brother. They offered me a lot of money. I want it to affect me.
I wouldn't do it. I tried to get me to go in the jungle. I wouldn't do it. And I just can't do that.
But I think it's important. If you are a writer.
That say something about. The conditions we live in and the way that we can be oppressed by certain systems, et cetera,
et cetera, then you should be able to show your face and get involved in public debates.
I would never call myself a public intellectual.
I'm not sure if I call myself an intellectual, if an intellectual means a curious mind and trying to build a point of view on all these things.
Yes, maybe. But when I hear real intellectuals, I mean, I.
I'm close to worshipping Noam Chomsky and people like that.
Christopher Hitchens, I was a friend of mine who I disagree with sometimes, but I just loved the way he would dig down and analyse things.
And, you know, even when I disagree with him, I could see the logic of where he is coming from.
When I think of myself against people like that, I think no way.
But one of the things that I have that a lot of those cats don't have is real experience.
You know, they may have ideas about policing in Britain or whatever.
I've lost teeth and lost locks because the police and in Britain, you know, they may have theories about domestic violence and stuff like that.
Well, I've seen my mother almost killed. I had to stab my father to save her life, you know, so that's what I have with a lot of those guys on her.
And it's missing, I think, from a lot of public debates in Britain.
Yeah. You know, when I teach poetry at Brunel.
One of the things I tell the students is to use your experience.
So what happens usually the girls start writing about the boyfriend poems and I think,
come on now, dig deeper and then, you know, after a few weeks they get it.
And I say to people, if you've had experience especially to be negative here, you can turn it into a positive.
You're not studying Shakespeare. Actually, this is you study your life, you know,
and the ones who find it difficult to the people that kind of are born with a silver spoon in their mouth have had no experience.
And I remember talking to a student about this and he just he went, yeah, that's me.
Every time I got a problem that he sends a helicopter and, you know, and I said, well, there's no reason why you can't find solidarity with people.
Don't fake it, but you can still have solidarity with people who are suffering.
Yes, so it's kind of I think there's an important in all our experiences, even if they are privileged to be honest about them.
Just before we turn to questions, one last question first, you just want to BAFTA congratulations.
And for our show that was bringing attention to up and coming talents.
But and I don't make you feel old again, but there's a generation of folks are coming up somewhere in your mould and thinking,
a you mentioned before, Loki and sort of folks who shout out that divide between politics, music, art, etc.
And I'm just curious how you feel about that movement and do you feel inspired by this, folks coming up?
Do you feel that you had a role to play in that in that space?
Do you feel just generally and. Well, I mean, when I did Life in Rhymes, almost every poet would come to me and say, you know, I studied your poems.
I read your poems when I was a kid. And you inspired me to do.
I think it's great and it's great to do that programme because I feel like the grandfather, grandfather,
if you like, of this form of what we used to call poetry, but now is generally performance poetry.
And I think it's brilliant. Once upon a time, I don't know how old you are, but you might it might be difficult for you to get this.
Once upon a time, it was like black and white. It literally was that it was like white and it was black.
And Asians were seen as black and white. It was a political term.
And they were gay and straight from.
Now you've got, you know, bisexual, you've got trans, you got then you got Jamaican's and then you got Nigeriens and you know,
and within the Asian community, you got the Hindus and the Sikhs and everybody got a separate identity.
That amazing how it kind of pulls apart. In one sense, it was a lot easier back in the day,
but I kind of enjoy listening to the complexity of it all and how they're kind of doing their negotiations.
And sometimes they get angry, sometimes it gets tense. I've seen it with my own students and it's a bit like finkin.
I used to think that all the LGBTQ plus people would be on the same boat.
I was amazed. One day in my class of massive argument broke out because somebody said they were gender fluid or somebody and a gay person said,
you know, stop sitting on the fence for arguments.
You know, all the straight people go, oh, my gosh, what's happening over there? But it's interesting.
And for us, it was.
I don't want to say simpler, but there was just something a lot more sorry for repeating it, black and white about it now with a lot more complex.
And I think this new generation deserves that.
Because I knew people when I was growing up who were gay, who wanted to be trans, but they couldn't do it.
Because of the way our communities were, when I listen to young poets now speaking about all kinds of things,
that kind of it really does fascinate me. One of the things I do find really difficult is when.
And I'm going to go a bit controversial now, but when people like Germaine Greer, who I've known for years,
who kind of turned on a generation before me to feminism and then became a dear friend of mine,
I kind of see how passionate she is about the issue when I see her being kind of not platform, you know.
I do find that difficult and now I realise when you're doing interviews and things, you've got to be careful about every word you say.
To complete this thing, but generally speaking, these new activists, poets, I love them, Lyndon Johnson said the other day in an interview,
he said that is kind of like going into retirement and he doesn't really feel inspired or the need to write poetry anymore.
I do. I feel completely inspired. But when the murder of George Floyd happened, I kind of sat back and forth.
I'm not going to get involved in this. Was this is the new generation of activists coming forward with that new generation of activists.
They called upon me and I was happy to step up, but I am inspired and do the other thing that really inspired me.
Sorry, it is a very long answer to your question. But the other thing that really does inspire me is the fact that even five,
four years ago when I was in the Black Lives Matter March, it was mainly black people.
You know, now there's white people, there's all kinds of people in the marches and gay pride marches with always gay people.
And there's all kinds of people. And I just love this kind of intersexuality, intersexuality both going on this.
These people connect people connecting things. I find that really, really fascinating and inspiring.
And it's black and white, I guess. You know, he spoke about it was it was simpler, but maybe it was making something complex, less complex.
And that makes I think what it was was. It was. We really.
Didn't have the luxury of. Saying, Well, I'm Jamaican and I'm Belgian and I'm Trinidad,
because we were all as far as the races were concerned, we were all I'm tempted to use the [INAUDIBLE].
I'm not going to. But, you know, we wrote the [INAUDIBLE] and we wrote the P word, you know,
and they wouldn't beat you a little less because you were a bit lighter skinned with me, you know,
and if somebody was gay and being beaten because they were gay, there wasn't somebody analysing and saying,
do we beat them hard because they're gay or is this person trans? No, they hated us all equally.
So we were much more united and we weren't kind of breaking off into little groups.
I think people have more space to do that now. But I still say that when you look at our main oppress the worldwide.
They are the same people, you know, as it were here, and they know how to divide and rule us.
So it's OK me saying I come from Jamaican background and I'm from Birmingham and I support Aston Villa.
And you might be saying, I don't know where you come from. Somebody might be saying, I'm Nigerian or Indian and I support Tottenham or whatever.
When it comes to fighting the racist, we must be united. Thanks.
It's a perfect transition point to walk back in again now.
So I've been collecting the questions that have been coming in and actually the first one I'd like
to bring in to is from L.A. and it carries on directly from what you've just been talking about.
And it's a question to both of you, which is,
do you have any insights about how any people who want to fight racists can be better activists in the UK now than perhaps?
You know, I was very, very moved when you talk about the 70s and 80s. I grew up through that, too.
Is there? We got insights on how to be better activists now.
A few years ago, I would be able to talk about taking to the streets and stuff like that, but they're trying their best to stop that.
So there's a whole area of. And I find it.
So much with young people now, with activism online and stuff, which I am just I'm just not clued into, I'm I'm still old fashioned in that.
I mean, I do a bit on Twitter, but I don't really have to political debates then.
I don't. I don't engage with it much, but I'm so.
My old fashioned way of going to the streets, my kind of end up being illegal quite soon because it's becoming more and more illegal.
The.
Sorry for hesitating like this, but I've got to say, I'm a I'm a revolutionary, and I think that's I think all we are doing is I don't know who it.
Well, some of it may have been Karl Marx.
Somebody said that capitalism will eat itself, but that's no reason for us to sit back and say, yeah, yeah, I believe we've got to stand up.
And we. And the future that. I want to see I actually don't know what it is yet.
In other words, I'm not going to dictate. I'm not going to say anything. Well, I've got this point of view.
I think the old ideas of Marxism and all this kind of you talk to young people about that and they got us old.
The idea that workers are going to be the factory, they're going to put the tools are, you know, people to be on laptops now.
And this is one of the problems. This is the problems that all of us have with people are not anarchists.
They say, well, what's this world that you imagine? Well, we need to have a conversation about it.
We need to do it together. It's not about imagining and then put it on you. And that's the point of it.
And if you look at all the leading anarchist intellectuals in the world, people like Noam Chomsky, I wrote to Roy, what have they got in common?
They don't want to be leaders, you know, so I'm a revolution.
And like Bob Marley said, it takes a revolution to make a solution with too much confusion and it's just so much frustration.
So I'm going to ask you the same question.
I'm going to set you up partly because of the way your conversation went earlier as the younger generation for a young man.
I'm not I'm not as big as I wish I was. And I am, as everyone who knows me, is very tech phobic.
So I think the best way to talk about how things can be done now is along the lines of
certainly and I think we need to get different groups of folks together to talk through it.
I think it's you know,
I think younger folks who are organising now very much need to learn the history and go back and see what was effective in the past.
And at times it seems like that might not be happening. But that's because I'm old and of course, I'm older.
Therefore, I think young people are doing very different things.
And but I think there is space for for getting together and kind of coordinating and calibrating any kind of advocacy activism work that I've done.
I've never, ever had an idea what to do. I have just been in situations I'm sure you have where you feel something has to be done right.
And you try to get the right people at the table to talk about what can we do, what can we do with this?
And so, yeah, I think everything begins with with conversation and and and planning collectively and along lines.
Also what you said earlier, Benjamin, you know, I feel that the folks who are running things, that's exactly what they don't want us.
That's what they fear. Yeah. Yeah. They actually fear it.
Yeah. And that's why they're so desperate. That's why they want to stop us coming out on the streets.
Yeah. That's why even when a woman is. Killed, I forget her name, Everett.
Yeah, you know, there's forces that don't want women to get together because they realise that, you know,
this could lead onto one thing, could lead onto another thing, could be done to another thing by very paranoid.
But they are scared, petrified. And I feel like the rhetoric around the white working class is very much in this in this line, you know.
Yeah. And in England, the powers that be have absolutely nothing to say to the white working class and have absolutely nothing in common with them.
And in my opinion, they don't care about them at all. Yeah, but the only way to shore up their power is to do what they can to try to disconnect
those individuals from the very people who live in their neighbourhoods, you know, their lives.
You said it all in the poem that you actually in my on my neck were going out when you when you started reciting from the poem about them, not me.
I mean, that's that's what that poem is about.
And I wonder if if we could think again, this is a question, but it's one I have as well, which is what about noise?
What about sound? What about rhythm? Can we just think collectively about the politics of that?
Because you've in your discussion, you ranged over a whole range of different questions.
But when one of the key things that you have as well as your experience is a particular relationship to noise, to sound, to rhythm.
And I'm thinking, obviously, part of that is scriptural, it's biblical, it comes from a long, long wail of of of all sorts of different places.
You know what knocked down the walls? Jericho Well, it was partly sound.
I wonder if sound can do stuff, if rhythm can do stuff as well as if you like, as well as the content.
Am I making sense here? Yes, I've been using music and poetry and sound vibrations, whatever I want to call it, or my creative life.
And I have absolutely no doubt about the power of it.
I mean, on a small level and on a bigger level, I remember being in a pub in Dublin and talking about the importance of.
Creativity in education at the time was trying to get rid of focus on the reading,
writing and arithmetic and that kind of literature and arts and plays and stuff like that.
So I did a gig and I did this talk about it afterwards. Many, many years later, Nelson Mandela comes out of prison.
I'm in South Africa.
This guy comes up to me and he says, I remember that talk you did in Dublin about the importance of arts and creativity and education.
And he said, I've taken that with me to my new job. And I said, What's your job?
He said, I'm the minister of education. You know, for me, talking in a pub in Dublin.
And I didn't know I was talking to the future minister of education to South Africa.
But I'm sure you don't remember the Nicaraguan revolution.
This is a revolution in Nicaragua, Sandinistas, where at the end of their revolution,
they won power and they saw that most of their leaders were dead.
But the people who were alive that really inspired the revolution were the writers and the poets and the musicians,
and they all ended up in government. A friend of mine called us.
Rigsby ended up being the mayor of Bluefields. You know, this is the government of poet.
I mean, it's changed and something went wrong. But but the reason why they were able to do that was because.
And the poets and musicians with their sounds and vibrations and their music and I think inspired the people and within the Palestinian struggle,
is not alive in it anymore. But I would wish the great poet and at one point he would have said, I'm going to join the PLO wherever.
And everybody said, no, no, no, no, there's enough people joining the PLO. We need you to write to inspire us.
Yeah, yeah. I know the importance of of of literature and music and poetry.
In Jamaica, no politician would go to elections without having a particular poet and musician on their side.
And that's why they shot Bob Marley, because they refuse to take sides. Mm hmm.
Malachi, do you want to say anything about this? Nothing major, this interview, Malachi's.
Yeah, I thought it's strange to ask the questions about which is which if I mean, if, as Benjamin says,
kind of poet can be inspirational, who apart from Benjamin, inspires you at the moment?
Who are the poets? And I'll come back to you in a minute. I mean, who are you reading now as inspiration?
Because you talked earlier about a book being an important thing in a person's life.
What are the books? One or two books? Oh, gosh. If I could just say some really click on sound, which again disappears from what you said.
And so I have to just look at a football match. Yeah. Unless I can turn a disparate group of people into a unified force for good and for.
And that's the power of sound. You know, it's as simple as that and other things that I'm reading.
Roger Robinson, I think, is a spectacular poet and a spectacular performer.
I mean, you know, if you don't know him, people look him up.
And Don Brand, a Trinidadian writer who I adore from Canada and then a champion.
And of course. Yeah, I mean, there's so many I mean, as you said about people coming up in the excitement,
so many voices now, I think, and who are doing just really, really incredible things.
And Caleb Femi Raichel along and this whole new generation of poets and from all over the place who are.
Yeah, I don't know, just just naming things, giving things the right name.
I think so, Pottsy. They they they describe it in the way we say. And there's so many folks in that now.
And going back to the, as you rightly said,
a cinematic moment when the gun under your pillow and you and you come to London and you find your way into this gang of poets,
um, with particular books or poets or voices at that moment that you had the Aha.
Moment Malachi's just talked about. Well, like I said, I didn't really grow up in a house with books.
No. Um. So for me, there was a kind of book, but it was called an LP.
We listen to music. I mean, Bob Marley is an obvious one,
but actually Bob Marley is like the commercial side of a thing as Pablo Moses Burning Spear Burning Spear sang about education all the time,
the importance of education. Peter Toshiro became a very good friend.
He was one of the original wireless and Macintosh Umali, of course, I thought Venezuela Judy Mahad,
who was known as being one of Bob Marley backing singers, but she was a singer in her own right as well.
So for me, it was really the music. When I started to really read the book that I read was the philosophies and opinions of Marcus Garvey,
and I could hardly read it at the time, but I stole it from a library.
I used to borrow it and I borrowed it week after week. And then one week I went back for it and it wasn't there.
And the woman said she's taking it off the shelf and it was originally bound one,
you know, it was like the old kind of leather bound and all that stuff.
And she said, no, we're taking it off the shelf. You can have a new edition.
But I looked at it and I saw it on the trolley literally being sent to be pulped or something.
So I stole it. I stole it. And I took it.
And I kept it with me for years. And then one day I was talking about it on television and I said, I've still got it.
And the library wrote to me and said, You can have it. And I said, bring it back in this country for me.
I still got it. But that book was about. He wrote that book.
Saying that, look, if black people don't have a better sense of self and knowledge of their own history and a sense of where they want to go.
They've taken away the change, but they will control us with their brains, we'll still be in a kind of slavery will be an economic slavery.
And at that time, people, especially women, but also men, black people started late the skin.
And with this kind of bleach stuff that they put on. And Marcus Garvey was completely against that.
And that taught me or inspired me to kind of really not be ashamed of being black and understanding that we had a.
A very important history that involved.
Inventors and academics and thinkers and scientists and and all those kind of things that we were told or begun in in Rome or Greece.
Mm hmm. I mean, again,
I was found one of the really challenging parts of your discussion about the degree to which racism is sort of sanctioned within the academy now,
and I'm not going to try and say that's not true. It's absolutely true. I suppose if we're leaning towards hope rather than despair,
you might say that one of the other things that's happening within academic discourse now is.
Kind of real digging down and discovery and rediscovery of black history is in the plural
that go right back beyond Rome and appeared in the early in the early 16th century.
Again, do you have thoughts on this particular moment as a as a kind of bending towards hope because part of your discussion in it was really painful,
that bit where Monica was asking you, so is it worse now than it was before?
And I don't want to say we have to be hopeful, but I'm wondering if if you've got a thought about.
Yeah. Where we might go next year within the economy because you are now an academic.
You like it or not. You don't want to say we have to we have to be hopeful.
I would say we have to be hopeful. What our professors want us to do is give up.
Yeah. They want us to be hopeless, you know, and this is something I've said before, and I don't mind repeating it.
I have no scientific evidence to back this up.
I read no papers to prove what I'm going to say, you know, but I just believe in the victory of good over evil.
I believe we must overcome them. And we just have to if if we can't struggle on and see.
Victory and just work towards it in whatever field we're doing that is kind of the colonialized in the academy or libraries or whatever,
then we might as well just give up. We might as well just give up, we might as well listen to the racist and I don't know.
Of course, they will go back to Africa. I'll go back to Birmingham or, you know, that's what they want us to do.
Yeah, you know, the thing with the 70s and 80s when.
Universities could get away with promoting racist intellectuals, all kinds of things,
but that is that there wasn't all these forces I remember kind of reading about this rather than just thinking,
why does everybody kind of respect his name so much?
You know, and and it was almost like I remember talking to an African person about, you know, I got a Rhodes scholarship.
You got to be grateful to the grateful. Mm hmm.
I thought, no, no, we can say, you know, there's another way I get the scholarship.
You want to go to anything that we can change it. And I'm just so glad we're having that debate.
And it's not just about the debate I. I feel a bit lazy sometimes I think it is lazy sometimes when we just talk about the debate, we want action.
Yeah, you know, and the young people who are fired up now want action.
That's why they take statues down. Yeah.
You know, and not only that, I did a every day for TV where about black people are putting statues up that represent us, all of us.
Not just black people, but all of us. Yeah. You know, I've got hope, you know.
I mean, I really it may not happen in my lifetime,
but there are some great people much better than me who have done much greater things than me that didn't see the change in their lifetime.
But we still appreciate what they did. Thank you, Your Honour.
I don't think what he said, as so often we say what he said.
We're now past 6:00 o'clock deadline and I think it's just about come to the end of the session this evening.
There are one or two questions, but in a sense, they've they've been they've been answered really already in the discussion we've had already.
I can't thank you enough, both of you, for this amazing really moving, but also really energising conversation.
As you said, Benjamin, it starts with a conversation with somebody else.
It starts through conversation. Obviously, it's got to turn from conversation into action.
And indeed, as Pelecanos one of the frames of this discussion is the Art and Action Project.
And I want to thank L.A. and Sandra Meyer and author Ruth Scobey,
who's here for inviting torture to collaborate as part of this conversation and indeed this action today.
I'd also like to thank the story museum where we are open again now, post pandemic or well post lockdown for hosting us so well today.
And thank all those behind the scenes, both here in the Story Museum and the torch.
Who made all this possible, thanks to to our viewers and listeners from all around the world for your comments and questions and in fact,
your loyalty to the project that we're building here in Oxford, which is through torch,
through the humanities cultural programme, through other parts of the university.
And indeed, through engagement with organisations such as the Story Museum here in the city.
So this is our last event of the Big Ten live event series for the time being.
But we'll be back returning with what we hope will be an exciting programme of activity and seasons of different kinds.
Later in the year, we hope that we can welcome you, the audience back then and if possible, as we've had the luxury of doing here today,
that we might even have some real life in-person events for now from all of us, that torch, we wish you all a relaxing summer break.
And most of all, many thanks to the two of you, Malachi and Benjamin, for a really amazing and inspiring conversation.
Thank you. Thanks for tolerating me. You did well. I like what?
Like to.