Benjamin Zephaniah

## Biography

**Born in 1958**, Benjamin Zephaniah is a **poet and playwright** who left school aged 13, and spent most of his teenage years in youth institutions and the criminal underworld of Birmingham. **He came to public attention as a performance poet with the anti-racist demonstrations of the late 1970s and early 1980s**.

Born and raised in Birmingham, England, **his poetry is strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he calls ‘street politics’**. His first real public performance was in church when he was 10 years old, **by the time he was 15** he had developed a strong following in his home town of Handsworth where **he had gained a reputation as a young poet who was capable of speaking on local and international issues**.

He loved Handsworth, he called it the Jamaican capital of Europe but although his work had become popular within the African-Caribbean and Asian community he thought the town was too small, he was not satisfied preaching about the sufferings of Black people to Black people, so **he sought a wider mainstream audience**. At the age of 22 he headed south to London where **his first book *Pen Rhythm* was published in 1980**. The book sold well going into 3 editions but **it was in performance that the Dub (Reggae) Poet would cause a revolution, a revolution that injected new life into the British poetry scene** and attracted the interest of many mainstream publishers, many of whom had sent refusal letters to him.

It was once said of him that he was Britain’s most filmed, photographed, and identifiable poet, this was because of his ability to perform on stage, but most of all on television, bringing Dub Poetry straight into British living rooms. **The mission was to take poetry everywhere**, he hated the dead image that academia and the establishment had given poetry and proclaimed that **he was out to popularise poetry by reaching people who did not read books**, those that were keen on books could now witness a book coming to life on the stage. **This poetry was political, musical, radical, relevant and on TV**. In the nineties his book publications, record releases and television appearances increased in Britain, although he has concentrated on performing outside Europe.

Zephaniah believes that working with human rights groups, animal rights groups and other political organisations means that he will never lack subject matter. He now spends much of his time in China, but he continues working throughout Asia, South America and Africa, and is as passionate about politics and poetry now as he has ever been.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### Performance (Dub) Poetry

Black performance poets have developed African and Caribbean oral traditions into a varied poetic language that is rooted in the speech of their communities, creating a powerful sense of black British identity through social documentary, the articulation of autonomous political thought and pure entertainment. Many poets have also developed sophisticated methods of transcription for their essentially oral work, so that the sound of the spoken voice is brought to the reading eye.

In 1976 Linton Kwesi Johnson coined the term ‘dub poetry’ for work that he and the Jamaicans Michael Smith, Mutabaruka and Oku Onuora were
performing, inspired by the ‘toasting’ of reggae sound-system DJs U Roy and Big Youth, and the Last Poets’ percussion-driven street poetry. Dub poetry uses speech- and reggae-rhythms (rather than the iambic pentameters that predominate in conventional English poetry) simultaneously to resist received pronunciation and to make their poetry familiar to audiences alienated by literary/academic writing. Much dub poetry deals with contemporary sociopolitical issues, but its variety is demonstrated by Jean Binta Breeze’s love poetry and the playfulness of Benjamin Zephaniah.

Broadly, performance poetry is any poetry delivered effectively in performance; narrowly, it is poetry composed specifically for performance rather than for the page. With the spread of literacy, Britain had lost any earlier tradition of poetry performance, and modern, essentially urban, performance poetry began in Britain in the late 1950s. Influenced by US jazz and beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, mostly young poets began to perform their work at jazz clubs and cafes, both with and between the jazz. With the rise of punk rock, new wave and reggae music in the mid-to-late 1970s came new styles of performance poetry, mostly with a fresh political emphasis.

Dub poetry includes lyrics and narrative poems on various subjects including protest against racism and police brutality, the celebration of sex, music, and ganja, and Rastafarian religious themes. Although primarily an oral poetry for public performance, it has increasingly appeared in print, notably in Johnson's Dread Beat and Blood (1975) and Benjamin Zephaniah's The Dread Affair (1985). Other leading dub poets include Michael Smith, Jean Binta Breeze, and Levi Tafari.

### Post-modernism

The term ‘postmodernism’ has been the subject of much debate, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Some see it as simply the continuation and development of modernist ideas; others have seen in postmodern art a radical break with classical modernism; while others again view past literature and culture retrospectively through postmodern eyes, identifying texts and authors (de Sade, Borges, the Ezra Pound of The Cantos) as ‘already’ postmodern.

### Post-Colonial Literature

A further movement which draws on the more radical implications of poststructuralism is the study of colonial discourse, or what is usually termed ‘postcolonial criticism.’ Analysis of the cultural dimension of colonialism/imperialism is as old as the struggle against it; such work has been a staple of anti-colonial movements everywhere. ‘Postcolonial studies’ overtook the troublesome ideological category of ‘Commonwealth literature’ to emerge in the 1980s as a set of concerns marked by the decentredness otherwise associated, philosophically, with poststructuralism and particularly deconstruction.

The appearance of postcolonial criticism has therefore overlapped with the debates on postmodernism, though it brings, too, an awareness of power relations between Western and ‘Third World’ cultures which the more playful and parodic, or aestheticizing postmodernism has neglected or been slow to develop. From a postcolonial perspective, Western values and traditions of thought and literature, including versions of postmodernism, are guilty of a repressive ethnocentrism.

As a starting-point, post-colonial studies is about the critique of and the resistance to colonialism. In terms of an approach, it is one that is consciously aware of and positioned against the ideology of colonialism and neocolonialism. By neo-colonialism, it is generally meant the way in which the West continues to maintain maximum indirect control over ex-colonies through economic, cultural, and political mechanisms.

## Bibliography

*Job Rocking* (1989) is recognized as Britain's first rap play. In 1991 he co-wrote *Dread Poets Society*, a BBC-TV play, in which he played himself in a fictional encounter with the Shelleys and Byron. After *Streetwise* (1990), he stopped writing for the stage on the grounds that most theatre did not reach ethnic minorities or the most disadvantaged communities. Collections of poetry include *City Psalms* (1992) and *Propa Propaganda* (1996). *Talking Turkeys* (1994) and *Funky Chickens* (1996) collect verse for children.

### Literary Style

* Poetry written to be performed.
* Incorporates a music beat, often a reggae beat.
* Often, but not always, the performance is done to the accompaniment of music.
* It can absorb and inocrporate any kind of black musical rythm.
* Usually written in the Jamaican English variety.
* It may be written in the informal language of people from anywhere.
* Most often politically focused, attacking oppresion and injustice.

## White Comedy

1. I waz whitemailed

2. By a white witch,

3. Wid white magic

4. An white lies,

5. Branded by a white sheep

6. I slaved as a whitesmith

7. Near a white spot

8. Where I suffered whitewater fever.

9. Whitelisted as a whiteleg

10. I waz in de white book

11. As a master of white art,

12. It waz like white death.

13. People called me white jack

14. Some hailed me as a white wog,

15. So I joined de white watch

16. Trained as a white guard

17. Lived off the white economy.

18. Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts

19. I waz condemned to a white mass,

20. Don't worry,

21. I shall be writing to de Black House.

**Tone:** Highly ironic

**Themes:** Racism, inequality

**Form:** Free verse

**Binary Opposition:** the “means by which the units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not”. Essentially, the concept of the binary opposition is engendered by the Western propensity to organize everything into a hierarchical structure; terms and concepts are related to positives or negatives, with no apparent latitude for deviation.

The principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on/off, up/down, left/right etc; an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought.

## Intro Paragraph

Expanding their territory and exerting control over foreign lands, British Imperialism had a great impact worldwide. With colonies across Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, the British shaped whole civilizations whose pasts and origins have struggled to persist.  Writers from these former colonies have taken a stand against British influences in order to recover and validate their native roots in what we can classify as Post-colonial literature. One of these artists is Benjamin Zephaniah (b. 1958), who challenges the establishment through his work. Even though he was born in Britain, his Jamaican heritage has influenced his art. His varied productions aim to reach all kinds of audiences, and range from plays and music, to spoken word in the form of dub poetry. An epitome of the latter, “White Comedy” (WC from now onwards) perfectly illustrates the extent with which deep-rooted racism and inequality is present in the English language. WC shows Zephaniah’s subversive style in its use of binary oppositions and the genre of the poem itself.

### MLA citation

Zephaniah, Benjamin. “White Comedy.” 1977. *Poetry Nook*, www.poetrynook.com/poem/white-comedy

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1  Drabble, Margaret. *The Oxford Companion to English Literature.* Oxford University Press, 2000.
2. ↑  Zephaniah, Benjamin. “Biography.” *Benjamin Zephaniah*, www.benjaminzephaniah.com/biography
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1  Childs, Peter & Michael Storry. *Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture*. Taylor & Francis, 2002.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1  Baldick, Chris. *The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms*. Oxford University Press, 2001.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1  Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. *A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory*. Longman, 2005.
6. ↑ Fogarty, Sorcha. "Binary Oppositions". The Literary Encyclopedia. 15 February 2005. www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=122.