Feature: Benjamin Zephaniah talks about women’s struggles, politics and the university of life
Published: 22 March, 2012
by PAVAN AMARA
Benjamin Zephaniah tells me he’s “nervous” about feminism, “extreme” about the “sick system” of politics, and got his degree “in life, in the streets, in dread”.
The poet, now 53, wrote rhythms from the streets of Handsworth in Birmingham, and emerged to take poetry to the stage, propositioning the police, the courts, racism, and sexism, and finally rejecting an OBE in 2003.
Along the way he was shortlisted for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University in 1980s.
This weekend he talks about Women and Politics at Holborn’s October Gallery.
“I didn’t do any course in feminism,” he says. “I learned the struggle of women through my mum, a battered woman. I learned my feminism in the police station watching her show her cuts and bruises to officers. That doesn’t leave you. It stays forever. That why I’m nervous about the word feminism now. It’s used about women who are taking over the boardrooms but at the same time stepping on other women beneath them. We’ve got to go back to basics. It is about seeing your beauty when you look in the mirror, and not through a man’s eyes, but through your own, and knowing those eyes that matter are yours.”
Discussing all-women shortlists in politics he says: “The bigger question is: do female politicians – or black politicians – do anything to help oppression once they are in power? No, because once in Parliament it’s all about where that Bill is in the House, so they can’t sort it, it’s a sick system. If there were a group of white males who were devoted to equality, I would vote them in. But in today’s politics people vote against what they don’t want, rather than for what they do want. Did anyone vote for this coalition government?”
Zephaniah, who had his first book of poetry published in 1980 when he was 22, says the political system isn’t working because of the disconnection between the monied politicians and those their decisions impact.
“There needs to be a quota for lay people in think tanks and committees. We’re in a state of emergency now, but the Transport Secretary doesn’t even use the transport; they’re closing libraries and youth services because of the price but not looking at their value; they’re closing domestic violence shelters just when battered women most need those spaces because losing their jobs means they won’t have the money to go anywhere else.
“I’m extreme when it comes to politics, but only because Benjamin Zephaniah was criminal, Benjamin Zephaniah used those services, those libraries, those youth centres, and so Benjamin Zephaniah knows once those things go, they are gone, irreplacable, and once we lose a generation who could have been saved through those services, that generation is gone forever.
“What I want to see in these housing discussions is talking to homeless people, and asking them: how did you get here?
What do you think went wrong, because you lived it?
But experts won’t do that because they think they know their stuff, because they’re educated, they went to university.
“But the university of life counts more than anything else, and that’s what those homeless people, those immigrants, the refugees, the battered women have got, that the politicians just don’t. That’s why they will run this country with knowledge, with what these politicians who front in Parliament just won’t.”