PUBLISHING THE UNPUBLISHABLE
Any writer who has tried to get published will tell you it can be very difficult, and every published writer has a story (usually a long one) about how they got published. Mine was a little unusual, though thankfully it didn’t take too long. With encouragement from Sheila, I started to seriously look for a publisher. At first I tried the traditional way of sending the poems with a letter by post, but I much preferred taking the poems to the publisher myself. I didn’t know that wasn’t really the way to do things – I was just enthusiastic, and I knew my poems worked best when performed. With that in mind, I thought it best that I turned up with the poems, and if necessary I would perform them.
Many publishers glanced at the poems and said no, and when I suggested that I perform them most of them looked at me as if I was mad. A couple of them said to my face, ‘Sorry, we don’t do black or Rastafarian poetry.’ I would try to tell them that my poetry was for everybody, not only blacks and Rastafarians. I told them I had white friends who liked them, but they weren’t having it. I think it’s too simplistic to say they were just being racist, however. Mainstream publishers in Britain knew nothing about black poetry, or dub poetry, or rap poetry back then.
In Dalston, east London, there was a bookshop called Centreprise. It was also a community centre, a meeting place and a small publisher. When I heard about them I thought this must be the place for me. I arrived early one Monday morning and met a colourful woman who welcomed me in . . . and then rejected me. Many years later another friend, who is also called Benjamin, went there with his poems and saw the same woman. She turned him down too. He walked out of the bookshop to the bus stop, and as he was waiting for his bus home the woman came running after him and she said: ‘You know what. I said no to Benjamin Zephaniah about twenty years ago and I’ve regretted it ever since. Why don’t you come in and have a talk?’ I met her again in 2007 and she was very good-humoured about it. She said her colleagues had never let her live it down.
Around this time I found another old friend from Birmingham called Raggs. He had come down a bit before me and was living in Leyton, east London. While we were all into hardcore reggae, he’d always been into funk – Parliament, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins. He made his own clothes (hence his nickname) and sported an Afro three times the size of his head. He had an extensive record collection and all he did, all day and all night, was dance to this funky stuff and design clothes. He was a great dancer. He had long, skinny legs that were like rubber. They would twist and turn like a rag doll’s legs, but he had great balance. He was totally in control when he looked out of control.
Raggs understood the Dread and Rasta movement but he never jumped on that bandwagon simply to be fashionable. He never got into the hustling life; he was always an honest, hardworking funkateer. At first the funky thing wasn’t my bag but it began to grow on me, as Raggs’s zest for life was so infectious. He was earning a living by making clothes that appealed to the funk and soul crowd – flamboyant shirts and shiny fabrics. He’d run them up on a sewing machine in his home.
I’d stay at Raggs’s house sometimes. I was working on my poetry and beginning to think about my first real public performances. On one of these occasions I was on a nearby street when someone suggested I visit another bookshop where they also did publishing. I found the place – called The Whole Thing – in nearby Stratford. It was a bit like Centreprise but more holistically connected. Part of the premises was used as a vegetarian café, another part was a wholefood store, and the bookshop was as radical as they came. Along with the Morning Star, they sold every feminist, gay, Irish Republican and black publication going. It was what was called an ‘alternative bookshop’ – a term I’d not previously heard used in that way – and it was a workers’ co-operative.
The staff was made up of the happiest, hippiest people I had ever seen. There I met a bearded man called Derek Smith. He was a thoughtful, humble man, but he had the kind of face that didn’t really do smiles. When I told him I was a poet, and I’d like to be published, I could just about see his lips move, as if to indicate a smile, then he told me I had come at the right time. They had recently formed a publishing co-op and received a grant. Their brief was to publish somebody who was unknown and represented a minority community. Gill Hay was another worker there. Tall, and the complete opposite of Derek, her eyes were always alight and she seemed to be forever smiling.
They both read my poems and straight away told me they would like to publish me. But there was a catch. It was a co-operative, so it wasn’t just a case of me leaving my poems and then waiting for the book to arrive through the post. I also had to get involved with the publishing process. That suited me fine; after all, I was always trying to understand that side of things, so we had a deal. Over the next few weeks I helped with the layout of the book, and then the pages would arrive at the shop and we had to staple them together. I loved it.
I had been in London almost two years when, in 1980, Pen Rhythm was published. It was a very small book, more of a booklet, really, and it was a slightly different version from the prototype I had made, but helping to put the book together was a great learning process through which I also met interesting people.
These days I’m not that keen on self-publishing, as I think a writer always needs an editor, and a lot of self-published books are full of spelling mistakes and use terrible typefaces, but I always tell new writers, especially poets, to imagine their first collection and, if possible, to create a model of what it would look like. Not necessarily for others, but for themselves. You must think about the order of your poems, and your mock-up book must have a title, dedications and as much information as there would be in the real book. Then you should put it away and read it later. You will then notice changes you might want to make, and you can begin to imagine what it would be like in the hands of someone who doesn’t know you.
I was told that Pen Rhythm was well received, but I didn’t know what that meant. I don’t know how many copies were sold, but it very quickly went to three editions. A few months after it was published, an independent filmmaker called Simon Heaven came to see me in the bookshop. He told me about a new TV station that was soon to go on air. It was going to make films about marginalised and minority communities, and it would give a voice to people like me. The station was to be Channel 4.
Simon had won a commission from the station, and his brief was to make a series of documentaries about alternative poets. He wanted the first one to be about me. I said yes. I had a book out, people were talking about my poetry, and I thought it made sense to do a documentary, but I was very nervous. As far as I knew the police were still looking for me in Birmingham. It had been in the back of my mind that they might have found me after the publication of Pen Rhythm, but they didn’t, which convinced me that the police didn’t read poetry.
It took about three weeks to make the documentary. The filming process was all new to me. I would say all the wrong things – things that were right for me but wrong for television. For example, in reply to a question about why people needed to fight, I began to talk about liberation movements in Africa, that felt they had no choice but to fight their oppressors. As I spoke, Simon nodded, as if to say, ‘Very good.’ But then I said, ‘The people of Africa must fight for freedom and equality, like the Catholics of Northern Ireland.’
The filming stopped, the crew looked at each other, and Simon said, ‘Very good, Benjamin. Can we do it again and be a bit less specific, a little more general?’ That was the moment I realised how cautious the British media could be when talking about the government’s interference in Ireland. Thatcher didn’t call her war a war – not when it was at home; that was what foreigners and dark people did. The British establishment and their friends called it ‘the unrest’ or ‘The Troubles’.
I wasn’t diplomatic, my poetry was raw and so was I, so that kind of thing would happen many times. I began to understand how much self-censorship there was in the British media, and how much the British people (especially the English) censored themselves. Still, the programme got made and was called Pen Rhythm Poet, and it was one of the first documentaries to be shown on the new channel – which had begun broadcasting in November 1982. The original idea was to screen it as part of a series about emerging talent, but by the time it was ready for transmission the book and my performance had raised my profile so much that Channel 4 decided the film should stand alone, and so it was shown in its own right.
Looking back, it’s a very strange film. Many people say I don’t look much different from the way I look now, in my late fifties, but I actually sounded much older and more Jamaican when I was younger. My performance style was more static, and I tended to get on stage and blast poems out without really introducing myself or my work. I just wanted to blow people away with poetry; I wasn’t really interested in ‘stage craft’ or making friends. I would learn that in the coming years.