A BARD OF STRATFORD
I left Kilburn and moved in with Raggs in Leyton. I was being called the Bard of Stratford, so I thought I should at least live in the area. Things were really changing. I had experience of chatting on sound system microphones, and I’d done a few performances in small community centres, but now I was doing gigs on bigger stages. I even did one accidentally. I went to watch a benefit event for the Troops Out (of Ireland) movement. The fighting in Northern Ireland was very hot at the time. I was watching the bands and, although I was passionate about justice for the Catholic minority, it was a pretty, dark-haired Irish girl who caught my attention.
I whispered some stuff in her ear about how good I thought we’d look together, and how, if we got together, we could represent the struggles of the black and Irish peoples. Then, in order to show her I was really on her side, I gave her a close-up, personal, whispered recitation of a poem I’d written called ‘Troops Out’, and I thought I was in.
She said she had plans for me and she wanted me, then ten minutes later I watched with a sense of shock as she took to the stage and said: ‘I’ve just met a really nice guy and he’s going to come up here and do a poem for us. Give him a round of applause!’
I was stunned, but I had no choice, so I went straight up on stage and did it. It was only one poem but that was my first gig in front of an all-white audience. I know it wasn’t ‘my gig’ – it was only one poem after all – but there was something liberating about performing in a place where absolutely no one knew me.
After my Troops Out debut, things moved quickly. I was soon to top the bill at an event organised by Gill and Derek from The Whole Thing. It was to take place in a room above the shop, but I needed a support poet. I didn’t have to look far. Raggs’s brother was known as ‘King’ and had been writing poetry as a hobby. He said he was happy to warm up for me. He was a real wheeler-dealer and had a look based on what you might think of as the classic pimp style – the way he walked, spectacular hats, a girl on each arm. He always talked with a very posh accent, which was put on, but he developed it.
His real name was Alexander Gordon, but I thought that sounded like someone from a soap opera, and he agreed with me. So I looked at his name, moved a few letters around, took a few letters out, and came up with the name ‘Da Zanda’. He now sounded like a magician, but he liked it, so I went and designed a poster. I wrote the words on the poster myself. It said:
Come hear local poets in a revolutionary style. Featuring Benjamin Zephaniah and Da Zanda. All who have ears, let them hear: voices from the city, on Saturday 31st January 1981. 1 o’clock at The Whole Thing, 53 West Ham Lane, Stratford, east London.
So that was my first real gig, with my own poster and my own audience. It had an immediate impact. I remember somebody stopping me in the street the next day saying, ‘You’re that poet. When are you doing another reading? Everyone’s talking about you.’
I didn’t have another performance planned but I could feel them coming. Then Derek suggested I work with them in the shop or, to put it correctly, that I should fully join the cooperative and not just the publishing operation. So I did. I started working in the bookshop and café to earn some money on the side. They ran a housing co-operative there too, which was a vital and thriving alternative to the traditional rental market. Once I began to understand how co-ops worked, I got a group of people together and we started our own housing co-operative.
Back then, before the days of the internet, and before everything became a corporate ‘revenue stream’, like-minded people still had ways of finding each other and spreading information. Most cities had their own alternative scene, and it often congregated around wholefood cafés that doubled up as bookshops and food stores. These places weren’t like Holland & Barrett – they would be alive with left-leaning activists hanging out, talking about philosophy and the Green movement and organising resistance. Radical ideas would circulate and there would be flyers about the Greenham Common protest and CND, and noticeboards where people would advertise events and look for others with whom to share their co-op or squat. It was the perfect environment for my message.
The buzz was going around and people were asking for more gigs, so I obliged. I was big in Stratford. People were starting to look at me differently; they called me ‘the poet’ and my audiences were typically a mixture of alternative types and Rastafarians. One day, a very well-respected and quite religious Rastafarian woman called Claudette said to me, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I was going to be around for a long time. When I asked her why she thought that, she said, ‘I don’t know anything about poetry but I know there is no one else like you. You’ve got intelligence, you’ve got reggae in you; black people and white people and youth can understand it.’ She was a very no-nonsense, to-the-point woman, so I knew she wasn’t just trying to impress me.
My day-to-day life was spent working in The Whole Thing. Helping to run and maintain the housing co-op also took up a lot of energy and time and required members to attend regular meetings. Being very left wing and ethical, there were endless debates and democratic votes. The community was running things for themselves and feeling a sense of autonomy that people these days don’t seem to have, unless they’re rich. It was an alternative existence with excellent principles that empowered people to learn about co-operation. We got paid, although it wasn’t very much, but we all had food and shelter. If something went wrong you could draw from the people around you in that caring, sharing collective.
I was chatting to Derek one day and he told me that most of the phone calls coming into the shop were about me. If someone wanted to book me for a gig, that’s where they’d find me. This is when I thought, I’m busier than the shop. I can be a poet full-time. I looked at my earnings and they were higher than the shop’s. I was wary about leaving the safety net of The Whole Thing – the co-op movement had really helped me – but I had to do it. I was beginning to build a name for myself.
Stratford was a very run-down part of east London back then, with lots of unfinished building projects, or buildings that were falling down. On a wall of corrugated iron on Stratford Broadway someone had spray-painted the words: ‘Beware Babylon, the poet has arrived’. I didn’t feel that Babylon was going to fall in the very first term of the Thatcher government, but it was uplifting to know that the poet was me.