DREAD POETS’ SOCIETY
In the late 1980s a number of British universities began to get interested in me. At first they wanted me to talk or do interviews in student magazines, and there were always university gigs, of course. But then I had a visit from a group of people with connections at Cambridge University, who wanted to talk to me about standing for the post of Fellow at Trinity College. Apparently some bigwigs in the university had found out that a story was going to break in the press about how the post (like the university) was regarded as elitist. Since Henry VIII’s time, it had gone to Professor So-and-So’s daughter, or the son of a friend of a friend, and it had never really been used for its true purpose.
The original idea was to reach out and allow somebody who didn’t have a university education to use the premises. It was for people who wouldn’t normally mix in those circles but who could benefit from raising the profile of themselves or their art. My initial response was that I would go for it. I went to Trinity to speak to the powers that were, and they explained that the idea of being a fellow was to add life to the college, to use their rooms and encourage students to engage in creative work.
I spoke to the college at length and was open and honest with them, saying I could definitely assist in initiating creativity. Everyone was sworn to secrecy in that meeting, but someone was talking. I left Cambridge and by the time I reached London it was in the evening paper. Then the Daily Mail printed a cartoon of me on stage surrounded by spliffs on the floor, with some hanging from my mouth. A don leans across to the students, and in the speech bubble it says: ‘If you hear any rumblings, it’s Keats, Shelley and Byron turning in their graves.’ The Sun then ran a headline on 23 April 1987 saying: ‘Would you let this man near your daughter?’, as if I was some kind of rapist.
Certain elements of the press began hanging around outside our house in East Ham, trampling over the garden and trying to get stories. I was confronted by one hack who said she’d spoken to a woman I’d supposedly been at school with in London, who said I’d got her pregnant. I told her truthfully that I’d only been to school for one day in London, at an all-boys school. It was nonsense. They were using provocation to try to scrape up all kinds of dirt. And all because the most shocking thing for their readers was the idea that a black man with dreadlocks might be allowed a position in some hallowed part of the educational establishment.
Mum and me were in the process of moving to another house in East Ham when a young, upper-middle-class female journalist for one of the broadsheets found out where I was moving. She turned up looking what she thought would be the part to lure me into an interview. Her blonde hair was braided in red, gold and green beads and she was driving an MG sports car. She asked me for an interview and I declined, saying I wanted to wait for the college decision, but the car caught my eye and I asked her for a drive. She agreed. When I looked in the glove compartment, to put on a cassette, the reggae ones were in the front – Bob Marley, naturally – but hidden behind them was the Dire Straits, U2 and Rolling Stones.
I told her that before she wrote her piece, and while I was waiting for Trinity’s decision, she should come to the spoken word gig I was doing in Brixton that weekend. To be fair to her she did come along, and later said she’d had her mind opened by the power of performance poetry. She hadn’t known what to expect but was really glad she came, as she had been moved by it. In the end I gave her the interview and she gave the gig a rave review. She’d been under a tough deadline. She told me that if she hadn’t persuaded me to speak, the newspaper would have run a piece she’d already drafted before she’d ever spoken to me – with little regard to its accuracy.
In the end, the negative campaign by the tabloid press made the clever folk at Cambridge back down. The dons had felt that if they appointed me, they could never be accused of being elitist. I was interested in the appointment because I felt passionately about education, and I also knew it would have been easy for me to add to the life of the university. The college had wanted to get a ‘normal’ person in, which is why they approached me, but it turned out I wasn’t so normal after all, and they didn’t want a fuss made. It wasn’t to be; the tabloids had won the day. One unnamed member of the university staff said, ‘I like the idea of Benjamin Zephaniah coming to Cambridge. Every time he comes here a buzz of excitement goes around the university . . . but I want him to go home at night.’
That wasn’t the end. I had the last laugh. Based on an idea by an independent producer called Rodger Laing and myself, me and the writer David Stafford wrote a screenplay called Dread Poets’ Society, where I meet Shelley, Byron and Keats on a train, en route to Cambridge. On this journey we exchange notes, read poetry and have a go at the establishment in an old Romantic poets kind of way. It was made into a short film for Channel 4 in 1992, starring me (as myself) with numerous actors, including Timothy Spall, in costume. It was a big hit, and people talked about it for years afterwards.
Intellectual and cultural theorist the late Stuart Hall used the film to illustrate to his students how racist the establishment can be in tandem with the media. Those newspaper cartoons were used all over the world to illustrate the same issue, and although the film was only shown on TV once, it has been shown at festivals all over the world.