KNOW THY SELF
When I told many of my neighbours about the racism I was receiving around the time of the Brexit vote, most seemed to be saying it was sad, but it was my problem. There was a handful of people who offered to help me by installing cameras around my house and generally being vigilant, but overall it was a very gloomy time, and I was on my own.
I’ve had gloomy times, I’ve had hard times and I’ve had good times, but most lives are like that. I have known people who outwardly seem to be very successful, but they’ve been extremely unhappy. I don’t believe you can have a completely happy life all the time. We can only have lives that are full of moments, and we have to try to make sure our happy moments outnumber the unhappy ones.
I remember being in a police cell when I was sixteen and wondering what would become of me. The cell was about the size of a double bed, and the walls felt as though they were closing in. I looked around and thought I would be in and out of police cells and prisons for the rest of my life. For a time I thought that I, and people like me, were condemned to forever be in places like that, but then I also remembered that I once had a dream of becoming a poet and leaving some kind of positivity in the world. Then I shook my head, I mean really shook it, as if to shake away all those negative thoughts. Yes, I did all kinds of things to survive and stay alive, but even when I did bad, even in darkest moments, I still had a deep belief that I could do better, and that I deserved better.
I’ve witnessed the thug life, the pimp life, the street-fighting life, because I’ve been right in the middle of it, but I’ve always been an observer. I’d always watch people and think, He’s a character. That one thinks he’s the boss. There were things I did even as a child, such as running away from approved school, where I’d think, This is going to end up in one of my books or poems. I jotted it all down in my memory.
I needed a chance, and when the chance came I took it. Having said that, just taking the chance is not good enough; I had to do some hard work as well. I wasn’t blighted by the culture of entitlement that affects the social media generation. I don’t believe the glib sentiment that if you simply ‘follow your dreams’ you’ll make it. Maybe if your talent matches your expectations you’ll make it but you might not. There might be cultural or class barriers stopping you. And if you don’t make it, you’ll need your own internal sense of self-worth to fall back on.
At this age people often ask me what I think is my greatest achievement, and I find it very difficult to pick one or even to rank them in any order of importance. Turning away from crime could be one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, but so could reaching the age of thirty without being shot.
Every time I visit South Africa I am filled with pride. My part was very small, but being involved with the anti-apartheid movement makes me think that I played a part in changing that country for the better. Actually Mandela told me it did. But my pride is also tinged with anxiety. There will never be another Mandela, but I fear that the ANC and its leadership are not focused on uniting the country and fighting corruption the way he was.
I was also very involved with raising awareness about the plight of the people of East Timor, and again I’m very proud of having played my little part in the liberation of that small nation, but I think we failed when it comes to Palestine. This is a country that for decades has suffered a brutal occupation – you can go online and see Palestinians being killed every day – but the people of Britain don’t seem that aware of their suffering because very little about their oppression is covered in the mainstream media.
The shameful treatment of the people of the Chagos Islands by the British government is hardly known by the people of Britain, and the government would like it to stay that way, because they know most decent people would be outraged that a whole nation of people were moved from their homeland to make a military base for a so-called ally. Then there’s West Papua. I know it will be free one day; I wanted to help free them before I was fifty; now I’m almost sixty and they’re still not free. So there’s another failing of mine. Yes, for me this is personal.
I really wanted to free the world, but at home, as I write this, I think one of the greatest injustices in the country of my birth is the number of people who are dying in custody. In police stations, prisons, immigration centres and psychiatric units the vulnerable are dying. Many are taking their own lives as a result of depression and other mental health problems, but many are dying as a result of the brutality they experience at the hands of the people who should be looking after them.
My mum has been the one constant and most important person throughout my life. She never helped with my writing or anything creative, and she’s read very little of my work, but she has loved coming to my performances, and she really loves it if I point her out in the audience. When I started out she didn’t really understand what I was doing because there were no examples of other people doing anything similiar. She understood what performance poetry was because Jamaica was full of poets, and in the part of Jamaica where she lived the oral tradition thrived but, like a lot of immigrant parents, she wanted what she believed was the best for me: a trade, or better still a profession, and ‘a nice black gal fi marry’. It was only when I started to appear on TV, and people began to tell her what my poetry meant to them, that she realised I had something to say that was valid, and that my work had some merit.
A lot of people from the Caribbean say that when they die they want to be buried back in Jamaica but Mum says, ‘None of that for me. I want to be buried here. This is my home.’ She’s Birmingham through and through. She’s only been back to Jamaica once since she came here, and she was counting the days until she could return to the UK. She hasn’t set foot outside of England since.
As I’ve been on the planet for nearly sixty years, it’s inevitable that I’ve witnessed the passing of those relatives who immigrated to Britain in the 1950s and ’60s. Around 2013 or so, the health of Mum’s second husband Brother Wright began to deteriorate. First he started having problems bending and lost dexterity in his fingers. I realised things were getting bad when he told me he couldn’t work on his cars anymore and asked me to sell them, along with his engines and all of his car spares. I was a fully signed-up member of the Triumph Classic Car Club, so I sold them all very quickly to someone who came and took the lot. He got a bargain.
As things got worse he began to make lots of references to death. His favourite place was the conservatory at the back of his house, where he’d set up his sound system and kept his CDs, tapes and records. As he got weaker he would spend more time there, and one day I came to see him and asked him how he was. As he rocked in his rocking chair, he said, ‘I’m just sitting here waiting to die.’ He would often say similar things. His arthritis was very bad and there were a couple of times when he went upstairs and couldn’t get back down because of his knees.
On one of these occasions an ambulance was called and he was taken into hospital, where he spent a couple of days, but as he was about to be discharged a doctor broke the news that he had stomach cancer. As the doctor began to list all the different treatment options, Brother Wright interrupted him, saying, ‘Stop. I’m not interested in you trying to keep me alive for a few extra weeks. I’m eighty-four. I’ve outlived all my friends and I’ve had a good life. So please, just manage my pain and let me go at my appointed time.’
It was tough to hear, but it made sense. On 21 June 2017 he asked to be moved to Marie Curie Hospice in Solihull, where he passed away on 28 June. He was buried at Greenhaven Woodland Burial Ground near Rugby on 5 July. It was a green burial in a woodland area with a simple, non-religious ceremony that I led.
When transferring my poems from the stage to the page, I’ve always tried to capture the essence of my live performance. I’ve always written with my voice in mind. I have to hear the words in my head before I can commit them to the written word but, try as I might, I am acutely aware that I can’t capture everything the way it sounds within me. Like a martial arts technique, my poetry works best when it goes via the quickest route to the nearest spot, which is from my brain, the source, to my mouth. Writing it down is another step removed from the source to the receiver. To fully appreciate it, to connect with its essence, you have to be in my head or in my audience.
My style is born out of the living, oral tradition of poetry – an art form that has always been part of everyday life in Jamaica. I grew up with that rhyme and rhythm coming down to me from my mum, who grew up hearing numerous parables and fables that had their origins in Africa. As the older generations pass on, younger people will get further and further away from those origins.
When it comes to the arts I think my greatest achievement was the creation of the British performance poetry scene. Of course, I didn’t do it by myself. There was Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Cooper Clarke, Jean Breeze, Joolz and others, not to mention collectives like Apples and Snakes, who dedicated themselves to promoting poetry. But in the late 1970s and early ’80s there was no real performance poetry scene in Britain. Michael Horovitz and others organised poetry performances in the 1960s and early 1970s from time to time, and I understand they were numinous events. Alan Ginsberg and other beat poets would come over and perform, and although the poets themselves were free-minded, progressive and all about peace and love, the scene was white and a bit too hippy for we, the new generation of punks, Rastas and hip-hoppers.
This is why in 1979 I said we needed to create a culture of performance poetry and spoken word in Britain. I wanted to see a time when it was really cool for someone to take their date to a poetry reading on a Saturday night, and it happened. I wanted to see a time when the music press would write about poetry like they wrote about music, and it happened. I wanted to see a time when lots of performance poets would be able to earn a living from their craft, and that too has happened. The scene is alive and well and all over Britain. In fact, all over the world talented people are earning a living from their craft, and more importantly millions of people are enjoying it.
But I’m not sitting back and relaxing. Not in times like these when the extreme right is on the rise all over Europe, when black people are still five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than their white counterparts. Not when homelessness is rapidly rising, soup kitchens are opening up across the country, and women are experiencing institutionalised sexism and suffering so much due to poverty. It’s difficult to relax when I live under a political system that is constantly creating refugees and then rejecting those refugees. Instead of relaxing I’ve released a new album, Revolutionary Minds, and, because I feel the political need, I’m back on the road with my band. What’s really inspiring me now is that, as I look out from the stage, I see that the majority of my audience is under thirty.
Poetry has the power to heal and the power to destroy; it can be used to liberate and, after liberation, to celebrate. In the beginning was the word, and the word became poetry, and I discovered it and found that it was great. I have loved many books with all my heart, I have campaigned to get books to the bookless, and keep libraries alive, for they live too. But the greatest poetry is collected inside I.
I have had books stolen from me, I have misplaced books and left them on trains and park benches, and I still want to get the blighters who took them. The idea that any book of mine ends up in a wastepaper bin, or sits on the shelf in a lost property office vexes me. The book is one of the greatest pieces of design ever conceived. They have survived upstarts like radio, TV, the internet and various book burners, and I love them, but they are books, and as much as I love books (and my bass guitar), they are material, and the attachment to material things, whatever that may be, is the root of all suffering.
The poetry within me is not owned, yet it is a part of me, and once it is spoken it becomes a part of anyone who opens their mind and receives it. If misfortune, sickness and death will come to us all, then we should let some poetry into our lives to ease the pain.
Poetry has wrapped my heart when my heart was naked. Poetry has eased much of the pain I have experienced. I have dedicated my life to poetry and ‘the struggle’, but ultimately I have been on a life-long quest to find inner peace. Anyone who has come to my home and seen how much time I dedicate to t’ai chi and meditation knows this. The peace of which I speak is not simply an absence of war, or something that comes about because a treaty has been negotiated; there is no way to peace, because peace is the way. Poetry helped me speak to the world; it helped me to represent my age and my ageing; it is a part of me, but in the end it’s about knowledge of self.
Peace. I’m out of here.