Benjamin Zephaniah and the toxic cult of black victimhood

I was doing the ironing and listening to BBC Radio 7 yesterday morning when, for some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, Benjamin Zephaniah came on and read some of his own doggerel. When I couldn’t take it any more – after about 30 seconds - I switched off. It was the second time I’d been forced to silence him in just under two hours. 

I enjoy popular culture (I’ve recently praised Johnny Kidd and Mad Magazine!), and I have no objection whatsoever to Mr. Zephaniah enjoying success as a “dub poet” (whatever that might be). 

But it really gets my goat when our liberal cultural establishment starts pretending that this sort of badly-written, piffling ephemera constitutes great art (or art at all, if it comes to that). In 2008, the Times made Zephaniah one of our Top 50 post-war writers. I’m told he appears on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. 

How terribly modish and right on, and how frightfully silly and insulting to generations of great English writers and poets. 

To think that our cultural establishment has a fit of the PC vapours whenever Kipling’s name is mentioned, but seems to feel a warm, inclusive, multiculti glow of approval when faced with something as undistinguished as this:

Dis poetry is not Party Political 

Not designed fe dose who are critical. 

Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed 

It gets into me dreadlocks 

It lingers around me head 

Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike 

I’ve tried Shakespeare, respect due dere 

But dis is de stuff I like…

Well, Ben, dis ain’t de stuff I like: it de stuff so bad it make me feel ill. 

In a perfect example of how to become a hero to white liberals, Zephaniah attacks... the white liberals who heap praise and honour on black poets!:

Take your prize, now write more, 

Faster,

**** the truth

Now you're an actor do not fault your benefactor

Write, publish and review,

You look like a dreadlocks Rasta,

You look like a ghetto blaster,

But you can't diss your paymaster

And bite the hand that feeds you.

Well, yes, Zeph - you evidently can. No wonder all those anaemic, left-wing wimps who run our universities can’t stop showering the man with honorary degrees (nine so far): there’s nothing like rank ingratitude to get them in an excitable, squealing tizz.  Oh Benjamin, beat me, whip me, call me names… I so deserve it, you wonderful brute, you!

Zephaniah was once poet-in-residence at the chambers of the liberal barrister and serial liberal cause junkie, Mike Mansfield, whose choice of a Zephaniah reading as one of his Desert Island Discs had made that programme my first switch-off of the day. The poem was about that illegal immigrant martyr to police brutality, Joy Gardner. ‘Nuff said. (To be honest, I’d almost switched off when Mansfield chose Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” as his first record - educated twassocks go for it, while their non-educated equivalents pick “My Way”.)  

Now, you might be wondering why I’ve stooped to beating up a silly old man, but every time I hear Zephaniah’s name I can’t help remembering that he turned down an OBE from the Queen because - and I’m not making this up - it reminded him “"how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised". (Our Liz must have been a bit more of a tearaway in her youth than the papers generally let on.)

Zephaniah is a cheerleader for the poisonous cult of Afro-Caribbean victimhood – the cult that blames all forms of self-destructive behaviour by black Britons on a repressive white society or as a legacy of slavery. 

He has done his people a great disservice.

As for this country’s liberal establishment, it does our culture a great disservice to pretend that this man has any talent: we don’t have to make special allowances for the plethora of gloriously talented, world-class black singers, actors, dancers, song-writers, musicians and novelists – applying a different standard to black poets is insultingly patronizing to them and to the art of poetry itself.