Benjamin Zephaniah was a true renaissance man

An artist, a scholar, a teacher, an entertainer – Bonnie Greer explains how the late poet was many things to many people throughout the course of his extraordinary life

Zephaniah was a critical part of a great upsurge in Black arts, that part of it rooted in the urbanity of Great Britain (Getty Images)

Benjamin Zephaniah was that rare phenomenon: both hero and anti-hero.

He was the hero, first of all, of his own life.

Born in Birmingham, a son of the Caribbean and of England, he would have been written off before he was even born. This was a man thwarted by society in his early days – by racism, by his dyslexia, both of them capable of disabling him.

These realities would have caused a person of lesser courage and without a sense of humour tinged with irony to be defeated. To surrender. To leave the field. Or to accommodate. Professor Zephaniah took what he was handed and forged it into art and teaching.

He was, he is, a part of that particular product of the Middle Passage and its triumph over it. I call it Caribbean Genius. Its agency was and is implanted in the soul of those enslaved – his ancestors, and their descendants: him.

The juxtaposition of this, the collision of this, created a kind of fusion that was both popular and particular.

Zephaniah was a critical part of a great upsurge in Black arts, that part of it rooted in the urbanity of Great Britain. I found his work, his person and the mirror that presented to me fascinating enough, liberating enough to cause me to want to move from New York to this country. And I am sure I am not the only one this happened to, not the only one who was inspired.

He was an anarchist in the true sense of that word.

The establishment for him was just that: an establishment built and created and sustained by those who wished to contain not only him and his people. My people. The people. But other species, too, that inhabit this planet with us: animals.

So he was vegan, for their sake. He was an academic for the sake of the young, who might be in danger of being rendered to what could have been his fate: the one he almost had.

He understood exactly the way his country, his city of Birmingham, his community of Handsworth, worked – and he found his place, his unique place, within it all: with all of it.

He was what used to be called a renaissance man, and that manifested in him in this way: he was a poet; a professor; a musician; a writer; an activist; an actor; a broadcaster. He broke the mould in all of these fields. He was always watchable, listenable. A teller of truth, he knew everything about his country and so, because of that, he refused the OBE – Officer of the Order of The British Empire. Well, after all: anything involving an empire was not for him – not even the empire that he could’ve built out of his own talent.

I do not like the phrase “rest in power” because there is no resting in power. It is a contradiction in terms.

Where I come from, we say “crossed over”.

Because no one really dies while all of us are still alive.

Those no longer with us go to the ancestral place to continue their work.

And yet, too, they remain. Not at rest.

So therefore, Benjamin Zephaniah is with us still.