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✨ Welcome and thank you for joining me on this journey to find glimpses of light in dark times. If this is your first email, you can read an introduction to the project here and find links to catch up with any posts you’ve missed at the end of this email. We are in the first week of Advent when it is traditional to burn a candle for hope, so that’s the theme running through all this week’s offerings. ✨
As I sat down to write today’s post, I was interrupted by news that the joyous, rebellious and brilliant British poet Benjamin Zephaniah died yesterday. I knew right away that I wanted to change my plans and share something by him because this was a man who ✨LIT UP THE DARK✨. A poet, musician, actor and activist, Zephaniah was born in 1958 in Handsworth, Birmingham, an area well-known for its race riots. He left school aged 14 unable to read or write, and later wrote about his abusive and criminal childhood in his autobiography The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. After he moved to London in his early 20s, Zephaniah regularly came into contact with both the National Front and the Metropolitan Police. The idea of a Rastafarian poet successful enough to own a nice car evidently riled racist police officers: “I got stopped four times after I bought A BMW. I kept getting stopped by the police so I sold it." Zephaniah’s mission in life was to make and take poetry outside of the ivory tower, bringing it to “people who do not read books”. He wrote and performed for children and young adults, produced music records and acted in all sorts of tv, film and radio productions. His spoken word performances were electrifying and often very funny (pause and watch this and this) and he was often described as Britain’s “people’s laureate”. I was writing about encouragement on the calendar earlier this week, and Zephaniah was a master encourager, championing those without many other kinds of support and showing them that their voices were not only valid but needed. Among the many tributes that are pouring out on my social channels, the most moving are from younger poets who Zephaniah lifted up. There will be lots of obituaries and eulogies in the coming days. I encourage you to be wary of those in which the establishment try to claim Zephaniah because he really wasn’t a fan. Have a read of this article he wrote in 2003:
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