Benjamin Zephaniah …  “a titan of British literature”?

Should we speak ill of the dead? Probably, not–if we can help ourselves. Speaking ill of someone who can’t speak up for himself is too much like kicking a chap when he’s down. But how about speaking ill of the living for praising the dead for qualities they didn’t have? Surely, we may do that, even if it can’t be done without the dead having to suffer some disparagement along the way? The dead may have claims on us but, surely, grotesque misjudgement, cant and what Jane Austen called “nothing-meaning terms” have more? Especially when they spread so far and wide, they become a public nuisance?

Benjamin Zephaniah, who is now one of that majority that cannot speak up for itself, has had, in death, plenty of others to speak up for him–all, every last one, everywhere, attributing to him a public importance no wholly sane public could ever believe in. Nevertheless, we are all asked, required, to believe in it. It must be widely thought rank bad-form not to. Hasn’t the Black Writers Guild told us to believe? Hasn’t the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Guardian, the Independent, the British Council told us to believe? Hasn’t Michael Rosen? Hasn’t Piers Morgan!?

Benjamin Zephaniah was a commercially successful minor versifier but what we are required to believe is that he was (the Black Writers Guild, the BBC and Piers Morgan seem to have coined the phrase independently of one another) “a titan of British literature”—a description which, its first and third words aside, is just journalist mush. Titan? What real poet is ever called that by anyone capable of recognising one? Is Blake ever called it or Pope or Yeats? Would anyone whose head wasn’t full of the mush call Shakespeare ‘a titan’?

Then “of British literature”. English literature has a lot of Scottish and Irish (and maybe one or two Welsh) writers in its composition. But who has ever called them ‘British’? If Swift or Joyce or Synge belongs to something other than English literature, it’s Irish; similarly with Scottish, from Dunbar to Hugh MacDiarmid or the Welsh from Henry Vaughan to Dylan Thomas.

If Zephaniah were a literary ‘titan’ it would be of either English or Caribbean literature. But, of course, to call him a titan of English literature would be to invite comparisons that invite, in turn, only ridicule; and to call him a titan of Caribbean literature might sound like a sneer. ‘British literature’ is a fake category but wonderfully useful for both fashionably non-white writers and the journalist claque that cries them up. It serves the interests of a caucus–one that might be tiny in number but which dominates what is sometimes called ‘the national conversation’, a conversation that is anything but national and less conversation than monologue.

One of the ‘poems’ Zephaniah’s cryers-up cry up is “The British”; and it is interesting but only as a document or a symptom–of something it’s not easy to see as anything but, for all its jocosity, a dislike of the people (or peoples) his parents came to live amongst. Its conceit is that ‘the British’ is a dish made up of many ingredients. But having spooned in the Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Norman French at the start, he ladles in the ingredients he really likes the taste of, Chileans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Trinidadians, Bajans, Ethiopians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Guyanese, Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians, Iraqis, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese, Palestinians. And adds, for good measure, that all the ingredients are equally important. (The Japanese are as important in England as the English? Tell that to the Japanese.)

What is interesting about this ‘poem’, and without which it would have no interest at all, is what is missing from its list of ingredients … the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh! Nothing less visible to its writer than the culture or cultures of the British, as it was and they were, before the mass immigration of the past thirty years, as they had developed over two millennia!

Zephaniah can’t afford in his ‘poem’ to acknowledge that the British are constituted–as they are–by the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. If he did, where would be his assertion that the Bosnians and Bangladeshis are as important in Britain as its constituent nationalities are? There may be Bosnians in Britain but they don’t make a Bosnia here as the Welsh make a Wales. But if we ignore the Welsh as a present culture, as a people in and with a history, and think of them only as a sum of individual, a-historical ex-Celts, then why should not Sri Lankans here be thought, however few, however recently arrived, just as important a part of the British as the Irish?

That Benjamin Zephaniah, son of immigrants from Jamaica, should be blind to (or close his eyes to) Englishness, Irishness, Scottishness and Welshness is one thing, but that an English, Irish, Scots and Welsh commentariat–an entire university-educated, Guardian-reading, BBC-heeding class–should be blind to it too is quite another. That isn’t self-denial, it’s self-cancellation. It’s a self-abasement that’s pathological.

A longer version of this post is available on Duke Maskell’s Substack newsletter Reactionary Essays, which you might like to follow here. 

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