ARTICLE: Interview with Raw Edge Magazine
Benjamin talks about how life in prison helped change his future as a poet.
Article in Raw Edge Magazine - Issue 5 - Autumn/Winter 1997
I understand that you spent some of your childhood in Jamaica. How old were you when you went back?
There was never a particular time when I went back and stayed there, I was always to-ing and fro-ing. I was born in Handsworth but I always felt that Jamaica was a second home. I haven't been there for quite a few years now which is the longest I've ever been away. Normally I'm there every two to three years...it's probably true to say that I've got more family there than I have here.
How important to your personal creative development was it to keep going back?
In both senses I think it was really important. A lot of kids with Jamaican parents grow up and they have a kind of Jamaica. They somehow always imagine it as a place where the sun always shines, and there's music on the street corners. I grew up knowing the reality, the good and the bad. Like all people who have two cultures, sensible people take the best of both and go forward. There are some very negative things about British culture and political life that you just want to forget. And it's the same in Jamaica: you take the best of both and go forward. Definitely the rhythm of my poetry, the language of it is always very Jamaican, but it's also British. That's why the part that stands out more is the music of it. I am a dub poet and dub evolved in Jamaica, but my themes are very British. When I perform in Jamaica people say it's like getting the news from England but with Jamaican rhythm. I've never been booed off stage there fortunately.
I read somewhere that your time in prison as a youngster had an important impact on your future life as a poet and as a Rasta. Is it true and if so, what caused this to happen?
I didn't call myself a writer for years, I didn't even write when I came out of prison. But I was a poet, I was a poet and a Rasta before I went in. I developed the themes and thought about life more, which brings you back to the other part of the question: what happened? you see, I think that, when people are in prison, we should spend a lot more time educating them. When I was in prison we didn't ahve an education department (or at least I never got invited to one), we didn't have a library, I can't remember any educational things at all. Prison gave me time to do one thing which was to think. And what I realised while I was in prison was that not everybody who owns a car or owns a house is my enemy. I thought I was fighting the system by stealing, by going out and upsetting a few cops on the streets, by going out and beating up some rich people, but actually I kept finding myself in the nick. I realised, sometimes through other people, what I could do with my writing, and that there was another way of fighting the system.
I remember when I was in prison I had this prison guard who was into kung-fu like me and in the night (he was the night watchman) he's let me out and we used to go and spar all night. And in the morning when he let everybody else out he used to leave me to sleep because we'd been working out all night. One night after we finished we were talking and I gave him a little bit of a performance and he just said "You've got to go out and do that, you've got to go out and let other people hear this". He actually said "half the screws in this prison should sit down and listen to that". And he came back weeks later and said "You really got me thinking". I'd got him thinking about his job, and you know, to a little Handsworth boy who thought he was unimportant and everything, it makes you think these people recognise the talent that I've got, you know, and it kind of gives you hope. The frustrating things about my family and a lot of people in the black community was that they thought I had to be a painter and decorator or a motor mechanic and do it on the side. There were no full time black writers at the time so you can't really blame them, they were jsut trying to protect me. But it was those people who inspired me to carry on.
When you were starting to find your voice as a poet who were you reading and listening to? Who were the influences?
My influences were people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Michael X, Angela Davis, Marcus Garvey. They're all political people. I didn't really read poetry at the time. I loved poetry but I couldn't identify with most of the poetry I saw. There was one artist who I really liked, a musician called Big Youth, sort of reggae DJ, a real Rasta kind of toaster. Some people do pick up on that. There are a few people who come to me and say "You're influenced by Big Youth, I can hear it in your style."
