thurs 7 dec

‘More books, more anarchy’

In the bleak mid-winter a festival of light begins and a luminous mischief maker dies.  Benjamin Zephaniah – ‘poet, writer, lyricist, musician and naughty boy.’

‘Deep down, I am a revolutionary. I have no faith in the political system as it is…I go on Question Time and I talk to politicians and get involved but actually I ‘d just like to burn the lot of them.’

His words of life and rhyme are shared in eulogies and grief across the internet. Most particularly his poem ‘We Refugees.’

‘We can all be refugees

Nobody is safe

All it takes is a mad leader

Or no rain to bring forth food

We can all be refugees

We can all be told to go

We can all be hated by someone

For being someone.

I am told I have no country now

I am told I am a lie

I am told that modern history books

May forget my name.’

Actions without rhyme or reason.  Lives and words obliterated. Words of MSF (Medicin Sans Frontiers) Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila killed in a hospital strike written hurriedly on the medic’s whiteboard: ‘Whoever stands until the end will tell the story -  we did what we could. Remember us.’  Zephaniah states that when he was young there was only ‘two things I wanted to see. A free South Africa. And a free Palestine.’ He has seen the first and witnessed the current horror of death in Gaza as his own life ended. Images emerge that are just too shocking. We cannot believe our eyes. Willing them to be fake. People stripped naked, lined up… and then….. Someone tweets ‘ Babi Yar in colour.’ A ravine into which justice and morality fell with the slaughtered.

G has a high fever. I feed him grapes and waffles that come all the way from Tesco. The world is feverish. Extremes of hot and cold. Potato shortages. Christmas lunches sabotaged by climate change.

And we keep singing. Inviting neighbours and musician friends up the creaking wooden stairs of this 127 year old house to record parts and voices to make our song and call for Bread and Roses. 

Palestinians in Gaza defiantly sing.

 ‘We will stay here until the pain is over,

We will stay here and we will keep singing.’

Singing as they refuse to leave patients. Singing amid the rubble despite it all - despite being told they have no country now, that they are a lie, that modern history books may forget their names.  Meanwhile a chart topping song (Charbu Darbu) in Israel calls Palestinians rats and amalek -  a drill beat telling Gazans to ‘wait for [bombs] to rain on you like a debt.’

Turner Prize 2023 winner Jesse Darling uses his acceptance speech platform to both attack the legacy of Thatcher as separating art from the people and display a Palestinian flag “Because there’s a genocide going on and I wanted to say something about it on the BBC.” I sit up. More interested than usual in the contemporary art world – a move away from “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff BS”(Toni Morrison) to “All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.”

Darling’s work is full of hazard tape. Net curtains. Barriers and bunting. ‘No Medals, No Ribbons’, ‘Enclosures.’ Work about Britain. About the fragility of what we take for granted. About coming to terms with the end of the world we recognise with the revelation that “the colonised indigenous have already experienced the apocalypse, if not several apocalypses. In other words, the world has always been ending for somebody.”

He states that what he is ‘trying to do is to make visible the fact that all the big stories and big structures that we really believe in are just flimsy and arbitrary. They may all fall down – but that also means things could one day be otherwise. And that for me is hopeful. And funny, as well.”

He speaks of using his ‘unemployable psychotic logic to do something else.’ This something else is what we are dedicated to. Committed to our independence and unemployability, to art that is political, hopeful and funny, art made with and for people, art that shows and makes things otherwise.

Rest in Power Benjamin Zephaniah. Live in the power of our vulnerability and interdependence Jesse Darling and all of us.

‘The planet is for everyone. Borders are for no-one. It’s all about freedom.’

Benjamin Zephaniah. Refugee Boy.