Rasta ‘ranter’ receives cold shoulder

Press, 30 May 1987, Page 21

Rasta ‘ranter’ receives cold shoulder

LAURENCE MARKS writes that the Cambridge University English faculty has been stirred by an angry dispute over the threatened appointment and subsequent snubbing of a 30-year-old Rastafarian poet

Every two years, Trinity, Prince Charles’s old college and one of the grandest in the University of Cambridge, appoints a “creative artist in residence.” He or she is entitled to the use of a set of rooms, a modest $lB,OOO-a-year stipend, and dining rights in the college hall. This time, Zephaniah came top of the short list recommended by the selection committee. The more traditionalist Cambridge dons were outraged. Zephaniah’s subject-matter is the street life of the young black communities in inner-city districts. Poems like “Dis Policeman Keeps Kicking Me To Death” and “there’s An Uprising Downtown, There’s An Uprising Downtown” held little charm for conservative, middle-aged university lecturers.

“The Day Dat I Met Lady Di” held even less:

the Day dat I met Lady Di I was Happy, not I tell a lie. I had a pain in my belly, I would not fart near royalty. Zephaniah’s style of delivery, dreadlocks flying, legs pumping, arms waving, as he recites his compositions with a strongly rhythmic Caribbean lilt developed for rock audiences, is also a long way from the genteel conventions of donnish poetry-read-ings.

Now, after several- weeks of common-room intrigue, the college council has dumped the selection committee’s choice and appointed a Scottish painter and sculptor, Mario Rossi. Zephaniah, born in Jamaica, migrated to Britain with his family when he was four. He was educated primarily in juvenile penal institutions, served 18 months in prison as a young adult, and emerged as a performance poet by way of pub gigs,and protest marches and the “alurrnative” cabaret circuit. lie calls his art “dub ranting”

to distinguish it from the selfconsciously literary verse written by other black poets. Dub is a form of reggae music in which the disc-jockey delivers a live commentary on top of a recorded track, and the rhythms of his work are recognisably related to those of reggae. Trinity was divided between those who welcomed the invasion of such a colourful and exotic performer and those who saw in the threatened appointment an affront to traditional literary values.

Zephaniah is certainly odd — though whether he is very much odder than some of the more eccentric Cambridge dons is questionable. in any case, as the “Guardian” newspaper pointed out in a mocking leading article, poetry has by no means always been a respectable craft. Some of Zephaniah’s material is scatological, but then so was some of Chaucer’s.

Rasta English can be hard for most people to understand, but then so is much of what Robert Bums wrote. Zephaniah’s youth may have been scandalous (he is now a conscientious community worker in London’s East End), but scarcely more so than that of Lord Byron, one of Trinity’s most distinguished alumni. In reprisal, some Oxford men have offered to nominate Zephaniah as the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a comparable but far more distinguished post for poets or critics outside the university) when it next falls vacant in 1989. Meanwhile, Tony Banks, the Labour M.P. for Zephaniah’s East End constituency, has tabled a parliamentary motion denouncing Trinity as "an unimaginative, timid, narrowminded collection of middle-class bores/’. CojSrright—London Observer * Service. '