Benjamin Zephaniah is one of the most exciting performers that Chennai has seen in recent times. He has the appearance of a modern sadhu with matted locks, gleaming, prophetic eyes and a voice that is lilting, musical provocative as well as entertaining. His greatest asset is his sense of humour that he uses to the hilt in all forms, gentle humour, irony, satire and sarcasm to convey deeper meanings and messages. His is a one-man show - all he has by way of performance accessories are himself, his voice and his poetry. But, he can easily keep an audience glued to their seats for more than one hour with these assets. In his hands, poetry becomes the text or script for theatrical performance. With a voice filled with music and memories, he transforms himself into an actor, moving, dancing, miming with ease, and consummate skill.

He began his recital with his own concept of poetry. "It lingers in my head, this is the stuff I like," and ends up, "the poetry from me, inside me and goes to you". It talks of a personal poetry which reaches out and touches the audience, at one level a poem and at another level, something which moves the reader into shaking off the cobwebs of the mind, and opening his/her eyes to the reality of life and living. I would like to call Benjamin's poetry, political poetry in the true sense of the term. His ideology come out loud and clear through his poems - a protest against all kinds of inequities and injustices, deeply embedded in society and social systems of the world. He is against oppression of any kind; but instead of adopting an explicit mode of expression he uses a two-pronged attack system - the appeal of folk music, folk songs that comes from an oral tradition to capture the interest of the hearers and the ability to couch serious messages in a web of humour, irony and sarcasm. The outpourings of his heart are in the poems - the language is simple but the musical tones and the strength of conviction revealed through his method of recitation makes unconscious inroads into sensitive as well as insensitive minds and prods them to wake up from their torpor and think.

His description of his father as a "self proclaimed philosopher" and his memory of "the man to man talks initiated by him" to inject manhood into him is reminiscent of many people's father-son relationships. This is a good example of how he used the personal to move on into a larger public sphere. "Son, when you grow up, I wan you to be a man". But what changes the tone of the poem is the gentle irony of the son's response, "Do I have a choice?" Being a son, being a man, being a father and a dictator is made to look like a burden, not a boon. "Macho man" is again a continuation of this stream of thought and a no-so-gentle dig at men who are so dependent on women and yet act as though they are the masters and controllers of the destiny of the whole world. His poems on "Monkey" and the "Indian Sadhu" again reveal the hypocrisies of practised economics and spirituality.

But, the most impressive poems were the ones on South Africa after the Apartheid has been lifted and the killing of Steven Lawrence, a black boy in the London streets by a group of white children. Here what he is revealing is that in spite of the appearance of the genteel, tolerant, non-racist, liberal façade that prevails in the Western countries, the spectre of racism is still rampant. It is not only the doer, but also the perpetrator of inequality that is at fault. Under this category comes, the guardians of law, the police and the government. It is the society of human beings who watches these injustices and keeps quiet. He even reveals the inequities in the language, the connotations of the terms such as "white" and "black" conjured through usage and custom. His humanity is not only to human beings, but also to the world of animals and birds which comes through in his poem "Turkey" - "Be nice to your turkey, this Christmas". Benjamin is the kind of modern apostle who may be able to make a difference in the unequal justice perpetrated by human beings and their systems.

Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan

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