The interview: Benjamin Zephaniah

What is it that makes a middle-aged Rastafarian dub poet desert the city and
divide his time between a remote Lincolnshire village and a flat in Beijing? The man
who once turned down an OBE tells Lynn Barber about his traumatic childhood, his
infertility, fear of old age - and why, at 50, he still feels like a child.

Benjamin Zephaniah has lived in Birmingham, Jamaica, Newham, Egypt, Yugoslavia,

South Africa, and now, at 50, divides his time between Beijing and a village near
Spalding, Lincolnshire. I was going to visit him there but I had a cold and he said
that, as a vegan, he has to avoid colds (something to do with having less mucus than
carnivores) so I had to meet him later in London. We ended up in the stockroom of
the wonderful Newham Bookshop, his London base and home from home, where,
perched among boxes of books, he talked a storm and recited his poem Rong Radio.
You can find it on his website, or on YouTube, but getting a private performance
was one of the most thrilling experiences of my interviewing career.

When Zephaniah refused the OBE in 2003, several newspaper commentators took
the line that he was ungrateful, refusing this crumb from the white man's table.
He, of course, objected to the word "Empire" which he associated with slavery.
He'd already published a poem, Bought and Sold, which expressed his contempt for
black athletes and artists who could be bought with a gong. In the same poem he
was equally disdainful of the poet laureateship - "Don't take my word, go check the
verse / Cause every laureate gets worse" - but I hoped he might have changed his
mind. He absolutely hasn't: "I just think it's one of those outdated things. Go on
the streets here and ask people if they know who Benjamin Zephaniah is and what
he does, and most of them will tell you. Ask them what Andrew Motion does and
silence. It's irrelevant." He is not anti-establishment - he does tons of work for
the British Council - but he wants no truck with royal flummery.

I made the mistake of asking why on earth he had moved to Spalding and suddenly
his hackles were up, scenting racism. Why shouldn't he live in Spalding? "I was born
in Britain, I've lived here all my life, I have the right to live anywhere I want to."
Yes, of course. It's just that he always says he loves those multi-ethnic urban
streets where you find a Mexican restaurant next to a Bangladeshi next to a
Lebanese and I don't imagine you get much of that in Lincolnshire. Actually, he
says, I'm wrong. Peterborough, which is the nearest big town, has as many
different ethnic restaurants as Newham. And Boston, Lincs, is the most
immigrated-to town in Britain - all the people who work on the land there are
immigrants, though they are mainly eastern Europeans. But it is true, he concedes,
that his particular village is not exactly rainbow nation. And although he has met
some nice people, he doesn't have any close friends there. His mother and siblings
all live in Birmingham, most of his friends are in London.

So why did he decide to move? Until last year he lived in Newham and always said
he loved it. It's a question he still seems to be pondering himself, possibly with a
hint of midlife crisis. "I felt that I had to move from the house I was living in,
that's how I started. No - actually, I felt I had to decorate the house I was living
in so I spent quite a lot of money decorating it, stepped back and thought, 'This is
really nice. I've always wanted wooden floors.' And then I thought, 'But you know?
I don't want to live here any more!' It was really strange - I just got the feeling
that I had to move. And I've always loved the English countryside, and I thought
to myself - I was 49 at the time - if you want to live in a small village, this is the
time to do it. It always upsets me when I hear older people saying, 'I wish I'd done
this, I wish I'd done that,' and it's too late. And there was a type of place that I
wanted, where I could jog straight out into the countryside - I love jogging, I'm a
health freak - far away from the motorway network. And a place came up in
Spalding and it was ideal."

He has only twice encountered racism since he moved. One was a builder who was
fine on the phone but then refused even to do an estimate when he met Zephaniah.
Another - weirdly - was a man who put an ad in the local paper saying he collected
old banknotes and wanted to buy them. Zephaniah rang him up and said he'd got
some old Egyptian banknotes (he lived in Egypt at one stage) which he could have
for free. So they agreed to meet in a pub and Zephaniah said, "You'll know me -
I'm a black guy with dreadlocks." Whereupon the man said, "I don't do stuff with
black people," and put the phone down.

Spalding is Zephaniah's base for about seven months a year; the rest of the time
he lives in China. He was led to China originally by his love of martial arts: he
wanted to train with the monks of the Shaolin temple in Henan province who he
believes practise the purest form of kung fu. He loved it and returned every year
till eventually he bought his own flat in Beijing. He has written his last three novels
there, although they are all set in Newham.

Writing novels for teenagers seems to have taken over from writing poems for the
past few years. And he's always doing something - writing novels, plays, making
records, radio programmes, working with musicians, doing poetry readings (he has a
new tour starting in February). He also does a lot of unpaid work: campaigning for
victims of injustice, or animal rights or whatever. In the past, he used to do beer
commercials (although he doesn't drink) to fund his work with children in the
South African townships, but now he doesn't need to. Although his income
fluctuates from year to year, he knows he'll never starve. He has no mortgage, no
major outgoings; "living all on my own, having nobody to love, nobody to spend money
on - though I give a bit of money to my mum - I don't need much to live on." So he
can afford to turn down work he doesn't fancy. He has twice refused to go on I'm
a Celebrity, and Celebrity Big Brother, and, when asked to act in films, always
insists on reading the whole script so, "if I'm the black man who walks in and says,
'Where's my deal, man? What's going down here?' I say no."

For someone who spent his teens in and out of approved school, borstal, prison
(mainly for stealing), Zephaniah is almost absurdly respectable nowadays. He
doesn't drink, smoke, eat meat, use drugs (he says few Rastas do), doesn't have
any vices. "I used to have this motto which was that at least once a day, every day,
you should do something illegal. But now I can't find anything illegal to do, I can't
get myself arrested! A policeman stopped me the other day and said, 'I saw you
coming down the A1 and you were on a mobile phone.' I said, 'Search me then - I
don't have a mobile phone.' And he saw me being so confident and said, 'Oh all
right.' And then he goes, 'Are you the poet?' So you see - I can't even get framed
any more!" But when he is stopped by the police, he insists on being addressed as
Dr Zephaniah, which his 13 honorary doctorates entitle him to do.
The eldest of eight children - but only the eldest by minutes because he has a twin
sister, Velda - he grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham. His mother was a nurse from
Jamaica, his father a postman from Barbados. When he was nine his mother ran
away from her husband, taking Benjamin but leaving the other seven children
behind. It's still a touchy subject. His siblings hate him talking about it. "They say,
'Why are you washing our dirty linen in public? Dad wasn't such a bad man.' They
think of him as a hero because he raised seven children all on his own. But my mum
and I, we saw another side of him. When my mum left the house, she left because
she felt her life was in danger - that's what she felt and that's what I saw. There
was something my mum said to me once and I suppose it's true, that when my
father started, the rest of the kids ran for shelter - they ran one way, but I ran
towards my father, shouting 'Leave her alone!' So when he turned on my mother,
he kind of turned on me, too. And I know when I ran out the door with my mother,
we couldn't find the rest of the kids - they were all hiding in cupboards. So just me
and my mum went. But listen - I went back to my primary school the other day, and
my mother was in tears. She said that when she left the other kids, she used to
come to the school gate and watch them playing, but know she couldn't get them.
And that image, to me, was just so powerful - her at the gate, hiding, looking at her
children."

Growing up with his mum, detached from his siblings, dyslexic, and often the only
black boy in school, Zephaniah developed a love of animals that made him turn
vegetarian at 11 and vegan at 13. "I didn't even know what the word meant. I just
knew that I didn't want to eat animals - it was a real gut feeling. At the time I was
in a school where I was getting so much racism, I found comfort in animals. A
playground can be the loneliest place in the world when all the kids are playing and
nobody will talk to you, so when a cat comes along, you play with the cat, you know?
And then the cat comes again the next day and brings a couple of his friends, and
you form a community. So that's where my love of animals started, and that was
when I went vegetarian. And later on I decided that I just didn't want anything to
do with any animal product." He is patron of the Vegan Society, and has written
some great poems about animal rights, especially the one beginning, "Be nice to yu
turkeys dis christmas" which brings him a crop of extra royalties every Christmas -
although he always makes a point of being out of the country then.

In Naked he talks about the pain of being childless - "I need babies to recite to/ I
need babies to recite to me/ my life is full of lonely childless eternities/ where
only poetry gives me life." He first suspected he was infertile as a teenager when
"We were knocking about and not using condoms and everybody was getting
pregnant left and right and centre but my girlfriends never did. So I just had this
feeling and then at one point I thought, 'Right, let's go and get tested,' and they
said 'You're infertile'. They said that part of me hadn't developed - the water's
there but there's no sperm in it." In the mid-1990s he agreed to go on a
programme about male infertility with Professor Robert Winston, hoping that
Winston could make him fertile, but Winston confirmed that he had "no sperm
count, absolutely none, and it's never going to happen". He consoles himself with
the thought of the hundreds of children who write to him, who come to his
readings in schools, who chat to him on the streets of Newham or wait for him
outside the Newham Bookshop. "So that makes up for it - or that's what I tell
myself anyway."

He gets on with children because he still thinks of himself as a child. He freaked

out when he turned 50 in April and Saga sent him their magazine. "I couldn't
believe I was 50. I still can't. And I don't allow my nephews and nieces to call me
uncle - they call me Benji and I'm their mate. They tell me their problems, they tell
me things they don't tell their mum and dad. I don't feel 50 - there's still
something very childish or childlike inside me. I ride my bike like a kid you know, I
love doing wheelies, I love climbing trees, I love exploring - I still love that stuff."

Lots of his friends, he says have "mellowed" - people who used to be in punk bands
now talk about interest rates and whether the neighbourhood is going down. They
tell him, "Benjamin, when you have a mortgage and children, you'll know what it
feels like." But of course he never will have a mortgage and children, he never will
mellow. "Because I've got to tell you really honestly, if you look at a lot of my work
in the early days, there was stuff I was really angry about, and deep down I still
am angry about it. OK, I'm not getting arrested by police in the way that I used to,
but there's lots of things in the world that I'm still angry about. I just think: why
can't people see the bigger picture and not just think about themselves?"