PU #258 - DIS PHILOSOPHY - Thinking About Benjamin Zephaniah
I like to introduce new black philosophers into my school curriculum each year during Black History Month. The mission I set myself is to find someone we don’t currently teach about, give all year groups a lesson on them, and then incorporate them where they fit into our long-term schemes of work. This year the theme of Black History Month was “honouring our communities” so, as an anarchist from Birmingham, I decided to go a little rogue this year and honour a fellow Birmingham anarchist who is not “officially” a philosopher, Benjamin Zephaniah.
Zephaniah’s label as “poet” and not “philosopher” would ultimately be one of the key takeaways I wanted my students to leave the lesson with: philosophy does not have to come from those deemed “philosophers” by particular institutions. Philosophy is all around us, and all people are potential philosophers. A poem can be (and often is) a work of philosophy. And, importantly, reminding students why Black History Month is still needed, when there has been an historical exclusion of particular voices within an academic discipline (as there has been in philosophy) then those voices (be they people of colour, people from different countries, or people of a particular gender) often found expression in other forms of public communication: speeches, novels, art, dance, and, yes, poetry. If we want to rectify our historic blindspots within philosophy, we must look beyond academic philosophy to find where the thinking was taking place outside of academia’s walls.
So, after a brief biography of Zephaniah, outlining some of his many accomplishments (including his rejection of an OBE in 2003, and his reasons for rejecting it), and noting common, and potentially philosophical, themes in his work, such as animal rights, racial and social justice, police brutality, opposition to war, etc. I explained that we would not be looking at any of his work with any obvious philosophical content and would instead look at one of his celebrations of writing and poetry itself: Dis Poetry.
Coming from his book City Psalms in 1992, I can’t remember when I first heard the poem, but I think the last time before this lesson was in 2018, at a live event he did to launch the publication of his autobiography The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. It is a poem which enthuses about poetry, and reclaims poetry from having to be written with “big words”, instead stressing poetry’s “verbal riddim”. While the poem notes such poetry “is not afraid of going in a book”, it is with the caveat that poetry should be heard with “ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look”.
I showed my students the text first, and then a video of Zephaniah performing the poem. Highlighting the poem’s idea that “pages of written words not needed / Brain has many words in store”, it was interesting to see the variations in certain words and phrases between the page and the performance.
Students immediately picked up on the way the poem was written in dialect, with words spelled phonetically and in “non-traditional” ways. For some students this was an immediate mental block — “I can’t understand what he’s saying” — though they soon seemed sheepish in allowing their prejudices to blind them to the language as their peers understood the text perfectly and noted its intentional simplicity. The poem itself tells us “Dis poetry is quick an childish / Dis poetry is fe de wise an foolish”.
Most importantly, the poem tells us “Anybody can do it fe free / Dis poetry is fe yu an me”. I had asked my students to identify “anything you think is philosophical” in the poem’s words, and in every class, from 11 year olds up to 18 year olds, one idea was identified across the board: this is poetry and some people might say it shouldn’t be, but we can all produce poetry, in loads of different ways, and we all have the capability to express ourselves as individuals. We shouldn’t be limited by the definitions and expectations of a society which might try to silence us, or force us to conform how we express ourselves into something that strips us of our core identity.
I found it interesting in my discussions with the students how few of them actually enjoyed poetry. How most of them only ever looked at poems in English lessons at school, and when they did they found the poems they looked at alienating and unrelated to their lives. Yet so many of those same students loved music, and could recite their favourite song lyrics off by heart. But when asked about poetry, didn’t identify lyrics as poems. In another one of my jobs, teaching improv to young people, I also find reticence whenever scenes in verse come up as a suggestion…yet see the joy it brings both the performers and their peers when the groups manage to achieve rhymes and rhythm in their scenes.
My classes spoke about Zephaniah acknowledging “I’ve tried Shakespeare, Respect due dere / But dis is de stuff I like”, and many said this was the first time they had realised that poetry could be a spectrum, with many different approaches to it; all of them valid and to suit different tastes.
In the same way, they all found themselves a bit baffled at first about why we were doing an English lesson in their Philosophy class. It took some time for them to realise that a discussion about a poem can be a philosophical discussion. Through analysing Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah we touched on deeply philosophical questions such as:
In what ways might the expectation of speaking, writing, and presenting our thoughts in a particular “accepted” way, stop us from expressing ourselves (and what might be lost from our collective knowledge as a result)?
Who gets to define what “art” is and what “art” is “good” art?
Are the norms around that what ought to be the case?
Who gets to define what “philosophy” is and what “philosophy” is “proper” philosophy?
Are the norms around that what ought to be the case?
As we discussed the idea of “gatekeeping” in literature and poetry, we could make links to similar gatekeeping elsewhere in academic subjects, such as philosophy. For many students this was the first time they had heard anything by Benjamin Zephaniah (though I was happy to see a handful in each class had encountered Talking Turkeys in their junior schools, and a few had read his novel, Windrush Child) and we talked about the difficulty for teachers of expanding their own subject knowledge from the limits of what they were once taught themselves. How many of your English teachers would have had a diverse education in what counts as “good” writing if their teachers were taught everything they knew in more stuffy and prejudiced times (and they, themselves, had been taught by people educated even earlier)? Well…the same is true of your philosophy teachers, your history teachers, your science teachers…all of us. Unless we have actively worked to expand our own subject knowledge since our own, limited, university educations, we will continue to pass on the same blindspots and gaps in knowledge to our students.
Gatekeeping might be useful as a form of quality control, but it also acts as an unjust barrier if the gatekeepers have too fixed an idea about what quality looks like.
I ended the sessions asking my students to stop assuming their teachers have all the answers, and that they start to recognise us more as flawed products of our own flawed education, doing our best to teach them what we know, but often unaware of how little we actually do. I asked them to keep their eyes open in philosophy, but also elsewhere, for what they aren’t being taught: people of colour, women…what might be missing as well as what have you been shown? Hold us to account and ask questions if they think there might be a blindspot in the curriculum. Consider if there might be a wider spectrum of what could count as legitimate examples within a particular discipline than the norms of a discipline currently acknowledge.
And most important of all — reconsider poetry. Make more of it. Don’t dismiss it as something dreary you are forced to read in the classroom, but listen to what Benjamin Zephaniah said: “Dis poetry is wid me, / Below me an above, / Dis poetry’s from inside me”. We can all be poets, just as we can all be philosopher kings.
No gods, no masters, as the anarchists say. “Dis poetry is fe de good of de Nation.”
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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