Leave the Ingredients to Simmer
by Maaz Bin Bilal
This was probably the first time I saw not only a black man, and dreadlocks, but also heard his kind of rhymes, his kind of poetry. This poet, I realised properly only much later, was Benjamin Zephaniah, who blew my mind, and shattered more stereotypes for me in one afternoon than decades of reading de-colonial theory. Even as we children listened to him that afternoon in India, in the inherited colonial tongue, he made me realise that Britain was also doing well by its Commonwealth — a black man could not only be British, he could also be a poet in English, and a very unconventional and exciting one at that. And this man came from a city called Birmingham.
Many of these realisations dawned much later, as I grew up to read English at university, eventually finding my way from Delhi to Belfast on scholarship for a doctorate on the politics of friendship in the work of the English novelist EM Forster. In my own way, I was returning his passage to India by coming to these shores to study his writing. In the meantime, I had become an Anglophone poet too, albeit a very different one from Zephaniah, more of a ‘page poet’ as the dub or slam poets like to call us. Yet I too, perhaps subconsciously like him, tried to innovate upon the English tradition, as I wrote more and more ghazals in English and postcolonial poems about Belfast and Delhi.
It was the American émigrés who charged ‘to make it new’ in England at the start of the last century, with Ezra Pound’s foundational aesthetic ideas of Imagism, and T. S. Eliot helming the now-iconic Faber, creating the Modernist tradition. Just prior to them, the Polish expat, Joseph Conrad, had mastered the language in his twenties to become its master craftsman and invent storytelling techniques such as delayed decoding in his novels, some of which led to heated literary debates as to whether they were against or supported colonialism. EM Forster had to go to India to innovate upon the formal rhythms of the novel to write his tour de force, Passage, on bridging the racial divide through friendship, with his Cyril Fielding even performing the bravado to clash with Empire for the sake of his friend, Aziz. In his other magnum opus, Howards End, England was symbolically inherited by a child of mixed race born out of wedlock by an artistic girl of German-English ancestry, Helen Schlegel, and a working-class English man, Leonard Bast.
Closer to our own time, Zadie Smith was to bring out British multiculturalism more strongly in her adaptation of Forster’s novel as On Beauty, as well as in her other works such as the wildly popular White Teeth, and NW. Hanif Kureishi, another favourite, had brought The Buddha of Suburbia to London, with ‘almost’ Englishman Karim reprising Kipling’s Mowgli at the West End. Both novelists usher in a new kind of humour, with the Empire coming back with its mimic men and women. This is to say nothing of the ‘chutnified’ magic created by the Best of the Booker, Salman Rushdie, or of the Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, who ‘writes for all times’.
This was my conception of literary UK as open, liberal, multicultural, welcoming, hybrid, and, therefore, cutting-edge innovative, as I became a professor of literature in India, where I had gone back after my PhD. I had even returned for a stint as a writer in residence in Wales for a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship and gone back to my job reinvigorated by Welsh pride in their languages — English as well as Welsh Gaelic. When my then-girlfriend told me of her job offer from Birmingham, I remembered Stuart Hall, the Jamaica-born founding figure of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Later when I joined her, I realised that David Lodge, the famous campus-novelist taught here as well, as did one of my favourite poets, the Irishman Louis MacNeice, whose ‘Meeting Point’ with its cyclic form and refrain, ‘When time was away and somewhere else,’ I had recited to my now-wife, during our period of ‘courtship’. We had also watched Peaky Blinders together, where too the dynamic Zephaniah had lurked in the shadows, bringing Birmingham and Britain alive to us in Delhi, India.
This literary and cultural diversity of Birmingham and the UK has always attracted me to it. It is what I would love a cosmopolitan globe to be. Oh, the world cuisine you get served in London and Brum, are there cities to match their culinary diversity anywhere else? Yet, this was also why I was all the more shocked when I read recently the statements of Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Conservative MP Robert Edward Jenrick on the subject of Handsworth, Birmingham. Jenrick, as is now widely known, had complained in a speech of a ‘lack of integration’ in Handsworth. Perhaps, I shouldn’t have been shocked, as his words hark back to another notorious speech delivered in Birmingham in 1968, one that its authored referred to as ‘The Birmingham Speech’, but which garnered a literary title over time, ‘Rivers of Blood’, from the Aeneid quotation used in it. Enoch Powell, also a Shadow Secretary and Conservative MP at the time, was a man who had read his classics, and used Virgil to condemn the rate of immigration in Britain, ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.’
Powell, much more literary than Jenrick, never ostensibly joined the National Front, the far-right political party, that later claimed him with their slogan ‘Enoch was right’. Jenrick is not ostensibly a member of Reform, the far-right party of our own time, either, yet some far-right groups are putting up various flags across Birmingham and England, even as communities are taking them down. Powell was born in King’s Norton, Birmingham, while Jenrick is born not far in Wolverhampton. I wonder how the irony was lost on Powell that Aeneas was an immigrant from Troy, Asia, to what his sons, the wolf-fed Romulus founded as Rome, in Italy, Europe. I wonder what Jenrick would think of the ‘integration’ of Zephaniah who, through a British Council-sponsored school visit to India, represented Britain so admirably, and inspired me as a child to grow up and research and publish on a canonical British author and to write poetry in English in a new (Asian) form, and thus expand this ever-growing amazing language and its literature.
Or does he know of major contemporary British authors of South-Asian origin who have enriched English tradition further? Poets such as Imtiaz Dharker, who questions Islamophobia and writes of British life; Daljit Nagra who gently mocks diasporic English while also making it literary; and Birmingham’s own Zaffar Kunial, author of Us (perhaps riffing on Zephaniah’s Us an Dem?) and England’s Green (taking from Blake’s ‘pleasant land’), published by Faber, and who brought cricket and poetry together in his pamphlet Six, written on a residency with the Oval.
I see a man from the realm of my other ‘English’ love, football, Gary Neville, to be standing up for what is right, as did football’s other famous Gary — Lineker — earlier. I do not see too many high-profile authors taking as bold and public a stand on the right side of history. I wish Benjamin Zephaniah were around today, for he would surely set Jenrick straight on what it means to belong to this nation. The closing flourish of his best-known poem, ‘The British’, puts it eloquently:
Leave the ingredients to simmer.
As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.
Allow time to be cool.
Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy.
Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.