Benjamin Zephaniah has appeared at really pivotal points of my life, either in person or through his work. The first memory I have of him was in the early 1990s when my parents took me to an anti-apartheid demonstration in Parliament Square. Benjamin addressed the crowd through a red and white megaphone. I can’t remember the poem he read out but he kept saying: “Open up your mind,” and my dad, who had me on his shoulders, was repeating it. Seeing someone on the stage who resembled members of my Jamaican family, who was taking a stance for peace and justice, had a huge impact on me.
When I was 11 and had just started in a deaf school, my mum gave me Benjamin’s young adult novel Face. I remember reading the whole thing in one go. I was very self-conscious about wearing hearing aids and I needed stories that humanised disability, as Face did. I was still struggling with my literacy at the time, and I understood Benjamin as someone who was self-taught and had been marginalised within the education system. And so he really felt like an ambassador for young people like me.
