I’ve thought a lot about Benjamin Zephaniah since reading Hugh Muir’s tribute (As we mourn Benjamin Zephaniah’s death, learn this lesson from his brilliant life, 8 December). In my work in adult education, I’ve found that students love his writing, attracted to the rhythmic verse and drawn to the simply but powerfully expressed sentiments of what it feels like to live outside the mainstream. They recognise the injustice and inequality that he wrote about and they are inspired by the call to action in his words.
Like him, many of my students had been unsuccessful at school, and felt written off by a system that didn’t work for them. Schooldays were not the happiest days of their lives and, in Zephaniah, they could see someone who’d failed at school, or more accurately, had been failed by school, and who went on to become a professor of poetry, a national and international figure who articulated in his writing their everyday experiences.
Some years ago, I took a group of students to a performance of his poetry. In an upstairs room above a bookshop, people filled the room, sitting on the floor, on windowsills, on one another’s shoulders. Unlike more conventional book launches, this felt like being at a party, with food and drinks provided and Zephaniah happy to chat and pose for photographs.
Earlier this year, I discussed with students his poem What If. While the Kipling original left them cold, they delighted in Zephaniah’s reworking, its naming of the corruption and lies that abound in society. The students wrote their own versions, calling out the unfairness and discrimination they felt in their own lives, yet motivated by the conclusion of his poem: “you can hold your head high as you walk the streets”.
Hilary Nightingale
West Molesey, Surrey
• Benjamin Zephaniah’s power to connect people continues after his death. On Friday, as I came out of the local newsagent’s with my Guardian, featuring a large picture of Zephaniah on the front, a stranger held the door open, on his way in to collect his paper. As we left, I glanced down at the front page and said: “What sad news.” “Yes,” said the stranger, “he was a very lovely man. I met him a few times.” “How come?” “My wife was doing an event for Palestine, involving Benjamin and a flute player. He was so nice to everyone he met.” The stranger and I agreed that a good man had died too young and wished each other well. I sensed that we both felt touched by our brief encounter.
Jo Tunnard
Finsbury Park, London
• For years Benjamin Zephaniah was the only man with a public profile who talked openly about his infertility. He knew what it was like to hear people telling what they assumed to be harmless jokes about seedless “jaffas” and men “firing blanks”. And he knew the real pain that male infertility can cause to men and their partners. We will remember him for making it easier for other men to talk openly about it.
Walter Merricks
Co-founder, Donor Conception Network
• The passing away of Benjamin Zephaniah is a great loss to the vegan and animal rights movement. He campaigned for a better world in which humans would extend their compassion to other living beings. His ideas are now being taken seriously, with a recognition that animals are sentient beings and should be granted fundamental rights.
Nitin Mehta
Croydon, London
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