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.
