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Benjamin Zephaniah Too Black, Too Strong Highgreen, Northumberland. Bloodaxe (Dufour, distr.). 2001. 87 pages $17.95. ISBN 1-85224-554-9
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to his newest collection of poetry, Benjamin Zephaniah, easily one of the most recognized of popular British poets, declares that he is not interested in winning awards and that he writes what he feels about being in a world in which a whole litany of abuses of humanity exist. He proposes that his poetry is not as important as many things in the world, but that he chooses to write because he cannot stay silent. The introduction does something else: it establishes clearly that Zephaniah understands himself to be thoroughly British - a man with no anxiety about declaring his Britishness and his willingness to own that identity.
Too Black, Too Strong is political. In a short note introducing the poem "The Men from Jamaica Are Settling Down," Zephaniah lets us know that the piece was first commissioned by a BBC-linked film company which eventually turned down the piece because the last two stanzas were too political and too confrontational. The poet takes pride in declaring that he will not compromise on the struggle. And there is more: Zephaniah is daring in the collection in that he does take on, as he promises, some tough targets. His poem lampooning UB4o, the popular British reggae group, pulls no punches: "You came, you saw, you copied, / And the record company loved you, / But you can't swing it / Like a buffalo soldier / Or a dreadlocks Rasta, / U.B. robbing we." But the dissing of UB4o is clearly too easily rendered, and one is not quite sure why he chooses to do that. The thing is that UB40, for all its limp cover songs, had a far from unrootsy beginning. And in a world in which the glorious power of reggae to...