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Benjamin Zephaniah: ‘I’m almost 60 and I’m still angry. Everyone told me I would mellow’
The celebrated dub poet might grow his own vegetables in the shires – but he is still in a revolutionary mood.
From carnival surveillance to the abandonment of the Grenfell families, he says Britain needs radical political change – now
Benjamin Zephaniah’s 1998 poem Carnival Days is a lyrical love letter to the Notting Hill carnival, where “We dance like true survivors / We dance to the sounds of our dreams.”
Or, more accurately, it’s a love letter to what the carnival once was.
He still supports the event, which takes place in London this weekend, and plans to be there on Monday, but reckons it has become less innocent, less spontaneous in the two decades since he…