Serve with justice
And enjoy.
Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.
This is a poem in the form of a recipe. The extract here is the final entry in the recipe, coming after such common cooking suggestions as turning up the heat, allowing everything to simmer, and give the finished result time to cool before serving. What separates this from similarly structured recipes on the millions of cooking sites around the internet are the ingredients: Picts, Hot Chileans and cool Jamaicans, a blend of Somalians and Nigerians, a sprinkling of fresh Bosnians, Iraqis and Palestinians and, just before serving time, the addition of “unity, understanding, and respected for the future.” The poem is a creative mixture of the sincerity of the poet's affirmation of the politics of inclusion with the irony of the poet’s veganism.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,
Don't eat it, keep it alive,
It could be yu mate, an not on your plate
Say, Yo! Turkey I'm on your side.
This quote is representative of much of the verse of the author. The use of dialect is a tricky proposition for writers, especially those who are actively seeking to spread a message beyond those for whom the dialect comes naturally. It can be off-putting. In this case, because Zephaniah is so closely associated with being a performance poet, the obstruction of reading dialect is somewhat muted…unless you are reading it. In addition to showing off the recurring use of dialect, this poem also speaks directly to the poet’s famous association with not eating meat. But it is not really just about turkeys literally. It is also a political allegory in which the turkeys become a metaphor for oppressed victims of all species. As the speaker goes on make explicitly clear:
“Turkeys hav brains an turkeys feel pain / In many ways like yu an me.”
Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry
It’s not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.
In 2003, Zephaniah infamously rejected the offer of appointment to receive the Order of the British Empire, rewarded to outstanding members of the arts and sciences specifically for their contribution to the arts and sciences. It was specifically the “British Empire” part of the honor which stimulated his public rejection through an article in The Guardian. The poem will specifically address the issue in the next stanza with when he takes to task those writers whom he accuses of betraying black ancestors, asserting that “When they have done what they’ve been told / They get their OBE’s.” It is a political diatribe against not just that specific honor, however, but more generally a caution against outsider artists becoming too keen to associated themselves with the mainstream by accepting awards as everything inexorably moves toward the poem’s concluding lines: “And we give these awards meaning / But we end up with no voice.” The title even not-so-subtly suggests that taking part in the whole awards process is tantamount to a kind of slavery.
