Benjamin Zephaniah, who was in Australia recently, uses music behind his words to create a big clear message. It makes you wish all that drivel written as lyrics to contemporary music could be replaced with his kind of writing. Simple sentiment alongside simple anger, superimposed onto syncopated walking rhythms has an effect that is energetically direct. Zephaniah’s beautiful voice plays with messages about political and social injustice, repeating ‘we will not forget’ or ‘free South Africa’ so that it sounds not corny, as it might, but important. He’s taken all that sexist love junk that was the mainstay of stoned Rastas and revitalised it.

In an interview David Britten did for the ABC’s Books and Writing recently, Benjamin Zephaniah spoke about his odd relationship with the BBC in London. He’s been in prison, his family is part of the Jamaican migrant community in Britain, he knows about injustice and prejudice and cruelty and repression; all those things that empires flagging democracy were so good at. He has a store of humour that makes his condemnation of idiocy more effective, and it’s easy to laugh with him about the way the conservative BBC wants access to his appeal and yet can’t quite approve of him, certainly not enough, he says, to have him actually working there. As for the universities, they are happy to have him come along to talk to students about ‘real life’ but they don’t want him to stay.

I wonder why he’d want to, I must admit. It seems to me that the interaction is valuable, and that one of the tasks of the university is to provide a place where that interaction can happen. But if Zephaniah was a university lecturer he wouldn’t be what he is – a singer of words, a performer, a minstrel.

(I’m all for our university people to stop treating the place like a sheltered workshop and to be a little more lively, but heaven forbid we start encouraging them to perform! The New Seekers, maybe. The Rolling Dons. Emeritus and the Professors. Hit singles such as ‘I’ve Only Got As For You’, ‘The Research Grant Blues’. Let’s remember, please, that in interdisciplinary there’s the word discipline.)

Zephaniah’s comment about having to die before they made him a Professor of Poetry was not very serious, but it did suggest his distrust of the university. They ask him there, he says, to tell the students about real life, presumably what he has known, what he goes on knowing about because he deals with people outside universities and institutions such as the BBC.

He’s right that it’s important but I’m not sure that it’s any more real than what is happening in the lives of the people he’s speaking to. And, in some ways, what he’s talking about is not really real at all. This is fraught with danger, as a topic – I once suggested that the ubiquitous use of business English across the world threatened to impoverish English and a ‘listener’ self-righteously condemned me for being anti-multicultural so I’m less hopeful these days that discussion can take place in an open-minded environment – but what I am trying to suggest is that the misery of the social pariah, the oppression of the unwanted by the complacent happens, but is only able to happen, because we have learnt to accept a state of unreality as being normal.

It is as real to sit in a university lecture hall and think about the possibility of infinity as it is to find yourself being beaten about the head by several drug inspired thugs in a dark smelly lane behind a night club that announces in neon its relationship to Paradise.

To say that the things Zephaniah speaks and writes about are real life, to say that police brutality, ignorance, racism, sexism, are all more real than knowledge and the sharing of it, can have the effect of romanticising those things. Universities and public radio stations and magazines not owned by gangsters (a favourite word of Zephaniah) aren’t less real, and it’s desperately important, in fact, that they continue to provide the possibility for the voice that can not only point out the emperor is naked but also why he got away with baring his belly in the first place.