Benjamin Zephaniah

A long time ago, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah came to the British Council in Chennai, and my friend Pipe and I went to go listen to the chap and see what was up. He's quite an entertaining fellow in person, but the part that sticks with me is that I have this whole thing with people interpreting art. Sure, la mort de l'auteur and all that, but some things are truly baffling. So I asked him if he ever found an interpretation of his works that he found not quite accurate.

It's been a while and I was somewhat high at the time, so the recollection might be inaccurate but the story he told us (after the usual stuff about aforementioned LMDLA) is about how he writes phonetically often (e.g. "yo bowy" instead of "yo boy") to reference the pronunciation in Jamaica etc. Well, in the story, some enterprising graduate student writes a whole bunch about how this is a reference to David Bowie, and how the rest of the poem is references to that chap's work.

Well, the author might well have been dead when he received that interpretation.