Dr Phil Edwards meets me in the teashop by Grantham station, where he gestures towards a black girl sitting in the corner. ‘I thought you were her!’ he laughs. ‘I thought – bloody hell, what have I let myself in for!’ But as we make our way to the local Wetherspoon’s he assures me: ‘I wouldn’t have minded if it was you – I’ll talk to anyone. And besides a lot of them vote for us anyway. We’re very misunderstood, the BNP’.

On arrival at the pub, he ushers me to a quiet corner at the back. ‘I’ve done interviews in places like this before and they’ve tried to kick me out when they’ve overheard the conversation,’ he says. ‘Not that it’s any of their bloody business.’

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Going by choice to someone else’s war is a way of escape. You find yourself very removed from whatever the roots of your life are. Heroin is another escape and the two fuelled each other. The war ended, I came home and was stuck with just heroin. I think it’s trite to say that war is an addiction but many of the same qualities become apparent in one’s life in war as with an addiction.

From drugs and war, you can often get the same adrenalised rush, there are the same essences of escape, the same unhealthy manifestations in character and behaviour in the two experiences. It’s a comparison which can become contrived, it’s just something that happened to be going on in my life at the time.

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

The LIP: Why did you start ST?

I think that the literary culture in this country has always been very, very complacent and very dominated by certain values. It gives me great pleasure to shake it up. But also I think in the 80s there were certain voices, like gay and lesbian writers, or black writers, which clearly weren’t getting published. It’s less the case now. I don’t think that you can say that it’s a disadvantage any more in terms of getting published to be black – one could argue that it probably helps. But that certainly wasn’t the case twenty years ago.

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

…Something of an over-determined character, Giles Coren is a man with fingers in numerous pies, and is unashamed to admit that writing fiction (and perhaps watching cricket) are the only passions in his life – the rest, the journalism, the television presenting – they pay the bills. ‘That’s the only reason for doing TV. With the exception of that bird with the fat tits who got sacked from the Big Breakfast, one can just turn up and read the autocue. They couldn’t put words of more than two syllables on the autocue for her. Whereas I can read. So long as I keep my beard reasonably trimmed and do my hair nicely, I’m fine.’

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

A champion of hip hop and reggae, it seems appropriate that Benjamin’s latest offering is a double release, not of books, but records. His album, Naked, features production from Trevor Morais of sixties legends ‘Faron’s Flamingos’ providing a dub-heavy back drop to the hypnotic recitation of eleven new poems. A side project, The Naked & Mixed Up E.P. sees hip hop aficionado and 1Xtra founder, Rodney P step up to the mixing desk to remix four of the tracks from the album. The records blur the lines between performance poetry and rap, a distinction which Benjamin himself is keen to erase. ‘It’s what we call the griot. You don’t sit there and go, “Do you want to be a poet, or do you want to be a musician?” You use whatever means necessary to tell the story. Rap is just a form of street poetry anyway.’

During the 1980s, it’s fair to say that Benjamin Zephaniah had more in common with the anger-fuelled rap scene exploding in LA than with the poetic establishment in London, ‘Hip hop, reggae, who really cares / The essence is loud, the anger is clear’ he proclaims on ‘Uptown Downtown’. I wonder whether being a darling of Radio 4 and black envoy to the middle classes has compromised his message? Is there any way that his poetic vision could be taken as seriously as, say, NWA’s Fuck Tha Police? ‘I think most people move on and want to say things in different ways,’ he comments. ‘I wrote this poem, ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death!’ which was like my Fuck Tha Police, but I wouldn’t write that now. What hip hop did really well and what NWA and Public Enemy did was tell it like it really is. When I performed ‘Dis Policeman…’ on television, black people were coming up to me and saying “At last, somebody’s out there and saying it.” Truth, telling it like it is, is an essential element of Benjamin’s poetry – ‘It’s the truth I’m telling you, poets don’t lie’ as he puts it, tongue in cheek, in ‘Touch’.

Truth and identity are inseparable for Benjamin, and as the title ‘Naked’ would suggest, it is a sense of truth that he is trying to uncover and unclothe. ‘I’m trying to strip myself down and just be as open and honest as I can’, he explains. Such a delight in the poetic truth puts one in mind of Keats’ famous lines in Ode on a Grecian Urn, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ An appropriate comparison given the Rastafarian poet’s love for the Romantics. ‘I love this idea that your poetry has a purpose, this is where we want to go, and I may not see it, but I’ll die for it’, he muses.

Benjamin Zephaniah has been called many things – a commentator, an activist, a black poet, a performance poet – and he has seemingly comfortably segued from one sphere into another. Integrity must be important to him, but difficult to maintain in a culture dominated by the bestseller list and the charts. When I ask him about the poet’s image and whether we should listen more closely to what poets have to say, Benjamin recalls the one stanza wonder, Murray Lachlan Young. Styled by his publishers as ‘The Million Pound Poet’ after his lucrative but ultimately unsuccessful deal with EMI just over ten years ago, Young soon disappeared from the scene. ‘It didn’t work’, he notes. ‘And the reason it didn’t work was because when people listen to a poet, they don’t care what you dress like, they don’t care what you look like, they don’t care what race you are…they just want to hear something true that speaks to them.’

Benjamin Zephaniah has certainly spoken to a lot of people. He has toured the world, read in schools across the country, published thirteen collections of poetry and three novels. His charisma and personality have set him apart from other vernacular poets such as John Agard, and have gained him support on both sides of the musical/poetic border. Alongside accessible poems, many for children, are fiercely political collections – the titles ‘Propa Propaganda’ and ‘Too Black, Too Strong’, as well as his much publicised refusal of an OBE paint the picture of an antiestablishment stalwart. Although Naked is celebratory in tone, thanks in part to the musical backing, the familiar rebarbative jibes can be found. ‘I’m one more nigga on your boot / Dis night you want dis coon to die’ he spits on ‘Homesick’, revealing that same distrust of politicians and police. ‘Dis is me. I hate dis government as much as I / Hated the one before it and I have reason / To believe that I will hate the one to come’, he states on the title poem. For Benjamin Zephaniah, hatred of government seems to be a central tenet of his identity. ‘More and more people are realising that there is a difference between…human beings and politicians. There’s all these political figures who claim to represent us, who are actually manipulating us for their own purpose’, he explains.

It is this elision of the personal and the political that appeals to Benjamin in the work of the Romantics, in particular that of Shelley. It is something that he admits trying to emulate on Naked. ‘Shelley is one of my favourite poets of all time, he was so passionate – people went on strike chanting his poetry. I’m trying to connect the personal and the political, Shelley showed that it could be done, that poetry could be revolutionary and personal at the same time.’ A particular favourite of Benjamin’s, ‘Song to the Men of England’ illustrates quite clearly why Shelley has a place in his heart – the themes, the rhyme and the emphatic short lines are echoed both by rap acts such as Public Enemy or NWA and by poets like Benjamin himself. Shelley’s lines,

The seed you sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.

could almost as easily have emerged from 1980s Los Angeles as England in 1819. ‘It’s still relevant today’, he says of the poem. ‘It’s a really beautifully written plea to the people of England to think for themselves. It’s saying, “Why are you looking up to these people? You’re looking at them and saying ‘you’ve got wonderful clothes, you’ve got wonderful this and that’, but actually, you put it on them.” And there you are, naked.’

Questions of national identity are of massive importance to Benjamin and he openly rubbishes attempts by Gordon Brown and Trevor Phillips to singularly define ‘Britishness’. ‘Britain, by definition is multicultural’, he tells me. ‘How far back do you want to go? The Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Cillas, all different tribes came here. I think it’s only become an issue now because the cultures that are coming here are black and Asian. I say to anybody who talks about some fixed idea of Britishness, “Come on, when did that exist? When the Queen was German?” I always say it’s like the weather. It has different personalities. It’s still the weather, but it’s different across Britain.’ Benjamin remains philosophical about the recent racial tensions in light of the Mohammed cartoon scandal. He himself is unafraid of Islamic iconoclasm – ‘I see women in Purdah naked’ he rhymes on ‘Naked’. But, clichéd or not, ‘if you have freedom of speech, there’s got to be responsibility’ he concedes. Naked is littered with references to the war on terror and the implicit links between Muslims and terrorism. ‘The Muslims I know already hate the idea of being associated with suicide bombers’, he says. In ‘Rong Radio Station’, a meditation on the influence of the media on our political opinions, he complains of having been ‘battered’ and ‘brutalised’ into harbouring racist ideas himself. ‘I was beginning to believe that all Moslems were terrorist / And Christian terrorists didn’t exist’, he admits.

Perhaps Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetic quest is concisely summarised in his stated aim, ‘I want to kill educated ignorance.’ His vision is that of an open minded Britain in which political faction and intolerance are replaced with some kind of philanthropic humanism:

Live de life you love
Love de life you live
Live with massive passion
And live it positive.

But there is a problem here. The political comment, like the rhyme which can be innocently simple, even naïve, frequently lacks the punch that it requires to elevate it above Glastonbury-festival-soapbox socialism. It is appropriate that Banksy, once renegade graffiti artist whose pictures now more frequently grace the pages of the Guardian than the streets of East London, has provided the artwork for the album. Like Banksy’s stencils, many of the poems on Naked, will appeal to a wide audience but are no longer revolutionary. The template is familiar and one can’t help but be moved by the enthusiasm behind their creation, but the overall images are becoming tired, and crucially, no longer make us think. There is no doubt that Benjamin deserves his place in the poetic canon, and Naked is certainly an honest, and truthful collaboration. There is, however, a fine line between truth and truism, a line which is crossed too often for the project to be a true success.

Naked and The Naked and Mixed Up EP are out now on One Little Indian.

So, too, must the very earthly fact of having been a Head of State for fifty-six years – nine years longer than Fidel Castro. Since his formal inauguration soon after China invaded Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama has established and run a government in exile, welcoming thousands of his weak and bitter countrymen who have arrived in India after a treacherous journey over the Himalayas to join him. He has met Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Popes, and debated with Chairman Mao. He has campaigned for peaceful justice in Tibet before a comprimised and slothful United Nations. If this was not enough, he has the moral trump card of a Nobel Peace Prize on his mantle-piece.

Not an arrogant demi-God, his manner is more that of an ex-President, the easy nature of a man with nothing left to prove. This is not so far from the truth. “We now have a fully elected Tibetan Government-in-Exile,” he says. “They handle many negotiations, so I am in a position of semi-retirement.” Some retirement: the Dalai Lama continues his arduous diplomacy and fact finding missions, such as his recent visit to the Scottish Parliament to assess its success in operating autonomously from its big brother in Westminster.

The comparison between Scotland and Tibet is perhaps forced, but there are pertinent points. The Dalai Lama repeats the need for ‘justice’ in Tibet, by which he means the need for genuine autonomy in the region, especially over cultural matters. Chinese immigrants in Tibet now outnumber the traditional Tibetan population, leading to the erosion of native customs. Perhaps these could be preserved through Devolution, rather than full Independence? So far as governments are concerned, the foundation of a solid ethical system to underpin the administration is most important, rather than the type of democracy in place. A country and culture may flourish, he says, when a people take responsibility for their democracy. This is what the Tibetan people desire.

For those campaigning for Tibetan liberation, this is hardly a universally accepted solution, and many are critical of the Dalai Lama’s essentially fundamentalist adherance to peaceful negotiations, over any kind of armed response. He has never endorsed any of the various groups of resistance fighters that have grown and withered over the years, some of whom received support, for a time, from the USA.

“Violence always creates more problems than it solves. It always has side effects. The alternative is indeed a compromise through negotiation and dialogue.” Few people have the patience for this approach, which is probably why he won the Nobel Prize. It is as if the achievement of a partial goal, or a goal achieved piecemeal over a long period is preferable to a quicker and more violent solution with untold side-effects. If you have been reincarnated fourteen times, it’s easier to play the long game. Everything the Dalai Lama says suggests he considers himself just a part of an ongoing historical narrative – a chapter in a longer story, not a whole book.

An answer to the problem of Chinese occupation of Tibet is, he says the first of three main focal points in his life. The second is the promotion of human value. If we see the whole of humanity, indeed, the whole living world as one body, then violence is merely violence against oneself. These are common values which underpin all cultures and religions, and a focus on human value is gaining ground.

“Compare the world today, with the world during the two world wars and the cold war. Although there is a problem with terrorism and despite the war in Iraq, there is more peace than in previous years”, he says. “War is the mobilisation of large numbers of people to violence. It legitimises and legalises violence.” He notes the anti-war protests that arose in 2003, and suggests that the ideal and philosophy of peace and negotiation is gaining ground. He suggests the promotion of peace, negotiation and non-violence from kindergarten upwards: “the spirit of dialogue” could invigorate societies in which neighbourly compassion is on the wane. Indeed, by being loyal to humanity as the whole, then conflict becomes not only an appalling way to operate, but also a ridiculously inefficient way to organise things. What he is saying (and what there is not enough acceptance of in the world) is that since we have a shared humanity, then any war should be considered a civil war between humans. The concept of wholeness and unity within Buddhism, and especially within the Dalai Lama’s writings, is probably his most important message for the rest of us.

What advice does he have for The West? Do we begin by adopting a more Buddhist way of life? “Not necessarily,” is the surprising answer. “Different people find different religions and spiritualities effective. Religion is like medicine for the mind, and not everyone needs the same medicine. So there is no particular need to be Buddist.”

“My opinion is that the West has its own religious tradition, which is Judaeo-Christianity (and to some extend Muslim). So I always say it is better to keep your own religion, it is not easy to change your own religion. So I say that westerners should be sincere Chrisitians.”

What if you are not Christian? Even if there is a strong Christian tradition running through our culture, many people do not have faith and it could not be said that they practice any religion at all.

“Of course, if you have no interest in a particular religion, then OK, but be a good human being.” Most ethics and values, he says, come from common sense, not religious text or religious leaders. It is therefore possible for everyone to adopt the idea of secular ethics. “The meaning of secular has two different interpretations. My understanding of the English word is that ‘secular’ means the rejection of religion. But in Indian, secular means the respect of all religions, including the non-religious approach.”

“People everywhere want a happier life, a happier family, a happier community and society. Our inner values, such as a sense of responsibility, a sense of compassion and the oneness of the entire humanity, are values that you can reach without religion as such, and I think these are the basis of values that will bring about a happier humanity. So, with secular ethics, we do not talk about God or the next life or salvation, but just about making this life a happy one.”

These ideas of a co-operation, and examining all faiths, seem to be the basis of interfaith dialogue, and in turn ideas of multiculturalism. What, I ask the Dalai Lama, does multiculturalism mean to him, and what should it mean for us? He says it is a difficult question.

“Actually, my rough impression is that in the UK, ‘multiculturalism’ means a society where there are people from different backgrounds: Multi culture, multi racial, multi religion. In this sort of society, it means we need harmony, respect for each other, and to recognise others rights.”

The Dalai Lama suggests that most cultures and the morals that underpin them are based on religious faith, so to talk of multiculturalism is really to talk of “multi-religious faith”. A religion has its own unity and consistency, offering different ways of live, so religion and variety of religion is important, providing a diversity of ‘medicines for the soul’. What is important is finding the common ground between religions and therefore cultures, identifying those common morals that can unite us all. Multiculturalism, then, is not so much about celebrating differences, but emphasising our similarities.

For the Dalai Lama, arguing over religion is pointless. “From a Christian view-point, I have a Godless religion, so strictly speaking, I am a nihlist. And from my view-point, since the Christian value system does not accept the concept of nirvana (among other things), I may call them nihlists. I might as well argue with you over whether to eat spicy food or not. There is no use in arguing like this. They have been doing so in India for three-thousand years and have not come up with an solution!” Religion is personal, and cannot be imposed on a plural society which has a heritage of many different religions. Multiculturalism is the acknowledgement of this pluralism. It is denying that other cultures are a threat, and instead seeking the earthly, secular common ground, on which we can all agree. And it is in the concept of secular ethics that we can find this commonality of purpose.

The Dalai Lama is fortunate that his fame has ridden the wave of advances in global communication. In his claret and saffron robes and thick glasses, he is a highly visible figure. The index specimen of a wise old eastern sage, he has written several books on self-help and spirituality. One half expects expects him deliver life changing words of wisdom with every breath. Perhaps it is inevitable then, that his sentences seem to finish early, before the life changing bon mot has been delivered. This is, of course, an unfair expectation on the part of the listeners – the Dalai Lama never claims to have answers, just guidance from a the perspective of Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, the broadness of his approach has drawn criticism. The oneness of humanity and the need for unconditional peace may be self evident for a monk who has studied nothing else. But convincing other people, especially those who have been born into suffering under occupation, is a somewhat harder task.

This sort of persuasion may be beyond the Dalai Lama. In any case, it is probably not his goal and not the point of his office. His symbolical nature stands for something longer. He is a cypher for the long-term. When he invokes ideas of unity, the Dalai Lama is very aware that he is advocating a paradigm shift in our thinking. These ethics, he says, must be impressed upon children from a very young age, so a new generation of leaders will be born with “the ideas of peace and human value at their heart”. He, and we, will not live to see these ideas bear fruit. As it is with Tibet, so it is with lasting peace – a long term project.

Riz tells the LIP of his unwelcome treatment on arriving back in the UK.

“When our flight landed at Luton Airport from Berlin, Shafiq Rasul was stopped at the Immigration Desk. Soon after, I was detained and questioned. I was not told the reason for this.

The officer had initially questioned me extensively by the baggage claim, taking notes from my answers and from my passport. When I asked what all these questions were for, and whether this was an interview, she led me to a small interview room and said that it was “if I want it to be”.

I gave my basic details, explained about the festival, and the film being the reason for our visit to Berlin, which she said she believed. She said they need to stop us and the Tipton boys as anyone with “terror links” must be questioned – not that I had any necessarily, she said. I added that the Tipton Three didn’t either, as is widely documented. She then asked to go through the contents of my wallet. I felt uncomfortable about the ambiguities in the purpose of the detention and this proposed search, and so asked to speak to a lawyer.

I was denied access to legal advice, supposedly officially, under powers used to detain me. However the specific powers under which I was being held were deliberately made unclear by the detaining Special Branch officer. She gave me a blank copy of a “Section 7 of the Terrorism Act Detention Form” to explain why I couldn’t contact anyone. The form stated that someone detained under its powers can be prevented from contacting anyone, including legal advisors, for up to 48 hours, by a superintendent officer. I asked her whether she was a superintendent. Her reply was that I was not in fact being held under the powers outlined in this form. I was only being denied legal advice for the first hour of questioning, rather than 48hours. The reason why I had been given this form was now unclear.

She left the room, and said she was bringing in a male colleague to enforce the wallet search, since “a lot of Muslims don’t like dealing with women do they.” As she left I quickly called an academic lawyer, Ravinder Thukral, on my mobile.

He called back as she re-entered and spoke directly to the her on my phone. It was unclear now whether I was officially not allowed to call anyone, or whether she simply wouldn’t help me to do so but had no power to stop me. I took another two calls from lawyers during the interview. Each lawyer was unclear about the powers she was using to detain me, prevent me from getting full legal advice, and search my wallet. Her explanations were often unclear and seem to contradict her earlier explanations about the form and its relevance.

Under the threat of “prolonging” my detention, I cooperated in allowing her to go through my wallet. She took detailed notes on all its contents. All of my bankcard details were noted down, as were the details on other people’s business cards I had in my wallet. I was searched for objects that I might use to “hurt” the officers. However this took place about halfway through the interview after I had been with the interviewer alone for some time.

While searching through my wallet she asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantanamo. She asked “Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, you know, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?”.

She also asked me what my political views were, what I thought about “the Iraq war and everything else that was going on”, whether the Iraq war was “right” in my view.

She then asked me whether I would mind officers contacting me regularly in the future, “in case, for example, you might be in a café, and you overhear someone discussing illegal activities”.

I then took a call from Clive Stafford Smith who had been contacted by Ravinder Thukral, the first Lawyer I had contacted. He told me to wait a moment as he was on his way to Gareth Peirce’s (Human Rights Lawyer who helped secure the Tipton Three’s release) office, and she would call me in a moment. When I told the interviewer I’d have to take a call from Gareth Peirce’s office shortly, she said she wouldn’t allow me to. She started raising her voice, and behaving in a more urgent and aggressive way. She called in a male colleague who threateningly told me to give him the phone before gripping my hands and wrestling it from me. He then sat on a table in the room, grinned at me, winked and went through my phone. I protested, but he ignored me and continued to go through my phone. Then a third officer entered, and all three adopted very aggressive stances, threatening to take me to a police station, calling me a “fucker”, moving in very close to my face, pointing and shouting at me to “shut up and listen”. I complained at being called a fucker. The officer who still had my phone, and who had sworn at me, smiled at me and then said “now you’re making things up, no one called you that”.

I finally convinced the original officer to allow me to call Ms. Peirce’s office simply to ascertain the validity of the detention and the denial of full access to lawyers. She agreed on condition that if I tried to ask any further questions of the lawyer my phone would be taken away. As soon as I got through to the lawyer, she suddenly said “we’re done with you, you can go, whats the point in calling lawyers”. The lawyer on the phone told the officer (again, speaking directly to her on my phone) that he hadn’t heard of such powers existing in Section 7 of the TACT. She changed the subject and said that I was free to go now anyway and that I was now prolonging my detention by my own insistence on calling lawyers.

I took the opportunity, took the lawyer’s advice, and left the room. She advised me to go home and read up on anti terror legislation. I advised the officers in the room to learn some people skills.

I asked for any notes from the interview, and for names/ranks of the officers. I was denied both, and given a small, pink, police search record sheet – specifying that the purpose of the search was for “intelligence” and that I had been examined under the “TACT 2000”. The reverse of the sheet, “Sheet 2 “which as stated on the form itself “officers must also complete” was missing.”

Caché tells the story of the kind of the bourgeois nuclear family that Haneke is so frequently drawn to – professional parents (in this case Anne, a publisher, played by Juliette Binoche and Georges, a TV cultural commentator played by Daniel Auteuil), and their 12 year old son, Pierrot. Their middle class life is derailed by the arrival on their doormat of video tapes showing their daily lives – someone is watching. Binoche as Anne is wonderfully sympathetic and frustrated, fearing for the safety of her family, whilst her husband Georges becomes increasingly angry, and increasingly certain that he knows the culprit. The drama which unfolds reveals both an ugly latent racism traceable back to the Algerian conflict of the 60s and a disruptive distrust between Anne and Georges which threatens to destroy their domestic bliss.

Haneke plays down the inspiration of a surveillance culture and instead concerns himself with addressing our trust in the truth as presented through the media, ‘there’s a pervasive delusion that we know more than we really do, we’re open to manipulation and I want to reflect that danger.’ The thrilling and disturbing drama which is set in motion by the arrival of the videos makes that danger a haunting central conceit, and one which provokes more questions than it provides answers; ‘when a film answers the questions that it raises, well, the work ends there’, says Haneke. Whilst the answers to his questions may remain hidden, they are certainly still worth pursuing.

Balance is something that Sway has almost mastered. He has marked his territory at the cross-roads between seemingly disparate cultural forces: Islam and Christianity, ‘trapped in between the imam and the priest’, American hip hop supremacy and British talent, ‘The Pound is stronger than the Dollar – holla!’, commercial success and critical acclaim. Yet these apparently incompatible elements have set Sway apart from the populous pack of emcees clamouring to get their 21 seconds on the mic. Quick to acknowledge his numerous influences, ‘Busta Rhymes, Eminem, Ludacris, Madness…’ Sway also knows that there’s a good reason that he can proudly proclaim to be ‘the rapper that people take to’, namely that ‘no one’s had that same combination of influences in one man, mixed with being someone who’s Christian-Muslim, Ghanaian-British…all of these things.’

Draped in the Union Jack and the Ghanaian tricolor flag, Sway is a model of British multiculturalism, proud of both his African and British heritage, with one eye trained on the States. ‘One thing Africans love’, he says with a wry grin, ‘is to see somebody come from nothing and become something. It’s usually labelled the American Dream, but it’s actually the African Dream.’ He recalls how his upbringing in London ‘was like living in two different countries’, the world outside his familial home in Hornsey, North London, bearing scant resemblance to the little slice of Africa that could be found behind his front door. ‘There’s a lot of time in Africa’, he muses, ‘so there’s a lot of conversation, and through conversation you get a lot of story telling, that’s an element I took within myself.’ The tradition of West African stories is weaved throughout This is My Demo, and not just in the comic appearances of ‘MC Charlie Boy’, Sway’s Ghanaian alter ego, who we hear is planning to swim to London ‘to eat champagne with the Queen.’ ‘He’s actually based on about twenty of my uncles’, he adds. He attributes his razor sharp wit and lyrical dexterity which permeate the record to his African background, skills which landed him ‘in HMV instead of HMP’, bagging a MOBO along the way, and all without a major label claiming a cut of the spoils.

Yet there is a danger that the qualities which have gained Sway a considerable commercial appeal are the same ones that make him unlikely to really make an impact on the die-hard avant-garde hip hop heads. ‘I’ve been described as “the more accessible Dizzee” which is a good thing…I am cutting edge, there’s nothing like me’, he says. Is there not a danger that you could be labelled ‘Hip Hop Lite’ I venture. ‘It’s not about being edgy for the sake of being edgy. I want people to understand where I’m coming from. Everyone has to be true to themselves. I can rap about guns but that’s not “keeping it real” to me.’ His major criticism of his UK contemporaries is exactly that reliance on an image inherited from across the pond – guns, drugs and violence. He would rather plump for honesty and integrity, even if that compromises the preconceived notion of what an emcee should be, ‘everyone’s a killer drug dealer with a 9 milla / That’s not sensible / And I can sense the bull / That’s why these rappers couldn’t see me coming if they were vaginas with spectacles’, he spits on ‘Hype Boys’. But even Sway, the thinking man’s emcee, the voice of hip hop with a sensitive side can’t resist a touch of machismo. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a rapper someone can talk stupid about. I got a lot of friends, and if you talk recklessly, they’ll come and see you, it’s as simple as that. I’m no wimp.’

Wimp or no wimp (and I’m inclined to agree with the man himself on this one), Sway is a man for whom respect and consideration are important factors. He eschews the attitude of many other British emcees which he comically paraphrases, ‘Well, I can rap about whatever I want, nobody’s gonna hear it anyway, and nobody’s gonna buy it, so fuck everybody!’ This in turn leads him to question whether other rappers would be making records that glorify violence if they thought they’d actually get played, and their mums might be tuned in to 1Xtra: ‘Do you think that if they thought their whole family could hear that they’d be saying those things? When I write my lyrics I think, “that might offend this kind of person”, or “that might take this person out of the picture.” Me, I think for the world.’ That’s not to say that This is My Demo skirts around serious issues, rather that they are dealt with in Sway’s inimitably humorous style – be it unwanted attitude in the pub, ‘If you’re a gangster, then I’m Prince William’, or domestic violence in the tragic-comic ‘Pretty Ugly Husband’.

Given the man’s predilection for in-jokes and diverse tastes, it is with some apprehension that I ask him to imagine that he’s been stranded on a traffic island in Wood Green with only one record on his iPod. I wait to hear his tune of choice. ‘That’s a really, really hard one’, he says after a lengthy pause. ‘Chaka Khan. Ain’t Nobody. It’d have to be that.’ I wonder whether he’s pulling my leg. ‘It was a toss up between that and Heal the World by Michael Jackson. I love that too, it’s the only song that makes me feel like I could jump out the window and not fall down. It’s a tough call, but I’d go for Chaka Khan’, he adds without the slightest hint of irony.

With the album in the shops and the buzz continuing to buzz only time will tell whether Sway manages to tread the most precarious path of all between integrity and success – without swaying too far either way. He is a man with a plan, having set himself the target of five albums to prove to the world that he deserves his ‘name up in bright lights and capitals.’ If progress to date is anything to go by, it’d be brave man who stands in Sway’s way.

Jess is a girl who is struggling to find her own identity in the hyphenated world in which she lives; half Yoruba and half English, she is torn between two cultures and finds herself occupying a world made up of dichotomies. TillyTilly who is at once a comforting friend and a disruptive demon is the embodiment of Jessamy’s struggle to discover her own identity – ‘My name is Jessamy. I am eight years old… She felt she needed to be saying this so that it would be real.’

Jess’ behaviour at home and school is disruptive, smashing her mother’s computer, cutting pictures out of books in the classroom, breaking the mirror in the bathroom – blamed in an eight year old’s plaintive tones on the mysterious, invisible, TillyTilly, ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t do it!’ The help of a psychologist is employed, though it is TillyTilly who reveals to Jessamy the true roots of her disturbance – the death of her baby twin sister, Fern.

Helen’s prose style is varied and vital. A lively spirit, as energetic as TillyTilly herself, weaves its way through the narrative which manages to recall both the naïveté of childhood, and to capture the uncertainty Jess faces as she firms her grip on reality. Her difficulties are compounded by the apparent contradictions between the tradition of her Nigerian roots and the British society in which she lives – in one world a wooden carving or ibeji must be made to lay to rest the soul of the dead twin, in the other world, sensitive if misguided psychologists probe with questions, ‘I know that things can be real in different ways’, offers Dr McKenzie by way of an explanation. Neither solution makes sense to Jess whose vulnerable childishness underscores the novel with tender pathos, ‘I’m tired and you’re confusing me,’ she responds.

The LIP: Do you consider yourself to be an ‘African novelist’? J.M Coetzee has said some interesting things about assuming such a title – does the African novelist have more responsibilities than the European novelist?

HO: Though I’m clearly influenced by a tradition of writers dealing with African consciousness, I think it’s more likely that I’d be placed on a different rung on the post-colonial writing ladder (if indeed I was going to get placed anywhere…) – basically it’s to do with uncertainties of language – I think and dream in English, and any words that I reach for in describing Nigeria are automatically and inextricably loaded with a sense of foreignness – ‘vibrant’, ‘colourful’, ‘hot’ – it’s so close to cliché that it’s embarrassing, and it almost suggests that I don’t even know what I’m describing anymore. A book coming from someone who thought in, say, Yoruba, would take all those adjectives as a given and either get past them and unravel new descriptions or just get right to whatever point they’re making. It’s that hesitancy and circling around the point that stops me from being qualitatively similar to the African greats like Soyinka, Emecheta, Achebe, Ola Rotimi.

I seem to have begun in a halfway niche that maybe writers like Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, though they handle it better, wouldn’t scoff at. Though social commentary of some form is integral to the dynamic of almost every novel, I don’t think novelists have any responsibilities outside of the honing of their craft; they obviously have responsibilities and concerns as people, but if these come above storytelling, it doesn’t work. ‘Concept’ novels are only interesting up until the point where the concept becomes clear – a major gripe I have with Dostoevsky’s blatant focus on morality and the mechanisms of psychological health in Crime and Punishment is that after Raskolnikov murders the old lady, which fulfils the concept, ‘what if a student entered into the act of murdering an old lady?’, I lose interest and have to struggle to finish. So, mostly I say, ‘If you’re writing about politics or sociology, kindly call it a politics or sociology book and not a novel.’ Arundhati Roy, whom I greatly admire as a writer, has made that distinction and is concentrating on using her writing skill to draw non-fictional attention to issues in India. ‘Concept’ novels really seem to interfere.

The LIP: Has your age been a help or a hindrance in getting published and/or getting people to take your work seriously?

HO: My age did become a somewhat cynical bonus selling point, and with good reason – a crazy number of books are being published every year. Couple this with the fact that readership inevitably decreases when films, plays and video-games are becoming stronger and stronger as industries, and it’s starting to seem like you need some kind of kooky trademark just to keep your head above water. Since there’s nothing else kooky about me, I guess age helped with Alexandra Pringle, my editor at Bloomsbury, who wanted to know what an eighteen year old would have to say. If you’re looking for a new and distinctive writing voice, it must be tempting to try and plumb our generation, who are (if they’re into that sort of thing) growing up with both filmic and literary imaginations in equal effect. In terms of general readership and critics, though, yes, the book is almost guaranteed attention, but people are bound to be more unpleasant about it than gracious. They question quality, (What has she read? How sophisticated is this going to be?) and they are more than likely to get horribly cynical and paint your publishers as monochrome ogres who’ve chained you to your desk and forced you to write like a bitch when you could be getting healthy, real-life material. Someone who interviewed me for a radio show told me that they’d been dreading reading The Icarus Girl because they thought they were going to have to contemplate the musings of a precocious brat. Luckily, they changed their mind a third of the way in, but obviously not everyone coming to the book will.

The LIP: What does multiculturalism mean to you? Jess struggles to get comfortable in a hyphenated world, do you think many ‘half and half’ children (TillyTilly’s words, not mine) feel that same pressure?

HO: Multiculturalism doesn’t really mean anything to me. I guess as a term it means embracing and integrating what was formerly ‘foreign’ into an eclectic framework that can then be identified as national culture, but I think at bottom it is very difficult to truly understand that someone from another culture, who dresses differently, may have a different skin colour and may speak a different language, is the same as you. It’s a big old fallacy.

The LIP: Where is Africa now?

HO: Africa is in a place where, alongside the urgent need for humanitarian aid to be found in Africa as a continent, people are beginning to recognise the immense talent that’s emerging from that intensely prideful, unembarrassed place.