Last week, around the world, there were celebrations of the birth of the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, 455 years ago.
Though this was a special birthday celebration, each week you can join the literary fun and puns of #ShakespeareSunday. I enjoyed the explosion of tweets and wished that my dad, whose area of scholarship was Elizabethan drama, was alive to see his beloved Shakespeare on such a popular platform. My father, a black man with a white mom, was often questioned about his academic bent. He was a militant socialist, activist, and advocate for black advancement, and he would frequently be asked why he wasn’t studying black literary history. He responded to the queries by stating that Shakespeare had not only universal appeal, cutting across lines of class and race, but also important messages for those who count themselves as part of the oppressed classes in society. I wish my dad had lived to see and hear Akala, the black British poet, hip-hop artist, and scholar, who has used Shakespeare as a tool to reach out to new generations that are struggling to deal with questions of race, white supremacy, imperialism, and social class.
Like my father, Akala, born Kingslee James McLean Daley in 1983 in London, is a child of a black father and a white mother—and that circumstance shaped the man, and the black activist and artist he is today.
Akala is well-known in Great Britain and to global audiences as the founder and artistic director of the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company (THSC), which bills itself as “a music theatre production company aimed at exploring the social, cultural and linguistic parallels between the works of William Shakespeare and that of modern day hip-hop artists.”
In 2016, for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, MacMillan Education launched Shakespeare for Life in collaboration with THSC.
Watch Akala’s TED Talk:
When we here in the United States are embroiled in issues of race, class, and white supremacy, far too often it is an ethnocentric discussion, limited to our own borders and history. Yet across the pond there are similar struggles, as well as activists and artists who address and confront them.
Many of us here are unaware of black struggles in Britain and the formation of resistance movements there, including the Black Panthers. Recently, due to debates and conflict around Brexit, we have also paid much more attention to the earlier Windrush generation, who have had to face discrimination and deportation.
Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, was published last year to critical acclaim.
From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers - race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook. In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where we are today.
Covering everything from the police, education and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right, Natives will speak directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain's racialised empire.
Afua Hirsch reviewed the book for The Guardian.
Akala is at his best destroying the comfortable myths that are invoked by white fragility to downplay attempts to correct the historical record. Like the idea that slavery is really the fault of Africans for selling their “own people”. Or the claim that Britain should feel good about the fact that its historical conduct was better than that of the Belgians or the Nazis. “It’s true, but it’s a shit boast,” he writes. This, like other tropes so regularly wielded against people like him, and me – who have the audacity to critique Britain while being black or brown – are beautifully ridiculed in a series of bullet-point lists.
Akala makes it clear that he is not brimming with optimism. But reading Natives – witnessing the kind of disruptive, aggressive intellect that a new generation is closely watching – I can’t help but be just that.
Manners, aristocracy, freedom: all things we tend to think of as inherent British values. But, says rapper Akala, we are taught a distorted version of history which erases serious political struggle. That, he argues, is what really bought us the fragile freedoms we have today
Here is his interview about the book with British journalist and political activist Ash Sarkar:
Liberal broadcaster and podcaster James O’Brien held this absorbing conversation with Akala.
Rapper, poet and scholar Akala joins James O’Brien for a scintillating interview, in which they discuss two issues that run to the heart of modern Britain: race and class. In a breakneck hour of conversation, Akala picks apart many of the modern myths around gangs, street violence and black youth, looking at the ways these are perpetuated in the media and who benefits from perpetuating them, as well as looking back to the Windrush generation and the institutionalised injustices that led to the recent crisis. It’s an education.
I am not from the hip-hop or rap generation. Each generation builds upon the one before it, and yet there is a constant. There will always be artists, poets, and social critics who see clearly and use their gifts and craft to hold up a mirror to our ills, push us to reflect, highlight our joys and tragedies, and effect change.
IMHO, Akala is one of them.
I’ll close with one of his music videos: “Carried Away.”
The songs content was inspired by two forms of death, one being young people from poor backgrounds in the midst of one of the richest cities on earth killing each other for a whole host of reasons that I would argue are part of a larger structural violence... The other form of death was inspired by young working class soldiers (I wrote the song in 05 so Iraq was relatively recent) who think because of propaganda and nationalism that they are going to war for their country, only to find out they are actually fighting, killing and dying for banks and oil companies.
Lyrics
Another hearse roll up slow
Carry one more poor lost soul
Carry them things every single day
Coz it makes him feel safe
Coz he carry on them ways, screw face
Love the game, reppin' his estate
Talk tough look straight in his face
Carrying deep pain, self-hate
Carry fam, so he carry weight
It's logical daddy got carried away
Not married away, just didn't stay
This Coward carried his son to this fate
His boys carrying weight in a wooden box
Can't stand straight
They was getting outta the game
But look fate she don't wait
Now the woman in the front row, her face
Show no pain
But her brain went insane on the day the
News came
Stare into space, face numb
The boy getting carried, she carried 9
Months
[Hook]
When this world strip me naked, I turn and
I face it
And really believe I have the strength to
Change it
I'm crazy, it's blatant sometimes I get
Carried away
When this world strip me naked, I turn and
I face it
And really believe I have the strength to
Change it
Commentary:
Akala juggles consonants, vowels and meaning like a master in his song Carried Away. He sings the first line: ‘Another hearse roll up slow,’ with intensity, but the words maintain their funeral pace...
A warning about Akala’s video. It pulls no visual punches. I think everything in it is necessary, but if you want to hear the words without the images, there’s an older, static version here.
If you were not already aware of him, I hope this brief introduction will encourage you to explore more Akala.