Ben Okri on poetry and politics. Plus: graffiti legend 10 Foot

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Ben Okri on poetry and politics. Plus: graffiti legend 10 Foot’

Lilah Raptopoulos
In June of 2017, just after news broke of the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, the writer Ben Okri got an unusual phone call. Ben is a novelist and poet. In 1991, he became the first black African writer to win a Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road. And the unusual call was from my boss, Alec Russell, the editor of FT Weekend and all of our Life and Arts coverage. Alec wanted to know if Ben would write something responding to the fire, which was devastating.

Alec Russell
And you just went home and you wrote this extraordinary poem in the night.

Ben Okri
Yeah, but you’re slightly playing down your role here because I’ve been worried about it. Didn’t know what to do about it. It was eating me up. And then you called and then you said, “Ben Okri, you did this great editor thing. Ben Okri, the world wants to hear your response to this tragedy.” And it was like another charge from above. It was extraordinary.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Alec and Ben chatting in our studio last week. They stopped by on Alec’s very last day as editor of FT Weekend. That Grenfell Tower poem took flight. It represented how many people in Britain felt. It was read out during the Labour party’s conference that year, which determines the party’s platform. Millions of people tuned into it on Britain’s Channel Four. And we are starting with Alec and Ben today because it’s actually pretty unusual for fiction writers and non-fiction outlets to work together this closely.

Ben Okri
I felt the weight of that responsibility that you very kindly and very wisely gave me, because if you had not asked me to do it, I would have written something, but it would have been of a very different kind, would have been more private, possibly even smaller. But the minute you said that you set me on a path to a kind of a . . . a new kind of public poetry. So I thank you very much for that great gift of the editor’s spirit.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Alec and Ben have worked together on a number of projects since then. Most recently in Alec’s last issue as editor, which is dedicated to art and culture in Africa. Today, we bring you their conversation, which is about what fiction and non-fiction have to teach each other. Then my colleague Miles Ellingham, comes on to introduce us to one of the biggest graffiti writers today. His name is 10 Foot.

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This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopolous.

Ben Okri
Grenfell Tower, June 2017. It was like a matchbox in the sky. It was black and lung and burnt in the sky. You saw it through the flowering stump of trees. You saw it beyond the ochre spire of the church. You saw it in the tears of those who survived. You saw it through the rage of those who survived. You saw it past the posters of those who had . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You’re listening to a recording of Ben reading that poem he ended up writing on Alec’s request. This video is almost 14 minutes long. In print, the poem spread across two full pages of the newspaper in very, very small font. Grenfell Tower was a moment of reckoning in Britain. The tower was part of the public housing system, and the people who died in the fire were mostly low income and not white. For years, residents had complained about fire safety in that tower and were ignored. And so Grenfell became a symbol of Britain not taking care of its most vulnerable.

Alec Russell
When I came in on that Monday morning, I said, we have to do something totally different. This is just such a shocking, shocking thing that has happened.

Ben Okri
Was it difficult to argue it?

Alec Russell
No. Well, I didn’t. I guess being . . . being the senior editor, I didn’t. I mean, ultimately no. But of course, you want the support and belief of your colleagues. And no, I think everyone thought, “Oh my goodness, this is just . . . this is what we should be doing. We should scrap all the plans that we had.

Ben Okri
I mean, it was a long poem. It took up columns and columns of pages. (laughter) I’d never seen anything like it. How do you find such a space in a newspaper?

Alec Russell
You just have to can a lot of stuff and you have to ring up lots of people and tell them “I’m really sorry”, but you know all that love and affection I’ve showered on you for this piece you’ve written. (laughter) But I meant to say, “Well, we’re going to run it next weekend and not this weekend.” No, I think that was the start of it, actually. And that was we’d met a few times before.

Ben Okri
And then we had a long conversation after I sent the piece into you, sent to the piece and you’d read it. We had a steamy conversation about, you know, what we’re going to do about certain lines.

Alec Russell
Yeah. You accuse me of censoring it. I was saying, “Ben, I want to publish this. But I have to be able to publish it without losing my job and losing the FT lots of subscribers. It’s got to work for both of us.” And you were very kind. You understood that ultimately it was important to get it published, and I don’t think I censored that much. I just took out one or two of the references on the revolution. (laughter).

Ben Okri
And but, you know, the funny thing is that the way poetry works, you took out the references to revolution, but the references to revolution are still in the poem.

Alec Russell
Yes.

Ben Okri
But indirectly . . .

Alec Russell
Exactly.

Ben Okri
. . . and much more powerfully for that.

Alec Russell
Yeah, exactly.

Ben Okri
And yes, I did. I can’t tell you the effect of it, the way it was spread around to people, the way it was quoted. I had people writing to me, calling me up saying I could never in my wildest dream have thought that the FT would do something so incendiary. Never been able to put the two things together in their minds. That was for me very fascinating. Very fascinating, because I think it’s much more powerful coming from where you least expected it. And I think that was the . . .

Alec Russell
Yes, I think that’s interesting.

Ben Okri
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ben loved working with Alec, so they kept going. And over the last six years, Ben has written about all sorts of things. About racism, about a 4,000-year-old Egyptian poem and a lot more. I’ve put links to some of my favourite pieces of his in the show notes. Ben was also eager to help Alec’s last project as editor of FT Weekend: last week’s Africa edition. Alec spent years reporting in countries across the continent and he wrote a definitive book about post-apartheid South Africa. So it was a natural choice for another collaboration, which includes an essay from Ben. And as the issue went to print, Ben asked Alec to reflect on his seven years in the role.

Ben Okri
I’m just fascinated by this. I mean, what interests me here is to see how you have, as it were, brought more of the cultural dimension into journalism, while bringing more of journalism into the cultural dimension. Was this something you always were fascinated by these, these two spheres of life because they intersect. But they are quite different.

Alec Russell
The two cultures. Yes.

Ben Okri
Yes. The two cultures. One responds to the world immediately, and the other responds to it in its own way, much more richly, but more indirectly. More imaginatively, more subconsciously.

Alec Russell
Well, I think I’ve had to learn. Actually I’ve had to learn. And also from our Arts editor and our Books editor, I’ve had to learn sometimes when to take the foot off the gas. And in fact, we’ve got some stunning, beautiful, thoughtful, clever writing celebrating the arts in Africa. Now, that is the more reflective school of writing. It’s not, you know, there’s no particular reason we’ve done that this week. We’ve just done it because it’s important and rather wonderful.

Ben Okri
But you see, I think it is also it is reflective, but I think it is also immediate because of the two ways in which journalism tends to reflect Africa. One which is that, you know, write about Africa when the disasters, coups and tragedies, troubles. Not enough about what is beautiful in Africa, not enough about its achievements, its creativity, its joys, its surprises, its playfulness. And I think both of them are news. I think both of them are real. Both of them are immediate. But we only tend to get the one side. And what is wonderful about what you’ve done on your last issue, and I want to ask you about, why you have chosen this is to celebrate Africa.

 Alec Russell
I wanted to end with a statement. And I wanted to remind our readers that we are a truly global publication. And I suppose one thing in my mind was that I have worked in different parts of Africa in my journalistic past, and I had always felt that there were these great creative forces that sometimes were briefly focused on, but too often weren’t. But I did need my conversation with you about a month or so ago. And your enthusiasm and support for me to think, “OK, let’s do it.” And then the next day I was in the office and I got all the editors together and said, “I’ve got this idea for a month’s time. Can we make it happen?” They will send for you, your last edition. OK, and off went (laughter) this blizzard of commissions and photographers travelling around the continent. And I thought, this is very special.

Ben Okri
That is very special. That is very special.

Lilah Raptopoulos
As the conversation wound down, Ben and Alec started reflecting on the other’s media. What has fiction taught Alec and non-fiction taught Ben?

Alec Russell
So one of the wonderful things that has happened to me, Ben, in my years as FT Weekend editor is that I’ve read less and less non-fiction and more and more fiction. And it’s not that I didn’t read fiction before. I did. But I have to say I’ve regarded it as a bit of an extravagance, a bit of an indulgence that the job of a journalist was to be immersed in the big issues of the time and in facts and in understanding more and more about them. So if you’re working in country X or country Y, you read every non-fiction book that comes about it and on it goes. And of course, there’s always more coming out because there’s always more big stuff that needs analysing. I have pretty much totally flipped in the last seven years and now very seldom read non-fiction. It’s got to be really quite a special non-fiction work for me to read it, and it’s either about something that I just know nothing about, I think I really should know about it, and I’ve turned to novelists and I tend to keep doing so.

Ben Okri
Why? But why? What have you discovered?

Alec Russell
Well, apart from if you pick the right novels, obviously the magic, the upliftment, the reflectiveness, the understanding of humanity, and the understanding of the sort of timelessness of humanity’s choices and predicament, I think that’s probably the main thing.

Ben Okri
That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. On the other hand, I’ve always found . . .  I mean, I trained as a journalist as a young man in Lagos, I was always going to be, thought I was going to spend my life as a journalist, because I was fascinated by that and by the things of this world. I’d begun reporting on things going wrong in my neighbourhood. Water tanks that were, you know, they had lizards in them that people drank and they fell ill. I just, you know, I was fascinated by facts, the things. At the same time as I was learning to write. And I find journalism very fertile for the imagination. I think the trouble with most of us novelists is that we could have an idea and we could wander off into that idea. But when you come up against the hard facts of the world, the imagination is never more empowered. And so I can see very much how Tolstoy was reading a newspaper one day, read the story of a woman who threw herself in front of a train, and the whole of Russia, the whole of Russia, its countryside, the beating heart of that great, enormous country just came rushing out of that single piece of newsprint, a single fact in a newspaper. The whole world was behind it when he imagined it, when he tried to make sense of it. That’s what fascinates me, that a fact can contain behind it a whole world.

Alec Russell
I’m certainly not, to be clear, renouncing an interest in facts . . .

Ben Okri
I know.

Alec Russell
... or journalism. I think it’s just that after some years now in journalism and being schooled in this way of thinking, where you’re trying, you are trying to understand everyone, and while you’re not looking for a false equivalence, that’s a disastrous route to go down. But you are trying to understand all sides of an argument or whatever. I find it just all the more refreshing to escape into the freedom of fiction.

Ben Okri
I don’t know if you call it the freedom. I call it the rigour of fiction, because to make up a world requires really precise edges. And the relationship between imagination and fact, between I mean, to understand, you talk about journalism and giving us an understanding of the world. But, you know, there’s two kinds of understanding. There’s understanding how things happened, but you know, why they happened and the emotional dimensions of why they happened. It’s fascinating. A lot of things that happen in this world can sometimes . . . sometimes decisions are made by leaders not because they were necessary, but because they had a stomach upset that day. How fascinating is that? That what seems so tangential can also be so powerful in the world.

Alec Russell
Ben, I want to close by asking you about something I read actually just earlier today. And it was about the future of the arts, addressing what has been discussed a bit in recent months, the massive recent decline in the numbers of people studying the arts, in particular English literature. And the article was sort of asking the question, “Well, should we care about this?” And I just wanted to ask what you thought.

Ben Okri
I think it’s a beginning of a cultural tragedy. It’s the beginning of the sowing of deserts in the heart and the spirit of the people, which we have to and we must reverse for one very simple reason. People think that the arts, that art is not functional. It’s not like engineering or law or medicine. And I say, “Well, you’re wrong.” Art is profoundly functional, like medicine, like engineering. And it’s functional in a very different level and on a higher plane. For the health, the mental, spiritual and psychological health of a nation. The art, literature, dance, music, painting give us an image of who we are right now. They give us an image of who we were. They give us an image of who we can be. Nothing else does it. It is the particular remit of art to deal with what is most profoundly human about us, what is most profoundly possible about our humanity. Even apart from that, the very fact that the art is deeply related to the spirit of a people who they are, that is related to the imagination, that is related to playfulness, and it’s related to the release from trauma. Only the arts and only artists and writers and poets and dancers and so on have the freedom to draw our attention to these things. And we diminish the art at the cost of diminishing the spirit of the nation. This is cannot be said strongly enough. Yeah, I think it has to be resisted, and I hope that you help to resist it, whatever you do in your future capacity.

Alec Russell
Well, I will. And I actually I was thinking as I was listening to you just then, I was thinking if anyone ever asked me, “So what is the foundational spirit of the FT Weekend?” We can just send them that little clip of you just now and say that’s what it’s about. Ben, thank you. Thank you for all our collaborations. There will be more under different guises, but also thank you for this conversation.

Ben Okri
Thank you.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Alec has been a true champion of us here at the FT Weekend podcast. The show just wouldn’t exist as it is without him, and we’ll miss him. The good news is he’s moving on to be the FT’s foreign editor, so we will find a way to have him on again. I’ve put links to all the pieces mentioned from this celebratory final special in the show notes.

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Unidentified speaker
Two, four, three. To watch the . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
My colleague, Miles Ellingham, lives in London. And he’s recently started noticing the graffiti that scrawled across this city in a totally different way.

Miles Ellingham
I used to listen to music on the top deck of the bus. I don’t do that anymore. I just look out the window. There’s this sort of amazing canopy of, you know, these, like, weird little hidden beefs and conflicts all around the city with people trying to outdo each other. And once you start to recognise them, it becomes quite addictive. I can see why people really like it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
He notices all of this because he spent about nine months on and off with a graffiti writer. His name is 10 Foot and he’s one of the most famous graffiti writers in London today. You may have seen 10 Foot’s tag mostly just says the words 10 Foot, and it’s on buildings and bridges and trains, not just in London, but in cities around the world. Once you see it, you kind of can’t unsee it. And for people who are part of this subculture that know a lot about graffiti, 10 Foot is revered. Miles has some friends in that world, and they love him.

Miles Ellingham
It’s a bit like they talk about graffiti writers like West Country farmers talk about their sheep. (laughter) And it’s sort of like 10 Foot is this sort of the way they talk about this man, this man who’s been everywhere, tagged everywhere as a thing in graffiti, where if you get your name out a lot, it’s called being up. And he’s is by far the most sort of up person they would talk about.

Lilah Raptopoulos
10 Foot is both up and also entirely anonymous, which makes Miles his time with him even more interesting. So I asked him to tell us about it. Miles, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Miles Ellingham
Hi. It’s great to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you recently wrote a magazine cover story that we loved. It was a profile of London’s most prolific graffiti writer named 10 Foot. And to start, I’m curious, just what interested you in graffiti? Did you have a personal interest?

Miles Ellingham
Yeah. I mean, when I was . . . I’m not close to this subculture. I’m not pro-graffiti as well, despite what some of our commenters would say. (laughter) But, you know, I, you’re always dimly aware of it, right, in the city because it’s sort of ubiquitous and it’s also used in sort of high-end consumerism, in hip hop, hop and covers and buying trainers and, you know, go to Urban Outfitters, you’ll see it all over the walls. But very little is actually known about the people that produce it. And the more I started getting an insight into this sort of weird, hidden subculture where people take this extremely seriously and, you know, can sometimes die doing it, the more I was sort of became fascinated.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I also just want to distinguish there’s a difference, right, between street art and graffiti writing. Like this isn’t Banksy.

Miles Ellingham
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So and I’m curious if you can help me describe the difference.

Miles Ellingham
That’s a good question. I’m like being the mouthpiece for this really, like, really important question at the heart of the whole thing is tough. But I said something 10 Foot said to me is he said that the main difference is that Wall Street artists add value to assets or property, things like that. Graffers or graffiti writers or taggers take it away.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Miles Ellingham
There’s a phrase, I think, sort of graffiti writers used to say . . . called doing damage, which means to get your name up. You’ve done damage, which sort of shows how they’re sort of approaching this. And there’s a whole lot of things that go with that. You know, if it’s legal, it’s not really graffiti. There’s even purists who might, you know, say that you have to steal all your equipment if you’re a real graffiti writer.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. In the piece, you bring us with you while you go with him while he steals spray paint from a local store, and then goes tagging. (chuckles) And then, you know, you went to a poetry reading of his. You know, you were like, kind of watching him go up on the rails, like, can you tell me how you felt travelling around London with him?

Miles Ellingham
I’ve never been on the UK track sides because if I did, that would have been a crime.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Miles Ellingham
But if I was to have gone on the track sides with 10 Foot, what I probably would tell you is that they’re this amazing sort of liminal, weird, void space where these sort of ruled by these sort of big mechanical whales that go through the city. And you have to sort of jump out the way to avoid. But it’s also incredibly dangerous because it’s just a space full of just these hidden, hidden wonders and hidden terrible dangers that can, you know, can kill you. The train tracks can redirect or you’re walking down them and your foot can get trapped. If you don’t free it, you know you’ll lose it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Miles, I’m going to ask you a question that’s pretty simplistic, but purposefully so. What is the point of it? (chuckles) Like, why would someone want to tag things, especially if they’re not considering it art?

Miles Ellingham
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if they know why they do it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Miles Ellingham
Some people will say that they do. Some people will come up with these sort of high-minded political reasonings behind what they do. Some people will talk about private property, and how it’s a commentary on that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Miles Ellingham
You know, I think that’s, you know, silly, I think, genuinely think a lot of them are just addicted to doing it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Miles Ellingham
Whether that makes it worse, you know, I don’t know. And it’s not something that people do maliciously. I mean, I must say, graffiti writers are a broad tent. You know, you some of them sort of the types of people you might refer to as sort of quote unquote, you know, “wrongins”. But some of them are, you know, people like Vamp, who was this very prestigious graffer who was turned out to be a 40-something account manager who worked in the City and had a family. (laughter) So I think what unites them, though, is this sort of sense of risk. And with inherent to that sense of risk is a sort of adrenaline high that you get from risking anything. I think there’s an element of addiction in that (inaudible) of habit.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Miles thinks that the other thing most taggers seem to have in common is that they really love their cities and they really love their cities’ trains. They know the rails.

Miles Ellingham
I remember walking with 10 Foot through Waterloo. I remember he once suddenly sort of as his eyes changed and he said, “Ah, come with me.” And we sort of ducked down the side street and got to this little fence and climbed over the fence and then sort of walked along to this little grate and was sort of standing on top of this grate looking down, couldn’t quite see what he’s pointing out. And he just said, “Look, look there. It’s a sleeping train.” (laughter) We sort of looked down and there was this . . . there’s this tube train sort of, he was right, asleep. And he’s I can’t go in there, but I just come here to look at the sleeping train.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Miles Ellingham
And there was something really tender and intimate about how he felt about this sort of an intense amount of anthropomorphization I think goes on between graffiti writers and the trains themselves.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You won’t be surprised to hear that the enemy of the graffiti writer is the cops.

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You also met with people on the other side of the brick wall, the British Transport Police, and it’s their job to intercept graffiti writers like 10 Foot and arrest them. And I’m curious what their perspective is like, I mean, it might be an obvious question, but why is it a problem to have people tagging stuff?

Miles Ellingham
Yeah, I mean, well, they’ll tell you quite rightly, is that, you know, it costs a lot of money to clean this stuff up. You know, that’s a big part of it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s hard to pin down exactly how much graffiti removal costs London. But according to the London Assembly reports, it’s around £100mn a year. The argument isn’t just about money, though.

Miles Ellingham
If you’re a train driver, you know, you accidentally run over a graffiti writer, so that’s going to be that’s going to be really traumatic. And, you know, some graffers, you know, write with acid on the side of windows so this sort of etches into the window and I was told by the representative from the British Transport Police that that can, you know, rub off on the hands of cleaners and then they can get burns from that. You know, it’s and it’s sort of also, I think graffiti is a strange one because unlike other subcultures like skateboarding or breakdancing, it’s sort of harboured this illicit psychic feeling about it. Part of their argument was, you know, it doesn’t look nice. It makes the place look degraded. It’s sort of twinned in the minds of most people with sort of antisocial behaviour and criminality.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, I really loved your piece, Miles, not only because it was beautifully written and a love letter to London, but because it made me love my city too. Like it made me love New York. And I think a lot about institutions and what makes something or someone an institution of a city. And this piece reminded me that, like, institutions aren’t just restaurants, you know, They’re also like things you don’t realise exist around you the whole time. The question it left me with is who does the city belong to? And I’d love to hear you reflect on that question a little bit, especially after writing the piece and digesting it and having it out in the world. Like who do you think the city belongs to? And has your opinion changed on that?

Miles Ellingham
I don’t know who London belongs to, apart from the people who live in London. I think at the heart of what 10 Foot does is a sort of critique about private property and things like that. I think there was a sort of interesting thing that when the piece came out, it was met with a lot of people who were really angry about it, who had this sort of anxiety about 10 Foot for tagging their stuff.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Miles Ellingham
Which I thought was quite interesting, because my main critique of graffiti is that the community doesn’t choose to have their playgrounds or whatever. Graffiti is not something that is not a democratic thing. There’s there is a sort of tenet in Britain that you don’t mess with private property. But I did find there was a certain, there was a certain sort of like funny sort of Freudian projection of like, “Oh, if 10 Foot ever comes to my house and sleeps with my wife, I mean, tags on my walls . . . “ I did think was sort of interesting. I did not, though, that’s an unwarranted anxiety. I . . . you know, I wouldn’t like it that someone drew in my house, but that’s not what I was depicting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, that’s interesting, Miles, because what it sounds like you’re saying is like the city belongs to, of course, the people that, like, we know belong to them and it belongs to the city government and the police and whatever. And then there’s people like these taggers who are doing something and in some ways countercultural in that they’re like, “No, the city belongs to us.” And then there’s the community of people who are like, “No, the city belongs to us. We don’t want this either.” And so there’s this tension of I mean, I guess the city just belongs to all of them. And all of, all we’re all trying to do is co-habitate.

Miles Ellingham
Yeah, well, I suppose what is amazing about graffiti writers is that they go to such dangerous lengths to do this thing that gets them no fame. No money. I know, I don’t risk anything to live in a city or to make my mark on it. Really, they do. And I think in some way, some part of me thinks that’s commendable. But also, I .. . you know, I understand people’s anxiety about it and why people don’t want it. And that makes sense, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Miles, thank you so much.

Miles Ellingham
No, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. There are links to everything mentioned today in the show notes alongside a link to a special discount for an empty subscription that is also at ft.com/weekendpodcast. I always find it the best deals. I’ve also put a discount link in there for the second annual US FT Weekend Festival, which is on Saturday, May 20th, in Washington, DC. It is quite a line-up.

We love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I am on Instagram and Twitter @LilahRap. I post a lot about the show on my Instagram. Also, if you really love the show this week, leave us a review. I know every podcast does that, but it really helps.

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I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team: Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Mollie Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. And a very, very special thank you to Alec Russell. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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