Levi Tafari interview transcript
family background
"My name is Levi Tafari, which means a creator of unity. The name Levi means unity, Tafari means creator. I was born 1960, June the 24th of that year. I was born the Toxteth area, Sefton General Hospital on Smithdown Road, which at the time was Toxteth, now I think it's Wavertree. I was brought up round Granby Street, went to Granby Street Primary and Junior School and then went on to Arundel Comprehensive.
My family came from the island of Jamaica, arrived in Liverpool around 1957 and I was born in 1960. My sister Sheila, she was born and raised in Jamaica with my grandmother, she came to Britain around 1967 and for me this was really exciting.
I had uncles and aunties who had come over, my mum's sister, my aunty Stelma, she came over in 1954 and she married a Ghanaian seaman. They managed to buy a house at that time, which I don't know how they did it because at that time black people couldn't even get accommodation in terms of renting a room in other people's houses, but they somehow had their own house on Jermyn Street and she sent for my uncle Cooper and then my mum came. Mum and dad came later on and settled in her house and as things go they ended up moving out and getting a place, and then I was born."
living in Toxteth
"Because of my experience I probably wouldn't live in another part of Liverpool, because I know people who have moved from this area and gone out and have just faced hell. It's always been a conscious decision to live in Liverpool 8, it's like sanctuary you know. And you know, I feel a part of the city, but I feel I don't feel confined to it if you know what I mean. I'm not saying that I'm bigger than the city but my horizons go beyond the kind of geographical boundaries of Liverpool.
As a youth I used to like going down to the Pier Head and going on the ferries and just sailing across the river, and there used to be river cruises where the Caribbean society would have a river cruise in the summer, and then they started having the Jamaican Independence Dance on the river cruise, you know. Because I travel so much, I like the idea of being able to get away and escape, so I quite like going down by the river and looking at the boats sail and stuff, yeah.
My hopes for my family is that they can live a good quality of life, be culturally and spiritually aware, know themselves and can live in a society that doesn't, as Martin Luther King said, doesn't judge them on the colour of their skin but on the contents of their character."
music
"My dad had a big collection of Ska and Blue Beat records and then reggae, because my dad used to buy records all the time. And my mum used to complain that dad was spending all the housekeeping on records, which he wasn't, but it appeared that way, and he had a great collection of music. We were listening to people like Desmond Decker, you know, and the Scatterlites and stuff, the Rastafarian stuff.
That just opened up a new chapter and turned on a light for me and I started questioning the society that I grew up in because, although I see myself as being British on one level, I see myself as being tri-cultural in that I have an African root - because I know on both sides, my mum and my dad's sides, that there's a Ghanaian link . Yes so I see myself as being tri-cultural in that I've got a Ghanaian root, with a Jamaican heritage, and a British experience - so although I felt a part of Britain, Britain didn't accept me. So I felt on the outside, on the fringes of the society.
So when I heard this Rastafarian music and talking about Babylon and chant down Babylon and oppression, I could relate to it, because we had skinheads chasing us at one end of the street to the other. And then we had the society kind of giving you the run-around and not accepting you as being who you are.
We had to assimilate into the society even though we were born and raised here but weren't seen as being a part of it because of skin tone, basically. Other Caribbean families whose children hadn't become Rasta, who felt a little superior because their kids didn't go that way, used to criticise and say, "Oh, you know, we see Levi walking with a big black Bible under his arm preaching Rasta, when he should be doing something constructive!", and they didn't realise that I was going to college and they weren't Bibles under my arm that was my coursework, you know."
career as a chef
"I was fascinated by travel as a result of going to Jamaica as a youth and I wanted a profession that anywhere I went in the world you could do that profession. And because I was thinking, if I did travel and I liked the place I could settle down, it wouldn't be a problem getting a job. So I thought, what would be the best job to do? And I thought well catering, because people have to eat. So I decided to go in for catering and I did a general catering course with the emphasis on classical French cuisine.
So I did a 2 year course at Colquitt Street technical college and passed with a distinction, did really well, I was well into it. I could cook before, because as a youth growing up, whenever mum would cook something she would call us into the kitchen and she would show us, "And this is how you make fried dumplings" and she'd show us how you knead the dough and how you shape them and how long you fry them.
We used to always have soup on a Saturday, Caribbean, like hot pepper soup and mum would show us the different ingredients, cayenne, cocoa, all the various ingredients. So, I could cook. And my mum was a good baker because at the time, during the kind of mid 60s to maybe the late 70s, my mum used to make the wedding cake for Caribbean people that were getting married, and she was a good cake decorator so she had that experience that she passed on to us of baking cakes. Caribbean cake with the rum in it, so all of that stuff I could do before I went to college, so when I went to college it was a doddle, it was just learning the theory.
Yeah, I sailed through college and then got a really good job in a place called Staff House, which was like a private club and we used to cook for dignitaries that came to Liverpool."
writing poetry
"Well I actually got my interest in writing through listening to Jamaican DJs and the way they used to chant and the things they'd talk about, and then I'd read one or two books. I read some of Langston Hughes' poetry. I was introduced to the Last Poets, the dub poets didn't come until a little bit later. The first poet I knew about on the dub scene was Linton Kwesi Johnson and it must have been about '77 when I first come across Linton and then I came across Benjamin Zephaniah around 1980-1981 and we became good friends, you know.
But at that time I just wanted to express myself because I felt whenever we, as black people, where being represented by anyone else it was always in a negative derogatory way, so I wanted to show us in a positive light. So hence I started writing, and I was writing in isolation at the time. And I remember showing some poems, one to a cousin of mine and a couple of people around the area, who I thought might be interested in what I was doing and they just laughed at me. They just ridiculed and thought, 'Who do you think you are writing poetry?' 'Black people don't write poetry, are you queer? Are you gay?' 'Are you this, are you that?' And all these stereotypical labels they threw at me that were associated with poetry. And to me they just didn't have the overstanding of the power of words, and as I've just used the word 'overstanding', which means we look above something and see it in its entirety, than going underneath it and not seeing it properly.
So with those kind of concepts I started writing and the stuff that I was writing was quite strong politically and culturally and people started to take notice after a while."
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