An Explication of Benjamin Zephaniah’s “The SUN”

This poem dramatizes a conflict between the speaker’s and the poet’s intent, particularly as the conflict relates to an endorsement of Britain’s daily tabloid paper, The Sun. Benjamin Zephaniah, the poet, deliberately creates a persona that is unreliable, unlikeable, and ignorant ; therefore, when the speaker praises The Sun, we instead question its value as a reliable source of information. This use of irony is effective because while the speaker is earnestly disclosing the socio-political beliefs he holds, he is unconscious of the reader’s increasing disgust, and he indirectly condemns the very newspaper he is endorsing by asserting repeatedly that The Sun is responsible for his ideology. The attack by Zephaniah on The Sun is a response to a notation in the paper “that in his youth Zephaniah had been sent to an approved (‘reform’) school and done time in prison on burglary charges. The poet’s opinion of The Sun is clear in the poem of that title…” (Zephaniah 895).

The speaker begins the poem by stating, “I believe the Blacks are bad/The Left is loony/God is Mad”, which immediately impresses upon the reader that he is a white conservative, and his blanket statement that “women should cook” later in the poem suggests that he is male. He says, “This government is the best we’ve had… I am friendly with the state,” which suggests he also holds power. Perhaps he is given these characteristics because Zephaniah believes the majority of people who hold these worldviews in England, and those at whom this poem’s verbal irony is aimed, are similarly white conservative males who enjoy a comfortable position in the social hierarchy.

These comments, along with “black people rob” and “Jungle bunnies play tom-toms” also indicate that the speaker is a racist bigot with misogynistic tendencies. He mentions black people three times in the poem: they’re “bad”, “jungle bunnies”, and they “rob”. These are all vague negative stereotypes of black people as a threat, but which are irrational and based on ancient fears of cultural differences, or possibly fear of retaliation for centuries of oppression by those in power. Because he is reading The Sun every day, which is evidenced by the refrain of the poem, it is also safe to assume that the speaker is a British citizen. When the speaker, as an Englishman, says that “Every Englishman loves tits/I love Page Three and other bits”, he is revealing his misogyny by unapologetically viewing women as sexual objects, not to be respected but ogled. The use of the vulgar “tits” instead of “breasts” reaffirms this. Also revealed is the content of each edition of the paper; if there are pictures of women with cleavage showing daily on “Page Three and other bits”, then that leaves room for less news reporting. Perhaps this also indicates what motivates him to read the rest of the paper.

As a bigot, the speaker is intolerant of differing ideologies, so when he says, “I believe Britain is great/And other countries imitate”, he is professing seeming patriotism, which in itself is innocuous, but with his other statements about being “not too keen on foreign ones” and not liking “Russian spies”, his “patriotism” melts into nationalism. The use of “I”, “we”, or “me” twenty-three times in this short poem also indicates the level of narcissism and egocentric thinking to which the speaker has risen. Not all Russians are spies, as he seemingly suggests, and Zephaniah ironically inserts into the mouth of the speaker, “But we (England) don’t have none (spies)/I love lies.” The speaker couldn’t consciously say that he loves lies, because it is evident that he does not know his irrational categorizations of people are lies, nor could he agree to being “blinded by The SUN,” as he asserts at the end of the poem. If he was aware of the “damaging” effects of his beloved newspaper, he wouldn’t be asserting so boldly that he reads it every day. This is how the reader becomes aware of the conflict between the speaker’s intent, and the poet’s intent. Zephaniah uses irony to emphasize the social or political stances of which he does not approve. In a sense, the reader can infer what he supports by what the speaker says he himself doesn’t. “Zephaniah does not employ such reversals of perspective and expectation simply to amuse or disorient his readers, but from awareness that such shifts in perspective are needed to emphasize how British, particularly English, society regards itself” (Cross).

When the speaker says he “really do(es) love Princess Di” and speculates on whether or not she reads the same newspaper he does, Zephaniah is pointing out how people who read gossip are addicted to fabrications and stories (remember the speaker “love(s) lies”) ,and feel a false connection to the celebrities whose stories take up more space than newsworthy news itself. The speaker declares, “Don’t give me truth, just give me gossip/And skeletons from people’s closets”, showing that this speaker is meant to come across as a busybody who isn’t reading the newspaper for the news, but rather for the pleasure of coming across a scandal or celebrity story. Further evidence of his disinterest in current events is his nonchalant “But aren’t newspapers all the same?” This illustrates how small his influx of information is, as he limits himself to only reading The Sun.

As the poem progresses, the speaker becomes bolder in his assertions. At the beginning of the poem, he says, “I believe” before making a sweeping generalization. Towards the middle of the poem, he drops any pretense of believing his statements are merely opinion, and audaciously and hyperbolically pronounces, “Every poet is a crook… Every hippie carries nits…Every Englishman loves tits”. This might be an indirect warning to readers of The Sun, or of any one source; perhaps they, too, might make the progression from one who allows difference of opinion to one who cannot delineate their own opinion from inarguable fact, if they continue to absorb information from only one source.

There is no specific meter to the poem, although it has a rhythm similar to a nursery rhyme, which might suggest a judgment passed on the speaker; the simplicity of the structure echoes how unconcerned the speaker is with truth and how childlike he is in his formulations of opinion. The rhyme scheme is also simplistic; every line in each stanza rhymes with one another, with no diverting from the pattern. This could be representative of the speaker’s unoriginality and inability to think creatively, with each line merely repeating the pattern of the one before it, and also to recall how uneasy the speaker is with all things foreign to himself.

The poem ends with the speaker saying, “I wanna be normal/And millions buy it/I am blinded by The SUN.” Perhaps these are its most effective lines. With such an ignorant and unlikeable speaker, it is horrible to imagine this speaker being one of millions who hold the same intolerant worldview for the same major reason: reading a propagandistic news source, or reading only celebrity gossip that promotes ignorance of more pressing issues. It is in these lines that we see that the speaker is meant to be representative of a large portion of the population who do not think critically (“I am told—so I don’t need to look”) and look to the media to cue them for what ideologies to uphold. If the speaker is “normal”, and “millions buy it” (both the newspaper and the propaganda it purportedly contains), then the reader is prompted to consider action. That action can be merely searching for a more credible source of information than The Sun (if Zephaniah is deemed to be a credible source of information himself), feeling the responsibility to prompt others to research from where their information is coming, or to rely upon more than one news source for relevant and factual news reporting.

Works Cited
Cross, Jasper. “Benjamin Zephaniah.” Twenty-First-Century “Black” British Writers. Ed. R.
Victoria Arana. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 347. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 9 June 2010.
Zephaniah, Benjamin. “The SUN”. Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Ed.
Keith Tuma. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 898-99. Print.