The cartoon described here by Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah, in a 2019 interview with the BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, appeared in 1987, the same year in which a headline in The Sun newspaper, accompanying a photograph of the celebrated poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and activist, asked the British public: “would you let this man near your daughter?” The controversy instigated by the two newspapers would soon culminate in the withdrawal of the offer of a would-be historic Visiting Fellow Commonership in the Creative Arts that had been made to Zephaniah by Trinity College, Cambridge. As the two publications were to discover, however, and to quote Zephaniah’s 1985 poem of the same name, you “can’t keep a good dread down” (Dread Affair 24–25). A riposte to the racist coverage, in the form of Zephaniah’s television play, Dread Poets’ Society, was aired by the BBC in 1992, replete with the characteristic wordplay with which Zephaniah has earned the accolade of “Great Britain’s premier black oral poet” (Middleton, “Zephaniah”). The play, Zephaniah’s first, saw an electric storm transport the Romantic poets John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the lesser-known poet, better-known novelist Mary Shelley, from a seance at Villa Diodati to a Birmingham-New-Street-to-Cambridge train carriage occupied only by Zephaniah and a witless car parts salesman (Zephaniah and Stafford).

The etymology of “dread” is traversed backwards across the course of the thirty-minute encounter, embodied in the fact that, although the long-dead writers at first perceive Zephaniah with fear or apprehension, they come to regard him with awe or reverence. Of course, both meanings relate to the Rastafarian sense of dread to which the play’s title alludes: “dread or fear of the Lord; also, more generally, a deep-rooted sense of alienation felt by Rastafarians towards contemporary society” (OED).