Whether it’s the celebratory verses lit in honour of the late dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, or a determination to counter the darkness cast by the flags flown like threats from too many of our lampposts, this year’s Cabaret for Freedom blazes more brightly than ever.
Indeed, it sets out its intent from the first, opening with a fiery reading from Zephaniah’s own composition We Refugee with its rhythmic insistence that “we can all be refugees, we can all be told to go”. It invokes both Zephaniah’s fierce and tender spirit and a defiance in the face of a rhetoric which seeks to capitalise on division.
Flanked by Stanley Chow’s portraits of secular saints, including the likes of Nina Simone and James Baldwin, a succession of poets declaim their gospel from the altar and pulpit of St John’s, their congregation representing the true extent of the broad Mancunian church. Throughout, the generosity of poets is very much in evidence; the support with which the more seasoned versifiers greet the precocity of their fledgling counterparts ripples through their finger snapping and applause, only to be returned in waves.
In fact, the neophytes, members of the Young Identity collective, earn their reception with performances that belie any debutant nerves. Maya Chowdhury, chiming with Zephaniah who declined the tainted reward of an OBE, is not the only poet to repudiate Empire’s legacy of slavery and exploitation, but she does so with especially pithy disgust, trashing the presumption of the honours system as “poison presented as prize”.
Cabaret for Freedom. Image courtesy of Manchester Literature Festival.
David Okodeh, on the other hand, engaging directly with Zephaniah’s biography, shifts shape through a verse that tricks and trips, wrong-footing the audience with a salvo of forced rhymes before moving with virtuoso versifying into words that slip into, and out of, Zephaniah’s own stream of consciousness. In doing so, he sheds the skin of youthful promise, revealing himself as a poet already fully formed.
Among the more established performers, J. Chambers, together with The Redemption Sound, is afforded the time to grow steadily across two sets, which build from poetry to which the three-piece accompanying J provide a rhythmic setting to more full-blown songs, inviting a participative call and response. Very much in keeping with the evening’s theme, J resists those who would rule by setting the uninformed against the unprivileged, emphasising the importance of “not speaking to difference, but speaking to change” while iterating the simple, powerful truth that “the country was never theirs to take back”.
Within such scintillating constellations of talent, Salena Godden somehow contrives to shine bright as Sirius, or – in the encroaching darkness of the seasons beyond Samhain – like a guiding light that offers the assurance of the year’s rebirth. A fine poet, with the knack of unpicking simplicity to embroider it anew, Godden’s greatest gift is arguably her ability to convey love, not with the passivity of platitudes but as a conviction which is actively lived; a passion with the power to eclipse even hate’s most enduring shadows. Declaiming from her collection Pessimism Is For Lightweights, her empathy is captivating, as are her admonitions, her bruised rebuke that “it’s silence that is complicit, it’s apathy that hurts us all”.
Unafraid, unashamed of vulnerability, the depth of her feeling connects with the audience, kindling what’s common; the seas that they’ve crossed to be here, the toil that it’s taken to find a home, and the words that too often go unsaid. Through her ministry, on an inky blue evening on Stretford, the 2025 iteration of Cabaret for Freedom puts the city in authenticity, the unity in community.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Main image Cabaret for Freedom, Salena Godden. Image courtesy of Manchester Literature Festival.
