October Feature: Safiya Sinclair

We are proud to have Safiya Sinclair as our featured artist of October!

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award. ​ Sinclair is the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and was the winner of the 2015 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. ​ She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Our features editor Nicholas Nichols sat down with Sinclair a week ago. Read below what they had to say.

---

Q: What was the inspiration behind Cannibal?

I’ve always lived with and tried to make sense of the landscape of experiences of the poems in Cannibal, and I didn’t know it was all meant to come together this way until I first started putting the poems together as a manuscript, when it all clicked – when I found the etymology of the word “cannibal,” as I was doing research on The Tempest, and I was thunderstruck – this idea of savagery, of being barbaric, of this vital part of selfhood being defined by another. I wanted to redefine that self and this idea of savagery as it relates to the Caribbean.

Then it just came together in this wonderful way that made it apparent that this is what the book was always intending to be. Once the poems started to be placed next to each other and on top of each other, I saw that they were already speaking back to each other, back to history, back to exile, and it all made sense that the book was called Cannibal.

Q: So you didn’t originally set out with the idea, I’m going to write from this linguistic… excavation of the word. It was doing the work in writing the book that you realized that the poems spoke to it. How long did the process of writing and then editing the book take?

Most of it was written in my MFA program at UVA, and this was my final thesis while I was at UVA. I had been writing poems about homesickness, being away from my family, being cut off from the language and culture, while also being in this strange place in Charlottesville, where people are weirdly obsessed with Thomas Jefferson, and there’s all this racial tension that no one really spoke about while I was l living there. And I thought, okay, it’s impossible for me to ignore these things, and the best way for me to make sense of them was to write them down.

So through this process of writing through or against history and rootlessness, I was writing poems that were thematically similar, talking about different types of exile: linguistic exile; exile of the womanhood, of the Black body; but also this exile of being in this foreign place and trying to make sense of that. I think that was always the narrative thread in the book. And then The Tempest has always been a part of my education and my background, as a Calibanic figure loomed over everything. I kept coming back to this play. When I was first organizing the manuscript, I realized that I wanted each section to have a header that was spoken by a character from The Tempest, then a last section giving Césaire’s own recreation of the last word. At this point, the book had a separate title – the title of one of the poems in the book, even though the manuscript always began with the etymology of “cannibal” – but I realized very quickly that no, actually, the book is called Cannibal and this is why.

And from then on I wrote maybe ten new poems with the idea in mind that okay, I know the focus of this book – how it’s all come together – this is what it’s about. And there were several poems that were written with that idea in mind of confronting savagery, confronting these historical narratives that have been placed on the Black body and the Black experience and Black history.

Q: What does it mean to you to be Caribbean, to be Black, to be female-presenting, to be a poet within the context of today’s culture? What are some of the struggles that you have to go through?

Do you mean American culture? I came to America for the first time ten years ago, when I started my undergrad at Bennington College. And that was a struggle because it was such an alien place and it was such a white place and when I came to Bennington I was maybe one of four Black students in the entire school. Period.

So, very quickly, I had to consider my Blackness in a different way than I had in Jamaica. It was having no choice but being cast upon this very white place. White landscape, white people. I was thinking about it the other day. I read one Black author in my entire time in undergrad.

Q: And who’d that be?

That was a short story called Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. It’s a one-page story.

I went back through my transcript and my courses recently. I was thinking about it because I always felt like there were these missing points of my education where I had to fill in myself, where I had to read these Black authors, where I had to seek out Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Why didn’t I encounter them in my education? Why wasn’t I given a chance to write essays about them or do final papers about these authors who are so important to who I am as a writer and where I’m going as a writer? So certainly that was a struggle because I always felt like an outsider, and there wasn’t anyone there to really understand that idea of being an outsider and being exiled by this strange place and by this strange culture and society. For me, that was a hard thing to deal with.

I don’t know if you’ve read my essay that I wrote for the Poetry Foundation where I talk a little bit about my time at Bennington. It was there for the first time I realized why exactly I was writing.

I was in this workshop and I turned in stories that included Jamaican patois, stories and poems was about Jamaican folklore, Jamaican experiences. And I just remember getting my papers back and seeing comments written across the page: “Can you write this in English? Can you say this in English?” and I just thought, what?

That for me was a very important moment where I was like, okay, no, because my work isn’t going to be defined by you, by the other. I am going to make sure I renarrativize my own history, and I know why I’m writing this, and I’m not going to stop writing it.

I think that until I got to USC, my life in academia has been confined to very white spaces. In Charlottesville, I was the only Black poet in the program at UVA. So it was me and Rita Dove, the two Black poets.

Q: That’s good company!

Not bad company, right? Like, is this real?

And then you sort of realize – who built the rotunda? Who built the columns? Who built this university where everyone is so obsessed with this heroic Thomas Jefferson idea, this unimpeachable Founding Father idea? You realize that it was built by slaves, and then someone discovers this slave quarter bricked off in the student dorms. There is history here that no one is talking about.

The students call Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” I find out they’ve done all this redlining, so the Black population’s been pushed out to the fringes of Charlottesville. There were times when I didn’t interact with another Black person for months unless I went to a Black hair salon or took the free trolley.

It was a very strange thing. One time, a UVA frat sprayed a racial slur on a public bridge. “We don’t want any n––– here.” So this is where I am. This is what is going on. I felt two things; [the first was] very homesick. This isn’t my country, my culture; these aren’t my people. I should go home. But also it heartened me: I’m here, I’m writing, and why not use this voice to say something about what I’m experiencing now, here, in the US?

The interesting thing that you said is you didn’t really have to understand or define your Blackness until you came to the US. If I may go further – what have you been using to cement your Blackness in your work? What books, poems have you been in conversation with? Which poets have been helping you with the language to create this dialogue? In short: can you list the people in your literary family tree?

James Baldwin. Audre Lorde. Lucille Clifton. Aimé Césaire. Kamau Brathwaite. Those are some of the names that immediately come to mind, poets who’ve anchored and rooted me, who I’ll return to again and again.

As for other poets on my family tree, I can certainly say Plath. She was the first poet I read who, when I was very young, excited me about the possibilities of poetry. How many complex and feverish ways could you say a thing? That for me was very exciting and at the heart of my poetry when I was young. I also like [Federico García] Lorca, and believe very strongly in the fire and the vital necessity of duende.

I’m also inspired by a lot of [visual] artists. Frida Kahlo is a big influence for me. Caravaggio. Wangechi Mutu, whose art is on the cover of Cannibal, really inhabits my poetic dreaming. If I could dream up a visual representation of what excites and incites me poetically, it would look like the work of Wangechi Mutu.

Q: There are very specific floral and animal references in the book. Do you fancy yourself an amateur zoologist or botanist?

No, I’m just a poet! [laughs] I have a very close relationship to the nature of my island, and of the places I grew up. My siblings and I were always out in the bush; we were always nursed and inspired by the landscape. For me, it’s part of the tropics and of the jungle of my work. I want it to be populated by all these feverish blooms and plants and vines, because in Jamaica nothing grows politely. I want to make sure that’s reflected in the world I’m building in the poem.

Q: If you could describe home in only using your sense of smell, what would it be?

Hmm… it would be the salt-sea smell on the wind. It would be the dark red ginger-root smell of sorrel. It would be petrichor – the smell of the earth when it rains. There’s a specific smell of the fertile dirt of home in the rain.

Q: What has been one of the greatest lessons in poetry that you’ve experienced so far?

Know who your reader is. Know yourself. Don’t listen to people who say senseless, narrow-minded, uninformed things. If you just think about it – someone at a very early stage in my writing life said about Jamaican patois “Can you say this in English.” That’s something that could very easily change the trajectory of how someone feels about their work, and their confidence in their work. We can just trace that line straight back to a year and a half ago, when a white male professor at USC told me that my work has too much of a female conceit, that I should be aware of alienating male readers and not do that anymore. I think it’s knowing when to stop listening, and knowing yourself. It’s not advice, but [a lesson] against advice.

Q: Through that process, who has been your mentor here in America?

When I first came to the US, I studied with Mark Wunderlich at Bennington. And Mark was very useful in my early education as a poet in that he assigned me a lot of contemporary poetry that I didn’t have access to in Jamaica, because you can’t just walk into a bookstore and buy poetry there. I got to play catch up, essentially, and read all of this contemporary poetry. Not Black poetry, but, you know.

He assigned Autobiography of Red, and for me, that was a transformative moment in my history as a poet. That book showed me that there were so many possibilities I hadn’t considered for I could do with my work, possibilities that involve mythification, voice, and breaking the form. We did a class on German poets and I read Celan, and that was also useful. Celan is another one of my favorite poets.

When I left Bennington, I was mentored by Rita Dove, which is everything a girl could ask for in life! So kind, so giving, so intelligent. She just knew how to get inside of a poem, articulate its aims, and let you know exactly how you could make it better. I was very lucky that I got to study with Rita when I did. I also learned so much from Gregory Orr, especially the power of lyric and of poetry as survival. Most of Cannibal was written in that two-year period at UVA.

Q: How would you describe your poetics?

A fevered, undulating lyric.

Q: Do you envision a particular audience before you write; why or why not?

I think it’s very dangerous to start with an intended audience. I think the poem has to start from a pure, unmediated place in the initial stages. In editing, you can figure out the rest. Sometimes, I like to write back to this disheveled God figure… I see God as a pathetic, patriarchal figure that’s disheveled and tattered. And sometimes I like to speak back to him directly. Sometimes I can quickly tell from the tone of a poem that it wants to confront this invented God figure, that pathetic patriarchal icon.

Q: What are your biggest concerns for art in the future?

I am concerned with poets moving away from honing a craft and neglecting music and lyric. I understand that people don’t have to write in form or adhere to lyric. They want to be more plainspoken and I think that’s a good impulse. But the poetry has to work on the page and also out loud. It has to inhabit both spaces deftly. And I think that to get to that point, you still have to have foundations of artistry that make good poetry sing and take the top of your head off and set you on fire. I am concerned about a trend away from craft and rigor. You have to do the work to make good work.

Q: Advice for an aspiring writer?

I think the best thing to do is to always read a lot. Broaden your influences and your references. Build a personal lexicon. And not just read… I’m concerned when people only read their peers and their friends, because then it can be a very strange echo chamber that ends up producing something not quite interesting. Read widely, and definitely read outside of your peer group. Know the poets on your family tree, and know the foundations of poetry, even if it’s to speak back to or confront that. You still need to be able to have that foundation.

Q: What have you been reading lately that’s moved you?

I have been reading a lot of prose, actually. Right now, I’m reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. It’s so good. The language is so good. I recently read The Black Maria, and that was very moving and inspiring, especially the long poem at the end of the book. That was so remarkable. I’ve been reading Keats’ Odes with wonderment. I’ve recently reread Ariel – Plath – for a class that I’m doing. It’s easy to forget the astonishment of the book as a whole. I have the touchstone poems that I have committed to memory, like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103°” – but then I go back through the other poems, and some of them are just so good they clutch you by the throat, and hold you there; so I’m rediscovering some of the poems in Ariel.

Q: Feelings on receiving the Whiting Award, and on your first full length? (Congratulations!)

Panic. When’s the next disaster coming?

No, I mean, I feel so lucky. It still isn’t something that’s sunk in. I know I was at the awards, I know I got the thing, but did it really happen? Nobody thinks this is going to happen, and then you get a phone call, and you’re like, “What?”

I don’t know. It’s not something I dwell on because then I start panicking, like, “Okay, something bad is bound to happen eventually. Surely these blessings are not normal – certainly not for someone like me, from a poor and ‘developing nation.’”

Q: I feel like a jerk asking this next question, then, but what are your plans for the future? Have you started on a new manuscript already, and if so, what is it about?

I’m working on a memoir about my childhood, growing up in Jamaica in a Rastafarian family. My father is a strict Rastafarian, so my siblings and I grew up in this very strange Rastafarian household, where we were very much outsiders to the larger Jamaican culture. I finally started writing new poems again, which I’m holding close before I start sending them away.

Q: If you couldn’t write poems what would you be doing?

I would probably still be writing! Writing plays, or writing fiction or something else. If I couldn’t write poems I’d be dead, Nicholas, honestly, I’d be dead. I laugh now, but it’s a sad truth.

Q: What do you want readers to walk away with when they finish Cannibal?

I want the reader to walk away with a new or better understanding of this experience of Black womanhood, of a Jamaican woman living in America. To be aware of the history of the Caribbean and the linguistic history that renarrativizes us and continues to haunt us. It’s important to excavate and confront our past, to know what it is and where it’s come from, the macabre tradition of naming and claiming a people. I think that’s an important thing to walk away with and be aware of; the history of sea and selfhood, how it makes a home while fostering a kind of exile.

I’d also like them to think, “That was beautifully said.”

Thank you for your time.

#featuredartist #interview #safiyasinclair #nicholasnichols