This October a poem exploring the dark is expected and what could be more horrible than the prism of our reality? Welcome to a late Poetry Corner, where this month we feature Safiya Sinclair (1984-), best known for her award-winning memoir, How to Say Babylon (2023). Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica to a mother who cherished the English language and literature and a musician father who was a strict authoritatrian. She and her siblings were raised in the Rastafarian community, which was deeply traditional and patriarchial in it's practices. As the eldest daughter, Sinclair quickly became aware of the status of women and the inequality inherent in the community. But it was her mother's love of literature and poetry which gave her the space to dream and create in her own right. Sinclair wrote her first poem at 10 and continues to write in the same way she did growing up, in bed, the only place she had to herself growing up. She works by reciting the poem outloud, allowing the words and rhythm to find their own order and coalesce into the poem before writing anything down. So, I encourage you to read our poem outloud, as it was meant to be!
She and her siblings got scholarships through high school at a private school but after graduating, Sinclair's future hit a wall. How would her modest family get the means to give her a further education? She continued to publish poems locally, from her first at 16, in the Jamaican Observer, and she gained the attention of an older poet in Jamaica, who took her under his wing and opened his library to her. It would be 6 more years until a scholarship at Bennington College in Vermont would give her the opportunity to pursue her education and hone her craft abroad in "Babylon". Leaving her family and Jamaica behind made her feel more Jamaican than ever and arriving in a very white school made her feel her skin color in a way she hadn't before. As she writes in the essay found in the Bonus LInk #4 below, "Coming to America forced me to consider my blackness in a new light. Here, the world held me at arm’s length and highlighted all my differences as a strangeness: remarkable and invisible all at once. Being one of only four or five black students in the nearly all-white Bennington College cast a sharp spotlight on the actual site of my lingering exile—my blackness". But it was not only skin color but politics that made her an outsider once more.
Her arrival to the USA coincided with a massive rise in politically sanctioned social intolerance and white nationalism. And, ironically, after an impressive direct invitation from poet laureate Rita Dove to study with her at the University of Virginia to get her master's in fine arts in poetry, it was Charlottesville where this violence would explode in 2017. Experiencing a dislocation once more, she mined the rich seam of this experience, of adopting the language of the colonizer and exile, as many other Caribbean writers had done before her, to find her own voice. Sinclair's starting point was naturally Shakespeare, the father of the English language, and his late play, The Tempest, a play very much about colonization and language and the figure of Caliban, which captured her imagination from a young age. Her debut poetry collection, Cannibal(2016), took this theme of exile and went on to win numerous awards, inlcuding the Whiting Award in 2016 and the OCM Bocas Prize for Carribean Literature for poetry in 2017.
Sinclair is in the academic world, teaching in Arizona now, after gaining her multiple degrees and continues to write poetry. Indeed, the Bonus Poem is one freshly written this month! We expect more to come from this rising literary star.
"This is a tight, focused collection, and through her visceral language Sinclair paints the institution of white supremacy as not just an individualized phenomenon, but as a ruthless and menacing force."- Publisher's Weekly, reviewing *Cannibal
"I think I can write myself out of anything" - Safiay Sinclair, in "Between the Covers Podcast"
A Bell, Still Unrung
By Safiya Sinclair
She daily effuses
the close-mouthed
tantrum of her fevers.
*
Hog-tied and lunatic.
Born toothsome,
unholy. Born uppity.
*
Blue-jawed and out-order.
Watched her sculptor
split her bitter seam
*
with his scalding knife;
mauled through the errant
flesh of her nature
*
and hemorrhaged mercury,
molted snakeroot, a smoke
of weeping silver.
*
She, accused.
Sprung form the head
of a thousand-fisted
*
wretch or a blood-dark
cosmos undoubling
her bound body.
*
Vexed shrew. Blight of moon.
She, armory. Pitched-milk pours
from her gold oracular.
*
Bred in her nest a lone
grenade, prized, unpried
its force-ripe wound.
*
She, disease. Often bruised
to brush the joy of anything.
Zombic. Un-groomed.
*
Her night slinks open
its sliding pin. One by one
these loose hopes
*
harpoon themselves
in, small-ghosts alighting
at her unwhoring.
*
She, infirmary.
God's swallowed
lantern, tar-hair and thick.
*
Her black torchstruck.
A kindling stick.
No sinkle-bible fix
*
to cure this burning.
Shrill hell. Jezebel.
*
Isn't it lonely.
Copyright © 2016 by Safiya Sinclair. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
Some things to discuss might be the play on words and images that conflate race, womanhood and the strange. Which lines or ideas catch your attention? Do you get a sense of an almost Shakespearen description alongside the violence? Is there something of the witch in there, as well? As I mentioned, this is one that is delightful to read outloud. The words ring and rhyme together, stanza by stanza. I would be remiss if I didn't share Sinclair's own words on this poem:
"Since the invention of the first word, the female body has been a constant site of fear and violence, in religion and myth, in our common language. So many words and phrases in our daily vernacular are pervasive weapons struck against womanhood, aimed to demean and diminish. By going back to the source of this language and examining its violence, both linguistic and literal, both historic and modern, and by inhabiting some of the ways the female body has been seen as monstrous and dangerous over time, I had hoped to subvert these sinister ideas. Instead, I found myself wandering alone in a more treacherous poem—coming to the stark realization that this body is the most overlooked body in the world—that being born a black woman is the original site of exile".
Are you familiar with this poet/author and have you read her work before? If you read the Bonus Poem, how do these theme of horror and fairytale contrast? Anything else to add? Just a reminder, as we reach the end of the year, if there is a special poem you would like to feature in Poetry Corner, just send me a DM!
Bonus Poem: Freshly written! Bluebeard
Bonus Link #1: Sinclair, being interviewed in 2017 by PEN Ten
Bonus Link #2: More poems on Sinclair's site
Bonus Link #3: An hour-long podcast, hosted by writer David Naimon, in discussion with Safiya Sinclair in 2017, on Between the Covers
Bonus Link #4: Sinclair writes an essay on Caliban for Poetry Foundation in 2016.
Bonus Link #5: Read an excerpt of Sinclair's memoir, How to Say Babylon
If you missed last month's poem, you can find it here