Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.” Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Sinclair’s other honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, 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.

Greg McCartney: Hi Safiya, Thanks for being in the HU. I have to say that Cannibal is one of the most wonderful and one of the most powerful poetry books I’ve read in a long time so I’m delighted to have you in this issue. I read that you grew up in a strict Rastafarian household. It’s interesting that as coming from a working class, pretty much 100 per cent white Irish housing estate whilst we were familiar with strict or even fundamentalist Catholicism and Protestantism our only vague contact with Rastafarianism was through music which even though there were protest songs the ‘Rasta’ concept was kind of sold on TV as basically being about men smoking joints and being fairly relaxed about life in general. We knew next to nothing about it as a faith. Did that strictness and being part of a minority religion in a Christian country lead you to literature and poetry as a form of escape or even rebellion? Or did it perhaps fuel a sense of self that was outside of or opposed to the expected narratives or norms? You were perhaps the ‘other’ from a very early age?

Safiya Sinclair: My primary aim as a Jamaican writer I write is to shatter those shallow stereotypes of Jamaica and Rastafarianism that pervades the west. As a young woman, I found Rastafarianism, like most religions, to be stiflingly patriarchal, and while Rastamen are primarily concerned with being revolutionary conscious about black liberation, repatriation and social justice, they make absolutely no room for women in their rebellion. So very early on I felt voiceless in my household, voiceless in the spaces I was restricted to moving around in. Turning to poetry was the best way for me to cultivate a self, to express myself on the page, to make sense of the world that made no room for me, and to carve a space for myself there. I decided to grow a womanhood out of Rastafarian rebellion.

GMcC: I’ll try not to ask why you decided to become a poet but rather to begin by asking why you decided to become the politically and socially engaged poet you are? By that I mean some people use poetry to (if it’s even possible) try to maybe escape from the world as is. Did you always want to investigate what shaped the world and people around you?

SS: First I’ll say that I don’t see a separation between the poetic and political—the systems and histories that have led me to speak to you English, in the imperial language of the oppressor, is inseparable from a political act, an act of violence—so even if my work only examined flowers and birds, that would still be a political act. It seems urgent and imperative to me however, to interrogate the ruin of the western world that shaped me, and all its terror. It also follows that those poets who have a choice to “escape the world” through their poetry are inversely shaped by a certain kind of privilege that is also political. I haven’t inherited such a luxury. I grew up in a household where the history of the African Diaspora was a daily lesson, and where being socially conscious was necessary to our survival. So it is not so much that I don’t see the flowers and the birds, but that I must also ask who named the bird and who owns the flower garden. 

GMcC: Who were your influences as an emerging writer?

SS: My biggest influences as a young writer were Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Caravaggio, and Derek Walcott.

GMcC: Family shapes a person and history shapes family. Cannibal you point out in your same titled book derives from caribal which referenced the Carib people in the ‘West Indies’ who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from where we get the word ‘Caribbean’. Language is a traditional weapon of the colonizer. How aware growing up of this growing up? 

SS: In the Caribbean we are always aware of how weaponized language is. In Jamaica we have two selves—we have the English self, and we have the separate patois self—and we interchange between the two, code-switching between strangers and family. Between the alien and unknown versus safety and home. Jamaican patois itself was born in linguistic rebellion, as a way for slaves to freely express themselves while the slavemaster could not understand. Often in Jamaican schools speaking “perfect” English is encouraged, and patois is discouraged. So even now, we’re always negotiating our survival against the poison of colonialism, its persistent roots, and the language we use is either a weapon or a wound.

GMcC: Quite a bit of poetry seems eternal so to speak in that it could be written at any point in the last x number of years. You don’t really get a sense of the world from it. Cannibal feels very ‘now’ (to use a terrible expression). Though the patriarchy as well as racism and colonialism has lasted aeons your work perhaps draws the ghosts from the night and questions the myths and lies that the US in particular these days seem to be resurrecting. You mention in an interview that a poet can no longer stand idly by these days. What do you see the role of the poet in Trump’s USA?

SS: One of the things I wanted to explore in Cannibal is how ageless systemic racism, colonial violence, and oppression is, how far and wide the shadows of imperialism loom. I begin with Columbus, collide with Shakespeare, with Thomas Jefferson, and also interrogate present day America. Racism, sexism, misogyny, or fascism isn’t new or “now”—as I see it, I’m engaging with, and have engaged with the historical systems of western terror that are inseparable from the birth of “America,” inseparable from the violence of Charlottesville last year, the violence of Charlottesville three centuries before, violence of Charlottesville five years ago. Almost every place in the Americas is a place of violence. The poet’s role today is the same as a decade ago, or a century ago: to excavate the bones buried underneath the façade of freedom, to let us never forget who walked here before us, and died brutally and unjustly; we must speak their names. 

GMcC: Not to mention what seems to be a state sanctioned attacks on black people and women in general. You suggest perhaps an obligation on yourself as the writer to strike back: ‘The meek inherit nothing’. Would that be accurate?

SS: Yes, the Jamaican in me lives as everything in Jamaica was forged—in fire. That’s the language I speak, the language of a woman born in the rebellion of patois and the power of Rasta-poetics. This guides me to stand firm and topple any empire, any patriarchy. No radical change comes quietly or meekly. Like Peter Tosh says, “I’m a walking razor, don’t you watch my size: I’m dangerous.”

GMcC: Violence is pervasive in your work, particularly on that focused on the female body and mind and existing within and without the family. The bruises from your father for instance in Autobiography or even the verbal abuse from the Whatever girls in Elocution Lessons With Miss Silverstone. Is it easy to assimilate this into your work and maybe draw a positive power/response to it?

SS: When I face the blank page, I can only write what memory and (and alternately) hope direct me to write. I write the wounds of memory as a way of subverting all the violences that made me. My hope is to write the wound until I no longer have to write the wound, that by naming the trauma, by honing beauty as a weapon, I can build a better song for myself to sing.

GMcC: For me you take the ‘monstrous’ as your own to articulate your views on historical and contemporary racism and sexism. It’s interesting that you’d choose a character from Shakespeare, a writer that was co-opted by the establishment as being symbolic of British civilised values. Why Caliban?   

SS: What better character than Caliban—a native man whose mother’s magic is stolen, whose mother is banished from their island, whose land is stolen, who is then enslaved, and forced to serve the colonist, to speak his language. He is described as “monstrous” by the play’s Europeans simply because he is different. So Caliban has always been a figure of post-colonial identity and rebellion, for good reason. From The Tempest Caribbean writers make their own room to interrogate the imperial systems and violences mirrored in Caribbean history. What I wanted to do with Cannibal, and what I still want to do with forthcoming work, is to find some way to grow a womanhood out of Caliban, to reclaim all “monstrosity” as a vital part of our power.

GMcC: You studied poetry in the Southern States. I love the phrases you use like ‘two centuries thorns may break sudden bloom’ and ‘this taste of old blood on the wind’ from Notes on The State of Virginia II. We can identify with that over here, where in the North secrets of the ‘Troubles’ suddenly come to light or in the Republic mass graves full of dead babies are found. History is never far away. How did you feel living and writing in what maybe felt like an alien place?  

SS: Charlottesville was a strange place to live in—a place that still lived in the shadow of its terrible history of racism and segregation, while blindly ignoring the fact that the root of its ugliness directly originated from their founding father, Thomas Jefferson, who was a rapist and a slave-owner. How to ignore that the University of Virginia was built by slaves? That Monticello was built by slaves? That Robert E. Lee’s statue is still in the town centre, even now? It was impossible to live in such a place and not try to make sense of it the only way I knew how—to take an anti-colonial stance and use poetry to interrogate this terrible history and its lingering effects on the black psyche.

GMcC: It’s clear from reading Cannibal that you love of words and a fascination with their origins. You mention being told to ‘write in English’. Someone saying this assumes that their version of the language is the only valid one. You mentioned that actually writing in English made you uncomfortable as it was the language of the coloniser?  

SS: We live under the hegemony of English, just as people of colour in the diaspora live under the hegemony of the west. I speak in English because my ancestors were kidnapped, tortured, and suffered myriad brutalities as slaves under colonial rule. Like Caliban I speak in the language of the colonist against my will, and like Caliban, I hope to subvert and use that language to curse the oppressor. It is my hope to continue finding ways to fracture and reconfigure English to be my own, to be sung through this throat that knows patois, that knows folklore, that spits fire.

GMcC: Words have power. There seems to be a battle between facts and alternative facts in the USA at the moment which I supposed isn’t helped with the President is both a Twitter troll and a conspiracy theorist. It’s a question from an old guy I suppose but I always ask poets where they fit in in the age of the Internet and social media where abuse can be sudden and overwhelming particularly if you are female and have said what is perceived as the wrong thing?

SS: I’m not sure what you mean by “if you are female and have said what is perceived as the wrong thing,” but I’ve gotten very good at tuning out white noise.

GMcC: I loved the cover of Cannibal. One thing that often irks me with writers is that you read their book with maybe some powerful poems in it and then you wonder why they’ve put a nice bit of an abstract painting or the like on the front that has no relation to anything other than looking pretty. For me it drains the life from the poems. A book to me is a curated space so the front is vital. How did you pick Wangechi Mutu? 

SS: I absolutely love and admire Wangechi Mutu and I find her work so powerful and so closely concerned with the same themes that interest me as a poet. I already knew that I wanted cover art by a black woman artist, and once I saw this piece of Mutu’s I knew it had to be the cover of Cannibal. Unfortunately many presses do not give poets the power to pick their covers, and I was terrified this might happen with me, so I wrote an essay about why this had to be the cover. Mutu’s work masterfully interrogates the black female body, subverting imperial violence by weaponizing our beauty. She also reclaims the monstrous as a source of power, always lingering on the female experience, the female gaze.

GMcC: Who’re the poets you’re reading at the moment?

SS: I’m reading Vievee Francis’ Forest Primeval, Shara McCallum’s Madwoman, Monica Youn’s Blackacre, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, The Great Camouflage by Suzanne Césaire, and re-reading The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks edited by Elizabeth Alexander.

GMCC: What’s next for you? I read you’re writing something biographical?

SS: I’m currently writing a memoir about my childhood growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica. I’m also working on my doctoral dissertation, exploring Jamaican womanhood and the power of our matriarchal, visionary language.

GMcC: Great to have you in the Honest Ulsterman, Safiya. Thank you!

Local readers can buy Cannibal from Amazon UK and those in the US at: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803290631/