CANR

• Catacombs ( chapbook) Argos Books (Brooklyn, NY), 2011

1. Cannibal LCCN 2016007774 Type of material Book Personal name Sinclair, Safiya, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Cannibal / Safiya Sinclair. Published/Produced Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2016] Description x, 111 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780803290631 (paperback : alk. paper) 9780803295384 (pdf) CALL NUMBER PS3619.I56847 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• (chapbook) Catacombs - 2011 Argos Books, Brooklyn, NY

• Kenyon Review - http://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/safiya-sinclair

  SAFIYA SINCLAIR

  microinterview-sinclair-carouselSafiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal, won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Amy Clampitt Residency Award. She is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her poem “One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof, II” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the July/Aug 2016 issue of the Kenyon Review.

  What was your original impetus for writing “One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof, II”?

  Coming to America really sharpened my rage in very unexpected and crucial ways, and burned in me the necessity of bearing witness. While living in Charlottesville, Virginia, I experienced for the first time the marked separation between the black community and the town’s inescapably blinding whiteness. One could live in a certain part of town, drive a certain route, be enrolled in a certain program and never encounter another black person unless you took the free trolley, went to a black hair salon, or on some rare and joyous occasion happened to run into Rita Dove in the hallway. It was in many ways a lonely space. While there, I found a book called 100 Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro: With Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers, which consists of a great list of (largely unknown) accomplishments of black people throughout history—Fact #2: Benjamin Banneker, a Negro astronomer, made the first clock in America in 1754. The book is also a compilation of some of the many crimes carried out against black people in the service of (white) American history—Fact #4: George Washington sent a Negro slave to Barbados to be exchanged for a hogshead of molasses, a cask of rum, and ‘other good old spirits,’ in 1776. I began writing a series of poems using some of the facts in the book as epigraphs, and was also inspired by the possibilities of its title, which subverted my expectation that it would center on violence rather than excellence.

  By the time I was ready to write the second poem in the series, I’d began researching scientific racism and pseudo-scientific texts from the nineteenth century, while also reading Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Reading all these texts together sparked my thinking (and my rage) about several things: the systemic erasure of any black history outside of slavery, the disruption of language and the power in naming, the danger of categorization, and a maddening frustration that while this constant massacre of black men and women now gets passing attention in national news, none of this was truly new. The scientific racism and the coded language, the erasure of black history and the literal eradication of black bodies was all cyclical, was systemic. This was America.

  Could you talk a little bit about the intentionality of language in this piece, and why you chose to write from a multiplicity of voices?

  A large part of my interest as a Jamaican poet is the history of the language I’ve been handed as a colonial remnant, and how this language informs my identity as a black poet navigating the world through verse. For me the English language is always going to be the language of the colonist, the language of oppression; so as a poet writing in English, I am always in some way a stranger to myself. I wanted to explore the nature of this linguistic exile by breaking the language and the structure of the poem in different ways than I normally do, by forcing the grammar and syntax beyond what is “correct,” while also exploring the nature of this fragmentation. It’s still a struggle to excise myself from the tyranny of “precise” linguistics, but as a poet, I’m finding it increasingly more interesting to do so. Daily language holds so much weight and so much history, and my ears are always pricking up suspiciously. For example: Why is the name “killer bee” interchangeable with “Africanized bee”? Perhaps it is innocuous, but I find naming like this very sinister. Just another way the coded language makes its way into our vernacular, often shielded under the unimpeachable banner of science. I am finding that there is always another way to measure the skulls. I wanted to include this specific kind of language from both pseudo-scientific texts and categorizations of modern science to highlight the violence of coded language hidden in plain sight.

  The multiplicity of voices is a theme that runs through my forthcoming collection Cannibal, sung through the throat of Caliban, who is also forced to learn the language of the oppressor, and who faces a fragmentation of self (and voice) at every turn. (Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / will hum about my ears, and sometime voices.) I chose to explore this multiplicity because injustice has many arms, many poisonous roots, and there is not only one way to interrogate centuries of subjugation, or one voice to decry how the massacre of black people is entwined with American (and Western) history. By using that same cursed language to conjure a choir of selves in attempt to refuse and refute this terror, the language itself becomes an incantation, a protection, a curse. Much in the same way I find code-switching to be a way of using language and this fragmented identity as a benefit, to voice many selves as a form of self-preservation, to alienate the enemy, to protect selfhood, and to find your people. When the enemy is your neighbour, your nation, and the too-often dissected fractions of your nature, one voice is not enough.

  How do you think the James Baldwin quote changes how your poem might be read?

  This was the only poem in the series where I didn’t use an epigraph from the J. A. Rogers book, for very specific reasons. Mainly, I wanted to move the framework of the poem into a more modern setting, to conflate the history of the black body in the eighteenth century with the modern representation of the black body. This Baldwin quote from The Fire Next Time so eerily helps me to draw a straight line (or a circle) from the nakedness of the auction block to the smaller skulls of scientific racism, to the super-predator, this language of criminalization, the weaponization of blackness, to freedom’s empty inheritance, and poverty, to the murdered black body left unclaimed in the street. The poem promises “one hundred amazing facts” but there is really only one fact: in America and the world at large the Negro has been and continues to be nameless, faceless, voiceless. A threat or a nothing. A hashtag, a talking point, or a nothing. A symbol or a victim, but never a man with a name that meant something, who lived and loved and erred. This quote is a way to engage with the truth of this macabre history, scarcely changed over centuries, but it’s also a way to reinforce belief in that same power of language to strike back the oppressor. Like Baldwin, I believe it a matter of survival that poetry must in some way disrupt the peace.

  What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?

  I’ve received a lot of terrible writing advice, because my experience of academia has been that of a mostly white space, where most of my peers and professors remained blissfully unaware of the violent history and systems that taught me to speak like this and exiled me to America. They had no idea how to engage with my work, just as they had no idea how to engage with me; I was the only black poet in my undergrad workshop and my MFA program.

  If I had to pinpoint the absolute worst “advice,” that would be the straight white male professor who called me into his office last year to tell me, with sincerity, that he was concerned that my poems had “too much of a female conceit” and I should beware of alienating male readers. This same professor also told me to add more exotic Jamaican flora and fauna in my poems to make them different. I could go on. It was all so ridiculous and appalling, but in many ways also the best hardening tool, a trumpet call to be unassailable, to always know myself.

  What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

  I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, exploring the ostracization my family and other Rastas faced in our heavily Christian country, while chronicling my struggles with religion, misguided desire and womanhood, a militant hotheaded father, and feeling estranged not only at home, but also estranged in my body.

  I also spent some time in Spain this summer researching the representation of black lives in Western art, focusing on the culture, influence, identity, and erasure of Moors in Spanish art and Spanish history, narrowing specifically on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 420 poems created with musical notations, where Moors are heavily represented in the poetic narrative, illustrated in full force of their blackness.

• Safiya Sinclair Home Page - http://www.safiyasinclair.com/

  Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and is one of the American Library Association's “Notable Books of the Year.”

  Sinclair is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, 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, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Oxford American, 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.

• Berkshire Taconic - http://www.berkshiretaconic.org/bReceivebNonprofitsIndividuals/AboutGrantsandScholarships/GranteeStories/InterviewwithSafiyaSinclair.aspx

  INTERVIEW WITH SAFIYA SINCLAIR
  Safiya Sinclair was named the 21st recipient of the Amy Clampitt residency. For over a decade, the program has provided poets and literary scholars a paid six- or 12-month stay at Clampitt's former residence near Lenox, Mass., where they can focus exclusively on their work.

  On Thursday, November 10 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., Safiya will read selections from her new collection of poems, Cannibal, at The Bookstore in Lenox, Mass. (11 Housatonic Street). Visit The Bookstore's website for additional information.

  About this photoTell me about yourself; where did you move here from and what were you doing before this residency?

  Sure. I was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and I moved here to complete my undergraduate degree at Bennington College. After that I completed my master’s at the University of Virginia, and then almost immediately I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. I came to the Berkshires indirectly from USC – I was in Provincetown last fall for a fellowship and I’ve been traveling quite a bit. I’m a nomad [laughs].

  What was it like growing up in Jamaica?

  I can't say that I had a typical Jamaican childhood. My siblings and I always felt othered because we were raised in a strict Rastafarian family, and in Jamaica Rastafarians are a minority; Jamaica is a largely Christian country. So when my siblings and I were young we had to create our own kind of society amongst ourselves. Very early on I turned inward to reading and writing because I wasn’t really allowed to interact with the outside world or fit into normal Jamaican society.

  At school, we were always seen as very strange because we were the only Rasta children at our school. That's when I started writing. I realized that there were different ways to express what I was going through – a way to understand myself on the page. I published my first poem in the national newspaper in Jamaica when I was 16. There was a Caribbean poet who took me under his wing, and that's when I realized that this was actually something I needed to do. For me poetry in a sense has always been an act of survival.

  Coming to America – especially going to the schools that I've been to – has been strangely instrumental in who I am now as a writer, because I constantly found myself in all these very white spaces. There were maybe four students of color at Bennington College the entire time I was there. The moment I came to America I realized I had to consider my blackness in a different way than I had in Jamaica, where the majority of people are black. In my courses I would write poems and stories Jamaican folklore and Jamaican life. I would write in our patois dialect and I would constantly find pushback to that in workshop. I once had another student ask me, “Why can't you write this in English?”

  What was your response to a question like that?

  It was anger. Anger was my original response. I had to immediately understand all these different cultural references that were very American, very white.

  I feel like people weren’t encouraged to be outspoken about issues of visibility and diversity. A lot of times I felt like I was the only voice. The following week I came back to class with a manifesto I had written about how I'm not going to change my work, and not going to have my language or identity colonized by anybody in this classroom. And, well, my peers did not take it very well. They were very upset.

  Did you always plan to come to America to earn your undergraduate degree?

  The hard truth is most Jamaicans have an unspoken understanding that - especially if you're born poor - one of the only ways you're going to change your station in life is through education. To do that you need to immigrate to either the United States or England or Canada. For me, I'd always felt like an outsider. I felt like I had to move away to come to a different understanding of myself and to do the things that I wanted to do.

  Poetry in Jamaica didn’t really live and thrive very much outside of the faraway crowd of Kingston literati, and since I was from Montego Bay it was very lonely. I couldn't go into a bookstore and pick up a book of poems. It was a very limiting world to live in, and for a long time I wanted to move away to see what else was out there in the literary world, to find my own community.

  Did you ever consider other forms of writing before settling on poetry?

  I think I've always been very poetic in my thinking, living not always on one straight line but leaping from point to point. Whenever I approached the page that was how the poetry assembled itself. But I write fiction and non-fiction too, and continued to explore that while I was at Bennington.

  Who are your poetry influencers?

  I love Sylvia Plath. I also love James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Audre Lorde, Lorca, Paul Celan, Natasha Trethewey.

  You have quite a list.

  Yes, their collections are all lined up on my desk - they're with me when I write [laughs].

  Can you describe a day in the life of a poet? Outside of this residency do you have a routine?

  No [laughs]. Well, like I said, I’m in my third year of a Ph.D. program at USC. They are very flexible with allowing me to accept opportunities like this residency in the middle of my schooling. But at the end of my five years, I will graduate with a dual degree in creative writing and critical theory. I have to write a creative thesis (a poetry manuscript), and also a critical component. I'm also working on a memoir, so we'll see. I’m always writing and revising in my mind.

  And you completed a collection of poems recently, correct?

  Yes. It's called Cannibal and the official publication date is tomorrow, actually.

  About this photoCongratulations! Can you tell me about the cover? (pictured, left)

  Yes. I'm so astonished and absolutely grateful to have this cover for my book. It's a piece by the African artist Wangechi Mutu, who is an immense inspiration to me. Her art is exactly how I wish the imagery of my poetry could assemble in someone's mind.

  What was your process of writing the collection?

  For me, a lot of the process of writing this was just living, you know? It was impossible to ignore my experiences as a Jamaican woman, as a black woman, and as an immigrant in America, so I knew it was necessary to write them down.

  The title Cannibal is a reference to me being a Caribbean poet. The etymology - the linguistic history of the word “cannibal”- is the English variant of the Spanish word “canibal,” which comes from the word “caribal,” a reference to the native Carib people who Columbus thought ate human flesh, and from whom the word “Caribbean” comes.

  By being Caribbean, all people who live in the “West Indies” are already in a linguistic sense born savage. And so I'm trying to examine this idea of black people and people of African descent being labeled as savage or barbaric or still being seen in some way as a threat. I'm doing that through a dialogue with the character of Caliban in The Tempest, who's sort of the father of the linguistic rebellion and represents - for a lot of us - the continual struggles of the African diaspora. He’s a figure of rebellion but also a figure of someone who has been broken, who's lost their land and their name and their place and their body.

  Then I'm also, through this examination of my identity, talking about my family and my personal history and talking about coming to America and experiencing the brutalism and racism in America through the lens of an immigrant.

  Do you feel like the poems come to you when you sit down to put thoughts on the page? Is it a natural process or have you ever struggled with how you want to say something?

  That's a good question, because I think everybody has a different process of how they come to the page with a poem. Sometimes I won't even write anything on paper unless I feel like there's a line or a couple lines already codifying in my head, you know, becoming whole, and so I’ll keep thinking about it for a few days.

  I very much live or die by the first line. If I don't think the first line is good, I'll keep working until I think, ‘Okay, this is a poem that wants to birth itself into the world.’ I still have poems that have come half-formed and then, you know, the struggle is the revision. But that's actually also the pleasure, because then it lives a second life after you've formed and molded it into a finished product. Sometimes I don't trust a poem that comes fully formed because that seems too easy—I’m mistrustful of miracles [laughs].

  What is it like living in this house, where so many other poets have lived including Amy?

  It's wonderful. The books especially - I'm always walking around and finding new things to read. For me it's a wonderland. And it’s wonderful to live with the ghosts of those that have come before me.

  What would you like to accomplish during this residency? Do you have a specific project you’re working on?

  I am using this time to work on my memoir and so my hope is to have a good portion of that drafted. I think part of the struggle is that I'm not a poet who writes by a schedule. For me it's hard to generate work that way. I circle around this vortex of lines for a few days before I write them down, and I’m finding that prose – even the poetic and lyrical kind of prose that I write – functions very differently than poetry.

  What have your days here been like?

  A lot of reading, especially in this room. It's so peaceful. I love looking out and seeing all the greenery being surrounded by it. Then I do some writing and go back to reading.

  What kind of impact will this residency have on your career? What does it mean to you?

  I think it’s a blessing any time a poet is given the space, time and means to sit with their thoughts and to write. I'm very grateful that I can make my way unhurriedly through the days and weeks as I write and make sense of myself.

  And after this residency will you return to California? Do you have a vision of what’s next?

  That's the plan. I’m not committing myself to anything too far ahead right now. I think for most poets and people in academia the light at the end of the road is teaching. So we'll see. I'm not tying myself to that 100 percent because I do like to have a little freedom. A year from now I want to be on vacation in Southeast Asia, and that’s as far as I’m thinking [laughs].

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/22/safiya-sinclair-poetry/

  Safiya Sinclair, Poetry
  By Whiting Honorees March 22, 2016
  WHITING AWARDS 2016

  PHOTO: DJANI SINCLAIR.

  Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her debut collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2015, and will be published this year. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Triquarterly, Callaloo, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and was the winner of the Boston Review’s eighteenth-annual poetry contest. Sinclair received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently completing a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.

  Citation

  cannibalRich and mythic, heavy with the legacy of family and history, many of Safiya Sinclair’s poems are inspired by her childhood in Jamaica; a richness and density in the imagery conveys a lush beauty and danger. There is traveling involved as you turn her pages and somehow all of the waterfalls and rivers and roads connect. Follow her sparkling, detailed phrasings and lines and you will arrive drenched in human contact. The mother in these poems recedes into myth, while the father erupts from the page, threatening disruption and disturbance. Other works capture a different life in the United States, one marked by a sense of order and withholding, which is at once reassuring and chilling. There often seems to be dialectics at play between wildness and control. Her poems reveal she is in full bougainvillea bloom.

  Home

  Have I forgotten it—
  wild conch-shell dialect,

  black apostrophe curled
  tight on my tongue?

  Or how the Spanish built walls
  of broken glass to keep me out

  but the Doctor Bird kept chasing
  and raking me in: This place

  is your place, wreathed in red
  Sargassum, ancient driftwood

  nursed on the pensive sea.
  The ramshackle altar I visited

  often, packed full with fish-skull,
  bright with lignum vitae plumes:

  Father, I have asked so many miracles
  of it. To be patient and forgiving,

  to be remade for you in some
  small wonder. And what a joy

  to still believe in anything.
  My diction now as straight

  as my hair; that stranger we’ve
  long stopped searching for.

  But if somehow our half-sunken
  hearts could answer, I would cup

  my mouth in warm bowls

  over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt

  of home, taste Bogue-mud

  and one long orange peel for skin.

  I’d open my ear for sugar cane
  and long stalks of gungo peas

  to climb in. I’d swim the sea
  still lapsing in a soldered frame,

  the sea that again and again
  calls out my name.

  Read more work from the 2016 Whiting Award winners here.

Cannibal
Diego Baez
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* Cannibal. By Safiya Sinclair. Sept. 2016.126p. Univ. of Nebraska, paper, $17.95 (97808032906311.811.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the opening pages of her stunning debut collection, Jamaican-born poet Sinclair provides an etymological lesson: the word "cannibal" derives from caribal, a word applied by clueless colonists to indigenous Caribbean peoples, with the mistaken notion that islanders ate human flesh. Sinclair upends this linguistic prejudice by dissecting historical texts, including Shakespeare's The Tempest and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, to create richly layered lyrics that highlight and devour past injustice. Caliban, Prospero's island-dwelling slave, stalks the complex architecture of Sinclair's lines, returning in epigraphs to punctuate the book's section breaks. Throughout, the work is rife with incredible contradictions: Sinclair measures time in abducted days and hijacked decades but also by the "bright red dress of September." One speaker recalls fondly a memory: "Father washing me in eucalyptus, in garlic, in goldenseal" but who also "wore the bruisemark / of my father's hands to school in silence." Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience. --Diego Baez

Cannibal
Publishers Weekly. 263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* Cannibal

Safiya Sinclair. Univ. of Nebraska, $17.95 trade paper (126p) ISBN 978-0-8032-9063-1

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sinclair, a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award-winner, crafts her stunning debut collection around the beauty and brutality of the word cannibal, whose origins derive from Christopher Columbus's belief that the Carib people he encountered consumed human flesh. Attacking this dehumanizing judgment born from white entitlement and denouncing the idea that blackness is synonymous with savagery, Sinclair ponders such questions as, How does a poet get inside the head of Shakespeare's Caliban? How would Caliban define blackness without the filter of a white man's bias? In the poem Mermaid," Sinclair shows how history is more than a time line; it's the ghosts that haunt a family and the memories that live in their veins. She notes how the English attempted to stamp out Jamaican culture as if it were a weed, yet it grew back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man." Sinclair's vibrant imagery and arresting diction injects inanimate objects with soul; sunsets, islands, beaches, and wind are stirred to life. More than a connection to nature, water becomes a safe haven: my grandmother's wet skirt cast a web across// the sea." 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. (Sept.)

Baez, Diego. "Cannibal." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 32. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755035&it=r&asid=37714d084c72450535837a2eb14ba737. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Cannibal." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444510&it=r&asid=be61d2eb54985aa72eec64ee2773fb9c. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.

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