'I became very certain of what kind of poet I wanted to be': The Rumpus Interviews Safiya Sinclair
Laura Cresté's Rumpus interview with award-winning poet Safiya Sinclair is a must-read. Cresté and Sinclair crossed paths while undergraduates at Bennington College, and perhaps it was this bond that cemented the ideal foundation for their incredible conversation which is complex, candid, and informative. Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award. In this interview, Sinclair describes her childhood in Jamaica, where she grew up in a Rastafarian sect, and her years as an international student of color at Bennington College and the University of Virginia: "I began writing poetry very early (around ten or eleven years old) to combat the strange sense of exile I felt within my body—black, female, exotified, Rastafarian—an exile I felt at home, and even in my own country." From there:
I relished early the exploration and invention of my own landscape, instructed not only by Jamaica herself but the ghost meter I found calling to me from the sea. Writing it down seemed the only way to go forward; honing a voice and a home, and speaking it into existence rang with urgency.
At Bennington College, facing an impossible whiteness of peers, professors, and curricula, I became very certain of what kind of poet I wanted to be. Which is to say, I wanted to interrogate the imperial history of the English language, the continued erasure of the Black experience from these Western spaces, and to reaffirm the Caribbean voice as capable of writing across oppression, invisibility, poverty, by forging my own version of this strange dual-self (of English language and Jamaican patois). Cannibal, most of which was my MFA thesis at the University of Virginia, circled around these themes and experiences I've lived with all my life—the dangerous stereotypes of blackness, the diminishment and objectification of this body, pervading ideas of "savagery," and the heavy silences of unspoken history and selfhood that Caribbean women carry with them. If I could invite a reader to enter this rich landscape, what would it look and sound like?
Rumpus: I'm interested in that phrase you use, "a fault of nature." That seems to correspond to the presence of The Tempest in your work. (Nature as in the landscape of the natural world in the play, and of course, aside from scenery, the phrase "human nature.") When did you begin writing poems inspired by The Tempest? How did you respond to a work written four centuries ago, and find that you could incorporate it into your own poetic voice—that Shakespeare had something you could use, and subvert, about being a woman of color writing today?
Sinclair: Yes, and "fault of nature" here is deliberate, and very much in quotes. A lot of the collection seeks to subvert the history of propaganda, of pseudo-scientific texts that reinforced ideas of barbarism, savagery, and the supposed lesser intellect of people of color. More specifically, I'm interested in exploring this idea that in the tropics "nothing grows politely." It was important to me to take control of these pervasive ideas of wildness and savagery and re-narrativize them on my own terms as a Jamaican woman.