BOOKS
Author Interview Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair’s début poetry collection is about to be published in the UK for the first time but it already comes garlanded with praise and awards
Caroline Sanderson @carosanderson ‘‘ B
orn four days late, a bruised almond/leſt puckering in the salt yolk,/the soſt bone of my skull was concave,/a thumbprint in wax, like the coin/for the
ferryman had been pressed there/overnight.” This arresting description of her own birth is from Safiya Sinclair’s poem “Osteology”, which appears in her aston- ishing début collection Cannibal, publishing on National Poetry Day 2020 (1st October). Her poems explore themes of race, womanhood, colonial history and exile, but are also intimately rooted in the sights, sounds and rhythms of her Jamaican childhood. The story of how Sinclair discovered her poetic voice is both fascinating and shocking. Now in her mid-30s, she was born in Montego Bay into a strict Rastafari family, and from a young age knew what it is to be an outsider and to go unheard in her patriarchal household. “My father is a militant Rasta man who is also a reggae musician. So there wasn’t much space for me as a woman to grow and thrive, or even have a voice,” Sinclair explains on the phone from Chicago, where she has been staying with her partner throughout lockdown.
“Rasta culture is one of the things that defines Jamaica in the global imagination, but for a long time, Rastafari were a persecuted minorit. So when I was growing up, my sense of being out of place at home was compounded by the fact that my siblings and I were oddities wherever we went: we were the only Rasta children in our schools, for example. It was a strange bubble of alienation.” Sinclair
20 24th July 2020
In a workshop, a classmate physically took the pen from me, crossed out all the dialect, and said ‘Can you say this in English?’ It was horrific
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