Dreaming Up Her Own Salvation: Poets & Writers on Safiya Sinclair
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Written in the kind of prose that could make any story sing, How To Say Babylon is a brilliant memoir rich with universal themes of empowerment and paired with a unique lens into a world few will find familiar but all will find intriguing. It’s a winning combination if ever there was one.
Listen in as Safiya discusses her memoir, writing poetry and more on our Poured Over podcast.
Written in the kind of prose that could make any story sing, How To Say Babylon is a brilliant memoir rich with universal themes of empowerment and paired with a unique lens into a world few will find familiar but all will find intriguing. It’s a winning combination if ever there was one.
Listen in as Safiya discusses her memoir, writing poetry and more on our Poured Over podcast.
We’re huge, huge fans of Poets & Writers — the organization and their eponymous magazine — and poet-memoirist-professor Safiya Sinclair, so we’re taking an opportunity to share excerpts from P&W’s current cover story, which you can find on B&N newsstands in our stores across the country, or subscribe to electronically using a Nook device or app.
From the magazine:
Having Rita Dove declare you her literary “heir” is no small matter, as Safiya Sinclair is the first to acknowledge. When the New York Times Style Magazine featured intergenerational pairings of women artists in its April 2023 issue, the legendary writer and former U.S. poet laureate did just that, an experience Sinclair describes as “still surreal” to her. Dove wrote that her initial encounter with Sinclair’s poetry, in the poet’s application to the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 2012, “took the top of my head off.” She added, “I was electrified by the soul and the muscular elegance of the poems.” Sinclair’s subsequent MFA thesis led to the 2016 publication of the poetry collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press), which includes a subversive retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Seven years later, with many awards and a PhD in comparative literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California in hand, Sinclair returns with How to Say Babylon, published by 37 Ink in October, her searing memoir of growing up in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica—a journey, as she writes, to become “the bard dreaming up my own salvation.”
Or, a little longer, from later in the profile:
Although Sinclair currently lives in the United States, she carries Jamaica and the Caribbean with her in both her work and her heart. She cites Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, and especially Kamau Braithwaite as important influences along with Jamaican authors Erna Brodber, Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett-Coverley, and the theorist Sylvia Wynter. She fondly calls her contemporary Nicole Dennis-Benn “my sister in writing.” Dennis-Benn, author of the novels Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2017) and Patsy (Liveright, 2019), believes that Sinclair needs to be read now because “she does not shy away from critiquing our culture and its racism, colorism, classism, even the bias against how we express ourselves by not speaking the Queen’s English. She stares things in the face in order for change to happen.”
The contemporary generation of Jamaican-born writers is speaking candidly about “our postcolonial scars,” as Dennis-Benn says, but, she insists, “we critique and love at the same time.” She and Sinclair pay tribute to the physical beauty of Jamaica and the surrounding sea, making the island itself a central character in their work. In How to Say Babylon, Sinclair juxtaposes “the postcard idea of Jamaica” with “my Jamaica,” and in her acknowledgements she calls the memoir her “song” to the island, “my first and truest love.” Any time she refers to “home,” she means Jamaica: “It’s part of what fuels my writing and how I write. I want the sentences to be parallel to the Jamaican landscape, vines lush and Edenic, the sort of humid kiss of everything growing. Without Jamaica I wouldn’t know what kind of writer I want to be.”