They appropriate monstrosity, transforming into cannibals with teeth for hearts, mermaids drowning unsuspecting males. This body, a crisis.” In Jamaica and America, anatomy is destiny: “Woman, wound.”īut these personae flout their limits, fusing body and language to avenge their suffering. Menstrual blood brings self-exile, “whole selves flushed away.” “One girl” is “branded woman overnight.” An “I” knew “what it was to be nothing / Bore the shamed blood letter of my sex / like a banishment.” Another asks, “How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear. In this patriarchal postcolonial world, black female becomes object, “helpless in the chicken wire of my soul,” the body “an open wound,” danger and goal. A white male choir intones the “unquestioning” givens of a world maintained by white supremacy, “lacquered and calm.” The god who rules woman “aches to stick an ache in my unmentionables.” Lovers seek possession, like Jefferson learning “how to belittle a thing.” One “ached to be inside, / thought he deserved to claim it.” Men are reptiles, predators: “the spotted lizard waits on my meagre life.” Fragments from Caliban’s subjugated speech evoke colonialism. The “unbending” father in “Pocomania,” his daughter “forged in the fire of your self,” bellows “the name of his God,” the patriarchal Jah.
Wielding Plath as a powerful influence, Sinclair censures male control.
The prefix “un,” meanwhile, pervades the text, modifying verbs and gerunds to describe either colonial suffering or the radical destruction of the processes producing it.
“Red” weaves through it, sign of rage and menstrual blood, color of birds, hibiscus, and sargassum. my brother is a criminal.”Ĭannibal pulsates with the lushness of Jamaica, its flora, fauna, rhythms, sea. Thus, for example, an epigraph from Ginsberg-“America is this correct?”-underscores the irony of “America the Beautiful,” where “every night. Through epigraph, allusion, and quotation, Sinclair critiques colonialism and its texts-e.g., The Tempest, Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Samuel George Morton’s pseudoscientific treatise on the relative intelligence of the races-and links herself to liberationist writers, including Rimbaud, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Du Bois, Baldwin, Lorde, Brathwaite, and Césaire. Their poems seek to claim a voice and a place in the human record. Most crucially, her personae share exile from “the lost chaos of history,” its “ghost arm” still “throttling” them. Merging rage and rigor, the fierce voices of her black female personae embody emancipation and revenge.Īfrican-rooted, Rasta-raised, a black island girl among white Americans, Sinclair foregrounds exile within her first four sections: at home in America in body and in language. Awarded the Whiting and Prairie Schooner prizes, Sinclair’s debut collection, “carved in our own language of the macabre,” burns with pain and fury. 2016. 111 pages.įrom shards of a “hand-me-down life,” “sufficiently tragic,” Safiya Sinclair conjures poetic magic, casting a spell whereby “cannibal masters the colonial / curse.” Weaponizing Columbus’s “ canibal,” misconstrued sign for the savage indigene, immortalized in Shakespeare’s anagrammatic Caliban, Sinclair wields the Monstrous (imaged on the book cover) to bare the pride, hypocrisy, and fear that underlie colonial systems of control, especially racism and patriarchy, Prospero their icon.
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