Safiya Sinclair on finding her voice and honoring her mother
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Please tell us more about yourself? History‘How to say Babylon’.
One. It’s a memoir about my childhood and growing up in a strict environment. Rastafari house in montego bay, JamaicaLiving under the rules of my father, an avid reggae musician, and following some of those rules, which I found out as I grew up, were different for girls and teenagers. women There were more of them than men. Fortunately, I found PoemThat allowed me to develop my own voice and figure out what kind of woman and poet I wanted to be.
Q: Sometimes you maintain balance by telling the story of your mother…
One. This book is, to a large extent, a tribute to my mother and the many gifts she gave me. My love of language, my love of literature, my love of poetry came from her. She was the person who gave me my first collection of poems, who made me and my siblings memorize and recite poems. And this work Story It comes from them themselves. And this is something that’s common throughout the Caribbean and probably throughout the Global South, that we have a tradition of oral folkloric storytelling, which is a way of keeping our history alive, where our history has been fragmented by imperialist and colonial powers. And in Jamaica, Oral storytelling The legacy that my mother passed on to me is very matriarchal. And so part of writing the book is that I wanted to pay homage to my mother and women like my mother, who are the real historians and storytellers in Jamaica and the Caribbean.
Q: You have enabled and empowered women to say, ‘Our knowledge has value, don’t ignore it’.
One. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. Not just about the next generation, but I thought a lot about the women who came before me. Many of them never saw themselves in literature, in the literature that’s been placed in the Western canon with a capital L. And I wanted to write this book because I wanted to write about the women who came before me, whose survival made it possible for me to dream and write poetry. Ordinary Jamaican women, women around the world, who have always seen their stories pushed to the margins, to make them feel like they’re alive and that their lives matter.
Q: How do you define memoir?
One. For me, memoir is about taking different and powerful moments of life and piecing them together to create a larger story. It’s not someone’s entire life, but I hope it’s about the most interesting or exciting moments of life, piecing them together to create something larger.
Q: What did you learn as a poet to become a prose writer?
One. I learned a lot of patience, I also learned humility. I spent maybe 2-3 days, or a week at most, writing a poem. But this memoir took many months to write, and I really had to sit with the language. I had to sit with the memories. I had to think about how to create a story and a story that was compelling. I also had to be very objective about the things that I kept and the things that I left out. I had to think about dialogue. I had to think about framing scenes. I had to think about the ways that I portray my family. So that if you read the book, you really feel like you know them.
Q: Where do you begin writing a long piece of chronological prose?
One. I had to really think about the history in front of me and pull that thread and figure out where this story really began. The Haile Selassie (Rastafari’s divinity image) chapter was one of the first chapters. And I think I was so excited to write it first because I wasn’t in it. And so it was pretty easy to reconstruct the narrative by looking at the archives and looking at the video footage of his arrival in Jamaica and putting the chapter together that way. But when it came to inserting myself into the narrative, it took me a while. And then I decided it started with me walking into the ocean.
Q: And that’s why the last part of your book is called “A Mermaid.”
One. The book also ends with me walking and swimming in the ocean. I liked the idea of starting and ending with the ocean.
Q: You had a very patriarchal upbringing…
One. Somehow, when religions or different faiths move toward a more militant view of the world or a more fundamental view of the world, in different cultures, movements, faiths, for some reason it inevitably leaves women and girls at the bottom, creating a hierarchy of power. And that’s what happened in my house. And there were other Rasta people we knew who were raised that way, and some Rasta people we knew who were much more strict than that. One of the interesting things about the Rastafari religion is that there’s no one unifying doctrine or one particular way of being a Rastafari. It was just the way that my father made the rules in our house, and each Rasta brother made the rules in their own houses. But the one unifying thing is that they were all the heads of their houses.
