“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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