...And I do praise the force that falls With loosened stones and plunging force Of clear ghost-rivers in dried beds. And besides this watchful course Of hours and currents, watersheds Of welcome, do I praise the eye That finds me welcome, needing no reply.
Poet Safiya Sinclair: ‘As a girl I felt small within Rastafari’
The Jamaican poet on her new memoir chronicling life with an authoritarian father, reconfiguring the postcard image of her homeland and her love of Marvel comic books
Hephzibah Anderson Saturday 7 October 2023
A
ward-winning poet Safiya Sinclair, 39, teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, but she was raised in a strict Rastafari home in Jamaica, where her reggae musician father used faith and control to keep her from absorbing outside influences. Smart and bookish thanks to her mother’s love of literature, she soon began thirsting for independence and a voice of her own, eventually escaping to college in the US. She chronicles her embattled becoming in How to Say Babylon, an electrifying memoir that embraces not only the role of women within Rastafari culture, but also what it means to grow up poor in a “paradise” scarred by slavery and colonialism.
How did you know you were ready to write this book?
I felt called to it a little bit over a decade ago now, but there were a lot of wounds that were still fresh, and I didn’t want to write from a place of hurt or vengeance. In 2018, I went back to Jamaica to do a reading and my father came to hear me for the first time. I read a poem that I had written for him, and when I got off the stage, after years of feeling I’d been diminished and never heard by him, he whispered in my ear: “I’m listening and I hear you.” In that moment, I just felt this catharsis – a literal, physical release of burdens from my body – and I said: “OK, I think I can actually begin this book because I know where it ends.”
What were the most challenging sections?
The sections where I am an adolescent were just punishing. It’s such a turbulent age but throw in being ostracised at school for being Rastafari, and then going home and feeling like I didn’t belong inside its strictures – it was a hard and heavy place to return to. Some of the later chapters, when I talk about the decision to finally cut my dreadlocks and leave, and my father’s hurt and anger and violence – those were really hard to write as well. I was typing and weeping.
You write near the end that you’re slowly trying to forgive your father. Has writing the book helped with that?
It was a gift that in writing it, I had to talk to my father about his own childhood and how he came to Rastafari, and then sit in his head and express his feelings, humanising him in a way that he’d never allowed me to do because he’d just loomed so large as an authority figure. The big revelation has been my capacity for forgiveness because before, I would not have said I was a particularly forgiving person.
The book’s dialogue is so vivid.
In Jamaica, we have a patois and then the Rastafari also have their own vernacular, some of which I tried to capture. It stems from this anticolonial linguistic rebellion – they’ll say “overstand” instead of understand, “apprecilove” instead of appreciate. It’s what I will be writing about in my next poetry collection, thinking through what I’m calling Rasta poetics. This anticolonial lyric frame was also something that inspired my own sense of linguistics and my personal poetics.
There’s some strikingly beautiful nature writing on these pages but it’s not without tension.
I really wanted to renarrativise this postcard idea of Jamaica. It is a strange thing, having all this beauty and natural wonder but not being able to access it and pay the price of living in, quote unquote, “paradise”. The beaches in Jamaica are owned by the hotels, they’re private – Jamaicans have to save up to go.
What’s your relationship with Rastafari like these days?
I don’t really now have any deep connection beyond my father and brother being deeply devoted Rasta bredren. As a girl, I felt small within Rastafari, I had no voice. Obedience and silence and being compliant were seen as the highest virtues a woman could have, and I’ve never been obedient or silent or compliant.
Have any of its teachings stayed with you?
The most positive thing was this very deep and affirming Black pride. My siblings and I would learn the speeches of [political activist] Marcus Garvey and we were always entrenched in this idea of Black upliftment. I’ve always walked tall and proud in my Blackness.
Your father made a living playing reggae in hotels. Was it a musical home?
Every day, pretty much, we’d wake up and hear guitar strumming. Our mum encouraged us to write and perform our own songs, and we even had a little family band once, travelling around Jamaica performing these songs about saving the environment.
Tell me about the role of literature in your childhood.
For me, poetry was survival, a crucial, life-saving place of order in a household that was ruled by uncertainty and chaos. My mother always had us reciting and memorising poems and reading books. Because of that, the world felt expansive to us, and writing was a big help expanding the possibilities of my own life. I can’t talk glibly about literature and poetry because it’s an actual fact that it changed the trajectory of my life.
The poems you recited were by the likes of William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and it wasn’t until you were much older that you discovered West Indian poets such as Derek Walcott. Do those first literary loves still hold meaning for you?
I will never lose a love of any book, any writer, any poem that was a guiding light to me on my journey of being a poet and finding my voice. It began in Jamaica with the dead white men, and it’s to me crucial and critical that I know them – and where they live so I can burn their houses!
What book are you reading?
I’m reading a novel called Chain-Gang All Starsby Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. He’s thinking about this dystopian future where prisoners are forced to fight each other for sport, televised, and it’s rooted in the history of racialised violence in America, and also this fascination with televised violence. It’s fantastic and I encourage everyone to read it.
Are there any books we’d be surprised to find on your shelves?
My siblings and I loved Marvel comic books growing up. Even now we have a group chat where we’re talking about all that. I also really love video games so I have books about Final Fantasyand The Legend of Zelda.
Is there a text that you regularly reread?
I reread Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider several times a year. Lorde, for me, is a very foundational writer and crucial to my own thinking as a poet and a womanist. I also reread Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison as often as I can. Those are my two touchpoints.
What do you plan on reading next?
Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend. She’s my favourite living writer. There’s a sumptuous feast of language there for me as a poet, which I don’t always find with a lot of novels. I come away feeling deeply inspired to push myself and the possibilities of language on the page.
Do you have another prose project on the go?
I have a multigenerational novel about Jamaican history, told over 600 years, beginning with the arrival of Columbus and the decimation of the native Taino people, and ending in the near future, thinking about the oncoming climate collapse. It’s told through six women and it’s called If We Must Die, from a really intense Claude McKay poem about colonialism and slavery.
Safiya Sinclair will be in conversation with Ayanna Lloyd Banwo about her book on 18 October in south London.
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair is published by HarperCollins (£16.99).
Thinking Anew: Philip Larkin in his `Wondering what to look for’ speaks for many today
It is a reminder that most of us seek a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning and purpose of life
Gordon Linney Saturday 28 October 2023
In his poem Church Going, Philip Larkin describes leaving an empty and underused church building that he had wandered into: “Back at the door I sign the book/ donate an Irish sixpence/ Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.” But then he continues: “Yet stop I did: in fact I often do/ And always end much at a loss like this/ Wondering what to look for/ wondering too/ When churches fall completely out of use/ What we shall turn them into…”
At one level, he is addressing the fact that churches in the West as we have known them are struggling with falling attendances and ageing congregations. This is both sad and challenging for those still committed, especially clergy who are being asked to do more and more with less and less while, at a leadership level, there is a lack of a credible vision to share with the wider world. There seems to be an inability to articulate a message that addresses the felt needs of people today. Instead, we get bogged down in endless discussions about issues that divide and exclude people, such as the role of women in the church and gender identity.
Philip Larkin: in Church Going, he describes leaving an empty and underused church building that he had wandered into. Photograph: Barry Wilkinson
Exclusivism has little appeal to more widely travelled younger generations that have a greater appreciation of the human diversity that was known to and understood by Jesus. The church he founded was intended to reach out to the margins of society, to welcome the least of our brothers and sisters, and even our enemies. As Fr Richard Rohr put it: “When any church defines itself by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be Christ. The only groups that Jesus critiques are those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of God.”
Larkin in his “Wondering what to look for…” speaks for many today. It is a reminder that most of us, religious and so-called non-religious alike, seek a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning and purpose of life.
In his book Broken Signposts, former bishop of Durham Tom Wright says that we need relationships at every level in order to be human, especially in “today’s rootless society”. He writes: “We sense that something is amiss with the way things are. We want to find, as we say, ‘true love’ not just in the often-trivial sense of the ideal romance, but something that is solid, lasting, utterly reliable, and constantly life giving. That is why, even in today’s cynical world, most people love to celebrate a wedding. It appears to be raising a flag of hope in the midst of a world of broken dreams. It points to something much, much more than itself. There is an important paradox there: the deep love that has brought these two particular individuals together into this challenging and demanding commitment and relationship is not, after all, just about them. It is about all of us. About the world. About (as St John would say) God and the world. About Jesus.”
In tomorrow’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers what is key to a meaningful life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind ... You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” This is not just about doing; it is about being – being in love with God and each other, the God who the First Epistle of St John insists is love. In every moment of love shared, a kiss, a hug, a generous deed, God is real and present, recognised or not.
“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,” wrote Larkin the agnostic about his church visit and goes on to explain: “It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is… /And that much never can be obsolete /Since someone will forever be surprising /A hunger in himself to be more serious /And gravitating with it to this ground…”
I could also say it frightened me: the reverse asymmetry of your face in the mirror was disturbing, a certainty turned inside out, I looked away – I’d seen the reverse of it, as if I was greeting the wrong twin: I didn’t want it seems, to accept such precariousness.
Mónika Mesterházi is a poet, essayist, literary translator. She graduated from the ELTE Hungarian-English Faculty of Humanities in 1990. In 2002, she received her PhD in contemporary Northern Irish poetry. The first volumes of her poems, Visszahagyó táblák were published by the Cserépfalvi Publishing House in 1992, and her second volume of poems Hol nem volt in 1995. In 1997 she participated in the translation and editing of Selected Verses of Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. Her third volume of poems, Nem hittem volna was published in 1999 and her fourth book Sors bona was published by Osiris in 2007. She works as a freelance translator since 1997; since 2006 she has been a member of the board of the Association of Hungarian Translators.
Important translations: Katherine Mansfield: Logs, letters, Novels by Alice Munro, Novels by A.L. Kennedy, Lawrence Norfolk, Joseph O'Connor and others.
Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. She studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University, before training to be a secondary school teacher of English at Oxford. During that year she met her Hungarian husband and, consequently, the Hungarian language. After teaching English in a secondary school in the north of England, she taught English as a foreign language in New York City and Kecskemét before moving to Budapest where she has lived since 2000. Her interest in translating Hungarian literature began in 2014, when she could not find an English translation of any of István Fekete’s works to share with family in Britain. Her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press in February this year. Anna has also translated Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, a book about five forgotten (or misrepresented) Hungarian women writers by Anna Menyhért, which will be published by Brill in December. A short story in Anna's translation from Gabi Csutak's award-winning collection Csendélet sárkányyal (Still Life with a Dragon) appeared in the online journal Asymptote's blog in April this year. She is currently working on Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (The Road to the Empty Sky).
Slow Italian rivers Dark green with weeds Verona’s opal glassblue water Tumbling over stones Lake Como that swallowed into itself the great black mountains not much further off the mirror of its leafier companion sandy rippled shores without secrets and the lagoon-like sea at night the sideways-scamper of white weasel-backed waves Sweet-tasting Balaton wild mountain streams white and green a tufa stream washing the earth to a shining beard the silky green-brown Danube and how many tiled pools how many shores keep and construe my face my gaze how many kilometres have I swum that I might come to rest
Mónika Mesterházi is a poet, essayist, literary translator. She graduated from the ELTE Hungarian-English Faculty of Humanities in 1990. In 2002, she received her PhD in contemporary Northern Irish poetry. The first volumes of her poems, Visszahagyó táblák were published by the Cserépfalvi Publishing House in 1992, and her second volume of poems Hol nem volt in 1995. In 1997 she participated in the translation and editing of Selected Verses of Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. Her third volume of poems, Nem hittem volna was published in 1999 and her fourth book Sors bona was published by Osiris in 2007. She works as a freelance translator since 1997; since 2006 she has been a member of the board of the Association of Hungarian Translators.
Important translations: Katherine Mansfield: Logs, letters, Novels by Alice Munro, Novels by A.L. Kennedy, Lawrence Norfolk, Joseph O'Connor and others.
Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. She studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University, before training to be a secondary school teacher of English at Oxford. During that year she met her Hungarian husband and, consequently, the Hungarian language. After teaching English in a secondary school in the north of England, she taught English as a foreign language in New York City and Kecskemét before moving to Budapest where she has lived since 2000. Her interest in translating Hungarian literature began in 2014, when she could not find an English translation of any of István Fekete’s works to share with family in Britain. Her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press in February this year. Anna has also translated Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, a book about five forgotten (or misrepresented) Hungarian women writers by Anna Menyhért, which will be published by Brill in December. A short story in Anna's translation from Gabi Csutak's award-winning collection Csendélet sárkányyal (Still Life with a Dragon) appeared in the online journal Asymptote's blog in April this year. She is currently working on Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (The Road to the Empty Sky).
After years of scandal, Philip Larkin finally has a spot in Poets’ Corner
James Underwood Published: December 2, 2016 9.47am GMT
Philip Larkin, one of English poetry’s most recognisable voices, has been memorialised in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
His ledger stone was unveiled on Friday December 2 alongside tombs and memorials commemorating some of the finest writers in English literary history, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and T S Eliot. The ceremony took place 31 years to the day since Larkin’s death.
This is an occasion foreseen by Larkin himself, whose place in Poets’ Corner would probably have been guaranteed had he accepted the Poet Laureateship in 1984. Larkin was touted for this role as early as 1972; on that occasion it went to John Betjeman, a poet he admired. When Betjeman died in 1984, Larkin was the obvious choice. He didn’t share the public’s enthusiasm, but was reflective about his place in literary history: “I think there will be a space for me,” he told his mother.
Although a household name – a rare thing in poetry – Larkin had spent three decades dodging attention. Reports of the so-called Hermit of Hull’s reclusiveness were exaggerated, but it’s true that he largely avoided public roles – and what role in British poetry is more public, more bardic, than the laureateship? Larkin wasn’t joking when he told one acquaintance: “I just couldn’t face the 50 letters a day, TV show, representing British Poetry in the ’poetry conference at Belgrade’ side of it all.” To Andrew Motion, a later Laureate, he wrote: “Think of the stamps! Think of the stamps!”
Having politely declined, Larkin knew he had gifted Ted Hughes – a poetic rival – a spot in Westminster Abbey. But when Larkin died the year after, he was already known as Britain’s “unofficial Laureate”. One obituary hailed him as “the funniest and most intelligent English writer of the day, and the greatest living poet in our language”. Perhaps the spot unveiled in the Abbey was always his.
Poets’ Corner.Wikimedia Commons
Posthumous scandal
But this outcome wasn’t always so certain. Scandal in the 1990s threatened to obliterate Larkin’s reputation. The publication of a Selected Letters in 1992, containing foul-mouthed tirades against women, ethnic minorities, and the working-class, was swiftly followed by Motion’s 1993 biography, which revealed Larkin’s heavy drinking, pornographic habits, and multiple infidelities.
Influential cultural critics rushed to denounce Larkin. Lisa Jardine lambasted his “Little Englandism”, boasting “we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English”. Tom Paulin spoke of Larkin’s “quasi-fascism”, and the “distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became”.
This was a troubling and hysterical reaction to biographical disclosures. However regrettable, Larkin’s bigotry was performative and insincere; much of his behaviour was also judged against puritanical moral standards. More pernicious was the reinterpretation of his work in the light of these new perceptions of his life. Bizarrely, poems hitherto loved for their humanity were suddenly dismissed as the eruptions of a bitterly prejudiced man.
Assessments today tend to be less extreme, but the way we think about Larkin is still jammed somewhere between celebratory and condemnatory impulses. The Philip Larkin Society has campaigned over many years for a Poets’ Corner memorial, but the previous dean rejected this on the grounds of Larkin’s agnosticism, and an unofficial policy requiring writers to be dead for 20 years.
As neither criterion prevented Hughes from being commemorated in 2011, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether other anxieties were at play. The current dean expressed a different view: “I have no doubt that his work and memory will live on as long as the English language continues to be understood.” His sentiment wisely refocuses attention on what matters most: the poetry.
Poets’ Corner
Poets’ Corner is one of the most famous areas of Westminster Abbey. The tradition of burying or commemorating the nation’s best writers there began in the 16th century, when a tomb was erected for Chaucer, buried in the abbey 250 years earlier.
English literary history is extraordinarily diverse, and scholars have subjected its canon – as both a concept and a holding place – to extensive critique since at least the 1980s. But as a reflection of literary history, Poets’ Corner is selective and partial, and it may be a long time before the south transept becomes less male and less white.
But then it was never “designed”, and chance has played its part in the erratic evolution of this collective memorial as much as cultural conservatism. Chaucer, for example, was buried there because of his day job as clerk of works to the Palace of Westminster; that he wrote The Canterbury Tales had nothing to do with it. And while 2016 has been a year of Shakespearean saturation marking 400 years since The Bard’s death, 124 years went by before the most famous name in English literature entered Poets’ Corner. Larkin’s 31 years isn’t much compared to that.
Larkin’s emotionally ambivalent attitude to Christianity is surely not unique these days. In Church Going, one of his most magnificent works, the narrator finds himself “at a loss”, unable to accept religious “superstition”, or even explain why he visits the church. But something pulls him there nonetheless – perhaps because “so many dead lie round”. Larkin keenly felt his own relation to the poetic dead; a stone bearing his name now lies close to at least two writers he worshipped, Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence. There is much in Larkin’s work to suggest he would have been moved by this act of “awkward reverence”.
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