Cannibal
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A beautiful debut collection from Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair that draws on our colonial history and speaks powerfully to our present moment.
Shortlisted for Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021
A Guardian most anticipated book for 2020
'Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection' – Scotsman
Colliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal beautifully evoke the poet's Jamaican childhood and reach beyond to explore history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal.
Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke. Cannibal marks the arrival of a thrilling and essential lyrical voice.
'Cannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers.' – Major Jackson
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sinclair, a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award winner, crafts her stunning debut collection around the beauty and brutality of the word cannibal, whose origins derive from Christopher Columbus's belief that the Carib people he encountered consumed human flesh. Attacking this dehumanizing judgment born from white entitlement and denouncing the idea that blackness is synonymous with savagery, Sinclair ponders such questions as, How does a poet get inside the head of Shakespeare's Caliban? How would Caliban define blackness without the filter of a white man's bias? In the poem "Mermaid," Sinclair shows how history is more than a time line; it's the ghosts that haunt a family and the memories that live in their veins. She notes how the English attempted to stamp out Jamaican culture as if it were a weed, yet it grew "back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man." Sinclair's vibrant imagery and arresting diction injects inanimate objects with soul; sunsets, islands, beaches, and wind are stirred to life. More than a connection to nature, water becomes a safe haven: "my grandmother's wet skirt cast a web across// the sea." This is a tight, focused collection, and through her visceral language Sinclair paints the institution of white supremacy as not just an individualized phenomenon, but as a ruthless and menacing force.
