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Herself behind herself concealed: a biomythography of Jamaican womanhood

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Herself behind herself concealed: a biomythography of Jamaican womanhood

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Content HERSELF BEHIND HERSELF CONCEALED: A BIOMYTHOGRAPHY OF JAMAICAN WOMANHOOD BY SAFIYA SINCLAIR ________________________________________________________________________ A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING ) MAY 2019 Copyright 2019 Safiya Sinclair TABLE OF CONTENTS HERSELF BEHIND HERSELF CONCEALED: A BIOMYTHOGRAPHY OF JAMAICAN WOMANHOOD PART I: THE BODY 1 PART II: MYTH 13 PART III: MADNESS 42 PART IV: MOTHER LORE 60 BIBLIOGRAPHY 72 CRANIA AMERICANA: POEMS PART I 78 PART II 97 PART III 117 PART IV 130 PART V 148 NOTES 151 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 153 Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 1 PART I BODY Dear S., I am thinking of the day you decided to leave California. You’d spent the previous week feverish in bed, full with poem, writing in your old studio apartment near Wilshire, the one you’d decorated to remind you of the sea. White blanket printed with blue seashells, white leatherette couch, glass and steel kitchen table, shabby-chic blue vintage chest you’d shipped from your old place in Charlottesville. Beams of light that fed you deeply. I write the sea, because the sea is history, you’d copied over and over into your notebook, when you still believed in the hallowed sound of that Old Poet’s words. The poem you’d spent the week writing had been culled from ideas that bloomed while reading an essay on Goethe’s search for the Primal Plant, the one original plant from which he believed all flora originated. This, coupled with your free-associative notes from a class on Victorian literature, had become your poem, “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” which you workshopped in class the day you decided to leave California. Insert Black Girl here. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 2 You forget what you were wearing, or how exactly your workshop went, because after workshopping your poem your professor called for a break and asked to speak to you in his office. His white face was ashen, and behind his glasses his mood expressed one of grave concern. You sat at his desk and waited for him to speak. He picked up a copy of “Eve” between his thumb and forefinger like an infinitely delicate, 1 infinitely disgusting thing. What happened next you will never forget. What happened next sharpened your idea of what kind of poet you needed to be. What happened next is why you decided to leave California. The professor, now floating in his chair, buoyed by all the history and hubris of his body, leaned forward and told you he was worried that your poems had too much of a female conceit. He was worried that you would alienate male readers and editors. “You write too much about the body,” he said. “A male editor of a poetry magazine, or a judge picking books for prizes, won’t choose your work, because it’s not universal,” he said. Unfazed by the historical silence of your body, he continued, without irony: “I just judged a poetry prize, and the final two came down to a woman writing about her mastectomy, and a man who wrote more universal poems. Poems for everyone. I picked him for the prize.” Though you already knew—though you already knew—you wanted to ask him, in front of the world: What is a universal poem? But in this particular moment all you saw was green. Her inside me /in a green hour I can’t stop. /Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth// green thorn in my eye 2 . Your face fixed its stone gaze upon the professor. A thousand mothers and their voices rushed through you. Dark, and ancient, and divine. 3 Yes, you say to him now, your body standing up to go, shaking. Yes, you say again with more certainty, nurturing into existence your raison d’être, your black and impolite body, Yes. Of your 1 Plath, Sylvia. “Fever 103.” From Ariel. The Restored Edition, (Faber & Faber Poetry; New Ed. edition 2010). 2 Diaz, Natalie, “From the Desire Field,” Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets. 3 Lorde, Audre. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 3 female conceit, you look him in the face and tell him, This is not an accident. • Lusus Naturae noun (rare) A freak of nature. Some nights later, facing the rare sound of rain against the window, while reading Darwin for my class on Victorian science and literature, I come across the term lusus naturae and recognize you, S. Which is to say, I recognize myself. The Oxford English Dictionary defines lusus naturae as a “supposed sportive action of Nature to which the origin of marked variations from the normal type (of an animal, plant, etc.) was formerly ascribed.” In other words, a lusus naturae is a deviation from the norm or universal, a freak of nature, “a natural production deviating markedly from the normal type.” 4 This presupposes that there is a “norm,” that there is a “universal.” I consider my historical body in the world. My Black and Female. My unbelonging. By which I mean I spend long swaths of time thinking about the histories encoded in the words and thoughts that wound me. In writing this, I aim to trace a straight line from word to world. I want to create a history of violence against our body. What violence might be rooted in the etymology of a word like universal, for example? 4 "lusus naturae, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Web. 16 March 2015. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 4 By using a specific taxonomy of poetry to explain his evolutionary evidence, Darwin sought to trace the evolution of man from some common ancestor with the lower animals, to complete his biological narrative of humanity’s origin story. In The Descent of Man and On the Origin of Species, he speaks very much in the language of similarities and differences, in the language of metaphor. Darwin does this by methodically comparing the characteristics of primates with humans. He traces the skull, the ear, the hair, the sense of smell, against a universal archetype. An archetype, which for the western world, and the professor, as for Darwin, is the “European race.” This is the imperial archetype against which the world measures all else. In his scientific and imperial desire to denude nature, Darwin creates a racial divide through his categorical naming. This categorical naming is scientific, but it also reinforces the notions of lusus naturae, the freak of nature, the other. This way of seeing, through the eyes of another, is what Du Bois calls double consciousness 5 . On the psychological condition of the descendants of slaves in the Americas, Du Bois explains our inheritance of a doubled vision, a schizoid fracture, in which we must observe and uncover the universal world through a splintered mirror of unbelonging: “The Negro is gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” 6 Left with the scars of the historical trauma of slavery, where does home exist for the black body in America? For the black woman? 5 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. 6 Ibid. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 5 Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? 7 You can still count on one hand the Black authors you’d been asked to read in more than a decade of education in America. Kincaid. Komunyakaa. Mullen. Butler. You’d gotten adept very quickly at spotting the one token on the syllabus—if there was anyone at all—a token that was somehow improbably, always Du Bois. It’s as if Black people did not exist before the 20 th century. Later you would admit feeling foolish at just how much it surprised you, that even here in graduate school, you were being asked to ruminate, without irony, on centuries-old white ideas of pseudo-science as if they were real. As if you and the one other black woman in class did not exist. By the standards of western hegemony and its predominance of whiteness and sameness, S., you, and I, and every other black woman, must always see herself through the eyes of another. She is always an element of chaos, the uncommon verb, the lusus naturae. In your Intro to Theory class the feeling you registered most frequently was Guilt. My family is starving. People in Jamaica are dying, you thought, while trying to wrap your mind around Barthes’ theory of semiotics taught by a professor who, apropos of nothing, called Beyoncé “a ho.” Being here meant understanding what it was to be the Ghost. Everywhere you looked, you were absent. 7 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 6 Most days you imagine yourself through the eyes of another. Back straight, chin forward, poised perfectly in your silence. Who knows who might be watching. S., most days I imagine myself through your eyes. This body of unbelonging. This doubled mind. S., your comes to me as the voice of the Black Mother. She is what Audre Lorde called the woman’s place of power within each of us; dark,…places of possibility, grown strong through that darkness…it is ancient and it is deep. 8 She is that inexplicable place, that feeling of possession from which poetry comes. Lorde believed that poetry was not only firmly rooted in a kind of feminine erotic power, but that a specific feminine doubleness—an openness to ideas and feelings—had to work in duplex tandem to create art. Women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. Poetry, in its most fundamental sense, is always primal. One night, longing to return to the paradise of her body, you began to imagine yourself through the eyes of the Black Mother, and then you heard the voice of Eve—or was it the snake? Listening close, you transcribed: I too, am learning the vulgarity of botany. This is the first line of “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda.” You were searching for a way to inhabit a historical fact: that Victorian women were prevented from practicing Botany, because men thought the cross-sections of flowers too closely resembled female genitalia; that our anatomy was thought to be too vulgar. But what you really wanted was to inhabit the vulgarity, to find beauty in it. You would decolonize the universal by reinventing it. 8 Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 7 The conjured double is its own survival act, Freud tells us, and one that spawns its own visionary language. S., somehow you already knew, without knowing, that the “invention of doubling [is] a preservation against extinction [that] has its counterpart in the language of dreams…” 9 The language of survival, you wrote, is the language of dreams. Trapped in some labyrinth of Freudian dream-logic, you could conjure a poem-world in which off- handed facts about the Victorian era might be alchemized to express the experience of a Jamaican woman living in America. You wanted to nurse a new poetics of the tropics. A helio-poetics. A dream language. Something that sang the constant song we heard: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. 10 Under rushing river and hungry sea. Under green bamboo and the sleepy night-jasmine. The mad ants and croaking lizards invading the burrowed silences of you. For women then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our experience. 11 9 Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion. (Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2009.) 10 Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. New York: Norton, 1997. 11 Lorde, Audre.“Poetry is Not a Luxury.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 8 S., I am thinking again of our female conceit. There is something exciting about leaning into the impolite body. Call me murderess, a glowing engine timed to blow, you wrote. One autumn under a wind-swept jacaranda I asked if you recalled that Brathwaite quote on the inherently rebellious prosody of the Caribbean writer. Of course you did. The hurricane doesn’t roar in pentameters, 12 you repeated, like prayer. Under the gloom of the professor’s suggestion to veer away from the bloodroot of your mothers—that which calls you to celebrate the feminine—I remind you that Brathwaite’s words are still, and always, a call to arms. You often say that you want the lyric landscape of your poems to mirror the wild Jamaican countryside, to be an echo of the frenzied music of a black woman’s body—that here in the tropics, nothing grows politely. If Nature is vulgar, let us too be vulgar in this body. Let us be impolite. Brathwaite’s quote is also grown from this unruly root—that the iambic pentameter is a reflection of a British landscape, as foreign as falling snow. Whereas the Caribbean ear is attuned to our own lush scenery: the hurricane, the sea’s crashing and sage whispering, the riot of every animal, every insect, every red, slick bloom burrowing inside and sideways and bursting in and out of each other. How to fit all this feral world into pentameter, when it’s surging through the windows and ears, with the natural drama of our rambling dialect and oral history? S., much like Du Bois’ double consciousness, and Freud’s invented double, you and I were born to inhabit a dual self, where the body speaks in one tongue and dances in another. Am I the tongue and you the dance—? You the hurricane or its constant roar? In reality, who am I? 13 12 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon Books, 1984. 13 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 9 Again and finally, we find that this dream-language is the first weapon of exile. Just as poetry for you was an act of survival. And for me the first tool of expression. In the face of this constant othering, we must consider mythification a necessity. Toni Morrison once said that in the absence of our existence in the imagination of others, black women must carve a space out of the world for themselves, asserting that “out of the profound desolation of [the black woman’s] reality she may very well have invented herself.” 14 Yes, we have our madness, but we also have our anger. How would we theorize our rude existence? In 1982, in a profound act of self-invention (and survival), Audre Lorde coined the term biomythography, creating “a new form of cultural ‘biography’—composed of history, biography, and myth to unfold her personal history.” 15 Of this feat of inventing herself, Lorde explained that her work was “not only an autobiography, but mythology, psychology, all the ways in which I think we can see our environment….I attempt to create a piece of art, not merely a retelling of things that happened to me and to other women with whom I shared close ties. I define it as a biomythography because I’ve found no other word to really coin what I was trying to do.” 16 S., imagine if we could now unjungle ourself. 14 Morrison, Toni. “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Liberation.” New York Times Magazine. 22 August 1971, 15. 15 Holland, Sharon P. “When Characters Lack Character: A Biomythography.” PMLA 123.5 (2008): 1494-1502. 16 Lorde, Audre. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi. 2004. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 10 I’ve spent whole nights, whole gone years thinking of how you and I could ingest history, biography, and myth to subvert the idea of the universal self. We wanted to write an entire work of female conceit. What is cannibal in us would conjure a dream-language. The Black Mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I think, therefore I feel. 17 How could we transgress the academy’s notion of what constitutes a thesis? How could a freak of nature confine herself to any norm? How would we write both a history and a myth of our impolite body? Just how would we weave a biomythography? Green moving green, moving. 18 How would I, vision doubled, now invent myself? A woman writing thinks back through her mothers. 19 My body is a universal poem. S., this is my attempt to create a biomythography of my body. And yours. 17 Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 18 Diaz, Natalie. “From the Desire Field,” Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets. 19 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press. (1935) [1929]. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 11 PORTRAIT OF EVE AS THE ANACONDA I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei for mischief. Of Man, redacted I came, am coming, fasting, starving carved myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I, twice discarded, arrived thornside, and soon outgrew his reptilian sheen. A fine specimen. Let me have it. Something inviolate; splayed in bird-lime, legs an exposed anemone, against jailbait August, its X-ray sky. This light a Gorgon-slick, polygamous doom. And God again calling much too late, who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable. His Primal Plant remains elusive— Wildfire and pathogen, blood-knot of human fleshed there in His beard. How I am hot for it. Call me murderess, a glowing engine timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow. Let me have it. This maidenhead-primeval schemes what ovule of cruel invention; the Venus-trap, the menses. And how many ways to pronounce this guilt: whore’s nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata. Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum. Engorging shored pornographies, the cells’ unruly strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years; my wings pinned wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 12 Jamaican tourism by way of eugenics. She is a western myth. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 13 PART II MYTH My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— Dear S., I am thinking of our creation myth again. The first time you walked into the sea, you never meant to come back. The pesky morning had yawned itself into existence like any other, burnishing the sea’s blues bluer, the day’s good sky flooding your heart with unfulfilled rain. You stood at the water’s edge and watched the waves heaving, its million eyes glittering, as you stood transfixed, staring down the blurred horizon where you were forbidden to go, and waited. You waited to be pulled back to the safety of the sand, waited to hear a grownup screaming for you to get away from the sea. But no voice came for you, except the wind sweeping sweet nothings in your ear. Your young parents were somewhere out of sight— your pregnant mother bathing your baby brother in the same red plastic basin she’d use to hand- wash your clothes, bending over then to feed her own baby sister, her father’s newest newborn who she’d delivered from his scared eighteen-year-old girlfriend on your bedroom floor only a month before. You picture your mother now, and always, wiping the world’s sweat from temple to temple. Your father, as you’d soon grow to expect, was gone; following his dream to play reggae when he could still feel a future in the rhythm of its one drop. What sent you running to the ocean was not the threat of his stinging hand, or your mother’s sewn-up silence. Instead, that morning you looked Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 14 out into shimmering blue, out past the diving herons, past the floating buoy, and saw there, beyond the visible line of memory, a woman, vaguely familiar, hands struggling against the tide, drowning. Or perhaps she was beckoning. *** Myth, you once told me, was a doubled Janus-figure of our own invention, looking forward and back at the same time, the uncanny mark of the womb and its wound. You’ve always believed that magic and mythmaking were imperative to our survival. Do you still believe that now, as you believed then, that the creation act of mythmaking is both a violence and a necessity? Some women spring from the loins of a dismembered father-god, some women leap full-born from the god’s riven head. In birth, there is always a violence. Whose blood, whose tears, anemone sprung to life in the sand, gave birth to us? 20 In recalling our creation myth, I watch you walk into the sea every morning, as if on a loop. Thinking then of the cyclical nature of mythology, I want to insert an idea found in the preface of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, which can be broadly summarized in two phrases: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth. 20 According to Greek mythology, the anemone flower was created from the tears of Aphrodite and the blood of her slain lover, Adonis. Cyrino, Monica S. Aphrodite. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 15 For Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment represents the vast shift in western history toward logos and reason; a sharp shift away from myth, religion, and the unknown, where over the centuries, magical thinking in the west had become outdated and “primitive.” The gods no longer represented the unknown and the unseen in nature. Eventually Plato eschewed the value of poets in Greek overculture altogether, due to their lack of “usefulness.” He even called for their exile from Athens. Perhaps I lack usefulness, I confessed. The kettle whistled just then, as if in a dream. You disagreed, countering by telling me that men fear what is unknown, and that the Unknown in nature was just another imperial conquest. Just as the unknown within us, the dark places mythic and divine from which poetry comes, was another territory to be conquered and colonized. And though scientific progression was supposed to lead humanity to a better future and a more enlightened way of thinking, instead it led to the H- bomb, to Auschwitz, to the Transatlantic slave trade, and the modern objectification of self. This is a truth I still feel most deeply. By writing to you now, my creative act of mythmaking is also an act of self-preservation, necessary for any oppressed person, any lusus naturae, to exist. You always reminded me that the idea of poetry was not only to survive, but to thrive. And a creative act involves its own strange kind of violence—by inflicting upon the air the “violence of poetic speech;” to “break into the un-thought” of silence, creating matter from a void. 21 S., for us, creation was also always an act of defiance—a black woman’s work becoming a kind of bloom daring to unfurl from razed ground. Again I watch you walking into the sea, enacting the myth that made us, from memory. 21 Martin Heidegger. “Limitation of Being,” An Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 1959). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 16 The western world has reached a profane cliff, you said—a point in which all knowledge turns in on itself, the point in which enlightenment becomes barbarism and collapses in chaos. Enlightenment, in its denial of myth, has itself become a brutal mythification. It is even possible that, pondering the force which can be contained in a fistful of matter, man might find poetic justice in an atom bomb formed in the shape of an apple. 22 Bridging the wide metaphoric space to conflate the atom bomb and the apple requires a being of equal parts violence and fecundity. Only a poet can be such a being. The poet is she “who sets forth into the unsaid and compels the unhappened to happen, and makes the unseen appear.” 23 *** So I’ve conjured you here again, following a drowning woman into the sea. Or perhaps was she beckoning— She waved feverishly and you waved back. Something about her face, even at this distance, felt like home. You could see her, just barely, head bobbing in and out of sight, her throat—or was it 22 Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, Preface. (The Alicat Book Shop Press; Yonkers: New York, 1946), 7. 23 Martin Heidegger. “Limitation of Being,” An Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 1959). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 17 yours—gasping for air. It didn’t matter that you didn’t know how to swim. Hello and I love you said the sea, speaking the kind language of a four-year-old, and so you stepped in, first one foot in the sinking sand and then another, warm sea-froth snaking around your tiny ankles, then rising quickly to your knees. Above, a concord jet shrieked across the sky, and you looked up, briefly studying the many white contrails crisscrossing our blue. An iron bird. A bird of Babylon. At four you’d already grown accustomed to the constant roaring of the planes leaving from the airport next door, just another place forbidden to us, the indifferent sun peeling its burnt skin overhead. S., what did it mean, anyway, to be someone? You turned one last time to look at your house—your grandfather’s house—a hundred feet away, crouched small on the sand, sun glinting off its zinc roof, the ripe almond trees on either side, and saw no one reaching for you, so you threw yourself quietly into the rollicking waves. *** The story of womanhood has always been a story of puppetry. It all begins with a Fall, you remind me. With our exile from the old Garden, the myth tells us that Eve betrayed us. That the casting out of Eden is man’s first source of vertigo, and woman and her desire is the source of that Fall. Eve and her desire. Eve and her “terrible wound,” the mark of woman—her body, her blemish, her birthmark—her sin. There in the old allegory, as in modernity, being woman was always the original evil. And man, ever since, has been trying to re-climb, reclaim, to revert back to the pure, vestal, fictive womb. His act of reclamation is its own kind of violence. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 18 S., at least once a month I am reminded of Tzachi Zamir’s essay “Puppets,” in which he recounts a story of an old peasant woman who frightens away the devil by “bending over and showing the demon the terrible wound her husband is capable of inflicting with his merest fingernail.” 24 Even here the womb and wound are indistinguishable, as a locus of creation and violence, two sides of the same coin. Note also that in this story, the old woman’s anatomy out-devils the devil. Her natural anatomy is terrifying. But all the power in her anatomy is transferred to her absent husband. The old woman’s cunning, as well as the narrative of her own body, become inseparable from and overtaken by her husband’s violence, and thus his control. Hysterical and voiceless, a vessel for the male ego, his desire, his narrative, and ultimately his becoming. The story, Zamir concludes, “belonged to the puppets.” Here you begin to recall with a shudder all the men who placed their hands inside you. All their twisting and turning, their searching. For something. Call me a curio, one Hottentot show, you write. And, body, found object whose hole can hold anything. If I embrace this emptiness, all puppetry is possible. 25 24 Zamir, Tzachi. “Puppets.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, 2010, pp. 386–409. 25 Notes on the State of Virginia, IV, from Cannibal. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 19 *** The sea was sometimish, and so were we. Blissful and incandescent one moment, brooding and murderous the next; our national temperament as mutable as a dream before the storm. S., if you stand on your tip-toes and peer hard enough into your family’s past, you can see the tea-black leaves at the bottom of your grandfather’s rusting tin cup. One morning, two decades before you’d walked towards the drowning woman in the sea, he had already risen, emptied his chimmy into the sputtering surf, boiled and drank his cerasee tea, and with the sea in his favour, had pushed off his old fishing skiff into the blue-dark morning. Like all the men in my family, he went were no woman was allowed to go, out past the visible line of my life, disappearing into stories whose shadows threw giant hands across the cloudless sky. He had wrestled with a marlin big as a man and lived, had gotten lost at sea for three days and survived on the meat of a shark, reappearing one Sunday like a myth on the horizon with a sea-turtle as big as a car, feeding our entire seaside village for a week. But the sea was sometimish. What it gifts in bounty, it waits, a hungry animal, to slake and take suddenly away. Your grandfather Ferdinand was a man coughed up wholly by the sea, with stone coral and brine where brain and blood should be; a man whose thumb was firmly placed on the thread that unravelled your mother, and so eventually, unravelled you. *** S., You and I and our mothers are an unsung casualty here, and everywhere. We must absolve the fissure of both facets of our selves, and so often we must do it alone: dance, ask the great questions of the divining stars, to fall into a trance of poetry, to sing. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 20 Perhaps no one was quite so invisible, while still so visible, as the Black woman, whose unspeaking body is equivalent to the striking form of writing itself—a utility, a mark, “a stigma.” 26 As Foucault writes, “The world is covered with signs that must be deciphered…to know must therefore be to interpret.” 27 If it is through the metamorphosis of language that the invisible becomes visible, and if language is a living thing that mirrors the biology of plants and trees, then at its most raw and primal state it’s found simply in the disruptive form of a woman writing—her black mark, her stigma. How do we read or interpret the drowning woman? How do we pronounce or denounce her? *** Rough-hewn and portly, your grandfather would eventually grow timeworn by women and the salt tongue of the sea, his bulbous fingers curved at the nail like grappling hooks that would sink themselves into you and your siblings as he dragged you into violent hugs, bruising your faces with his sharp grey stubble, his rum-smell misting the ether. A fixedly tactile man, your grandfather was born with a sixth finger on each hand, which only continued to mythify him to White House, as he made his life’s work a master class in making and unmaking things. He’d built his boat from the wound of a blue mahogany tree just as eagerly as he’d struck his women, building his many fish traps by hand, crafting little land mines in his wake. 26 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 27 Ibid. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 21 He walked large and lived larger; drinking heavy, slamming dominoes every night, a different woman, sometimes as young as fourteen, on his arm. They called him Massa B. He became so well- known for the flashy spectacle of driving around in his white Beauford car that people in Montego Bay started calling him Beauford, which was crooned as a raw and drawn-out “Bawww-ford,” until “Baw-ford” became simply “B.” The “Massa” rode uneasily on the back of our colonial legacy—that lingering deference still given to anyone with even a hint of non-Black breeding—so your grandfather with his “coolie” hair, loose curls grown long, slicked back and soft, had owned this shoreline and the title which had been handed to him from his father, the light-skinned and notoriously haughty Mas’ Jim, who was both English and cruel, and never let anyone in White House forget it. S., wherever the women in your family went, there too was the blood-wound bored deeply and sweetly by men. So that expectant morning two decades ago, like every morning since, after your grandfather patched his fishing traps with driftwood and chicken-wire, dropped them into the teeming reef, and pushed his fishing boat out into the water, he did not see either of you following him out to sea. Not you, nor the drowning woman two decades before you. What he left behind was the sea village he had burned to the ground the previous night. His inheritance. And yours. *** Sadism demands a story, you like to say. 28 28 Mulvey, Laura (Autumn 1975). “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” Screen. 16 (3): 6–18. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 22 And somehow this inheritance of violence returns to us, doubled and doubling. The act of narrative is one of masculine desire, you tell me, and any path forward is inevitably one of violence. As Teresa de Lauretis explains, 29 a traditional narrative act always involves denuding and unveiling, as well as the movement of an actant-subject, a hero (male) through an open plot-space, and the defeat of an actant-subject—female, the womb, a trapdoor to fall through—for the real action to happen. Think: your grandfather leaving that morning without noticing his violence-doing upon your grandmother. Think: you, years later, walking towards her in the sea. This trope—beginning with Eve, traced down through Ovid’s Galatea, down to all the western fathers’ heroines and beyond—is the all too familiar emblem of the woman as a tool for male self- discovery. The woman, the womb-space, the plot hole, as Ned Schantz writes in “Time Stalkers,” is simply “a female singularity for patriarchal interests.” 30 And it is a narrative we know all too well— Gwen Stacy dies to give Spiderman more complexity, Circe is villainous to give Odysseus brave resolve, Penelope is virtuous to give him hope and meaning. Their stories are left unfinished once the male hero has moved on, often now imbued with the power of the female monster he has just defeated. The narrative act, with its “incipient tumescence,” is driven by masculine desire, and the hero must be male (“regardless of the gender of the text-image”), because the obstacle that he must overcome is “morphologically female, and indeed, simply, the womb.” 31 29 de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). "Desire in Narrative", Alice Doesn’t, p.118-119. Indiana University Press. 30 Schantz, Ned. “Time Stalkers.” Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature. : Oxford University Press, September 01, 2008. 31 de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). "Desire in Narrative", Alice Doesn’t, p.118-119. Indiana University Press. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 23 It is not enough for Oedipus to defeat the Sphinx, she must also be remade in his perfect image. *** The seawater had now risen to your chest, the waves splashing against your torso, your dress clinging frantic to your skin. Out ahead you could see the woman’s blurred face, visible now in the distance, her sprout of black hair dark as kelp, her hands still waving to you, as the sea’s blunt motion pushed you back towards shore. Her voice, sweet and familiar, seemed to call your name. Your name. Somewhere in the unseen place of you, a root small as a leaf bursting from an almond flicked alive inside, and you wanted to walk past that naked ocean-line, to part your known universe, and follow her. Like rain falling against your zinc roof, her voice floated as through a storm-drain. She called to you from somewhere beneath hello and I love you, from beyond the beach where you liked to dig your toes in the shallow sand, in that wet bank where the wily sting-rays buried themselves to cool off; she called from that ripened place where the sea-grapes would bruise purple and sweet, announcing they were ready for sucking. You tell me it’s hard even now to say why you I did it. Why you kept going when you knew you couldn’t swim. But you thought she was there and your only impulse was to reach her, despite the hungry nature of the sea. You knew that the empty husk of a crab in the sand meant something soft and once- scampering had been hooked out of its boiled shell to keep you alive one more day. A life for a life. You knew that your brother, squealing and curious, was only two-years old, and that it would be four more years before you could both read each other’s minds. You knew that your younger sisters, were both somehow here, listening, still waiting beneath the catacombs to be born. Here, where the Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 24 thorny urchin inches its millimeter death-drive towards oblivion or shoreline—whichever came first—to live against a foreigner’s postcard-idea of your fictive happiness only sharpened each day’s reality, lengthening its grief. The woman buckled in and out of sight, your mind heavy. Somewhere in this glassy-eyed chaos, perhaps she too felt the weight of extinction pressed upon her lungs—that when you looked left and looked right on either side of your family line, there was nobody past or present now to answer your desperate call. *** S., this morning I woke under a fog, thinking of twoness, of doubles, of opposites. You were crying, or I was. Cause and effect. On the mobile screen I came across a Lucille Clifton poem 32 that emptied the Black Mother’s toil into me: why some people be mad at me sometimes they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine. I am still finding ways to conjure our dream-language. Flushed with word-magic, I wake you to tell you about the mysterious etymology of the word “Siren,” a word that has no discernible root. Siren. A witched word. From the Greek Seirenes, first mentioned in The Odyssey, these fabulous monsters, part 32 Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, Rochester, BOA Editions, 2012. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 25 woman, part bird, who were supposed to lure sailors to destruction by their enchanting singing. 33 Beyond the myth, they seem to come out of nowhere. As if they had conjured themselves into existence, you said. Like all myths, she is still there, fixed in place and time, the woman on the horizon. You walking into the sea. You reconstructing a past. You conjuring a memory to follow your grandfather into the sea. You chasing the ghost of yourself. Through this creative act of self-making, the self has given birth to another self—our own parthenogenetic life cycle come full-circle. I return again to Freud’s doubling, spending long nights thinking of you, and of Freud’s cleaving phenomena, which he believed belonged to das unheimliche, the uncanny—wherein the fractured psyche contains both the frighteningly strange as well as the familiar, the homely. And similar to a “cleaving,” in the linguistic sense, which means both to divide and to join together, the psychological existence of the uncanny is as much a unification as it is a separation (a doubling). In Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny,” he describes odd experience of his, where he once awoke in his private train car to find a strange old man standing there. When Freud starts to tell the man that he is in the wrong private compartment, he frighteningly realizes that the old man is actually himself, reflected in the mirror. In that hazy subliminal dream-state Freud has misrecognized his doppelganger as himself. Two men standing on opposite sides of the mirror. To each one, his 33 "siren, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Web. 10 January 2019. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 26 unreality is the real one. S., the woman has been bisected. Here at the mirror, in the uncanny plot-space between thoughts and words, she does not recognize herself. In the face of man-made violence, she has made a shell of-and-for herself. Perhaps this creative act of our self-portraiture is the most uncanny—the strange and the familiar as one, the self and the anti-self twain, the doppelganger born in the womb of the mind, the uncanniest place. One need not be a chamber to be haunted. One need not be a house. 34 *** Time blurs and fractures. You were now farther out in the ocean than you had ever been, dipping and bobbing dangerously below the waterline. You splayed and kicked your arms and legs uselessly, as the ocean, with all its weight and thousand hands, pushed you back and back towards the shore. But you shouldered forward stubbornly, her horizon in your eye, until the sand, once-safe and assured between your trudging toes, melted away, away. Gone. Until all that was left were your legs thrashing underwater against nothing, your body sinking in slow motion, your hands reaching up, reaching out, and feeling only sea, touching nothing and nowhere but the surging, darkening blue below. 34 Dickinson, Emily. “Poem 670.” From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Johnson, ed., (Little, Brown & Company, 1961), 333. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 27 *** You assure me that in the liminal space between thought and the act of creation, most artists cultivate two selves—the corporeal (flesh and body), and the immortal (literature and art). The poet has made of her body both a haunted house and a birthing place, “Ourself behind ourself concealed.” 35 Art itself is a strange birthing act of selfing/unselfing, making the womb the true realm of the uncanny. In giving birth to and observing her self in exile, and in living through the trauma of a time-out-of- joint, the black woman contemplates the spiraling trance-state of meeting one’s doubled self, and the madness that gave birth to both. Through art, and through literature, she finds some way to make sense of her selves, to harness the madness of her historical and inherited trauma into something curative. She speaks her own future into being. This leads us, of course, back to the gods. *** S., the first time you felt the weight of your blackness and womanhood converge in a truly visceral way was in the spring of 2013. You were living in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at a dinner 35 Dickinson, Emily. “Poem 670.” From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Johnson, ed., (Little, Brown & Company, 1961), 333. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 28 celebrating your birthday one of your UVA peers asked you if you were biologically capable of tanning. This was not the first time you’d felt your human self diminish in the white gaze. It wouldn’t be the last. Just weeks before, a frat house had spray painted “WE DON’T WANT ANY NIGGERS HERE” on a public bridge in town. Yes, you’d felt inhuman. You’d felt alone and othered. This was the condition of being a Black woman in America. The exile of being in your own body. Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers. 36 S., so often you write to excise this aching ache inside of you; the anger yes, but something else, too. Something unnamable. Impossible to remove you tell me, no matter what I do. You tell me that living in the United States of America still makes you feel in many ways, so much a stranger to yourself, always at war with yourself in this adopted world, which is also always at war with you: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.” 37 In this merging of “the double self into a better and truer self,” the black woman in America is inescapably trapped in a mise-en-abyme—standing between two reflections, doubled for all eternity, facing both the self and the not-self, the body as subject as well as object. And usually in this dream- space between self and not-self, reality and unreality, this kind of doubling ends in violence, with either a shattering of the self or the other. 36 Lorde, Audre. “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 37 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 29 But how could you make it useful? How does the lusus naturae speak? Put in in the poetry, I tell you. The poem is the locus and transfiguration of all our pains. But what I should have said is that I wanted us to find beauty in our own nature, to accept that the threatening parts of us are beautiful. S., if we considered now the collage of ourselves, we might interrogate the fear and shame thrust upon a black woman’s body while also subverting the ideas of savagery historicized in our being. Once the “known world” had been denuded, “discovered,” colonized, and science had overtaken superstition as the main mode of navigating the world, the lusus naturae (the freak of nature, the other) was no longer burned at the stake, but measured, dissected, and put on display. Black women like Saartjie Baartman were taken to Europe to be ogled. Her black body was enough of a curiosity to be caged and observed. After her death in 1815, they kept her vagina in a glass jar on display in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in France until 1976. 38 Her body, like yours and mine, was made into a spectacle of deviation, a space of displacement. In her poem “The Researcher Contemplates Venus,” 39 poet Bettina Judd asks Saartjie: Where would you like me to put you? 38 Qureshi, Sadiah (June 2004). "Displaying Sara Baartman, the 'Venus Hottentot'". History of Science. 42 (136): 233– 257. 39 Judd, Bettina. Patient. Black Lawrence Press, 2014. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 30 She laughs, or maybe she sighs. Researchers only ask leading questions. Questions that lean toward the body sometimes trip over the dead. S., all week you had been aching again with poem. You began to write one celebrating black womanhood, celebrating your historical body, the one that swung wildly between rejection or objectification. You wanted to play against the stereotypes of blackness being monstrous and womanhood being dark and mysterious. By having a point of reclamation where that monstrosity was actually the source of our power, a chimera created from the collage of these two things—you and me, empowered with a vaginal all-seeing third eye. Who else but you would sing a song of yourself? You’d been trying to find a way to mythify yourself in the poem, to make of yourself an expansive goddess of the flesh: An ode to my vagina, you said. She is Gaia and Gaia is me. You told me you found power in playing up your own body’s danger and subverting that threat, that you found thrill in playing coy and helpless, only to say no, I will consume and devour you, and destroy you. In your poetry you were trying to dismantle the demand for order that so ruled the western fathers. To decolonize the words that wound you. English vernacular includes so many words and terms of violence against women—outside of common pejoratives like “bitch,” “whore,” and “cunt,” and their myriad synonyms, there are words in common English vernacular like “wife-beater,” for a common item of clothing, phrases like “knocked up,” for a pregnant woman, and terms such as “smash” and “hit” as a euphemism for having sex with a woman, all which only normalize the Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 31 violence against women in society. If English language—with the weight of its macabre colonial history, with this implicit and explicit violence against women—is the language of our trauma and oppression, what would a language of preservation and healing, a language of breadth and depth and inclusion look like? What would a matriarchal language look like? The meek inherit nothing, was the first line you wrote, thinking of the gods that inhabited you, the gods you inhabit. God in his tattered coat/this morning, a quiet tongue in my ear// begging for alms,/cold hands reaching up my skirt. These first lines would become your poem, “The Center of the World.” This would be one poem of your many poems of female conceit. You were in the midst of assembling a whole vulvic collection: All the ways a black woman’s body could jeweled, and immense, and beautiful. Here is the center of the world. By reframing the gaze of shame cast on the female body, you are where the power is centering in her figure; here is her unstoppable magic. S., for so long you believed that to be powerful meant to be destructive, to denude, to exclude, to possess. For the western fathers, for the professor in Los Angeles, for scientists and historians, power was always a decidedly masculine realm. To be open was to be vulnerable. A woman’s purpose was a silent and silenced body. That we must never speak. That we must never speak. That we must never speak. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 32 “There are many kinds of power, used and unused,” Audre Lorde writes at the beginning of her essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” where she explores the idea of power as springing from an erotic source rather than a destructive one. Women are so often discouraged from using or expressing erotic power. “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic,” Lorde tells us. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame/ How a sound comes into a word, coloured/ By who pays what for speaking. 40 Somehow, it was in this body of silence that you started writing poetry—in your need to express yourself, the page was the first place you could cultivate a voice. Where you could turn inwards to yourself, toward the feminine within you, to guard it. And there was real power in that. Like a city built for yourself, the poem was a home you carved out in your head, where the words were always the right words, where you could speak in English or patois, you could formulate a song or a self. Home for you, as for me, had always been poetry. And S., even after you breached that unnamable place to create your own lyric landscape, it took you decades to learn that this too, was a source of power. 40 Lorde, Audre. “Coal.” From The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 33 To change the world that wounds us, you had to study the weapon doing the wounding. For you, and for me, that weapon is language. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. 41 And what if the power to change the world is not what we have always held as masculine, but as something more inclusive, more intuitive, more feminine? What if being open was a strength, as Lorde instructs: “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female plane, firmly rooted in…feeling.” 42 There she shows us that emotion and sensuality, are great and untapped sources of power and knowledge. She urges us to be open to the world, to be open to joy, to music, to rhythm, to poetry. To be open. The importance is the openness, which is deeply feminine—to be entered, to be penetrated, takes fearlessness—and this tapping into the erotic root of understanding the world and our selves in the world is the way to our deepest knowledge. I/Is the total black, being spoken/From the earth’s inside./There are many kinds of open. 43 S., you also believe, as Lorde believed, that the erotic is the most profoundly creative source, and it’s from this openness to the emotional landscape, the ancient and dark and divine—the diving into the feminine world—that lyric poetry is born. 41 Lorde, Audre, “Transformation of Silence.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 42 Lorde, Audre, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 43 Lorde, Audre. “Coal.” From The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 34 Some nights, dreaming at our desks, we would find ourselves wading the same dark sea that birthed H.D.’s theory of “jellyfish over-consciousness,” where she imagined a fecundity of “the womb of the mind,” making a pregnant space of vision and creativity. The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is vision of the womb. The brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important. 44 Reading these words, you are tempted to lean into your “female conceit,” to forge the poetry of a mastectomy or Eve or an incandescent cunt. To write a poem that moves against the universal, utterly against what Lorde called the white fathers’ “imagination without insight.” 45 But why shouldn’t all of us move through the world with a depth of feeling versus a detached and logical one? S., you’ve managed to convince me that the lyric is female. That it is also fundamentally oceanic. In the creative act the artist fractures into two selves: the mindfulness of the brain and a corporeal “over-mind,” like a jelly-fish nursed on erotic power, “centered in the love-region of the body...like a foetus.” 46 This amniotic consciousness is a new type of seeing, a new kind of artistic vision, which is beyond the homely and familiar, becomes the uncanniest realm. 44 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Notes On Thought and Vision: Second Draft, Typescript, Corrected By H.D. (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). 45 Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 46 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Notes On Thought and Vision: Second Draft, Typescript, Corrected By H.D. (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 35 Memory is the mother, begetter of all drama, idea, music, science or song. 47 S., how long did you know that all our visions were emerging from this ocean of memory? *** What crawled from the sea into your village at night, who could say. Beneath you, you knew, were the bones of your many dead, feeding the dreams of those not-yet-born. You could exclaim in a hundred ways that this was your land, your mother’s land, your grandfather’s; You could tell me that you owned the fresh sugar cane as much as the anchorless ghosts. But you knew you belonged nowhere, as keenly as all of you knew it was blood that gave this land to you, and that your hearts, like the land, belonged to no one. The dark moods of the sea nursed this private country—all of us harbouring our unspoken darkness until the whole nation erupted in a hurricane—sister kicking against sister, lover against mistress, father against daughter. What your grandfather left behind him that morning five decades ago was a wife he had kissed and beaten, beaten and kissed, along with their nine children at White House top. What he glanced at only briefly in the low distance, trying to shake like a bad dream, was the shack at White House bottom that housed the seamstress, his old mistress, who bore him two young daughters. The hairs on his skin prickled as he envisioned the whispered-about half-caste woman he’d loved in secret 47 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Notes On Thought and Vision: Second Draft, Typescript, Corrected By H.D. (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), 7. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 36 then discarded like the empty crab-husks that littered the beach. That woman was your grandmother Isabel, who was now pregnant and doubled over in pain on the last morning of her life. *** What you wanted most from your work was to save her. What you wanted most from your work was to uncouple the power of femininity from the male gaze; you wanted to separate our understanding of femme beauty entirely from the masculine. Everything we experience now, is rooted in some historical or mythological elsewhere, its origin just beyond our sightline. Even Aphrodite, you say, was formed from the severed genitals of the sky god Uranus. His severed genitals were thrown into the sea, creating a white foam from which sprung Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. You quote from Hesiod’s Theogony aloud to me: “And so soon as he had cut off the members with flint and cast them from the land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the main a long time: and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. From there, afterwards…came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass grew up about her beneath her shapely feet. Her gods and men call Aphrodite, and the foam-born goddess…because she grew amid the foam….And with her went Eros, and comely Desire followed her at her birth...” 48 If Aphrodite is the womb of feeling, the erotic, the expression of beauty, then the beloved goddess Athena is the formation of the ideas, the mind, the wisdom of the Black Mother. We hoped for an origin of self-creation. But myth tells us that Athena, whose pregnant mother was swallowed by Zeus, was born by springing from the Zeus’ split-head fully formed, in armour. Fully armed. This 48 Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Theogony. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. (190-205). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 37 angers you. Why should Athena owe any of her intelligence to Zeus? you argue, and I agree. Both feelings (Aphrodite) and ideas (Athena)—which is to say, you and me—are inescapably linked to the patriarch. His body and his mind. Meanwhile the woman, even in her own creation myth, is merely an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix, and matter, 49 made purposeless. S., I am keen to understand this sense of a historical or mythological elsewhere, honing a kind of foresight that might pick future (and past) out of the roots of words. Athena did after all emerge from Zeus’ head full of wisdom, and in full armour—the position with which all women must eventually face the world. In defense of her mind. In defense of her self. Call it my wayward belief that the history of a thing, especially words, gives them actual metric weight. There is always a symbiotic relationship between language and science, both with their power for change, each with the capacity for grievance, creating the double consciousness of the lusus naturae. If I can divine their origins, tea-leaves at the bottom of a cup, I may better express the particularities of this body. Through the eyes of the Proto-Indo-European mother tongue, which has no mother. *** 49 de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). "Desire in Narrative", Alice Doesn’t, p.118-119. Indiana University Press. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 38 S., the story of your grandmother that comes down to you from the green hills of Germantown was whispered from hand to mouth across two parishes, from Westmoreland to Montego Bay, hand to mouth across the decades, until the gossip ripened red and bled out of a bitter cerasee vine. You can count on one had the facts you know about her. Isabel Häcker was the mixed child of a German man and the blackest woman in Westmoreland. Her father left her a big inheritance and when she turned eighteen she spurned her own mother, venomously spitting: “You too black to be my mother.” She ran away from the country with her inheritance, and arrived on a bus in Montego Bay, where she was promptly robbed by a silver-tongued Indian man, only the first of her many misfortunes with men. She worked as a seamstress, and they called her Mam Bel. She died at thirty- two while pregnant with her eighth child, leaving only myth and mystery and unreeling grief in her wake. *** The afternoon is in tatters. You’d been showing me the poems. The ways in which you were re-narrativizing your own history through the magic of mythmaking and folklore. You were looking into the empty god-head and saying Yes, I am a power source and you should be afraid. We’d just seen J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship, and wanted to make some use of it, its furious brushstrokes. How viscerally the painting depicts a storm at sea, with angry waves thrashing a tumultuous ocean, nearly engulfing a ship in the background of the frame. It is sunset and the ocean looks on fire, painted in reds, golds, and oranges. And though it is very easy to miss at first glance, Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 39 just in the near right corner is a shackled foot and a drowning black body, being devoured by hungry fish. Look even closer—and soon many other black hands appear, still shackled, sinking below the bloodied ocean. The original title of this painting was “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on.” You spent all afternoon trying to convince me the Turner painting perfectly depicted what Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia, an intersection of history and anti-place “that can be found within the culture,…simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” 50 Turner painted this as an abolitionist statement in 19 th century England, and it depicted a horror that was both a part of history, as well as the space of his imagination. But I was more convinced that both the painting and its idea of heterotopia expressed something about you and your creation myth. You following a drowning woman into the sea, only to find out decades later she was your grandmother. There was nothing men broke that the sea couldn’t fix, you tell me. As I watch you walk towards another shoreline of yourself. 50 Michel Foucault, From Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec) Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 40 CENTER OF THE WORLD The meek inherit nothing. God in his tattered coat this morning, a quiet tongue in my ear, begging for alms, cold hands reaching up my skirt. Little lamb, paupered flock, bless my black tea with tears. I have shorn your golden fleece, worn vast spools of white lace, glittering jacquard, gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust on my skin. Cornsilk hair in my hems. I have milked the stout beast of what you call America; and wear your men across my chest like furs. Stick-pin fox and snow blue chinchilla: They too came to nibble at my door, the soft pink tangles I trap them in. Dear watchers in the shadows, dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease, please. Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here, some blood in the hunt. Now the center of the world: my incandescent cunt. All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis and the wild pink Damascus, my sweet Aphrodite unfolding in the kink. All hail hot jasmine in the night; thick syrup in your mouth, forked dagger on my tongue. Legions at my heel. Here at the world’s red mecca, kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem, here in the cradle of Thebes, a towering sphinx roams the garden, her wet dawn devouring. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 41 FRIDA KAHLO - THE TWO FRIDAS (1939) Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 42 PART III MADNESS “In reality, who am I?” Dear S., You are now older than your grandmother was when she died. You tell me you wish to return the sea, which scientists tell us has the same chemical properties of amniotic fluid. 51 A white anemone, tears of Aphrodite, held by a long, ghostly hand. Disembodied. Something you wrote in your last poem, which stayed with me these many months since. Madness is a way of seeing, you said. To envision a world of your own strange creation, speak in indecipherable tongues, rage against an indifferent sky, to look into the mirror and see a fractured version of reality, a fractured self. Both psychopathology and literature seem to recognize madness as being fundamentally rooted in some kind of psychic break or fracture against order, some potentially violent de-construction of reality which may be caused by trauma, or triggered by a historical or generational crisis, affected or organic—the self’s failure to recognize itself. 51 Cathy Anderson, “The Water of Life,” Western Fisheries, March 2009. One source that discusses this and many other facts about the properties of our oceans: <http://marinewaters.fish.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WF- Mar2009-Page50-55.pdf>. (December 1, 2014). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 43 *** Beyond this moment is a blank page. Your grandmother lives at the fading window in a house at the edge of your dreams, all day staring, staring. A woman wakes up on the last day of her life and watches her old lover pull his boat into the sea, in the blue five o’clock morning, right on time. Seeing him makes her clutch the flesh between her navel and pubis, a sharp pain like lighting across the dark line of her sex, the same pain she feels every time she watches him go. She thinks of another man’s child growing inside her again as his boat slips into the shallow sea. Though she hasn’t talked to your grandfather for more than a year now, something in her calls out to him this time, at this hour, where this moment and the next split her open like a sharp knife. She runs past the almond trees and the sniffing mongrels, who now begin running in unison with her to the shoreline. Her toes hit the water as she throws your grandfather’s name into the wind. But this morning, the sea slowly waking in its moist kettle, he never looks back. She considers swimming out to him but thinks instead of her seven children who must be turning awake now in their one double bed. She lingers for a moment and waits. Then she feels it—a stab wound twisting in her womb, then a slow trickle of mucus running down her inner thigh. She wipes away between her thighs and looks at her fingers. Blood. It must be working, she thinks, as she turns away from the horizon, away from your grandfather, away from the day blinking itself alive and walks back to her house, the mangy dogs still in tow. *** Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 44 S., I find myself drawing ever closer to a fluency in the language of dreams. The same way you have been tracing your inheritance back to its root. Madness, we discovered, is derived from the Latin word mania. It comes from the Greek root µανία meaning “inspired frenzy,” linked to the crazed and furious Maenad women of Greek myth. Madness then, is not only tied to its own way of seeing, but is also inseparably linked to ritual, to primal language, to naked and unfettered emotion. This is the realm of the wild and irreverent, the mad untamable. And for many of us in the African Diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean, madness is a way of being. Madness dictates the directions of many black lives, as Frantz Fanon posits in The Wretched of the Earth, explaining that the inherited and continuous trauma of colonialism has caused a psychic break in the descendants of the African Diaspora, as “colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” I ask you if this madness is literal or metaphoric and you tell me that in the space of poems, it inhabits both meanings at once, the self and itself, doubled. Still, we search for its meaning in the science books. Madness, in psychological terms, as defined by the DSM, may be either “affected,” denoting a mental illness that includes disordered thinking developed over time through external factors like trauma, or an “organic,” madness, which includes mental illnesses inherited genetically. These mental illnesses may include schizophrenia, personality disorders, melancholia, mania, as well as outdated diagnoses like hysteria. All have different Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 45 symptoms, but share a common history—madness includes cognitive behavior outside of the “norm,” disordered thinking, or what the OED defines as “insanity; mental illness or impairment, especially of a severe kind; psychosis.” Again you point out how much science shapes our language towards tyranny. The presupposition of a norm. The professor’s notion of the “universal.” Overall, madness denotes a strange psychology, an anomaly, abnormality in behavior or pathology, and can shape the way a person experiences the world. Or perhaps the way a person experiences the world can shape her madness. *** We live as we were born, under the augur of madness. In the Caribbean, we the descendants, are always an anomaly, experiencing the world through our fractured experiences, our fractured selves. We have inherited the madness of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” carrying within us both native self and colonial Other, weighing the frenzied storm of our dialects against the imperial language of the oppressor, bearing our uncertain reality against our traumatic past. This questioning of one’s reality, is the strange yet all-too-familiar exile of being a part of the African Diaspora, and of being a Jamaican woman descended from slaves: the unreality of belonging in two places, and no place at all. “We are all strangers here,” Derek Walcott says of our fractured identity, “our bodies think in one language and move in another.” 52 Here and 52 Walcott, Derek. “Muse of History”; What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 46 everywhere, we live under a constant hurricane of doubleness, and home for us has always been a place of unbelonging. In Jamaican patois a “madwoman” or “madman” is a synonymous with a homeless person. For us, dialectically at least, the bridge between homelessness and madness is already a fact of being black (and most likely poor) in the Diaspora. This linguistic fact of madness/homelessness in Jamaican patois is essential and instructional to your poetry, where you use dialect and the home it provides as a direct counteraction against the fracturing trauma and isolation of colonial languages. In the face of our history, we have always been homeless, you tell me. This homelessness of a black person in the African Diaspora is physical and geographical, but more importantly, it is a psychic homelessness. We have been left placeless in the face of an amputated history, left to invent our own narratives. *** Your grandmother invented her mother’s narrative, just as you have had to invent hers. She was a seamstress who made most of her living sewing school uniforms and costumes for the Go-Go dancers who worked at the hotels and brothels on either end of the village. She sewed the more revealing outfits by candlelight, in private, away from prying eyes. Constantly working in the dark made her eyesight go quickly, so she wore thick glasses with clear frames until the end of her life. When she was younger she used to wear her black hair long and flowing down her back, but the village men and the city men would not leave her alone, relentlessly running their fingers along her Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 47 scalp against her will, holding her down helplessly one time too many, so she chopped it all off and kept it short, her soft curls billowing like smoke up above her head. She had seven children with five different fathers. Thirty-two and penniless when she got pregnant with her eighth child, she knew either her or it would have to go. Your grandmother knew the medicine woman had done this many times before for girls in trouble, many of them coming to her from the hotels in tears, in shame. The medicine woman had given Isabel some bush-tea to drink—could be tansy, could be pennyroyal. This was routine. Boil the tea and drink overnight, then wait for the pain and the bleeding to pass, along with the fetus, over the latrine. The bathroom at White House was one public pit with no running water, so Isabel boiled some water she’d fetched from the stand pipe outside, poured it into a plastic basin, writhing silently in pain as she waited for the day to extinguish itself. *** In the cruelty of western winter, the ceiling of yourself collapses in on you. You feel the ache of homesickness, a long cord pulling. But when you think of home, your mind only comes to rest upon the sea, still waiting for your return. There was no house or plot of land to call home. S., home for you—as it is for me—is still an idea. A red door in the house of your mind, your hand reaching to open. One may call our homesickness a kind of Sehnsucht, you say. I turn the strange word around in my head. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 48 Sehnsucht, a German word almost untranslatable in English, is defined as “a high degree of intense, (recurring), and often painful desire for something, particularly if there is no hope to attain the desired, or when its attainment is uncertain, still faraway.” 53 Psychologists define the condition of Sehnsucht as “life longings.” 54 Our melancholy. Our yearning. Our wistful longing 55 for a place and time that does not exist. A person. S., our longing is infinite and inherited because for us, home does not exist. Home was not the country we were shipped to as slaves. Home was not our language, given to us by the oppressor. And home was not the body, never the body: chained, whipped, exiled, raped, burnt, hanged, scorned, and sold. Against this halved reality, you choose to define Home not as a physical birthplace, but a space where you would feel safe, welcome, and understood. A place where you and me, and women like us, the descendants of African slaves, could be free, could thrive. Where we could live full-bloodedly in a way your mother couldn’t. Your grandmother couldn’t. 53 Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. Deutsches Wörterbuch Bd. 1–33 [German dictionary Volumes 1–33.]. Munich, Germany: Deutscher Taschen-buchverlag. (Reprinted from German Dictionary by J. Grimm & W.Grimm, 1854–1871, Leipzig: Hirzel) (1984). 54 Scheibe, S., Freund, A. M., & Baltes, P. B.. Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): The optimal (utopian) life. Developmental Psychology, 43, 778-795. (2007). 55 "Sehnsucht, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Web. 13 October 2018. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 49 Home for us is a utopia, you say. Which overlaps, psychologically and linguistically, with Sehnsucht: a wished for place that does not yet exist. Except in the fictive door of our mind’s eye. Soon the two of us—the black woman haunted and hunted, study the word-roots, trying find a home in utopia. Utopia, for us, means freedom. Utopia is the future, free from state-sanctioned violence and prejudice. Utopia we finally discover, is Greek for “no place.” For us, utopia exists only in the mind, and nowhere else. With this realization, that crushing weight returns within you, intent on snuffing you out. *** To this day there are whispers that Mam Bel was cursed by obeah. That a routine herbal abortion, a tea taken without incident a thousand times, should not have gone so wrong. Nobody heard her or saw her, you tell me, until one small creature, a child or a dog, found her unmoving on the floor, her still eyes open, waiting. A jealous mistress of your grandfather did it, the whispers said. She thought she was better than everyone, they said. Maybe she wanted to die, hissed the whispers. Beyond the bleeding edge of the facts, your grandmother waited for a sunset that never came. That morning, with the sea at her back, Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 50 with your grandfather gone past the horizon one last time, she bled slowly to death surrounded by her seven young children. At some point in the day, the part of herself that held invisible desires walked out into the sea at last, and with no future, not even a single picture of herself in existence, as if she had gathered it all in a wide net dragging behind her, she carried all her family history, her middle name, and all her mysteries to be buried with her in an unmarked grave, in a cemetery that her daughter and granddaughter will spend years searching for but will never find. *** You write to tell me you’d been thinking of your grandmother again. In thinking of her, you are concerned with the linguistic, psychological, and metaphorical definitions of madness, examining where they overlap and evolve through the fraught experiences of black womanhood and the literature of black women. You made notes all afternoon on Fanon’s vital question, In reality who am I?, exploring the psychic homelessness the black body has faced for nearly five centuries. The homelessness that you and I feel. This question of selfhood exists at the psychic root of every descendant of the African Diaspora, and holds within it the maddening irony of one’s unknown identity, as well as the impossibility of knowing one’s self in the aftermath of colonial oppression—since one must first understand whose reality, and “what self,” before one can speak forth the “I”—an “I” fractured, a reality erased, a self unhistoried by colonialism. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. This inner turmoil Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 51 is a kind of violence, to be not-at-home in one’s own body. Home-burnt, family-torn, language- silenced: the self tearing away at itself. You who had mastered the master’s language found yourself in conflict with yourself, and a western world that categorized you as an anomaly in their system of sameness. “Why can’t you just be normal?” a white lover asked you once, long before your white professor had asked you to write more universal poems. Until then, you never considered you were abnormal. But after him, your abnormality was all you could see, fenced off by the unscalable wall of “normalcy” in western culture, your otherness a prisonhouse, with the white world closed to you, “relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable.” 56 Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? “How does it feel to be a problem?” You answer, asking the ever unasked question, describing this isolation between you and me, and the other world. 57 It is a peculiar sensation, being a stranger in your own body, a stranger in your own house. Between you and me is the complex inner turmoil of the black soul, you say. A wry laugh. 56 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. (I, 2.) 57 Ibid. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 52 S., we already know too well the facts of our disruption. After five centuries the black woman’s body is still a site of strangeness. A thorn in someone else’s side, a sidekick in someone else’s narrative. A female conceit. Our body is a heterotopia. Heterotopia, a Latin word that translates literally to a “place of otherness,” and in Foucauldian terms, “Des espaces autres” (Of other places). Heterotopia is an idea in direct contrast with utopia. It is the black body drowning in the Turner painting. Until Foucault published his meditations on heterotopia, the word was a medical term attached to the study of anatomy. In medical science, “heterotopia” refers to the displacement of a bodily organ from its normal position: it denotes “‘parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra’ or ‘other’ 58 in terms of corporeal matter, such as the growth of a tumor.’” (Burrows, 168). For you, heterotopia is your black body. Heterotopia is your way of speaking. Your way of seeing. Your female conceit. 58 Hetherington, Kevin. (1997) The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London: Routledge. 47. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 53 For you, heterotopia stands in contrast to your definition of Home. Whereas utopia is the yet-unattained future and long dreamed-about ideal, heterotopia is a place of otherness, deviation, and discordance. Heterotopia is an intersection of western history and anti-place. Heterotopia is existing as an anomaly in your own skin. Heterotopia is the realm of fracturing, of trauma, of the Other. Heterotopia is being pulled over and arrested for a broken taillight and only to be found hanging dead in your jail cell three days later. “A body, I’ve read, can sustain/ its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours,” writes Nicole Sealey, in her poem “A Violence,” 59 ruminating on the coping mechanisms of mind versus body in the wake of trauma, concluding, “It’s the mind,” she continues, “It’s the mind that cannot,” emphasizing the connection between madness and womanhood, tracing the boundaries of reality when we encounter violence. 59 Sealey, Nicole. Ordinary Beast. Ecco, 2017. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 54 S., perhaps we are never meant to find utopia. Left with the scars of the shared historical trauma of slavery, where does utopia exist for the black woman? “And where is the safest place when that place/ must be somewhere other than the body?” 60 “The history of madness would be the history of the Other,” writes Foucault, 61 explaining how the marginalization and mistreatment of a minority group by a dominant society only leads to the madness of that minority group. It all comes back to doubleness. The self and the anti-self moving apart. What breaks us. And how we eventually break. The black woman, doubly fractured by both her race and her gender, is often pushed to the margins of both her blackness and womanhood, and is too often asked, impossibly, to choose between gender or race, pulled apart from both sides. S., how deeply you and I both understand that the psychological madness of the black woman is as much an ache for unification with her historical selves as it is for a separation from this historical trauma (a cleaving). In being forced to merge her “double self into a better and truer self,” 62 the black woman in America is inescapably trapped between past and future, between utopia and heterotopia, an image standing between two mirrors, doubled for all eternity, facing both the self 60 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. 143. 61 Michel Foucault, From Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec); xxiv). 62 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 55 and the not-self, the body as subject as well as object, unable to lose the past, while dreaming of the future. It is inevitable then, you say, that the black woman fractures herself somewhere in the intersection between the two: only she might understand the frenzied wind that hurls their words from both sides. This double fracturing is the exile of black womanhood. Scratch of pen across paper, as you write: The intersection of black womanhood is the first site of exile. *** Your grandmother is the ghost on the horizon that you have been chasing. The water had now filled your ears, all your thoughts sealed into a holy silence, all sounds of the world locked out. Three decades later, you are still struggling to separate hurt from history, the way the Columbus and the Spanish colonists took the Taínos’ land of Xaymaca and the Taínos’ words for family, words for home, and burned them to ash, hacking our dark path from Africa to Jamaica, turning island to prison. What to do now in the wake of it? After the long crawl to anger and the sun-sweetened ichor, all that remained was a self-destructing shell. *** Something is wrong with me, you said the first time we met. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 56 You’d began by telling me how you’d now arrived at an absolute break with your traditional time. A heterochrony, you called it. It was trauma that anchored you to the past, and violence too, that propelled you back to the future. Of Jamaican womanhood you’d asked me—how much of our madness is inherited, and how much is wrought through external trauma? Most importantly, what to do with our mad inheritance? You were torn between the violence of our past and the hope for a (future) world of our own making. You described this chaos as self-out-of-time, along with a deviance of self-out-of-place. All of this was triggered by our macabre past, causing a kind of cleaving, which led to a separation of self from selfhood. Then there you were, bolt of lightning, at the doorstep of the red door of my mind. Here with me. I welcomed you in. Called you ethnographer, historian. Called you time-traveler, writing your way into our family’s past. Trying to write our way out of madness. S., you were insistent that we write it all down. Without the means to tell our own stories and to narrate our lives, you said, without the freedom to invent our own narratives, the self, and thus the future, is lost. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 57 Now you tell me you are longing for your future self, free to exist in a longed-for place, no longer on the outside of ourself. For you, freedom is not only a future-self, freedom is the Future itself, the place where you really belong, the place-in-time that you long for, the time you keep losing, being dragged back again and again to the past, back into sea, to the drowning woman. And perhaps it is still this dream for a future that compels you to travel back in time, giving an account of another era and place, of the history of your grandparents, who are unable to make a written record of their own lives. S., there is power in that because there is a futurity in that. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 58 I SHALL ACCOUNT MYSELF A HAPPY CREATURESS Our body antipodes. Brilliant lung and ten good bones, crochet-neck umbilical, myself the yarn. She carries her hands her hair around like ghosts, my nocturne-unfamiliar, coiled interruptus, gooseflesh clouding our display case. Already twice myself the noose. No one has shattered that errant tooth, not even you. The ocean sucks its salt appendage through my empty. Already I have been a miracle, emerging Still tending its incestuous wound. And there goes our little world, set upon its haunches, fraught with neglect— Sister, we must eat. Even the glittering oracle of the bird-catcher spider offers nothing but the bones of bones. Your carnivore unheaded what stalks our puncturing what marks the mouth bewails its spaces, pines for permission to flush or anther. Night prowls dangerous heavy. Exhume a neon city. Our moon gone fat With such astounding matter. This feast parasitic. Five days I watch its slow work with envy cough up beak and penumbra. While our one mind hardens its grief homicidal till what inverts this lonesome dark I call thrall, luciferous. Mine only. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 59 WANGECHI MUTU - BENEATH LIES THE POWER, (2014) Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 60 PART IV MOTHER LORE Dear S., Everything we know about the world was told to us by our mother. In the Caribbean, black women have been doing an unseen work for decades—preserving our histories and identity, weaving a heavy tapestry of our lives through a matriarchal language, what you and I have been calling a Mother Lore. In Jamaica, we have no family trees, no documentation, and most of our family history has been lost to the obliteration of slavery. But what remains with us is the oral history and folklore that comes down to us from our mother and other women in our family. Here, every medicine and herb, every sweet cure-all is rooted in a history passed down to our mother from her mother, her aunts, her sisters, retold to us like myth, our science anchored in Old Wives’ tales. S., in order to make the poetry of our Mother Lore, we must make sense of the sobering history of our native language. We live with the frenzied voices of our intersections, our double consciousness. You always remind me that the reason we speak and write in English is inseparable from our inherited violence—the vicious kidnapping of our mothers and sisters and daughters to be sold into slavery and shipped to the Caribbean. Like the Maenads of Greek mythology, so too the women of the African Diaspora are always carrying within us the fury of our dialects, of our past. Who speaks for the woman who has lost her story? Without our myth and folklore, which future is a future for us? Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 61 The reason I am writing you now, is that part of our goal as Jamaican women is finding a new language to counteract our linguistic exile. To reject the isolation that comes with writing and speaking in the language of the colonist. Forging a new kind of language requires a potent foresight—a clear and certain sense of hope that a world that has never existed in the Americas will one day exist. You told me this requires a new kind of power. “Because we cannot fight old power in old power terms only,” as Audre Lorde says. “The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence, at the same time as we are resisting.” 63 This new power requires a visionary language. Divining words and worlds. Our dream-language and its imagination, its own kind of healing. S., if we put our visionary way of seeing into words, what would they be? What kind of future can we create for ourself, what kind of Mother language and art, what kind of lore? Who can see or speak this future into being? *** The morning is in the shreds of a dream. In your memory the wind is always in her hair, and always in the curtains, like a ghost. For years later, you would thrive on the idea of Isabel. Your poems grew from her limbs as you built worlds and feeling. Drawn to your own haunting, you constructed a person as you imagined her to be; swooned around a dress-form, romanticizing her plight. You would picture her standing in your 63 Lorde, Audre. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 62 window at night in white georgette dresses, because that is what you imagined ghosts would wear if they lived inside of poems. You built the room and the peeling paint and the faded window frame to stand her in. Her face was the face that called out to you, one stern answer to the open question of yourself. *** One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—/One need not be a House— writes Emily Dickinson, 64 approaching her womanhood as a text that can be deciphered through mapping the uncanny link between brain and body. Athena and Aphrodite. S. and S. More haunted than the body is the mind, Dickinson writes, tracing the link between creativity and madness, as well as the vast power of the visionary mind: The Brain has Corridors—surpassing/Material Place— and what combats the exile of one’s own body but the infinite faculty of the dreaming brain itself? Though the psyche of the black writer in the Diaspora is broken, it is also the mind’s invention that might heal us. Speaking as if under water, you are asking me to listen. You are telling me to look here. Here in the “I” of Fanon’s question, In reality, who am I? is where black women, particularly the black woman writer, must find a locus of self in a selfhood smashed asunder. She must build a new home. She must invent new selves, she must create. You tell me this is how we will survive. 64 Dickinson Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Johnson, ed., (Little, Brown & Company, 1961). Poem 670. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 63 I can hear you questioning again the location of Home. You feel very deeply that poetry and art are still the only spaces available to us for this invention of Home. Even now, in 2019, home for us is visionary. But how do poets build it? You ask me, as I ask you ask myself. You already have the visionary language you say. It is myth. It is dialect. It is poetry. And S., if poetry and its mythmaking is the root of our survival, with what tools do we build? Just then, I have an urge to walk towards the sea. To explore folklore and dialect as the tools of visionary language. This language of madwomen, of oral storytelling, this Mother Lore. S., how do black women writers tap into the visionary quality of the mind’s dream-logic, into the mad and entranced music of poetry? Dialect, you tell me—the direct linguistic rebellion against colonial tongues—must be the antidote to its madness. Or perhaps a defiant celebration of it. If we interrogate our Jamaican womanhood using myth, history, and biography, might we not uncover how our dream-language overlaps with the visionary? Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 64 Already and again we’ve circled back to Freud’s belief in the curative power of the language of dreams, and how our own self-invention is an act of survival, this doubling a radical act. We know the language of dreams is a visionary language, you say. The liminal space between thought and the act of creation is also where the fractured mind unifies again. It is here in this liminal space that madness nests and from where it riots. *** Where she went you wanted to go. Your head was completely underwater, your lungs gasping, burning against my chest. There was salt in your eyes, and no woman ahead of you. No one on the horizon at all. Bobbing there like a toy, your body started to spasm, and beneath your kicking legs was nothing, and deeper nothingness, as your heart made thunderous knocks in your head. The little root of yourself unfurled ever so slightly. Finally, there was fear, seawater filling your nostrils and mouth. You knew there was nothing left to do as the salt water filled your throat and burned against your lungs. From somewhere behind or somewhere above, you heard a small voice echoing your name. You closed your eyes at last against the crushing tide. *** S., in asking me to write this, you believe we can solve the identity problem caused by the colonial trauma of the English language. That by harnessing our Mother Lore, our fracturing could be healed. But what if this dichotomy of “problem” and “solution” is a marker of imperial language Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 65 itself? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? 65 How could healing ever be born out of this rigid contradiction of western linguistics? Be firm, you say. Become as infinite as any infinite power. By reframing the question through ourselves, we might approach this dream-language of Mother Lore. How could you and I create a matriarchal language? How does a black woman writer philosophize the reality of herself? You ask me to consider now the instructions of Audre Lorde’s essential theory: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We cannot birth change by claiming or wielding the old powers. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. 66 Therefore the power of the othered is otherness itself, you say. And the most potent purveyor of this power is our language—our dialects of the Caribbean and the Diaspora, all our colloquialisms and folklore. Our wild vernacular. The way Jamaican dialect is inseparable from our rebellion. What is nursed on the pensive sea, what erupts from a head of fire. This is our native language. 65 Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 66 Ibid. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 66 It’s here in the hot canefields that Jamaican patois was cultivated and concealed, whispered and sung as a new language, a secret code that the slavemaster could not decipher. This potent dialect, like our folklore, was a weapon passed down from parent to child, from mother to daughter, like maps braided into the canerows of slavewomen’s hair. All of this, you tell me, our coded language, was a secret weapon; an act of linguistic rebellion. We’d had our visionary language all along; rooted in the power of patois itself. And the Mother Lore is our birthright. *** In White House a woman can grow wings. And did. What you remember next was red. Red shirt, red in the water. Blood. Suddenly your mother’s arms were around you, lifting and gasping, and all was loud again. The world unsealed itself and sang every song in your ear. Our mother was holding you tight, too-tight, and screaming your name. Against you her body was warm and wanted, her pregnant stomach firm. You could hear her heart pounding in your ear, the world quiet, the world loud again. She was sobbing, and looking into your face. Darting between your eyes, touching your head, counting your fingers, kissing them, and sobbing, sobbing. “Are you okay?” she cried, breathless. “Are you okay?” “Are you okay?” Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 67 *** S., all of our history, all of the power of our language, is inseparable from the native language of fire, of madness. From this same wild fire came Kumina, a Jamaican folk religion that combines female rituals of ancestor-worship, African folklore, revivalism, and spiritual possession, while using singing as a mode of healing the sick. Through Kumina we will find a star-map to the visionary. The women of Kumina chant and speak in tongues, they use dancing and drumming as their way of communing with the past and with the dead. Kumina ceremonies involve the power of repetition, the power of incantation, of speaking a thing out loud to find power in it. This is poetry. This is Mother Lore, you say. These women are an active part of the matriarchal language keeping you and me alive. Kumina, derived from the word Pocomania, is a colonial word, from the Spanish root meaning “little madness.” Spanish colonists, upon witnessing the rituals of Kumina women and their new language, misnamed their rituals diminutively, condescendingly as “little madness.” Somehow these women tapping into a primal state, going beyond colonial language to find a home in their mother tongue, was threatening. But we survived. Creating our own word in our dialect for Pocomania—recasting the Spanish as our own. Here, “Pocomania” becomes “Kumina” in Jamaican patois. We used the master’s tools to build a boat. May we live as fiercely as a Kumina queen, you tell me. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 68 S., I am becoming more fluent in the divining the roots. In crafting this Mother Lore. The thick hills of Westmoreland is where our first slave rebellion was born. It is here that the Maroons, a powerful community of freed and runaway slaves, behind their veil of trees and karst limestone, hollowed out small pockets of caves in the hills where echoes of freed slaves still hung. In the deepest cockpits, the Maroons and their limestone bullets would ambush English soldiers who could not navigate the impolite terrain. The English would shout commands, only to hear their own voices bellowing back at them, distorted as through a dark warble of glass, and were driven away in the dead of night in madness, unable to face themselves. The English term ‘maroons’ comes from the Spanish ‘cimarones,’ which means wild and untamed, or from “marrano,” meaning “wild boar.” 67 Here we find a historical reflection of the “wild” Jamaican rebels who exiled themselves, who unpeeled themselves from the world to avoid their destruction at the hands of the colonizing Other. And like the word “Caribbean” itself, much of our identity in the Caribbean is shaped by a sinister colonial miscategorization of our identity—we are always defined by our savagery, our madness. The word “Caribbean” comes from the word ‘caribal,’ a reference to the native Carib people whom Columbus thought ate human flesh, and where the word “canibal,” Spanish variant of the word ‘cannibal’ is rooted. To be Caribbean is to be cannibal. By virtue of being Caribbean, all “West Indian” people like us, like the Maroons, like the madwomen of Kumina, are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage. *** 67 "maroon, n.2 and adj.2." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Web. 24 Oct. 2009. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 69 The day still unreels like an old cassette. You far out to sea, drowning. Your mother had briefly gone to the latrine and missed you when she came back, seeing you then out in the distance bobbing in the water. Then she had flown to you from hundreds of yards away. Something in the sand had ripped through her bare foot, a broken bottle or old tin can, and she was now bleeding all over the sand, all over you. She didn’t seem to notice, or feel it, as she touched you gently here, and there, pleading, “Are you okay?” *** S., I am tempted again to lean full-throatedly into our madness. I am ready to conjure the power of The Other, which is to say you and me. Much in the same way the Maroons used the natural landscape of Jamaica’s impenetrable hills against the British Army, so too the native dialect of Jamaican patois is a mode of protection, a talisman, an incantation. This visionary language is the same one that has been handed down to me from our mother and from her mother, all madwomen like me. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 70 How easily we “secretly undermine language, because [we] make it impossible to name this and that, because [we] shatter or tangle common names, because [we] destroy ‘syntax’.” 68 Precisely because the black woman is the first site of exile; she who is displaced, not-at-home, transilient and code-switching, she is also the most natural candidate to move between the margins and the mainstream of language, between sameness and other, corrupting the ordered bridge of this and that. Making a home of chaos, of madness. Using language to create new realities, new homes. By virtue of being unfixed and homeless in self, speech, or place, S., we are the passing back and forth through this void where English language and material objects intersect. In western history, culture, and language, black women are the disrupting elements, just as the Maroons and the Kumina women were in Jamaica. Here, our body, as with the black mark of language, creates a new connection between poetry and space—a new way of seeing; the lyric of the lusus naturae, which is rebellion. Our patois is our visionary language. A language of looking into the future, a language of hope and revolt. And how do we trance this visionary language into being? This poetry? By writing verse that inhabits the frantic music of Kumina chanting—the ululation, kette-drum beats, and the quick rhythm of their rituals. Through a poetics of fractured diction, fevered tempo, dialect, 68 Michel Foucault, From Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec); xviii). Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 71 and untamed lyric, we will attempt to plant and preserve our strange vernacular; English language grown new inside an African woman’s mouth. S., with this biomythography, I only hope to commune with our own lost history, to honour and preserve something rapturous and rebellious from our own small space in the brutal world. To create a home of our fractured psyche, through healing, through trance, through song; a visionary language without language. To use the master’s tools to build a boat; forge a new kind of poetry. Here we have made our own home. To divine the matriarchal language, to speak a Mother Lore. So she who once came from madness might find unstoppable magic in her own incorrigible nature. So she who comes next may survive. *** “Yes, I’m okay.” you said, with what our mother has described as an unnatural calm, as you slipped your wrinkled thumb into your mouth and sucked, looking away from the horizon, looking away from ourself, and placing our head against her chest, breathing when she breathed. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 72 Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : DSM-5. 5th ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Anderson, Cathy. “The Water of Life,” Western Fisheries, March 2009. <http://marinewaters.fish.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WF-Mar2009-Page50-55.pdf> (December 1, 2014) Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon Books, 1984. Burrows, Victoria. (2008) ‘The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Studies in the Novel. 40:1 161-17. Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, Rochester, BOA Editions, 2012. Cyrino, Monica S. Aphrodite. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010. de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). "Desire in Narrative", Alice Doesn’t, p.118-119.. Indiana University Press. Deren, Maya. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, Preface. (The Alicat Book Shop Press; Yonkers: New York, 1946). Diaz, Natalie. “From the Desire Field,” Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets. Dickinson Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Thomas Johnson, ed., (Little, Brown & Company, 1961). Du Bois, W. E. B. The Sous of Black Folk. New York: Dover, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Foucault, Michel. From Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec) Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion. (Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2009.) Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. Deutsches Wörterbuch Bd. 1–33 [German dictionary Volumes 1–33.]. Munich, Germany: Deutscher Taschen-buchverlag. (Reprinted from German Dictionary by J. 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Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997) Lorde, Audre. Zami, A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1982. Print. Morrison, Toni. “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Liberation” New York Times Magazine. 22 August 1971, 15. Mulvey, Laura (Autumn 1975). "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema". Screen. 16 (3): 6–18. OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Plath Sylvia. Ariel. The Restored Edition, (Faber & Faber Poetry; New Ed edition 2010). Qureshi, Sadiah (June 2004). "Displaying Sara Baartman, the 'Venus Hottentot'". History of Science. 42 (136): 233–257. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Schantz, Ned. “Time Stalkers.” Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature. : Oxford University Press, September 01, 2008. Scheibe, S., Freund, A. M., & Baltes, P. B.. Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): The optimal (utopian) life. Developmental Psychology, 43, 778-795. (2007). Sealey, Nicole. Ordinary Beast: Poems. Ecco, 2017. Safiya Sinclair Critical Component 74 Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. New York: Norton, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Wide Sargasso Sea and a Critique of Imperialism”; From “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 243-61. In Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea [Norton Critical Edition], ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Walcott, Derek. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture”; Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970; London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press. (1935) [1929]. Zamir, Tzachi. “Puppets.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, 2010. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 75 WANGECHI MUTU - UTERINE CATARRH (2004) Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 76 CRANIA AMERICANA POEMS Safiya Sinclair Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 77 v The word “cannibal,” the English variant of the Spanish word “canibal,” originated from the word “caribal,” a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, whom Columbus thought ate human flesh, and from whom the word “Caribbean” originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all “West Indian” people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 78 I. Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices. — Caliban, The Tempest The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. — Kamau Brathwaite Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 79 HOME Have I forgotten it— wild conch-shell dialect, black apostrophe curled tight on my tongue? Or how the Spanish built walls of broken glass to keep me out but the Doctor Bird kept chasing and raking me in: This place is your place, wreathed in red Sargassum, ancient driftwood nursed on the pensive sea. The ramshackle altar I visited often, packed full with fish-skull, bright with lignum vitae plumes: Father, I have asked so many miracles of it. To be patient and forgiving, to be remade for you in some small wonder. And what a joy to still believe in anything. My diction now as straight as my hair; that stranger we’ve long stopped searching for. But if somehow our half-sunken hearts could answer, I would cup my mouth in warm bowls over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt of home, taste Bogue-mud and one long orange peel for skin. I’d open my ear for sugar cane and long stalks of gungo peas to climb in. I’d swim the sea still lapsing in a soldered frame, the sea that again and again calls out my name. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 80 POCOMANIA Father unbending father unbroken father with the low hanging belly, father I was cleaved from, pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged in the fire of your self. Ripped my veined skin, one eyelid, father my black tangle of hair and teeth. Born yellowed and wrinkled, father your jackfruit, foster my overripe flesh. Father your first daughter now severed at the ankles, father your black machete. I remember your slick smell, your sea-dark, your rum-froth, wailed and smeared my wet jelly across your cheek. Father forgive my impossible demands. I conjure you in woven tam, Lion of Judah, Father your red, gold, and green. Father a flag I am waving/father a flag I am burning. Father skittering in on a boat of whale skeleton, his body wrapped in white like an Orthodox priest. Father and his nest of acolyte women, his beard-comber, his Primrose, his Dahlia, his Nagasaki blossom. Mother and I were none of them. Father washing me in eucalyptus, in garlic, in goldenseal. Fathering my exorcism. Father the harsh brine of my sea. Making sounds only the heart can feel. Father a burrowing insect, his small incision. No bleat but a warm gurgle— Daughter entering this world a host. Father your beached animal, your lamentations in the sand. Mother her red bones come knocking. Mother her red bones come knocking at the floorboards, my mother knock-knocking at his skull when he dreams. Scratching at your door, my dry rattle of Morse code: Father Let me in. With the mash-mouth spirits who enter us, Father the split fibula where the marrow must rust— Father the soft drum in my ear. Daughter unweeding her familiar mischief; Mother jangling the ribcage: I am here. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 81 IN CHILDHOOD, CERTAIN SKIES REFINED MY SEEING Sunset. That blood-orange hymn combusting the year, nautilus chamber of youth’s obscurities, your empty room for psalms, lost rituals. There find the bittersweetness of one’s unknown body, heliotropic; Welcome, stranger of myself. Consider the Jumbie bird clanging its deathshriek like a gong, shooting through our mapless season, unnaming the home you’re always leaving, scattering the names we have lost again. The heart and its bombshell bespeak the hurricane— what has drowned, has drowned. She will not return. The headless sky unseals and aches for us, mother and sister caught upon the steel hook of its memory. Wet mouth of my future body, we’ve come to understand each word, and how sometimes the words themselves will do. Obeah-man, augured island, I am called to remember the burning palm and the broad refuge of the Poinciana tree. Dear Family, how willingly I pushed my feet into the hot coals of your lamentation. Jamaica, if I wear your lunacy like a dark skin, or lock this day away in the voodoo-garden of our parting, know that I still mimic your wails, knee-deep in beach, know I am gouging the stars for any trace of ghost. For the algorithm of uncertain history. The simple language of our cannibal sea. If Grandfather, your wandering fishermen still recast their lives down on the disappearing shore, know I too am scorching there. Igniting and devouring each abducted day. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 82 FISHERMAN’S DAUGHTER In this wet season my gone mother climbs back again and everything here smells gutted— bloodtide, sea-grapes in thick bloom, our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared orphans out bleating with the mongrels, all of us starved for something reclaimable. What chases them, her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia, shined church shoes, our black words, our hands. I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar, her tar this same fish odor I am washing. I know I am one of them. The emptied: How night comes raw, open-wounded, her gills wafting in the iron’s heat, sea’s marrow unrelenting, my heart one coiled mass and sweating. I scald a ritual cleansing. White poui tree of my youth stripped bare, her burned hair, what starched pleats of uniform. My skin a red linen pressed through with salt. The house. Even the body burns. Carbolic disappearing; scrubbed pink into fingernail, a prayer, bone of coral scraped, kneaded into breasts and thighs. Frankincense and swallow a bar of soap. But no washing will avail me of this ghost. I smell her at school and sulk my head into the sand, watch my body carve this resurrection— its dull gleam of scales, a new ache: For salt, for sea-grapes, her brown flesh sucked down like a thumb. Sun and snapper-eye sucked out, her spine like a straw. I cannot help myself. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 83 Her keen and shadowing. My hair still tied in her old handkerchief, Pray, pray she is not here today. Teacher, unbeliever. Chasing me home to wash myself. Last week’s daughter, twelve years old, heart still for sale. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 84 HANDS Out here the surf rewrites our silences. This smell of ocean may never leave me; our humble life or the sea a dark page I am trying to turn: Today my mother’s words sound final. And perhaps this is her first true thing. Her hands have not been her hands since she was twelve, motherless and shucking whatever the sea could offer, each day orphaned in the tide of her own necessity—where the men-o-war ballooned, wearing her face, her anchor of a heart reaching, mooring for any blasted thing: sea-roach and black-haired kelp, jeweled perch or a drop of pearl made with her smallest self, her night-prayers a hushed word of thanks. But out here the salt-depths refuse tragedy. This hand-me-down life burns sufficiently tragic— here what was cannibal masters the colonial curse, carved our own language of the macabre, sucking on the thumb of our own disparity. Holding her spliff in the wind, she probes and squalls, trying to remember the face of her own mother, our island or some strange word she once found amongst the filth of sailors whose beds she made, whose shoes she shined, whose guns she cleaned, while the white bullet of America ricocheted in her brain. Still that face she can’t recall made her chew her fingernails, scratch the day down to its blood, the rusty sunset of this wonder, this smashed archipelago. Our wild sea-grape kingdom overrun, gold and belonging in all its glory to no one. How being twelve-fingered she took her father’s fishing line to the deviation, and starved of blood what grew savage and unwanted. Pulled until they shriveled away, two hungry mouths askance and blooming, reminding her that she was still woman always multiplying as life’s little nubs and dreams came bucking up in her disjointed. How on the god-teeth Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 85 she cut this life, offered her hands and vessel to be made wide, made purposeful, her body opalescent with all our clamoring, our bloodline of what once lived and will live and live again. In the sea’s one voice she hears her answer. Beneath her gravid belly my gliding hull a conger eel. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 86 PORTRAIT OF EVE AS THE ANACONDA I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei for mischief. Of Man, redacted I came, am coming, fasting, starving carved myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I, twice discarded, arrived thornside, and soon outgrew his reptilian sheen. A fine specimen. Let me have it. Something inviolate; splayed in bird-lime, legs an exposed anemone, against jailbait August, its X-ray sky. This light a Gorgon-slick, polygamous doom. And God again calling much too late, who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable. His Primal Plant remains elusive— Wildfire and pathogen, blood-knot of human fleshed there in His beard. How I am hot for it. Call me murderess, a glowing engine timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow. Let me have it. This maidenhead-primeval schemes what ovule of cruel invention; the Venus-trap, the menses. And how many ways to pronounce this guilt: whore’s nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata. Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum. Engorging shored pornographies, the cells’ unruly strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years; my wings pinned wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 87 MERMAID Caribbean thyme is ten times stronger than the English variety—just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy, who couldn’t yank a Jamaican weed from her rose-garden that didn’t grow back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man. The tepid American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet and plant the proud seed of your shame-tree; don’t let them say it never grew. Roll the saltfish barrel down the hill, sending that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled by her long earrings at our sea, ten times bluer than the bluest eye. That mint tea whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than liquor, and takes six spoons of sugar, please—what can I say, my great-grandfather’s blood was clotted thick with sugar cane and overproof rum; when he bled it trickled heavy like molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red ant from Negril to Frenchman’s Cove came to burrow and suckle at his vein, where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic rot, and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing net, he served her up cold to his wild-eyed son: “Mermaid on the deck.” Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 88 CATACOMBS In the sour almond shade of the decades, one last gull makes a long encircling screech to wake the woman asleep in the sand. The beach folds itself into the breath of each limb, where her lone body has made a saddle of silence, snuffing every lost call from the air. Here, time has long stopped the heart like a stone; the slow choke of asphalt, sweeping a bruised people, drowned émigré of dreams, to the shattered archipelago, the broken constellation of these West Indies. There is no life beyond this quiet shore, but the toppled colonnade of millennia, the last imperfections of God. Black seaweed spawns like hair, lancing farther into night, cutting through knees of mangroves skirting their thick roots at the ocean mouth, vast webs catching the debris of centuries— the Spanish galleons wracked on pillars of coral carved into weapons by the Caribbean Sea, by that same foaming retribution which tore Port Royal in half; its wrath uncorked to gulp Gomorrah down into the volcanic depths of Bartlett Trench. Here in the sand sleeps the lost chaos of a history; she calls the ocean by its original name. The heavy apple does not wake her. Beyond this white sea is only white sky, the last black Anansi coiled tight inside the ear; beneath, a vast hive of catacombs formed in the shape of a scar, where the villagers came to bury themselves in sand; miles of skeletons clutching each other from island to island, linked like a shackle, femur to femur. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 89 DREAMING IN FOREIGN after Caliban Give your throat to everything, not the word but the thing of it. What the body speaks is untranslatable, how always some unpeopled aching, our mouths closed around the past like knives. Jah, mind our words, our wound. Our runaway climbed deep into these cockpit hills, kissed his good memory into limestone, into blue fern-gully, built that same fire combusting these stolen margins, our scarred double gaze, shantytowns slashed black from ear to ear. Circumstance has made us strangers here, wild dance we are slowly forgetting; what home. The Mobay sky a lingering torch to mutiny. Rebellion. Here I conspire with fish-monster, ignite and riot with sugarcane, with shame-a-ladies, brush palms in solidarity with each thorn, each shy tentacle, our bodies opening and closing eager, breathing the dark impossible. How time holds me under a shadow I cannot name, the bush-music and its sweet bangarang. Do not wake me. Downtown I’ll roam wild with the improbable goats, window-cleaners careening through traffic, ripe urchin bartering his endless hope: Each day is usable, I want to tell them. Our hunger is criminal, faces sewn shut. We are tongue-tied with the songs of unknown birds, an extinct diction. Fireburn that shipwreck, its aimless curse. Jah, guide these words, this life an invisible column, my one bloodline stretching, red livewire vein, to appear across these hijacked decades, inventing Paradise. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 90 FAMILY PORTRAIT At our table we don’t say grace. We sit silent in the face of our questions, a crown of mosquitos swarming our heads. In this picture, some hot day in March, the sun makes a strange halo around my ear, light exploding in our dining room window. Outside, the mongrels whine against our door, two pups forbidden shelter for their impurity, my weak heart dividing to offer all its scraps. But what could I offer them, when I knew nothing of love, and took my corrections with the belt every evening? There in that city of exile, cobbled square of salt-rust and rebellion, my father’s face looms its last obstruction, where the dark folds of bougainvillea remain unclimbing; the one clipped flower of my objection. That withering bloom still hangs limply in its tangled brooch; my dress, my hands, bruised and falling loosely about my thighs, unable to ask for a single thing. And perhaps it was only the rain that howled in my ear, as I observe my doppelganger in the shadows of the frame, setting fire to the curtains while we slept. Poisoning whatever dark potion filled my father’s cup, my mother at his shoulder with her fixed pitcher, pouring. She was pregnant then, and still wore the mouth of her youth, so quiet and unsure of itself, her fingers’ twelve points streaked across the jug’s fogged glass. There I am again. I am not myself—long before I shed my Medusa hair, before anyone caught my sister eating black bits of a millipede, shell and yellow fur snagged in her teeth, I had my crooked guilt. My brother with his dagger at my throat. This is us. This is all of us. Before we knew this life would shatter, moving wild and unwanted through the dark and the light. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 91 I SHALL ACCOUNT MYSELF A HAPPY CREATURESS Our body antipodes. Brilliant lung and ten good bones, crochet-neck umbilical, myself the yarn. She carries her hands her hair around like ghosts, my nocturne-unfamiliar, coiled interruptus, gooseflesh clouding our display case. Already twice myself the noose. No one has shattered that errant tooth, not even you. The ocean sucks its salt appendage through my empty. Already I have been a miracle, emerging Still tending its incestuous wound. And there goes our little world, set upon its haunches, fraught with neglect— Sister, we must eat. Even the glittering oracle of the bird-catcher spider offers nothing but the bones of bones. Your carnivore unheaded what stalks our puncturing what marks the mouth bewails its spaces, pines for permission to flush or anther. Night prowls dangerous heavy. Exhume a neon city. Our moon gone fat With such astounding matter. This feast parasitic. Five days I watch its slow work with envy cough up beak and penumbra. While our one mind hardens its grief homicidal till what inverts this lonesome dark I call thrall, luciferous. Mine only. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY When I was a child I counted the Looper moths caught in the dusty mesh of our window screens. Fed them slowly into the hot mouth of a kerosene lamp, then watched them pop and blacken soundlessly, but could not look away. I had known what it was to be nothing. Bore the shamed blood-letter of my sex like a banishment; wore the bruisemark of my father’s hands to school in silence. And here I am, still at the old window dying of thirst, watching my girlself asleep with the candle-flame alive in my ear, little sister yelling fire! Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 93 OSTEOLOGY Born four days late, a bruised almond left puckering in the salty yolk, the soft bone of my skull was concave, a thumbprint in wax, like the coin for the ferryman had been pressed there overnight. When each of my hands glossed over like a plastic glove, my pregnant aunt, wearing a fresh bouquet of red hibiscus, threw her body limp at the incubator, clutching her own belly in fear. With all of White House gathered around to watch me die, they found themselves instead marveling at the strange yellow creature slicked in a bright shine of plastic wrap. This was the first injury, the one that set me in a dizzy furor— a hermit crab scurrying through the sand at a drunkard’s jaunt, no palm cupped wide enough to hold me. I burned often at the candle, pulling fire through each eye, consumed by the fever which beaked at my limbs, aegypti mosquitoes needling through my skin like air, each hole tattered through to the vein, each sore left to suffer at the nail. At the probing finger of the dark, my grandmother’s wet skirt casts a web across the sea, pulling this borrowed body down the tumbling basin, emptied underneath the sand. All decade I’ve been buried, reaching for a red calm underwater, drinking the same dram of pennyroyal that washed her beyond the penance of human suffering; waiting for the black nail to shudder through my heel, the last metatarsal sacrifice, the rust Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 94 of blood; lockjaw claiming every tooth that drilled its way up through the gums— hammered in on the cement, crumbled to chalk against the bathroom wall. Nothing takes. Not the brown knee wobbling dry at the root, each keloid scar a notch for another year survived; the parched ribs now emerging as orbital rings in the mirror, famished as the stab wounds left unseen, where every tongue that made an attempt at the fighting heart fed the countdown to this last collapse— my pillar of bones with only dust left to stand upon, this threadbare racehorse finally taken down to the beach, head buried in the shallow sea, waiting to be shot. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 95 AFTER THE LAST ASTRONAUTS HAD LEFT US, I The ocean was at war with us. There were men in space mending the void between here and the falling stars. My heart in their cross hairs, our zinc roof unpeeled to show toy soldiers cramped inside a matchbox, tangled limbs melted by the great fire, the Rasta man’s lightning still crackling our brains. Every time the thunder struck my father bellowed out the name of his god in reply, as we cowered in the damp ear of the night, sucking at the finger-root of uncertainty. I watched sea ducks, guarding their eggs like wet pearls, lifted and sainted by the wind’s fury. Saw my mother learn to unlove my father, her bags packed like a hermit crab, her white shell impenetrable. My father, the wind, howling. All the stray dogs had been scraped from the mouth of the city, and we were one of them, suckling for days at the bones of any animal the ocean put in front of us. Searching for my mother, the astronaut. What flattened the azaleas I knew to be the voice- box of God. And knew myself a black rag caught in his dumb machine, made whole by my fear, stories from Sunday school. What pulled apart in her absence. America was at war in the desert. I had seen whole cities turn to smoke through a night-vision mirage, a millennia of history smeared green like a video game. So my siblings and I crouched and waited for their bombs, never forgetting we too were godless. Back then we passed one sweaty dream back and forth between us like a hot bowl. It could have been hope, our heads two broken calabash halves, catching the old voices like rain, while the stars held their breath in the August shade for her return. But one could be lost anywhere. Here in our sea village the whole world swam drunk in the pool of my navel, streets littered in emptiness after the last Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 96 astronauts had left us, my father one homeless lion moaning silently under a broke-glass sky, a blue palm bent in to feed us news of his storm, the way what is unwritten whispers unto itself. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 97 II. “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” — Miranda, The Tempest Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 98 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, I Child of the colonies. Carrying the swift waves of oceans inside of you. The wide dark of centuries, the whole world plunged down, sewn through the needle’s eye, the old crow’s glisten in your gullet. Eyes beetling through black. You wear your mother’s face in the mirror. Your mouth closed around all those pills like teeth, each one so heavy your tongue falls numb. Think of your friend who only wanted you to find sleep, whose face asked you not to choose the worst. Dull wretch, slack-jaw orphan, you always feel sorry for yourself. And swallow each capsule like the last pearl your grandfather pressed into your palm. How he had dived three whole days for it. Your grandfather who loved you but could not say it. All the men who love you and cannot say it. Jamaica, old fur sticking to the roof of my mouth, the one long dream that holds me underwater, black centipede I still teethe on. Ruined train clattering through my track. Here, I could come up for air. Here, I could wake with a name I can answer to. Where Thomas Jefferson learnt how to belittle a thing. How to own it. He created the word and wanted my mouth to know it. He wanted the whole world pulled through me on a fishing string. Where I will find my fingers in the muscle of my throat, where I will marvel at the body asking to live. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 99 AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? – Allen Ginsberg, “America” Silent and small, his white-tipped quills chilled this winter, a black groundhog emerges from the margins. He wants nothing of the twelve white men unfurling in their dark cloaks, each asking him a question for which they’ve long chosen an answer. A whole nation waits in front of them. Like his fathers before him, he is a footnote on the year like a hanging nail, no different than my wild branch of blackamoors, cousins and uncles. My brother, dark and beautiful, marking X’s in his almanac. But the morning crowd, who must be drunk this February, are swaddled in a year’s worth of our island-clothes, Midwest-heavy with hope, or whatever drags them out of bed to brandish signs, spit and call, their worn breaths misting each word’s urgency, heart’s compass frozen, directionless. Who knows the dull rush of seasons here? The secrets of the finches? Ask the women in the picturebox who now squeeze through the thin mirror of Hollywood to swoon in Technicolor, lips that crime-scene-red. Even the birds make gowns for them. Slurping at their cocktails for the last scraps of pomegranate, the wet privilege of their summers, their perfect skin only a Disney effect. Camouflaged in witchgrass, small featherwork of children. O to be hungry and to be in. My foot slips like a baby’s in this glass slipper of desire. While Phil dreams of hurricanes all winter, his dark mind obscuring. The humans boo for a whole minute, hurl obscenities at him, who, quivering and illiterate, has done nothing but survive in his pinebox and tried to understand his name. But every night in America my brother is a criminal. Gunned down for his clothes when he is not being shunned for the shadow of his face. Even the weatherman is in a rage, his blonde fringe frosting in the falling snow. He is telling us of deer dying off in Montana after their hooves have made a perfect spiral in the grass, tufts of cotton caged in the thorn of each antler stiff with the blood of too many of us. We have no words for how we dream to die young. Dream to wake up one morning and learn there will be an early spring. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 100 But how many ways can we reinvent violence? I hold this winter in my mouth like a pearl. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 101 ANOTHER WHITE CHRISTMAS IN VIRGINIA The house at the end of my street has been looming all winter. Perched garishly through this sour season, pepper-lights slinking red, gold in its wake, heralding the sign of its own coronation, its million chittering fires, Chevy-pickup colony declaring the sidewalk. This their own white sky, old names they refuse to bury. The whole yard a boisterous spectacle. I long to set fire to all of it. The glimmering reindeer, fat snowman inflating his visible lung, ghost child ringing his one hoarse bell through the night. That bright harassment of Santas. The idea of America burning holes in the lawn. Who could live here? With enough mirth to power my city; enough of myself haunting me in some other place. Nonetheless. One matchstick man comes and goes on their horizon, walking hard on his invisible horse, Confederate buckle stroke kicking, toothpick silences. No words ever pass between us as he hoists and pulleys his large flag, daily hanging and freezing through the verbless rubble of these months, determined as an eagle. Clawing at its steady rituals. Don’t tread on me. Still I am resolved to come friendly, built and nested my cowboy greeting, torched it out into this world and watched it choke soundless, die with my good foot caught in their blue hydrangeas. The hawk-wife watching. Spies me smiling, waving in their driveway Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 102 of angels, swoops up her children and says nothing, but retreats from some darkening on the horizon, some fast approaching plague. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 103 ONE HUNDRED AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE NEGRO, WITH COMPLETE PROOF, I In 1670, Virginia passed a law forbidding Negroes from buying white people. This was 51 years after the Negro had arrived in chains. Free Negroes bought white people in such numbers in Louisiana that the state made a similar law in 1818. Beware the African in his natural state. His thoughts, much wilder and darker than you can imagine, bisect in blood knots in the trigger of his ribcage. In the ripe season, his blood will burn hot; each knot coils tight, a fist inside his body with rigid animal violence, dark braids of hair. Hope, an ache culled taut in his throat will strain to form a black bark of words. Do not attempt to understand the diction of a Negro; he wakes in strange tongues and speaks entirely with his body. The Negro scrawls the language of the birds, dreams of bold rivers and molten crowns, your blue field peopled with bucksaw and bur-heads, your hedges razed with pickaninny, starved black-eyed Susans. Dark heads teeming, remembering. Observe the teeth, astonishingly white, as they struggle to gesture beyond anger. The Negro will shatter before he is kind. Their women too, like dark acanthus, bear an unusual stench, are known to perish without direct sunlight, and menstruate together. Too loud and easily provoked, they horde in congregations and spit from vast distances. All Negroes prefer to be near the water. If they sense rain, they will swarm, strip naked, hum, dive, demand to be reborn, march barefoot through your garden to devour your weeds, to spook and mark new heirs with venom. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 104 ONE HUNDRED AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE NEGRO, WITH COMPLETE PROOF, II “They could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.” — James Baldwin Nature, we have spent our many lives undressing our scowl colossal, half-light stripped from eye and sockets, that song bojangling, unrecognizable. Home some brute sojourn we wracked unspeakable, we mute vernacular smashed nuclear sun and this code-switch. All night the world bled on my fang like a language and we unsmiling our narrow gape our space unslanging, And all of us a zero. Count old catalogues of bone, hair, teeth: How broad how thick how beastly and you the glass beaker of seeds who gauge minute fractions of man, am I Orang-utan Or am I savage? Neighbour, I am naming you damned. Blood brother, trained guerilla, renegade. Killer. Threat of the Africanized bee. Are we unsymmetry, skulls a million unfillable, this dark uranium. With life half-cycling. The parched chopper circling. Cowed mammoth in the weeds. Tag skin, brain, misdemeanour. What was left to inherit? Another spotlight Nation, we are silencing our many voice rehearsing your shadow plays; a knock, a hard knock, an illiterate dream; O snuffed singularity— How bright the searchlight of our homecoming: Black comet Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 105 sprawling past black infinity, black heavens. Black grenade. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 106 ONE HUNDRED AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE NEGRO, WITH COMPLETE PROOF, III Two centuries ago the Negroes of South Africa and the Northern Europeans both practiced a form of cannibalism that was strikingly similar. Woke ravenous. Woke with a mollusk mind and swallowed all, you who skulked through the hull of me and glowering. Glorious dead, I am inhabiting— Sat fat in your feral sun mouth-wide and purred with wonder, Hunger, small hands devouring. Such darling flesh invents the supple maw of me Moon-wholesome and meager, what wet-nurse. Night’s bivalve abandoned and unhousing you. Meanwhile, in carnage. Meanwhile in silence. How all this year the mule season Unbosoms me, my every throat a goring, that barbarous root starved carnal, a plucked star. Sweet injury. Drink plum-dark at the neck unhistoried, avow its nakedness, your animal slaughter. Slow massacre. Selves I am ingesting, what fodder. Morsel, we mean to say. Wolf. Bruise of unbecoming. Imbibing stem and longtooth, wet seedcase, the butcherous fruit. Reap tongue. Teeth. Skull. Genesis. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 107 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, II February, I am an open wound—woman discarded and woman emerging. Scars devising scars. To live here we know precisely how to be haunted. Sundown sun, a sterile sky come running, sweet gallow-grass whistling; Ghosts. All year we learn that chainsaw hymnal, outside the Lawn, another excavation—slave quarters found concealed in the student dorms; buried rooms choked, sounds bricked off. Two centuries’ thorns may break sudden bloom. What can we say? No one speaks of it. I dream pristine. And skirting the caution-tape instead, we clasp hands with each other in complicity. Somewhere, the ghost-arm of history still throttling me. Taste of old blood on the wind, the crouched statue of Sacajawea shrouded behind the pioneers. Creature of unbelonging, un-name this new silence. Magnolia explosion, its Leviathan shade. Then fall, what sick messiah. Fall, I am coughing in the aisles again, where bare triage of voices pour molasses in my ear. Where a bald insurrection of tongues. Then squashed rebellion, scrutiny. Indoctrination. To live here we know precisely how to be hunted. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 108 WHITE APOCRYPHA A choir of male voices rises from a room out of sight: assured cathedral, bright white jingle, their hymn climbing and falling for almost an hour, cheerfully winding and rewinding this way. I’ve been waiting here for a friend, hungry and unpeeling some anemic Western fruit, observing in my hands its unnatural rind, while their voices break into dog howls, all shine and no soul. For them, the world is lacquered and clean. For them, every vibrato is measured and paid for. Even looking at the fall leaves has its own upstate vacation, and the old manger is a catalogue photograph where the wise men and the moon are smiling. I want that world. Set in its wide white pearl, unquestioning. Who can say why my sister, whose impossible voice made the splintered rafters tremble, and had women fainting and bawling in the aisles, could find notes to breach that unnamable place which filled and transfigured us, but was not enough for her. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 109 My sister, whose song made me believe the soul could bloom and flourish, that God could sweat and wail here in the mud with us, still calls me weekly to say there is no version of herself that she can believe in. Not even the singing. Not even the song. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 110 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, III After W. E. B. Du Bois Wild irises purpling my mouth each dawning— trauma souring the quiet street. Its whole dark field roots me down and down. The mock-sun a blank obscuring. Fire whips white-shock of lightning, bright Molotov angel, what ash marks assume a coon cemetery. And all the names scratched out. What burns this house burns apishly. The mouth the church this immaculate body, such untouchable sounds we have made of ourselves. A blues archeology. Thus like a snake I writhe upward, mottling and spine-thick, where heavy nouns flay through my tubercular, their heavens coil a twisted rope. Your veiled suffocation. Unknown asphyxiate. The mourning-dove which scales its double gaze in tongues knows this: the broken world was always broken. How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear. The aimed black spear. This body, a crisis. A riot. A racket. The whole world whistling. Harass me a savage state, vast hectares will tar this noon infertile, each day a prisonhouse, my sickbed caulking each bloom a bruise. Quick hands swathe me in miles of cotton. Now blood-stained sheets in my room. There is an old woman who is not my grandmother. There is an old sadness I was born to wear like a dress. She feeds me condensed milk through a bird-feeder and smiles, says don’t pay attention to the flies in my eyes. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 111 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, IV Love carved me in stained glass like a new tattoo. Call me a curio, one Hottentot show. Ask how I learnt to admire the prettiest bruise. Or how a body can be sold into anything. O what soiled words I could fit my lips around. And, body, found object whose hole can hold anything. If I embrace this emptiness, all puppetry is possible. I stuffed most of myself down his snow-globe exotica, found room for my black head on his mahogany shelf. Squeezed between David Foster Wallace and a gilded map of the Americas. He liked his women unspoken, the body imperfect. To mark and remark that terrible wound. No matter if sugar was dulled and unconscious. He preferred to invent a person there. He ached to be inside, thought he deserved to claim it; as if there was something here to be reclaimed. Some mystery codified in the dark bone. As if a self could be unowned. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 112 ELOCUTION LESSONS WITH MS. SILVERSTONE You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! – Caliban, The Tempest In high school boys were easy— they saw none of you or all of you in one ravenous gaze, slurped hankering glances or walked right through you in sterile absolution, high-fived and hissed about your dick-sucking lips. Brewing names for your body in the mastabatorium. Yours was an easy ripening, this new narcissus, high-yellow sparkle held fine like a jewel, your one canary crowned in amber, now hardening a slow curiosity. But the girls—blonde and burning to a bitch-fever, all suntanned limbs and tumid, knew only how to hang their barbs of laughter like a carcass in the frangipani tree, jaws unhinged to a dark massacre, fixed only on your studied disassembly. Boobless, and poor you are a faceless charity, a bloodshot water lily. Stiff-as-a-board. What self illuminable? What sound among these selves was plausible? Under their shrapnel, your tongue heavy, that girl too furred in dialect; Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 113 O wild naïveté. How night unspools its vowels in your unfillable mouth inelegant, and you the heir of nothing. Such clueless heavens boast their blind messengers: French-kiss of catchphrases by your favourite actress, American gold dripping honey from her Cartier glitter. Her language a white tusk, what wild fire. Whatever. Imposter. Virgin falling through your silence your sky impaled, mouth a crooked Valkyrie, unclaimed— Study that diction, Her holy existence. Hot thumb and revolver burning the shape of an L, pink bullet for whatever Loser was left. Call this a triage in your summer make-over, tell them naturally your T’s were the first to go. Pretend what was pret-ty only emerged “priddier.” Smear yourself golden in their Vichy “wadder.” Somehow Mallory will negate you in her arctic gaze: As if. Fishlips. Ugly in any syllable— Let’s call you mirage. As if you were possible. As if you could invent your place. Rasta-girl, interloper. Whatever. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 114 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, V Spray-painted on the Beta Bridge some drunk, early morning clean sky on the wet lisp of May whole galaxies bore witness here in the pale columns of antebellum here in the idyll of Charlottesville: We don’t want any niggers here Mother, It is 2013 & I am fit for the measuring. I am wild for the sizing up. Fevering you a telegraph of unhoused pages, its plain ink bruise your ghost moon: say orphaned mark, axe-wound. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 115 LITANY FOR CHARLOTTESVILLE Heart— long fogged with thunder, let us spit fire through our teeth. Let the long winter find us sucking on charcoal, orphans barking at a moon burnt out. Let us be swept in the ear of an unquiet morning, and remember the home we have built for ourselves. Remember this city’s a blousy mistress, her Sunday veil some pale American whose brain coils thick with klonopin, Camel Lights, and gin. Bless the ground shook black with soot, the long strides that carry you through doubt, each night pulled up at the root, far house in your memory blown down. Bless the hurricane that comes for it, as smoke clots to stone in some coward’s throat—O brute vessel stuffed through with straw; the blond rust of autumn. Eternal Father, devour these mountains with flood, until what remains of the spirit is purged, your old fictions snuffed out— I am the wild diviner unparting miracles this morning; may all your deeds burn to nothing in my mouth. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 116 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, VI In the cold pews of the chapel, Old Dominion, our damp logwood misery is bare. Yes, we are nondenominational here. Yesterday’s rake is still hot on my back. And God, grey huff of monoxide this insufficient morning, your white oak forest keeps burning. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 117 III. “‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-caliban Has a new master: get a new man. Freedom, hey-day!” — Caliban, The Tempest Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 118 PRAYER BOOK FOR VANISHING “Anything black nuh good.”— Jamaican patois maxim. White mirror of morning, the body is yours. Yours the face to anoint with Epsom salts, clean teaspoon of bleach aside in the decanter. What holy water. Approach the angels to efface this blackness, another tar-baby, self I am scorching. In the night find nothing but a dagger of teeth. Pitch-black marrow, vile pigment unwanted, set fire to my undesirable. Un-soot and scrape, until Grandmother, hissing redbone made sacred in her lightness, liming me in talcum before I faced anyone. Grandmother, indelible. I wear your undoing like a mask. Wear your porcelain pock of dust across my forehead as one of the damned. Sired in the image of no one. Each day, each day. Accost the angels: Marilyn, Jesus, and Mother Mary, kissing their pink cheeks, the rail-thin white skin of the heavenly. Their eyes that same blue swimming pool marked No Locals Please, even now still glittering baptismal, that clear awe in which I dived for blessings, hid for hours my kinky-head underwater, Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 119 to suck and marvel at the suntan taste of foreign which could transform me eventually. But Lord I think my angels do not hear. Lord, they are tourists gawking through the cages of my poverty, who take pity in this squalor then return to far moons. My black face a blemish in their photographs. Each morning the same horse-fly, milk I must throw out. The albino sun my enemy. Whole days spent under cellophane, under parasol, days wrapped tight in scalding creams, skin a purge of litanies. Baking soda. Peroxide. Blue cake-soap. Witch-doctor fixes for vanishing. This ghost sarcophagus. Come burn and beseeching. Come alabaster. I drink and drink to the dark disappearing. That familiar sting. The one sweet arc of my unmaking. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 120 CONFESSOR This is where you leave me. Filling of old salt and ponderous, what’s left of your voice in the air. Blue honeycreeper thrashed out to a ragged wind, whole months spent crawling this white beach raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides. Out here I am the body invented naked, woman emerging from cold seas, herself the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles, who must believe with all her puckering holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits forth, what must turn red eventually. The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling bird scratching its one message; the arm you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean. Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new as a lamb, helpless in the chicken-wire of my sex. I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces with the rundown sun, count fires in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot, studying their scarred window-plagues, nightshade my own throat closed tight against a hard hand. Then all comes mute in my glittering eye. All is knocked back, slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic tiles approaching, the blur of a beard. The white tusk of his ocean goring me. This world unforgiving in its boundaries. The day’s owl and its omen slipping a bright hook into my cheek— Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 121 OMEN Life has thrown my boxes into the street: the good years, men I wore like petticoats, sweet playthings. The bright red dress of September now fitted and filled by a new body. Young and hissing like the croaking-lizard that slinks in red-throated through the burglar-bars at night, bold in his stasis, laughing at me. Many nights I have come with a boot or a broom, often I have even mangled his tail. And still the lizard returns, his old self sloughed off, ghost a perfect paperweight. My hands are the first to go— the skin split dry and mottling, like croton left to perish in too much sun, its leaves unpeeling, its browned vessel long forgotten in the yard. The teeth too have begun to unsettle, egg-grey and cracking here under stones, under bulbs already dark with knowing that nothing grew, that here nothing could take root. Perhaps I too can be renewed, mother and grandmother, one tail after another I have snuffed out. But the bone instead has chosen to give way, while wild heliconias mark their shapes in the hinges. Here, in this room and in the dark of many other rooms, I make no sense of this silence, how the corners fill and fill with weeds; nostrils and ears overgrown, my one pink rose unpetaling. The spotted lizard waits on my meagre life. I watch and he watches, locked in one gaze, his gold eye fixed, unafraid. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 122 GOOD HAIR Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair. —W.B. Yeats, “For Anne Gregory” Sister, there was nothing left for us. Down here, this cast-off hour, we listened but heard no voices in the shells. No beauty. Our lives already tangled in the violence of our hair, we learned to feel unwanted in the sea’s blue gaze, knowing even the blond lichen was considered lovely. Not us, who combed and tamed ourselves at dawn, cursing every brute animal in its windy mane— God forbid all that good hair being grown to waste. Barber, I can say a true thing or I can say nothing; meet you in the canerows with my crooked English, coins with strange faces stamped deep inside my palm, ask to be remodeled with castaway hair, or dragged by my scalp through your hot comb. The mirror takes and the mirror takes. I’ve waded there and waited in vanity; paid the toll to watch my wayward roots foam white, drugstore formaldehyde burning through my skin. For good hair I’d do anything. Pay the price of dignity, send virgins in India to daily harvest; their miles of glittering hair sold for thousands in the street. Still we come to them yearly with our copper coins, whole nights spent on our knees, our prayers whispered ear to ear, hoping to wake with soft unfurling curls, black waves parting strands of honey. But how were we to know our poverty? That our mother’s good genes would only come to weeds, that I would squander all her mulatta luck. This nigger-hair my biggest malady. So thick it holds a pencil up. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 123 WOMAN, WOUND Spackled yolk this morning. The dawn a moth-plague called down to winter. Salt, old hair. Sweat. Sprawled across the floor in thick nets, body a slack tangle. Newsflash of neon in the windowpane— Woman come undone. Scales withering in the heater hum, lips cracked despite the pomegranate. What myth. Sweet allegory ungifted. What bitter vision tides the mouth. The heart’s shuttered stem, blue-veined with drought. December drinks itself to silence. And even God in his thick brocade has cast me out. Frayed bosom taken out to trash. Legs thrown to rust. The damp craw of bougainvillea sewn shut. Could I open wide the sore uvula, browned with age, to find the whole day used-up, throat-white with wonderment at what had passed? That he was a reptile, vile enough, scavenging at the gash— but for a sticker with the shelf life he offered cash. Black teeth, black heart. Black vice. Ruin comes at any price. A livewire of birds, the whole sky ripped out. Woman, wound, dragging the star of archangels, unwheels in midair, stoking Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 124 the white-hot clamorous oxides, charging ions, charging white bulls into spring. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 125 WOMAN, 26, REMAINS OPTIMISTIC AS BODY TURNS TO STONE The fruits fall all December, flesh pulled soft across each skull, at dawn a feast for gingy-flies. I mistake each thud for horses out the window, where the sea grinds the air thick with my mother’s cannabis, the pollen of her sweet cure-all, as she collects the fallen mangoes and chants my name at the battered sky: Montego Bay, Thermopylae. My finger a stiff bullet of karst limestone. My mother’s song her only version of prayer. Little sister emerges from the wall to scrape me clean. Dust settles in the fringe of her lashes, but she does not complain. All winter I’ve been petrifying in this greenery, my body a fixed bolt; sheets of dermic ash, stirrups of bone, and one black tooth pulsing canines in my heart. Mother, your cannibal lives there. Where the first teething on rough cement left me dissolved inside of you, absorbing everything that made you ache—your clothes soaked with blood every night, your hair growing thick in places you had never seen. Now this morning you have come to reclaim me, carrying my name in your throat; but I have purged myself empty in our seaside home, a sea fished barren by your father, his traps long salted dry, the sternum of my body now a relic in the sand, as grayscale claims this maw of pelvis, my womb the coiled rock of coral. Nothing will survive here. Ossa, Infanta. The world in bloom obscenely. Pluming and dividing while I crackle dry with plague. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 126 HOW TO BE A MORE INTERESTING WOMAN: A POLITE GUIDE FOR THE POETESS Call me Mary. Call me Sophie. Call me what you like. I’ll answer to any man who looks at me right. You may come to my garden and steal hydrangeas in the night. I’ll suck your thumb and play dumb. I’ll pretend I can make anything grow. Rosebushes and violets and bruises for show. I’ll open my hot mouth for an orchid to snake out; I’ve been practising this bee-sting pout. I will titter and fluster and faint. Write hundreds of sonnets in your name. (Each one born fat and sunny. Then I can claim to have made something happy.) Light pools slick in my eyelids— I am all lashes and lips. I have learnt how to smile, how to talk with my hips, how to swallow my words, how to make myself small. I won’t make a fuss. I will coo. I will crawl. And if you knock right, this spine will give out— I will crumble and weed and paw at your feet. Unbraid and emote, walk faceless from the brink; if you spit, I will drink. I will grow heavy and silent and sick. I will strip you right down to the bone. I will take your name. I will take your home and wake dark with a song on which you finally choke; my black hair furring thick in the gawk of your throat. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 127 BIRTHMARK, OR PURIFYING AT THE SINK As you’ll have heard, I’m no beginner. The hand’s thin muscle remembers scrubbing the cloth this way, three drops of bleach to the spot of blood, washing away this little stain. And cotton remembers the first month’s blood, how I brushed in panic at its scarlet root, asking this blight to let go of me, one girl branded woman overnight. Each time I thought every man could tell— us young girls shadowing each other, making sure we hadn’t soiled ourselves. Face still hot with embarrassment and what impurity we are made of, whole selves being flushed away. One whole girl whispering back to the snake. Now three aspirin and mint tea are all I have to my name. And the womb’s thick ache. Where my first child slid out of me like a plum while I dreamt. They do not tell you it can happen so easily, just a mangled root of flesh and string. That the blood in these clothes would be all I have left; tiny birthmark still burning red. Now I touch the bathwater to my face, touch blood to my mouth, wanting to drink anything left: Pulp, dregs. Brute body. Heart, a black river branching between us. Wound with nothing left to answer for: Recall with your small mouth all that I fed you in despair. Wet stone, tea leaves, our worn rag of silence, half-mound of Venus fracturing violet in the bathtub, your halogen light descending. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 128 LITTLE RED PLUM Crisis in the night. My heart a little red plum in my mouth. Glowing its small fire in the dark. How you, hand on my breast, open my little animal cage to watch me burn, eyes marvelling at the birds that rush out. My voice rising red balloons in the air. My hands find a bright cardinal bleeding through your shirt, my name spreading softly on your tongue. Swift cherry vine galloping, stitching warm skin to skin. I reach for you, reach into the feathers of the dark, wanting to stay here, wanting to press each hour into vellum so tomorrow I may search and find our little blossom still unfurling there. I slip slowly into your light, kiss my red plum into your mouth. Here. I give you all of me in this little pink cup: hot mouthfuls of fevergrass, of wild Jamaican mint. Here, in the shadow of this hothouse room, a red hibiscus blooms and blooms. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 129 CENTER OF THE WORLD The meek inherit nothing. God in his tattered coat this morning, a quiet tongue in my ear, begging for alms, cold hands reaching up my skirt. Little lamb, paupered flock, bless my black tea with tears. I have shorn your golden fleece, worn vast spools of white lace, glittering jacquard, gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust on my skin. Cornsilk hair in my hems. I have milked the stout beast of what you call America; and wear your men across my chest like furs. Stick-pin fox and snow blue chinchilla: They too came to nibble at my door, the soft pink tangles I trap them in. Dear watchers in the shadows, dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease, please. Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here, some blood in the hunt. Now the center of the world: my incandescent cunt. All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis and the wild pink Damascus, my sweet Aphrodite unfolding in the kink. All hail hot jasmine in the night; thick syrup in your mouth, forked dagger on my tongue. Legions at my heel. Here at the world’s red mecca, kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem, here in the cradle of Thebes, a towering sphinx roams the garden, her wet dawn devouring. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 130 IV. “This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.” — Prospero, The Tempest Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 131 AFTER THE LAST ASTRONAUTS HAD LEFT US, II (LAIKA) Yes, they had been brave in the face of it. The Geiger counter at navel-gazing. Down here, Earth vespers nothing but its tinfoil sermon. How to Survive These Extraordinary Days. Particle angels and lost radio stations teach you how to read your self. I sink like a pinprick through that Sunday hymnal, and scour the worlds for proof of us. Sputnik in the news. Mother in her vestal suit, clutching the whimpering canine, both of them orphans, inscrutable. Stray smiles emerging. Did I imagine it? The moon between the pews, searching for a tuppence, the milky congregation gone. Her voice hanging its white frequency in my ear. Gamma radiating some kind of fractal the dark growing older between us. Each day mute in its numbness. We learned too well this steady decade of forgetting. The wild unfathering of it Crackling her helmet static, the same broadcast inevitable. How to measure in obsoletes— Ten cubits and a rope of hair. I press my face into the night and listen, mapping out judiciously the binary of her language. Some scarce dactylic. Her song a distant banner. Interstellar. Lunar. Monolithic. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 132 SPECTRE Invented a story, invented a girl for you to talk to. Call me an easy animal this dark season, a door for you to walk through. How my deer carcass slits to limbs in your refrigerator, each pretty word a cigarette you will put out in your skin. Here each fault consumes the hoarding of numb silences, the way you give voice to nothing. Your hands still folded, the phone unringing. A nothing hiss. Nevertheless. I knell and touch mouths with the mostly dead, my self entombing itself. The woman splits indefinitely. * My father spins his web of sensimilia in the country, mother smiling green in the ear of his god, both teenagers budding new selves in the cane fields. His voice is her voice, their unlived life, my siblings and I one in four chance to leave the slums of this boyhood. The answer of his father still unknown to him. But daughter is always a sightless gamble. At night he dreams of hands closing tight about her throat, this poisoned root we must cast out. My mother says nothing and turns away, a worse kind of violence. Her good hair, her skin, her bright hibiscus. Her shoe thrown hard in solidarity. * I was born with one ankle dangled in the sea, body grasping for another horizon. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 133 Hungry infant reaching for the salty night, I ate leaves of scripture left open to avert the spirits of the dead— but already I was unruly and invited them in, imbibed them in my fevered dreaming until my skin was no longer my skin. * Now years later, I am blue October caught in this southern gloom, thinking of the man I have just welcomed inside me, an eager creature still answering the call of her body. Already he is a spectre of some future patricide, my long face in the mirror nothing but the yellow smear of shame, and he the same Western sky I have been chasing, my country nothing but a satisfied lover now with no reason left to call, the rain this morning nothing but my father’s spit at my back. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 134 CHIMERA Margaret, your phantom limbs ache and marrow at my root, where we once twined low in our dim husk of coconut, skirting the toxic drain of milk, blubbering and hinged at the shattered cliff of pelvis, reaching for the light. Two flies drowned in the ink of absinthe, we slowly ruptured at the liver, severed where the hasty doctor wired her copper hook between us. You were a fish caught in the clasp of oxygen; your fragile lungs could not deliver you. I clambered awake, sputtering in the night, the worn breath of fingers against my throat, imagining your plasma circling the basin, flushed away among the day’s last offal, wracking my body in black contrition, wondering why I survived. Mother, when she speaks of you, does not call you by a name. She has already abandoned your crippled stamen plowing its helpless grief at the heart—but I was born anemic and only half a self, purpling and diaphanous at the wound, salvaged unwillingly from this divergent sacrifice, still clinging to your absent warmth. Sometimes I imagine nothing has changed—you rib and I claw, sailing the earth in our wry husk, both preserved as one taxidermic enigma, or coiled in a thick jar of amnion in Mother’s old cupboard, dreaming the same dream in the dark. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 135 HOW TO EXCISE A TUMOR Don’t fall in love with it, whatever you do. Such affairs can only be temporary, and incapable of feeling. Don’t give in to its rosary; full, hot breaths blossoming under your skin—it will always want more than you can give. First entering the mouth through sticky fever, soon its bald worm will make a home in the damp chasms of your heart. You’ll begin to see the good in everything; a life unwinding in cursive, your atoms coming apart. At night it will move to leech at your nipples and other parts of you will grow hot. Don’t give in to accidental pleasure, seeing the world in symmetry, or chasing after phantom wants. This foreign organ will make good use of its host. Blind aphid chewing straight through the core. All day it will sleep and feed, sometimes dragging its plump body across your floor, lazily undoing your hair, and staining your sheets. Making such a mess of your dreams. Learn to turn away, say no. Skip meals. Abandon your friends. Rummage through bowls of week-old fruit, snipping at the tendrils where something once grew. Imagine a hive of pearls coiled there in the seeds. But who could ever live here, you will wonder, old follicle split to nothing at the root— even the once wilding promise of us is unblooming even this sound for stay cannot be heard in a vacuum. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 136 INCORRIGIBLE All night I wrestled with it— the onerous verse, trying to salt the wound; there are worse things one could fix a gloom upon, I suppose. But I fight to tack it down, the indefinite I, I, iamb; to tease this venom out— its cerasee vine grown thick as my hair, pulling at my limbs, the fur of my mouth. Opening my hand in the fissure of my throat, a gutted fish, I am raking rut out. Beached now on his shore, blanched bone-white, I am watching my grandfather strangle a bucket full of conger eels. Waist-deep in the sea’s phlegm, each finger a purposeful hook, today he is putting light out. From the almond dusk, sun-roasted stiff, spinning their brittle halves around, he offers each to me like an eager child, until something in the eel’s eye claps me shut— a dull movement I cannot comprehend. Need to trawl some meaning from our grief; to shake the vaguer shadows out—to rack the place where something once moved. Suck the marrow out. Pity the body who knows itself gone apart. How shaking his rough hands gentle round my head, Grandfather laughs like a loon, wolf-throated, snapping this stasis like a nylon line. A frightened net of sparrows comes loose in the air; weaving through a thicket of sandflies, picking life out. Are they watching us? Ourselves one drunk sound in the soundless sea. Grandfather, dizzying. Pity the owl-moth that struck with all its might, night’s shutters unopening. Moon at my window, one slow eye, known-wound I am salting as proof of existence. Pine this self amongst the green Adirondacks, its blank hem of fog unfurling where something else moves in the eye’s swift blink—beneath its greying leaves, life’s dark unstirring flashed its incorrigible scream of light. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 137 AUGUST GHOST My sweet grotesque there is nothing left of you here. Except the crawl of last week’s sporing; slow ferment of urges you no longer feel. Already you’ve reclaimed your books (I did not notice), have gone to build and nibble at your worst obsessions, still clinging to your last vice. Now whole days and freight trains pass between us. Soon it will be rivers and mountains. Soon it will be the half-buried sun and the dreams I keep of no one. At my gate the plumegrass still grabs for you. But you peel them off like leeches, and resign your absence to the air, sneak in to snip at tendrils you once claimed, to burn what grew your body in the dark. Friend, your name comes and goes with the wind. Out west you will make a mistress of the ocean, ply the flesh of every orchard plum. Be eyed and filled with a stranger sky, while I shatter and rearrange my empty cups. My long throat still withering here with dust. Perhaps one day you will ring and I won’t recognize your voice. Just some August ghost asking after fireflies. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 138 A SEPARATION Born in the ink of the vulture, hauled beneath the same wing, we were dropped like offal across the waiting sand, fingers webbed together at the sinews. There your matted hair, your one grey tooth. There the strange ocean offered nothing but your fear of drowning. How you crouched inside the palm of a breadfruit leaf, sneezed black feathers and cried all night, already soured to our half a life. You wanted the breast and the bottle and your thumb. You never learned how to choose, so you never chose me. Beneath the scar of our thunderstorm, small bodies pressed navel to navel, we resigned to suffer our two halves, whole worlds existing between us. Our silence. Our stomachs burning hot in the Kingston sun. Back then I wanted more of you than you could give. Wanted to strike you down with lightning, and watch you struggle with the sea. Will your hands come shattering at my teeth, or your hair, which never stopped growing, come strangle me in my bed. Where you found me embracing another woman; the helix redacted. The body unsexed. I remember you spat and this body unfeathered, Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 139 tongue lodged with disgust in my naked rattle. Was it then I became something you could no longer love, another stranger you pass alone in the street? One toothless bird shivering soundless in the air. Brother, I reached for you and there was no one there. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 140 IN THE EVENT OF THE LAST UNHAPPINESS, RETURN TO THE SEA I waited only a decade for the package to arrive. Wrapped in plain brown paper, it came humble as a stone, vested relic of my seaside home, boxed plain as the last brown loaf feeding flies in the window, my mother a little girl hankering for it. I was certain its whole held the cure for all things. For my swollen lip, for my yellow skin, for the wounds I fingered open, for my father’s sin. For how badly I wanted to rib to nothing. To be bursting and pregnant with everything. Do not open was what it said. (In the event of the last unhappiness, return to the sea.) For years it brewed a dark hum from its edges, and sometimes I thought it called out to me. I hid it in my abdomen and tried to forget, until the body found a way to flay open itself, the way grief yanks its weeds from hallowed brick, my family a hem still unraveling. I awoke to find it hatched like the cleanest egg, polished steel and glass alive in my bed. The machine was small and simple the way my life is small and simple: only seeming, or aching for itself to unmatter, to shatter at the heel of greater things. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 141 AUGUST IN THE COUNTRY OF ANOTHER Like any good heroine, she had nine ways to bury him. Under the torn rags of winter with the sea in its jowls, out with the icy jacarandas, the fish-nets blurred and swept in the moon, by the tinder-music handed down to her each century, its ballerina worn faceless, arms outstretched, each day a faltering. A typewriter ribbon pulled out, black fox vanishing with all her good words. Then the lone cypress groans blustering, untamed, its milksap grown thick, grief prehistoric. What to do with the old summers in the lake, what was found and renamed of each other in the canals, each night a wild field of japonica flame or what shook loose from her black river of hair. What to do with all this sun, this lifetime that flared godlike each August in the country of another, and what cherished blossom pushes up, its old roots and hands reaching. Today and today this one becoming. The deer fossil the dog keeps uncovering in the yard. The self and somehow the self still blooming like a mouth torqued open in the rain, beloved and returning, beloved and asking again to be filled, asking only to be tended, to be bodied, asking what here will scatter and what again remain? Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 142 KINGDOM-COME I. The tongue finds the sparrow softly nestled in the cheek; a white call of feathers plumes wild in each throat. Our murmurs, pulled thin through the narrow beak, coming to settle inside the other. Consider the gasp, teeth-caught, consider this whistle through the mind’s thick chapel, where you found me sounding the warmest note. Sire the muscle bruise bone make music of your brittle animal. II. I came to you hungry, and full of dismissals. I came to you eager. I came with mammy eye and pappy lie; black duppy bruising you in the night I gave you skin and bone, I gave you teeth. Stone after stone, I swallowed anchor. And nobody saved you, white as a throat as I washed Noah’s animals caterwauling from the dark. Hand by hand. And shoe. The water a black history. Bathed them in a deluge of the spit, the bile, the phlegm, the offal we called lovemaking when eyes shut tight, you dared not look, Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 143 hands clasped for you a body you would not see in the dark, praying for your order, for symmetry. Well this sugarcane-blood was black before the rambling sea learned which names to call me until I crumble like cornmeal pudding Hallelujah and Kingdom-come. Nobody warned you, cold as bone, how this hair uproots antenna, red-ant stinger, this kiss and this kiss a thick nettle. No room on the boat for me. No Bible passage. No field guide to advise you to dress for fire, to bring a thicker whip. That what you thought was simple sparrow was Jamaican grassquit. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 144 THE ART OF UNSELFING The mind’s black kettle hisses its wild exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee and the hour after. Penscratch of the gone morning, woman a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble, her small wants devouring. Her binge and skin-thrall. Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths, this birdless sky a longing. Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing these touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters under floorboards, each fickle moon pecked through with doubt. And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops on her kitchen counter now sprouting green missives, some act of contrition; neighbor-god’s vacuum a loud rule thrown down. Her mother now on the line saying too much. This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much with each gaunt memory, your youth and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here a private history—consider this immutable. Consider our galloping sun, its life. Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you. Until a family your hands could not save became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you. And how to grow a new body—to let each word be the wild rain swallowed pure like an antidote. Her mother at the airport saying don’t come back. Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat. And even exile can be glamorous. Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one in particular. No answer. Her heart’s double-vault a muted hydra. This hour a purge Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 145 of its own unselfing. She must make a home of it. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 146 DOUBT I. There’s nothing of the dinosaurs in these bones— no blue fern locked in the carbon fossil, spirals trilling on spirals recoiling; question collapsing on itself. Nothing carbon can claim to know of me; three-hocked hydra pressed neat in my iron bone binding these ragged and unlikely molecules, echo clamming the garden dark as a bell, thickening the Sunday crows like old London’s wretched rats, leaping and furring, giving birth to themselves. The sermon if you please, is disease. II. Ring Gethsemane. I shall be late. Turning my hands about some troubling verse, my bald body stretched over the silent ether, news of your illness, your boundless assassins. Still trying to pick a dim sound out the clamorous tomb, a bronze chime I can fix my brow upon. But somewhere in Kingston you are one with the mud, lungs graveled in limestone, mouth ajar, a jawbone still begging the silent answer. Only doubt unfurls this wind of disquiet; my body then too young and too unknowing, now wanting, only wanting to say yes. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 147 III. Too late at this hour to wean your heart’s wild membrane still boomed against that flickering memory. Against all my careful inventions of love. Blackness in. Blackness out— or something clever you might say in the blue field where I dream you, wide vectors of tyrannosaurus locked with Nero’s crumbled spine. Where our whole beggaring rabble is spinning to a blur, all these vast oceans still coming to a boil. IV. Find my body now at its empty page. Blanched beyond the darkness. Think a thumbprint of sand in Eve’s mitochondria. Where I unburied my own shell and found there no great design. A plain bone to be cast off in a nameless storm; these atoms flung wide and rebound in the ocean’s keening, giving birth to my old selves on a faceless shore. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 148 v Another part of the island. CALIBAN: Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name…a man whose name has been stolen. — Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 149 CRANIA AMERICANA The Caucasian skull is large and oval, with well-proportioned features. The nasal bones are arched, the chin full, the teeth vertical. This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments. Lusus Naturae noun (rare) A freak of nature. Black body burns itself to bushfire— spurned husk that I am. Skinned viscous, daughtering fever. Grief knifes its slow lava through my fluorescent, gnarled as if a neon viper, as if singed animus. Gaslamp-hot for necking, lit oceanliners gulped in. Such is our ambush. Spore of my peculiar— Even the sea derails full-throttle at every turn. What scurvy thrush unmoors this boiled microbial as spite besots my humid mouth. Storm, hag-seed and holy. Come dusk, a rumbottle sky I am sipping. My preening tongue, the guillotine. Know nothing here will grow politely. Such is our nature. Such lurid rains sedate us villainous low: This eel-eye screws to dazzling fright what slowly turns to vapor, and another hot light spoils me for grotesquerie. Sibling, Sisyphean. Howl of my unusual, now we have reclassified the very ape of us Half fish and Half monstrous. Drowned spine of toothache take us and barnacled, all crippled filaments all jawbone Already plucked of cruder blooms, brined hippocampus unzipped with germ. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 150 My dropsied and unteachable. Lo, this Indigene. Hissing into madness this infrared. All night our dark carousel haphazards, churning to house our many jargon, masked congenital, and cloven in. Diagram and mooncalfed. Even I. How sometime I am wound with solitude. Enough a Negress all myself. Scorn, one golliwog-bone knots the black mock of me, naked and denouncing us artless. Vexed skinfolk. Unfossiled, hence. What a brittle world is man. Self inflammable, I abjure you. And wear your gabble like a diadem, this flecked crown of dictions, this bioluminescence. Predator coiled eager at the edge of these maps. Master, Dare I unjungle it? Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 151 NOTES The Kamau Brathwaite quote “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters,” is from the History of the Voice: Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). The title “In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing,” is taken from the first line of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “War,” as translated by Robert Yates. In “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” the line “His Primal Plant remains elusive,” is a sentence from “Goethe’s Botany: Lessons of a Feminine Science,” an essay by Lisbet Koerner, which details Johann Goethe’s botanical obsession with finding a “Primal Plant,” which he believed was the “necessary and sufficient cause of all flora.” The title “I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess,” is a phrase from The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published in 1666. “Autobiography” is after Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria,” and loosely follows his form there, mirroring the first lines of his first and last stanzas. The “Notes on the State of Virginia” poems take their title from the Thomas Jefferson text of the same name. “Notes on the State of Virginia, I” references the invention of the word “belittle,” which was first coined in the late 18th century by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, originally meaning to ‘diminish in size, make small,’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The title “One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof,” and the facts used in the epigraphs of the first and third poems of this series were taken from the J.A. Rogers book with the same title: 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro: with Complete Proof, first published in 1934. “Notes on the State of Virginia, III” incorporates words and phrases from W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. “Birthmark, or Purifying at the Sink” begins with the first line of C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Sculptor of Tyana,” translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard. Both the title and first epigraph of “Crania Americana” reference the Samuel George Morton text of the same name: Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 152 North and South America: To which is Prefixed An Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species, published in 1839, in which Morton proposes that the intellectual capacity in different races is based on the size of their skulls. “Crania Americana” also incorporates, alludes to, and repurposes the lines, words, and phrases which are either spoken by Caliban, or spoken in direct reference to Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest. The definition of lusus naturae used in “Crania Americana” is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 153 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to the editors of the following journals in which these poems have appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions: The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, online feature: “Hands” The Atlas Review: “In the Event of the Last Unhappiness, Return to the Sea” Bennington Review: “Autobiography,” “August in the Country of Another” Boston Review: “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” “I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess,” “In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing,” and “Notes on the State of Virginia, III” Callaloo: “Incorrigible,” “Doubt” The Cincinnati Review: “Pocomania,” “After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, I” Devil’s Lake: “Notes on the State of Virginia, I,” “Woman, Wound” Ecotone: “Another White Christmas in Virginia” Fawlt Magazine: “Kingdom-come” Gettysburg Review: “Family Portrait” Gulf Coast: “Fisherman’s Daughter” The Iowa Review: “How to Be an Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess” The Journal: “Home,” “Woman, 26, Remains Optimistic as Body Turns to Stone” The Kenyon Review: “One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, II,” and “One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, III” Mason’s Road: “A Separation” Poetry: “Center of the World,” “Confessor,” “The Art of Unselfing” Prairie Schooner: “One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, I,” “White Apocrypha,” “Prayer Book for Vanishing,” and “Omen” Sonora Review: “Dreaming in Foreign” Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art: “Spectre” TriQuarterly: “Notes on the State of Virginia, II,” “Notes on the State of Virginia IV” “Mermaid,” “Osteology,” “Catacombs,” and “Chimera” first appeared in the poetry chapbook Catacombs (Argos Books, 2011). Thank you to my mentors, friends, and muses for helping this thesis evolve to such full-blooded life. Safiya Sinclair Creative Dissertation 154 My deepest gratitude to USC mentors and professors David St. John, Susan McCabe for all your invaluable encouragement, insight, and guidance these past five years. Thank you for all your help in bringing this dissertation into the world, and for making me a better poet. Thank you to professors Velina Hasu Houston, Edwin Hill, and John Carlos Rowe for selflessly helping me along on this doctoral journey with all your crucial insight. Many thanks to Janalynn Bliss for always listening, and for all your reinforcements, especially when I needed it most. I am ever grateful for the support and encouragement of the Creative Writing and English Department at the University of Southern California, where I found the space and the invaluable time to write this dissertation. Most of all, thank you to my family for nurturing this dazzling life, and for being an unstoppable source of light. Infinite and boundless thanks to my partner Mitchell Jackson for being a sounding board for every idea and theory, for diligently reading and re-reading every page, and for setting the horizon on fire every morning so that I can find my way out to the words.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation creates a poetic future at the intersections of blackness, Jamaican womanhood, and sexuality, by exploring biomythography—what Lorde describes as an intersection of biography, myth, and history—through oral folklore, sex, and western ideals of beauty. My aim is to decolonize the western ideals of beauty that have so long dehumanized and defeminized the bodies of black women like Saartjie Baartman and Joice Heth. My dissertation will be a cunnicentric re-centering of the western gaze, where I will explore my own counter-idea that in the female body, as in the tropics, nothing grows politely. By examining Jamaican dialect and the oral history preserved by Caribbean women, I aim to invent a matriarchal language, what I am calling a “Mother Lore.” Through this Mother Lore I explore how the perseverance of our matrilineal culture creates a kind of visionary power, a balm against colonial traumas. Both my critical and creative work, which are a hybrid of critical prose and lyric prose poems, will give voice to the rebellious and curative power of Jamaican patois itself, all while celebrating the nature of the impolite body as a vital and beautiful part of Caribbean selfhood, of black womanhood.

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Creator Sinclair, Safiya (author)

Core Title Herself behind herself concealed: a biomythography of Jamaican womanhood

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 04/24/2021

Defense Date 03/08/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag biomythography,Black feminist poetics,Caribbean selfhood,cunnicentrism,impolite body,Jamaican dialect,Lorde,lyric,Mother Lore,OAI-PMH Harvest,oral folklore,Poetry,postcolonial theory,sexuality,western ideals of beauty,womanhood

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), St. John, David (committee chair), Hasu Houston, Velina (committee member)

Creator Email safiya.sinclair@gmail.com,sjsincla@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-143748

Unique identifier UC11675195

Identifier etd-SinclairSa-7240.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-143748 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SinclairSa-7240.pdf

Dmrecord 143748

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Sinclair, Safiya

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA