ASU English professor wins Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry

The awards — and opportunities — keep piling up for Safiya Sinclair, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s Department of English.

In mid-April, Sinclair received one of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships, which are given to culture creators based on their career achievements and “exceptional promise.” The fellowship, which includes a stipend, is for Sinclair’s new poetry project, a book titled “Planet Dread.”

In addition, Sinclair’s memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. According to the New York Times, the awards are “among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States” because the recipients are chosen by book critics rather than committees made up of authors and academics.

The memoir detailed Sinclair’s childhood growing up in Jamaica and having her life defined by her father’s authoritarian Rastafarian beliefs.

ASU News talked to Sinclair about the book award and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and/or brevity.

Question: Is the Book Critics Circle Award significant to you because it was chosen by critics?

Answer: It really felt like a big honor because the book critics are the best at what they do, and they read perhaps the most books annually. For them to highlight my book, it really did feel very special.

Q: So, what is "Planet Dread" about?

A: I’m going to be examining a couple of things. Primarily the book is going to be examining the way the Rastafari think. I’m thinking a lot about language. I’m thinking about vernacular. I’m thinking about dialect.

In Jamaica, we don’t just have a Jamaican dialect. The Rastafari also have their own language, which comes from this desire to uproot the English language and turn the English language on its head. So, they do a lot of twisting of grammar.

The example I always give is that my father doesn’t say “understand”; he says "overstand." He doesn’t say “appreciate”; he says "appreciate love." The way of the Rasta speaking is born out of this linguistic rebellion. And as a poet, I’m very interested in this.

In this book, I’m going to be examining this sort of linguistic disruption and linguistic rebellion through Rasta poetics, but also through the lens of womanhood to see how I can bloom my own femininity out of this language, which is very male centered.

Q: How long have you been thinking about this project?

A: For a few years now. A lot of it overlapped with the writing of the memoir because in the dialogue it’s all Patois (an English-based Creole language spoken primarily in Jamaica) and it’s in Rasta poetics. So, I spent a lot of time immersed in making sure I got the language right. And then I started to think, “This very much exists orally, but it’s never been written down.”

There is no sort of dictionary you can go to double-check that you’re spelling this right or using this correctly. So, there were some times in the writing of the book when I was using this Rasta vernacular that I asked my father, “How would you spell this word?” Or the Rastafari don’t say “me” or “I”; they use “I man.” So, when I was writing the book and I would write “I man,” I would say, “Is there a hyphen or is there no hyphen?” How can you know grammatically how this is written?

So, my interest in what I could do with this language that’s born out of this very much anti-colonial sense and sensibility is really when I first felt like the fever of, “Can I do this through poems?”

Q: The feminine perspective is missing in Rasta vernacular, correct?

A: I asked my brother about “I man” when I was writing, and I was like, “What does it mean to you when you say that?” He said, “I think of it as I’m philosophically asserting myself and my existence to the universe.” And then I said, “Well, OK, so what if I wanted to philosophically assert myself and my existence to the universe? What would I say?” And he said, “Oh, I never thought about it before.”

Q: Because women don’t have that opportunity in Rastafari culture?

A: Yeah. So I said to him, “What if I say ‘I woman?’” He said, “Well, that sounds kind of strange.” In my last chapter of the memoir, I actually used “I woman.” And so, in many, many ways, I’m seeing this poetry book as a bridge to that last chapter where I said, “I’m going to say ‘I woman.’ I’m going to assert philosophically my existence in this space."

Q: You said the Rasta language is born out of rebellion. Can you expand on that?

A: You’re kind of throwing off anything born out of colonialism and imperialism. The reason I speak in English is because we were enslaved and taken to Jamaica and this language was forced on us. Our dialects were born out of the sense of rebellion where the enslaved created this language over centuries because it was ours and because the enslavers could not understand it. In that way, it became its own path to freedom.

Q: The title, “Planet Dread,” is also a reference to climate change, right?

A: Yes. The second part of the book is going to be concerned with the oncoming climate crisis. Islands like Jamaica have the smallest carbon footprints in the world, but we will be among the first climate refugees. We will be among the first affected by the oncoming climate crisis. As somebody who was born at the seaside, I’m already seeing the effects. Our beaches are eroding. Our sea levels are rising.

For me, this is something that is imperative in my writing. So, anything I write next will be in some way about the oncoming climate crisis and talking about how it will affect citizens in countries like Jamaica, which exists I think in the first world as someone else’s idea of paradise.

Q: When do you anticipate the book being released?

A: I’m hoping to finish a full manuscript this year. I would hope within the next two years it’ll be out.