Episode 586
with Paul F. Tompkins, Safiya Sinclair, and Isabeau Waia'u Walker
Comedian Paul F. Tompkins chats about his improv comedy podcast The Neighborhood Listen, where he and fellow comedians re-enact posts from the app Nextdoor; poet Safiya Sinclair discusses her memoir How to Say Babylon, in which she recounts growing up Rastafarian in Jamaica under the strict patriarchy of her father; and singer-songwriter Isabeau Waia'u Walker performs her song "All My Friends Think I'm Okay." Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share some unhinged behavior from the neighbors of our listeners.
Paul F. Tompkins
Wickedly funny comedian, actor, and writer
Comedian, actor, and writer Paul F. Tompkins is nothing short of a comedic gem and podcast royalty. Alongside being an absolute Live Wire fan-favorite, PFT has appeared on over two hundred episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang!, and hosts the wildly popular shows The Neighborhood Listen and Spontaneanation, among others. He and his wife, the actor Janie Haddad Tompkins, co-created the podcast Stay F. Homekins. Full of good ideas and gut-busting jokes, Tompkins’ is also a bit of a TV star! His TV credits include more than two dozen appearances on HBO’s Mr. Show, and he is the voice of Mr. Peanutbutter on the hit Netflix animated series Bojack Horseman.
Safiya Sinclair
Award-winning author and poet
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, the stunning story of her struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a tour de force” and Kirkus Review writes that the book is “more than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation.” She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.
Isabeau Waia'u Walker
Singer-songwriter
The vision for her music is clear and thought provoking, and Isabeau Waia'u Walker often expresses her vision through her master storytelling. The authenticity of her musical presentation as a performer and storyteller taps into human emotions and bonds her with the listeners and audiences in front of her. Isabeau worked as a high school teacher for over a decade while she made music, slowly amassing an impressive YouTube subscribership. She then orchestrated an early retirement from education to redirect attention to music, allowing her to tour as a member of Y La Bamba and to record her EP, Better Metric. Her full length album Body, recorded at The Center for Sound, Light and Color Therapy with bandmate and producer Ryan Oxford continues to highlight the tensions of the stretches and contractions nested in Isabeau's core which then reverberate through the layers of her product: storytelling, collaboration, presentation, music.
-
Luke Burbank: Hey, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How's it going?
Luke Burbank: It's going well. We've got a tough one for you this week on Station Location Identification Examination. Are you up to it?
Elena Passarello: I'll try my best.
Luke Burbank: That was, like, kind of an intense opening to Live Wire this week. Of course, this is where I quiz Elena on a place in the country where we're on the radio, you got to figure out where I am talking about. This place is located, I'm going to give you the state, on Minnesota's first birding trail, which is the Pine to Prairie Birding Trail. And it’s home to the Agassi National Wildlife Refuge. I know that you write for Audubon Magazine at times. Maybe you know this through birds.
Elena Passarello: Is it somewhere in the Minneapolis area?
Luke Burbank: It is the birthplace of professional basketball player Mel Peterson. So that narrow it down for you? That's also the first time learning there was a professional basketball player named Mel Peterson.
Elena Passarello: Is it Peterson Falls, Minnesota?
Luke Burbank: It has Falls in it. It is Thief River Falls, Minnesota where we're on the radio on KNTN. So shout out to all of our folks out there in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. All right. Ready to get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire. This week, comedian Paul F Tompkins.
Paul F. Tompkins: I wear overalls at home and barefoot. So just sitting there with on the porch with my jug and, you know, just waiting for the sun go down.
Elena Passarello: And poet and author Safiya Sinclair.
Safiya Sinclair: The Rastafari language is very much rooted in anti-colonial thought. The idea is to uproot anything to do with the English language.
Elena Passarello: With music from Isabeau Waia'u Walker and our fabulous house band I'm your announcer Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone tuning in all over America, including Thief River Falls, Minnesota. We have a really fun and kind of varied show for you this week. All kinds of stuff to discuss. Of course, we have a listener question we put out there. We asked what is the most unhinged thing a neighbor has ever done? I will tell you, Elena, that this is reportedly the biggest reaction we've ever gotten to an audience question. But turns out a lot of people have a lot of unhinged neighbors. We're going to hear those responses coming up. First, though, of course, we've got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week. This is our little reminder at the top of the show that there is some good news happening out there in the world. What is the best news you've heard all week?
Elena Passarello: I was going to say right now, I don't think you're ready for this story. I don't think you're ready. This is the bootylicious of stories. All right. We start off on October 16th, not too long ago at the Nebraska Humane Society, where somebody brought in three very young four-week-old kittens, one of whom was not doing well at all. It had this thing called flea anemia when kitties are really young and fragile, the blood that fleas take out of the kittens can really affect them and so they had to do something stat. And it turned out there was a six-year-old husky who was also in the Humane Society, and he had just had bloodwork done and so they could tell without having to waste any time that he would be a match. So they did a kind of really it's not a permanent fix, but they did a quick transfusion to just give the kitty a little more time.
Luke Burbank: From a dog to the cat.
Elena Passarello: From a dog to the cat. It worked. Kitten was reunited with her siblings and is now in foster. Oh, but the story does not stop there because this six-year-old husky with one blue eye and one brown eye is named Bret Michaels.
Luke Burbank: Like the singer from Poison?
Elena Passarello: Like the singer from Poison. I believe he's from Mechanicsburg, PA originally. So they posted the story about this amazing hero dog, Bret Michaels on the Nebraska Humane Society's Facebook page. And somehow that got back to human Bret Michaels. Weeks before, just two weeks before Bret Michaels had posted that he had just lost his beloved best friend, German Shepherd Phenix. And so, you know what's going to happen now? Human Bret Michaels adopted dog Bret Michaels.
Luke Burbank: Every rose has its happy ending.
Elena Passarello: Every Rose has its Humane Society love connection. They found—they drove that dog to L.A. or Vegas or wherever he is. This took place over two weeks. There's just this the six-year-old dog in the Humane Society minding his own business, and then before you know it, he is living in a mansion with the lead singer of Poison. He saves an adorable kittens life, by the way, they named the kitten Rose and Thorn, which I thought was a little bit of a stretch. That's a mouthful. I would have named the Kitten Unskinny Bop and called it Little Bop or something like that. Anyway, so now on Bret Michaels Instagram, you could see photos of little Bret Michaels, which is what they call the dog. Everything about this is making me so happy. And now I feel like if you have a dog that you really love and you want to get adopted or a cat or anything, just name it after a nice seeming celebrity.
Luke Burbank: That's how I got my parrot Sir Mix-A-Lot. I got to tell you, my best news story also involves a pet, but a pet that's very low maintenance. You know, dogs and cats are lovely, but they can, you know, take some taken care of. What if you are somebody that maybe didn't have the ability to take care of a pet, but you still wanted that companionship? Well, that is where the Eugene, Oregon Public Library comes in Elena. I got this story by way of our friends at KLCC Radio in Eugene, which is a fine station that carries this very program. The Eugene Public Library has a Library of Things. So during the pandemic, they started stocking not just books and media, but like ukuleles, something called tongue drums. But they just have this Library of Things now. And one of the things they decided to add was a basically robot cat. So this is a very fluffy robot cat that is pretty realistic actually. They got three of them and you can check them out from the Library of Things at the Eugene Public Library. Their names are Bandit, Mr. Pickles and Percival. Those names were picked by the staff and they say these are great for folks that are maybe feeling a little bit lonely or people that are dealing with maybe memory issues. Like it's really great to have this thing that sits on your lap and purrs when you pet it. It purrs and vibrates just like a real cat would. But of course, you don't have to worry about feeding it and taking care of it. These cats are checked out now, like for weeks and weeks. They're so popular, like one of the most popular things at the Library of Things so popular that the librarians got their own robot cats that they keep in a breakroom at the Eugene Public Library, and they go in with feeling stressed out and sit with one of their robot cats on their lap.
Elena Passarello: To deal with the demand of the other robot cats.
Luke Burbank: Robot Cats. The fact that people are like banging down the doors of the Library of Things, trying to get these cats.
Elena Passarello: If you name a rescue husky Bret Michaels, maybe you should name like a robot cat, like Devo or something. Like you should give it —try to think what the musician equivalent is.
Luke Burbank: Whatever musician you're hoping will adopt this particular robot cat. But anyway, shout out to the Eugene Public Library in their Library of Things Bandit Mr. Pickles and Percival. That's the best news that I heard all week. All right. Let's invite our first guest on over this week. He has appeared on over 200 episodes of the show Comedy Bang Bang. He's been on TV, on Mr. Show on HBO. And also he's the voice of Mr. Peanut Butter on the Netflix animated series BoJack Horseman. But perhaps his most impressive achievement of all time is that he is now making his fifth appearance on Live Wire, which has got to be some kind of record. I don't know if we got him a special blazer for this or not. But we are very appreciative of Paul F. Tompkins, who joined us on stage at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon, recently. Take a listen. Hi. Hi, Mr. F. Tompkins. Yes, hello. Did you recently have a birthday?
Paul F. Tompkins: Yes, I did. As recently as Tuesday. [Elena: Oh, Virgo baby.] Law and order ripped from the headlines. I had a birthday this week.
Luke Burbank: Ripped from your wife's Instagram page, which I follow. And there was a picture of you with it.
Paul F. Tompkins: Alright, we'll talk about that later.
Luke Burbank: But there's a picture of you with a cake. And then the music is, I believe, Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show.
Elena Passarello: Oh.
Luke Burbank: Which I just didn't see you as a wagon wheel kind of guy.
Paul F. Tompkins: Here's the thing, and I will say this to my dying day, my wife and I had when we got married, we had Wagon Wheel as our recessional song. [Luke: Hell, yeah.] Before it became a thing, a blight on society. Where it's just all over the place.
Luke Burbank: I'm surprised — I also love that song. But I guess because you're so dapper and you kind of have the bearing of a gentleman from a different time, I would assume that you just listen to, like the music that's playing in the bar during The Shining, Wong Wah, wah, wah wah. Like just, you know, whatever. Oh, great. Whenever Grady is listening to it, he's fixing up the drinks.
Paul F. Tompkins: I mean, I don't hate that but I wear overalls at home and barefoot. So just sitting there with on the porch with my jug and, you know, just waiting for the sun go down.
Luke Burbank: Now, the thing that's interesting about your career, Paul, is that you [PFT: Please tell me. ] have always—
Paul F. Tompkins: I can't believe I'm finally going to find out. This is exciting.
Luke Burbank: Is that you have always done so much stuff outside of your television work. You've always done stage shows and podcasts and all kinds of things where you're diversified in a way right? Now, I'm curious how you avoided the urge to sort of settle in to, you know, you're on a sitcom, you drive to the lot, you work, you come home, you have a cocktail, you rinse, repeat the next day. I feel like a lot of people—because you've had a lot of success in entertainment. How have you stayed so kind of diversified with the different thing that you're doing?
Paul F. Tompkins: Well, because no one wants me to do that sitcom job you mentioned. [Luke: Ah, I see.] And so—
Luke Burbank: Patton Oswald got that King of Queens gig and that was the last time.
Paul F. Tompkins: No more comedians.
Luke Burbank: You would take that job if it came to you.
Paul F. Tompkins: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I did a multicam sitcom in 2000. It was a show called Dag. It starred David Alan Grier Burke. [Elena:Wow.] Yeah, and it was it ran for one season. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had. Multicam sitcoms are like it's like you're doing a little play and you rehearse all week, and then on Friday night, you put it in front of an audience and it's fun. It's really fun. And I, I would absolutely love to have that life. And I would jump at the chance. I don't care how bad it is.
Luke Burbank: Really?
Luke Burbank: [PFT: Yeah.] And you must have friends that do show up on sitcoms that you all of you as comedy people with a pretty high quote unquote comedy IQ, whatever that would mean. [PFT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah] Like we're like, this is it maybe the comedy that is for us, but are you all just like, rooting for your friends? Like, is there some unspoken thing about, like, no one make fun of how bad a certain show might be that somebody is on because they're making a living?
Paul F. Tompkins: Absolutely. And it is like it's also when you get to a certain age, you realize, Oh, we don't have to watch each other's stuff. You know what I mean? Like, good, good for you. I'm very happy for you. You don't expect me to watch this right? And they'll like, absolutely not. And but another thing is that I grew up in a generation that was very afraid of selling out. Like the idea of selling out was it was the worst thing you could do and then when you kind of get older and you see the world, it's like, I don't care. I don't care.
Luke Burbank: I think that was a really big Gen-X thing. [PFT: Yeah, it was. It really was.] I think we were the first and last generation that thought selling out was bad. [PFT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah] Which is financially a terrible thing for your generation to focus on.
Elena Passarello: That's why nobody talks about us. [PFT:Yes.]
Paul F. Tompkins: Because I remember going from seeing a friend of mine in a commercial and being very snobby about it to then years later seeing another friend in a commercial and being like, Oh man, good for you. Like I'm friends with Flo from Progressive ads. [Elena: Yeah.] Every time those commercials come on, I'm like, man, good for you, Stephanie.
Luke Burbank: Not to mention [PFT: I hope you're a billionaire.] And those commercials are actually very well-written, so that's sort of the perfect thing if you can be in a campaign like that. Yes. And they're—
Paul F. Tompkins: Fun. You can have some fun. I will say I'm not a fan of the expanded Progressive universe. I like when the commercials are about Flo, these other people coming in, they're fine. You know what I mean? But it's like when a commercial is going to focus on Jamie? No, no, no. Jamie's there to support Flo.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire Radio from PRX. We're talking to—
Elena Passarello: A controversial take.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to noted advertising critic Paul F. Tompkins. He's from the shows The Neighborhood Listen and Varietopia and many other places. We need take a quick break. Don't go anywhere. We will be right back. Welcome back to Live Wire Radio from PRX. We are here with the great Paul F. Tompkins. So your show, The Neighborhood Listen, is coming back this fall. Can you try to — I really enjoyed it. Can you explain for people that haven't heard of it, what how exactly it works?
Paul F. Tompkins: Absolutely. It is a a character improv podcast hosted by myself and Nicole Parker as two people who live two friends who live in this fictional town called Dignity Falls. And what we do is we take posts from Nextdoor. And we have guests be the people from the posts. And then we talk about what their problem is and why they're upset and all that. And it's it's so much fun. We laugh all the way through it. It's a ball and we're we're coming back for a fifth season.
Luke Burbank: And I know that you did this great kind of live video version of it that I was watching the other day where you're like a pharmacist and she's a real estate agent, I believe. [PFT: That's right.] And I was watching it. I was cracking up. And I was I mean, you've sort of answered the question when you're doing this and other improv things that you do, is it challenging to not laugh or are you so, what's the name of your character, Burnt Millipede?
Paul F. Tompkins: It's spelled Millipede, but it's pronounced me a payday.
Luke Burbank: So are you so deep in the world of Burnt me a payday that what the ridiculous [expletive] you're saying doesn't sound funny in your own head because you're like in the character or are you laughing?
Paul F. Tompkins: No. We we laugh all throughout the podcast. We make each other laugh a lot and the guests make us laugh and we don't—I don't know if there was like a shift in improv where you were not allowed to laugh before. [Luke:Right.] Not allowed to laugh. And then when podcast came along, I feel like I was, if I may, I feel like I was a pioneer in off mic laughter in podcasting and I now I hear it more and more where it's like, Yeah, we're all sitting around having fun and it's like it's you're not trying to create a laugh track, but it is kind of fun to hear that. Like when I listen to a show and the people are having fun with each other, I like it. It's really enjoyable and it does. It also feeds that parasocial thing that we have with podcasts in a good way. I think.
Luke Burbank: We had your friend Scott Aukerman of Comedy Bang Bang and In Between Two Ferns—
Paul F. Tompkins: Work friend, work friend.
Luke Burbank: And we were talking about you a little bit and I, I was so surprised to hear that if I have this right, you had not done improv and still you until you started doing stuff on Comedy Bang Bang.
Paul F. Tompkins: That's correct. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Which is fairly recent like, I thought you were one of those Second City people and you just been like, Yes and'ing your way through through life. That is amazing to me how talented you are at improv for someone who got into it relatively late.
Paul F. Tompkins: My school of improv was podcasting because I'd never done characters before Comedy Bang Bang. And so I knew the basic rules of improv. And so I would try to stick to that and just like, take whatever is thrown at me. And then eventually, after a few years of doing improv on podcasts, I got on stage to do it for the first time with some people, and I did not totally embarrass myself. And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to keep throwing myself in the deep end. Then I started an improv podcast so that I would be, you know, I would have three other improvisers with me and I would always be the least experienced. I would always be the weak link. And so
Luke Burbank: Is this Spontaneanation?
Paul F. Tompkins: Spontaneanation. Yeah. And the idea was like they would bring up my game and so that even if I sucked, there were three other people that were great, so it wouldn't be bad for that long, You know, if I were if I was messing it up, somebody else would fix it, you know? And that's how I learned. And I still—there's still things, though, that my my biggest downfall is something that is called object work. And that is where if you're in a scene and somebody establishes, there's a little end table here with a glass on it and somebody knows exactly where that table begins and ends so they can go up to it and pick up the glass, put it back down the exact same level where they picked it up from. And I can't do that at all. I'm terrible at it. I get scared whenever it enters the scene when somebody is like, okay, we're going to try to crack this safe or whatever.
Paul F. Tompkins: I'm like, Ah, okay. Well, I'll be the lookout. I'll let you guys…
Luke Burbank: Nobody bumped this Faberge egg. That existed an incredibly specific height.
Paul F. Tompkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Luke Burbank: Speaking of some of your improv projects, can you explain, I did not actually get to enjoy this, but I saw you talking about it online when Superego tackled James Joyce's Ulysses. That sounds like a laugh riot.
Paul F. Tompkins: Okay, so I'm in. I'm in a group called Superego, which is there's four of us and then five and we do this specific show, you know, it's an improv podcast and we would do live shows. And then we started doing this thing a handful of years ago called Forgotten Classics, where we would take a book that none of us had read, like a famous book that none of us had read. We would get the first line, the last line, and the the character names, and then we would just improvise the story. Like what we thought it was or what it could be or whatever. And we did a handful of them was always really, really fun. And then we hadn't done in a while and a spot opened up at this great theater called Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. And I immediately they asked me, Hey, do you, you know, theater ask me, We have a slot open. Is there any show you want to throw together? And I said, Let me talk to the guys. And everybody was free so we're like, Let's do it. Try to come up with a book. And then we finally settled on Ulysses, which none of us had read. Half of us had attempted to read and stopped. And one of the most wonderful things was when we began the show asking if anyone in the audience had read it. And not a single person had. [Elena: Oh no.]
Luke Burbank: Yeah. Don't lie. Has anyone in this audience finished, Ulysses?
Paul F. Tompkins: Yeah. Hmm. [Luke:Figures.] Really? It's okay. You don't have to say that here.
Luke Burbank: Were there any amazing plot lines that emerged? I mean, I know it's kind of going by quickly.
Paul F. Tompkins: I mean, another thing that we always end up doing is we seize on these extremely minor characters because we like their names. And so we ignore who the people that are clearly the protagonists of the book. And we just focus on these people with weird names. So Mrs. Yelverton had a big party at her estate and she had made plans to take— she made plans to lay with three different men in the gatehouse or whatever and she was piting them against each other.
Luke Burbank: Elena, have you read Ulysses? You're in English —does that happen in the book as you remember it?
Elena Passarello: Like six times. Yes. It's a motif in the — yeah. I bet what you guys came up with made about as much sense.
Paul F. Tompkins: That's the thing, right? From what I understand, it's a stream of consciousness.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, a lot of it [PFT: Style. Yeah.] And the first line and the last line, it doesn't give you any information.
Paul F. Tompkins: And the last line is 4000 words long.
Elena Passarello: Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the first line is, stately Buck Mulligan came trippingly down the stairwell, which actually is a pretty good place to start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. [Luke: By the way, Elena Passarello—]. And the last line is: Yes. Yes, I will. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I will. Forever. Yes, yes. To love the love. Yeah. This is not exactly what it is, but it's just word spaghetti. Yeah. So you had to — you had an hour and a half to go from a guy coming down the stairwell to word spaghetti. Yeah. And then you had a list of the characters.
Paul F. Tompkins: Absolutely.
Elena Passarello: I hope that there was some recording of it and some lost high schooler in, like, you know, like Peoria is like, didn't read the book and has a test on it tomorrow. And like —
Paul F. Tompkins: Oh, that's the dream. That's the dream. Like, we just watch this real quick.
Luke Burbank: Alexa find me an audio synopsis of Ulysses.
Luke Burbank: Paul F Tompkins, the original PFT. That was Paul F. Tompkins right here on Live Wire. Make sure you're on the lookout for the newest season of his really incredibly comedy improv podcast. It's called The Neighborhood Listen. And it returns to pod catchers near you this fall. You're listening to Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank. That's Elena Passarello right over there. Of course, each week we like to ask Live Wire listeners a question. In honor of Paul F. Tompkins' podcast, The Neighborhood Listen, we asked, what is the most unhinged thing a neighbor has ever done? And as I mentioned at the top of the show, Elena, this was a very popular topic with our listeners. We received an avalanche of responses. You've been collecting them up. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello: Woo doggie. That's what I'm seeing. So let's start with this one from Esther. The most unhinged thing a neighbor has ever done to Esther. I asked my neighbor to get any mail or packages while I was away, and she rearranged my living room furniture and changed the light bulbs in my ceiling fixtures because she thought they were too bright. Well, I mean, that's nosy, but it does sound nice.
Luke Burbank: Honestly, that sounds like a favor.
Elena Passarello: Depends on the rearrangement. Like, maybe. Maybe it's got better flow.
Luke Burbank: Sure. Maybe. I mean, lighting is a big thing. With the comedian Todd Glass, who was a a guest on Live Wire in the past, will go around his house adjusting all the light bulbs before he has a party up into actually taking out the light bulb in his refrigerator because he does not want that light to throw everything else off when people are opening the fridge.
Elena Passarello: Wow. Okay. Maybe. Maybe this is the neighbor in question. It's Todd Glass.
Luke Burbank: What's something else unhinged one of our listeners' neighbors did?
Elena Passarello: Who Doggie again. This one from Allison. Our 80-year-old neighbor suffers from insomnia. She tried out Ambien and then finally decided that it wasn't for her when she climbed up a ladder onto the roof of our garage late one night. Wow.
Luke Burbank: 80 years old?
Elena Passarello: Zonked out on Ambien, climbing a ladder. No, thank you.
Luke Burbank: Bad news: you're dealing with some sleep disorder. Good news: you can climb onto a roof at 80.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, well done.
Luke Burbank: We should be so physically fit. All right. Another unhinged thing that somebody's neighbor did.
Elena Passarello: So Andy says, When I lived in an apartment, my neighbor used to constantly put My Little Pony stickers all over my front door. And every time I took them off, he'd put them back on. So I just let him win. Was your neighbor like a five-year-old girl? Like what?
Luke Burbank: Yeah, that's just kind of— I think that is, if you look up gaslighting in the dictionary, it's just somebody re-affixing the My Little Pony stickers to your door. Okay, one more unhinged thing that one of our listeners neighbors have done.
Elena Passarello: Deb says a mystery person left a mincemeat pie at my door, so my uncle fed it to his chickens and said, If they don't die, you could have eaten it. And the chickens lived. So I could have eaten it if I liked mincemeat.
Luke Burbank: That is— there's so much to unpack from that e-mail.
Elena Passarello: Once somebody put a brownie in my mailbox at school and I totally ate it. Because, you know, I always want a brownie. And then one of my colleagues was like, Did you get that mysterious brownie thing delivered? And I was like, Yeah, did you get one, too? And she was like, Yes and I threw it right in the trash. And I was like, Uh-Oh.
Luke Burbank: That was when you knew you and your colleague were cut from very different cloth.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, I was like, I guess I got to wait to see if I make it through. And I did.
Luke Burbank: All right, Elena, thank you for tracking those responses. Thanks to everyone who sent in an answer to our listener question. We've got another one for next week's show coming up a little bit later. In the meantime, our next guest has been an award-winning poet for many years, but is now out with a memoir. It's titled How to Say Babylon. It's about her life growing up in Jamaica, in the Rastafarian movement, and also her attempts to escape from under the very literal patriarchy of her father as he descended into depression and disappointment over his own life. Publishers Weekly calls it a tour de force, and Kirkus Review says this book is more than catharsis. This is a memoir as liberation. This is Safiya Sinclair, who joined us on stage at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland to talk about her book. Take a listen. This book, first of all, was amazing. [Safiya: Thank you.] I was totally I was totally riveted. It was interesting. It starts it's your memoir, but it starts in 1966 when Haile Selassie is visiting Jamaica. He's the king of Ethiopia at the time, and everyone comes out for it, like at least every Rastafarian comes out for it. You weren't even born yet. Why do you start your memoir on this day?
Safiya Sinclair: Well, because Haile Selassie represents to the Rastafari movement so much that there was no way for me to tell my story and my connection to Rastafari, my father's connection to Rastafari without beginning in this moment. And this is three decades after the Rastafari movement began in the early 1930s, and it began with a street preacher in Jamaica who heard the speech of the Pan-Africanist abolitionist Marcus Garvey. And he said, Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king, for he will be the Herald of black liberation. And Haile Selassie had been coronated as the emperor in Ethiopia in the early 1930s. And so when Howell saw Haile Selassie, who was the only Black leader in the world at the time, and Ethiopia was the only African nation that had never been colonized. So the movement of Rastafari really hardened around this man who became Myth and Mountain. It was founded in this aspiration of Black liberation, Black unity. And so when I wrote that beginning scene where he comes to Jamaica and there's like a hundred thousand Rastafari who come to meet him, I just couldn't pass up bringing that to life. Like, how often does that happen that people come face to face with the person they believe is God?
Safiya Sinclair: And so—
Luke Burbank: He told them—
Safiya Sinclair: He said—
Luke Burbank: I'm not actually God.
Safiya Sinclair: He said, I am only a man, but to the Rastas, only God would deny his divinity.
Luke Burbank: It's a good point.
Safiya Sinclair: So, you know— but when he when he finally stepped out of the plane, instead of stepping onto the red carpet that the prime minister had laid down, he stepped onto the muddy ground where the Rastas were. And that, to them, meant everything.
Luke Burbank: Your father was only a toddler, I believe, at this time, 1966. But of course, this impacts his life deeply, which impacts your life deeply and is really the center of the book. Something that I will admit I was not familiar with until I read this was how strict the Rastafarian life could be, depending on how they embraced it, the way that your father embraced it. He didn't eat meat, he didn't smoke, he didn't drink. [Safiya:Yeah.] Was that also the rules in for everyone else in your household growing up, your mother or your siblings? You?
Safiya Sinclair: Yeah. I mean, that's the rule for every Rastafari. They adhere to what they call an ital diet, which is kind of like a vegan diet on steroids. So growing up, yeah, so there was no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, no salt, no sugar, no no MSG. So it was you know, it's a very restrictive diet. And, you know, another part of being Rastafari is, of course, everyone knows the dreadlocks, right? But for the Rastafari, it's not a choice. For them, the dreadlocks are, and, you know, that's like an absolute, it's a sacred marker to the world to show your reverence, your purity and your admiration for Jah, which is what who they call Haile Selassie.
Luke Burbank: One of the things Jah is obviously comes up in the book all the time. The Patois is so fun to read. I mean, obviously there are very intense scenes in the book, but I feel like I'm really listening in on a conversation between Rastafari. How did you choose how much of that to include and when to use it?
Safiya Sinclair: Well, I just wanted to really maintain the authenticity of our language in Jamaica. A lot of this book is a love letter to Jamaica and our culture, our history. And so, you know, we have Jamaican Patwah, which, you know, is our is our vernacular. But for the Rastas, they also have their own language and their own way of speaking that's separate from Jamaican Patois. And there the Rastafari language is very much rooted in anti-colonial thought. It's a lot of linguistic rebellion. The idea is to uproot anything to do with the English language, right. And so, for example, for a Rastaman, he doesn't say "understand" he said "overstan." He doesn't say "appreciate," he say "appreciat love." Right. And so for me, I really wanted to make sure that the way that my father speaks and the way that the Rasta brethren speak was captured precisely in the book. You know, they also don't speak in the singular. They don't say "me." They say "I and I" or the I or Iman, because the Rastafari is a collective, that Jah is always with the Rasta man. And so the language reflects that. And that was important to me. And, you know, my team, my editors, you know, I made sure they knew you're not going to touch this. [Elena: Wow.] Okay. We're not going to italicize anything.
Luke Burbank: I need you to over stand this, you're not going to touch this.
Safiya Sinclair: Overstand. Overstand what I'm saying? Exactly. Yeah. There's no glossary. Right. This is the experience of you step into Jamaica, the real Jamaica, beyond the postcard idea of Jamaica., this is what the people speak like. This is what our lives are like.
Luke Burbank: Let's talk about your mom a little bit. She was, it sounds like, effectively an orphan in her teen years and went towards Rastafarianism because of a kind of a countercultural streak that she had. But she also was sort of a genius. Like, she was teaching these classes to people and she was sharing poetry with you. I mean, let's talk about her a little bit.
Safiya Sinclair: I would love to talk about her because, you know, I say all the time, I actually wouldn't be here without my mom. She first had a love of poetry and literature when she was a young girl. And she would you know, books weren't always available to her. You know, she lived by the seaside and she would sort of go to the hotels after the tourists had left and threw their books away. And she would take those books and read them. And so, you know, her love of literature began even in a place where it wasn't accessible to her. And as she had me and my siblings, she passed that love of literature to us. So she created her own after school curriculum to teach me and my siblings outside of school. And she was the first person who handed me my first book of poems and said, Poetry was always the thing that made my world seem wide and wild and warmer. And then she told me that was alliteration. And I was like, What is that? That was something a lot of people might not also know about Rastafari culture is that it is a very repressively patriarchal one. So I grew up for a long time being told that a woman's highest virtue was her silence, her obedience, her plience. And it was poetry that first gave me the space to nurture my voice and nurture myself and think about what I wanted to say, if I could say it. So, yeah, you know, without my mom, I would not be a writer. I would not have the tools that I needed. And she loves it. She's like, I just can't believe I have my own personal poet.
Luke Burbank: Because we should mention that you're a very beloved and awarded poet in your own right before you started writing a memoir. I mean, that was what I think a lot of people knew from your work. So that must have been tremendously gratifying to your mother.
Safiya Sinclair: Oh, yeah, She loves it. Every time she's at a poetry reading of mine, she's either like, mouthing the words to the poems or she's turning around to make sure everybody's paying attention.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Safiya Sinclair. Her new book is How to Say Babylon. It is a memoir. Now, the the sort of story of your childhood is very much affected by the story of your father and his music. So he was I looked up, by the way, his band, Future Wind, there's video of it. You can buy a 45 of Future Wind.
Safiya Sinclair: I don't know if he knows that.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I was looking at it last night. [Safiya: We're going to have to tell him that] It's like $40. It's like a 45 of this band that your dad was in.
Safiya Sinclair: I wonder who's getting those royalties.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Based on what I've read in the book, he would say not him. [Safiya: Not him.] And so your dad was kind of a musical star in Jamaica when he was younger. [Safiya: Yeah.] But then ended up in this world where he was playing music and playing Rastafarian music, but Bob Marley covers at hotels and not as much things that at times felt nourishing to him. Is that an accurate description?
Safiya Sinclair: I think that would be an accurate description. I think most people don't realize that reggae in Jamaica kind of lost its cultural significance on the island in the eighties, when dancehall overtook reggae as sort of the primary music and the primary mode of musical expression in Jamaica so—
Luke Burbank: What did your dad call the dancehall stuff?
Safiya Sinclair: He said—he call it the damn bugaboo noise.
Elena Passarello: I have to say he has some pretty great ways of describing things he doesn't like.
Safiya Sinclair: He does. Bald head.
Luke Burbank: Anyone who's not Rasta as a bald head?
Safiya Sinclair: Yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's also Rasta vernacular. Right. You know, the Bob Marley song chased those crazy bald heads out of town, right. So, like, that's what Rasta, the Rastafari call anybody who is not a Rastafari. There's a lot of terms for, you know — there's bald heads, there's heathens, the women are Jezebel's, they're unclean, you know, there's like. There's a lot of terms.
Luke Burbank: As your dad's career ended up not being maybe what he had hoped it would be [Safiya:Yeah] it sounds like he just became more domineering, more violent, more threatening in certain instances. There are moments where I thought, okay, she's out of there. [Safiya: Yes.] You know, you had these moments where, I mean, it just seemed like you've achieved escape velocity from this home environment. And then that's like I read like ten more pages like and then I move back and I'm always like, did you have a feeling in your, you know, late teenage, early twenties life that you might never escape that environment? Or did you always know that you were going to eventually end up getting to live your own life?
Safiya Sinclair: I mean, I was always hopeful. I knew I wanted to study even though my parents didn't always have the means to like, pay for me to go to college. My siblings and I always kind of knew that education was like our primary road if we were ever going to sort of break that cycle. So I always had that hope, and I always think about that hope that keeps Jamaicans buoyant. Also in the book, I talk about this like in Jamaica, you're kind of born feeling like you're living a second hand life, particularly so many of the citizens live in poverty and you're supposed to like, enjoy it, right? But because we have that hope, we had a Jamaican prime minister in the 80s named Michael Manley, he ran on a slogan, said, Better must come. And it became part of like the Jamaican national character of like, even though things are bad, we're always thinking better must come. And so I always thought that, you know, I did what I could.
Luke Burbank: Well, it's a really incredible memoir. It's called How to Say Babylon. It's by Safiya Sinclair. Safiya, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. [Safiya: Thank you for having me.] That was Safiya Sinclair right here on Live Wire. Her memoir is How to Say Babylon. And it's available right now. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We have to take a quick break, but do not go anywhere, because when we come back, you will hear some incredible music from Isabeau Waia-u Walker here on Live Wire. Stay with us. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Okay. Before we get to our musical guest, a little preview of next week's show, we are going to be talking to journalist and podcaster Kelsey McKinney about her very popular and very juicy podcast, Normal Gossip. The show is based on this kind of interesting idea, right, Elena? Which is that if you hear gossip even about a person that you don't know and you will never meet, it's still going to be fascinating. We're also going to talk to the poet Brenda O'Shaughnessy about her book. It's called Tanya. It's about women, artists and mentors, but it's also sort of low key, an attempt for her to find her college roommate who was named Tanya. So if you're listening, Tanya, reach out and we're going to hear some music also from Grammy Award winner Madison Cunningham. And of course, we have a listener question we want to get an answer to next week, Elena. What are we asking the listeners?
Elena Passarello: We want to know what is some gossip that only you care about?
Luke Burbank: I feel like this week's question about unhinged neighbors and gossip only you care about those are very tightly connected, potentially. So if you've got some gossip that you seem to be the target audience for and maybe the only person who cares about it hit us up on Twitter and Facebook, Live Wire radio. In the meantime, our musical guest this week worked as a high school teacher for over a decade while she was making music, slowly amassing an impressive YouTube following. Then she moved away from teaching and became a member of Y La Bamba and also started working on her first EP. Portland Monthly calls her music an overthinker's dream, which means this will be great for our audience. This is Isabelle Waia'u Walker, recorded at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Check it out. What's the name of this song that we're going to hear?
Isabeau Waia'u Walker: We're just going to end on a happy note. It's called All My Friends Think I'm Okay.
Isabeau Waia'u Walker: Yeah, it's actually not.
Luke Burbank: All right. This is Isbeau Waia'u Walker here on Live Wire.
Isabeau Waia’u Walker plays All My Friends Think I’m Okay
Luke Burbank: That was Isabeau Waia'u Walker. Her full length album, Body is available now. And that's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Paul F. Tompkins, Safiya Sinclair and Isabel Waia'u Walker.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Molly Pettit is our technical director and our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Tre Hester is our assistant editor, our marketing and production manager is Karen Pan. Rosa Garcia is our operations associate. Jackie Ibarra is our production fellow and Ant Diaz is our intern. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayal Alves and A Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Molly Pettit and Tre Hester.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank member Susan Bragdon of Portland, Oregon for more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Live Wire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team, thanks for listening and we will see you next week.
— PRX —