01907 Spring 2023

SPRING 2023 | 35
BY EMILY PAULS
Swampscott resident and poet Enzo Silon Surin said he
finds inspiration for his writing everywhere.
“The right music, the right light, the right
conversation, everything inspires me and I think it's because I'm
always looking for what things mean and why things happen, the
way that they happen,” Silon Surin said. “So because of that I feel
like the entire world is open, for me as a point of inspiration.”
Silon Surin has always been a writer. He initially started out
with script writing. One rainy day in junior high school, he was
looking out of the window when something changed.
He was feeling sad that day. Teenagers, he said, have “this
mood thing” that consumes them and he was “predestined for the
dramatic.”
“So I was wallowing and I look outside, and there was this tree
right outside the window, and the rainwater was cascading on the
side of the tree in a subtle, unusual way,” Silon Surin said.
It was almost as if the tree was crying, he said, which made him
consider whether trees can become sad.
At that point, Silon Surin knew he had switched from
something, although he did not know what it was.
“Then I knew something was different when the next question
came,” Silon Surin said. “I was like, ‘I wonder if the tree is crying
because it’s sad or it knows that I’m sad, but I can’t cry my own
tears.’”
There were a lot of things he felt inside but couldn’t say, he said.
“That day, that tree was expressing what I was feeling and I
kind of tucked that away, but I wrote it down,” he added.
That was the day Silon Surin became a poet.
He showed his teacher what he wrote and she asked him if he
knew anything about poetry. He’s been a poet ever since.
Years later, Silon Surin has been awarded for his poetry. He
won the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award from the Massachusetts
Center for the Book, which held its official ceremony for the 2020,
2021, and 2022 winners on Jan. 18, for his poetry book When My
Body Was a Clinched Fist.
The book covers his experience growing up in Queens, New
York in the late 80s.
“It’s … really coming of age at a time where the social scene
was drugs, some violence, police brutality, that so forth,” he said.
“There was a tough time, late 80s, early 90s, and trying to come of
age in that environment.”
Silon Surin was born in Haiti, which “added some weight to”
his experiences in Queens, he said.
“I think it allowed me to have some sort of perspective as well,
that I was able to see things from the outside in,” Silon Surin said.
“At some point, I was just like, ‘how do I tell this story?’”
Receiving the Massachusetts Book Award was not something
he was expecting, but he had still been holding out hope for it.
He had attended the center’s ceremonies before and, as a writer
in Massachusetts, understood the significance the award carries.
When he saw the email that he had won, he said he “kind of
screamed” because of how much it meant to him.
“Then my two boys came running into the room, and they
screamed with me and started to jump up and down,” he said.
While he actually received the award a few years ago, he
said having the in-person ceremony with his fellow authors and
winners was “wonderful.” Silon Surin’s next poetry book will be
released in May and is titled American Scapegoat.
He said it picks up where When My Body Was a Clinched
Fist left off. It is about a kid who survives the environment of that
book and grows up to be a father. Initially, he is relieved.
“But then he quickly realizes that being black and male puts
him in a specific category,” Silon Surin said. “And so now he has to
grapple with the world as an adult, and to feel like, ‘But I made it
through, no, my life is still at risk.’”
He added that he wrote about people like Breonna Taylor and
George Floyd.
“It’s really about America not really coming to terms with its
own history and I said as a result, the democracy of this country is
not in touch with its humanity,” Silon Surin said. “I said we need
to take a look at what’s really happening.”
A lot of research went into writing this book, he said.
The research into those injustices was more “heartbreaking”
than he thought it would be, and he questioned how he could
write this story while his own heart was breaking. He realized he
had to get past that in order to get the truth out.
“American Scapegoat is really the American story, and you
never really know what the scapegoat is,” Silon Surin said. “One
time, it’s a Black man, and other times it’s the white farmer from
Iowa, or somebody growing up in rural Alabama dealing with the
opioid epidemic. So in a lot of ways, it’s about shifting our lenses
to say, ‘We’re pinned against each other but we should really be
united together.”