How to Say Babylon is Safiya Sinclair's memoir of growing up as the eldest daughter of a volatile reggae musician and militant Rastafari adherent in Jamaica, who became obsessed with keeping the corrupting influences of the Western world, which Rastas call Babylon, away from his family. He forbade almost everything, demanded his daughters' silence and obedience, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her compliance.
My Review
How to Say Babylon is a memoir about growing up as the eldest daughter of a militant Rastafari adherent in Jamaica, a father who became consumed by the need to keep Babylon, everything Western, everything outside, everything that might corrupt his daughters’ purity, firmly outside the gate. No pants. No friends. No opinions. No voice. Disobedience answered with a fist or a belt. And yet, quietly, her mother passed books to her children. Poetry, specifically. It was, as Sinclair puts it, her oxygen.
What makes this book extraordinary is that Sinclair refuses to tell a simple story. Her father is not a cartoon villain. She gives him a history, traces the roots of his rage and paranoia, shows how colonialism and systemic oppression shaped the man who would in turn shape his children. His arc across the book, and it is an arc even though it belongs to a real person, is devastating and complex and the ending will wreck you in the best possible way. I did not expect to feel what I felt at the close of this book, and I am still thinking about it.
What I also did not expect was how much I would learn. About Jamaica’s relationship with Rastafarianism, its history, the violence visited upon Rastafarians within Jamaica itself, and what it costs to grow up inside a belief system that uses purity as a weapon. Sinclair wears this research lightly because she lived it, and the result is something that reads less like a memoir and more like testimony.
She was a poet before she was a memoirist and you feel that on every page. Not in a way that gets in the way of the story, but in the way that makes every sentence feel like it was chosen rather than landed upon. This is one of those rare books that is both an important story and beautiful literature at the same time. Five stars, without hesitation.