Born in a seaside Jamaican village near Montego Bay, Safiya Sinclair grew up in a strict Rastafarian family on the fringe of a hedonistic tourist mecca. By the age of 8, she had heard her father rail about the evils of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher so often that when the family was naming its first pets, two black-and-white puppies, Safiya and her brother chose “Reagan” and “Thatcher.” Despite what those names stood for to their father, the children adored their pets and deeply grieved their untimely ends at the hands of a resentful neighbor.
Sinclair’s memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” is a lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle of how a girl raised from birth to be the perfectly obedient Rasta “dawta” (and eventual dutiful Rasta wife) threw off that yoke, leaving her dreadlocks behind with it. Doing so risked the wrath of her father, a reggae musician who feared that corrupting Western influences — what Rastas call “Babylon” — would ruin his daughter, turning her into the worst type of pariah, an “unclean woman.”
As a Jamaican who is a decade older than Sinclair and who grew up in different circumstances, I read “How to Say Babylon” with particular interest, unsure I would recognize my homeland in what she captures. Yet the spark of recognition burned in every chapter. That is a testament to a distinctive national character but even more to Sinclair’s kaleidoscopic writing. I’ve never learned more from a book about my native country.
Sinclair’s brilliant memoir — this excavation of a soul — is also a tale of two dysfunctional systems: a family that chafes under a flailing patriarch and a nation that treats its Rastafarian citizens as an invasive alien life form (despite trumpeting the reggae musician and Rastafarian Bob Marley as its brand). The Sinclairs are exceptional but constantly struggling — celebrated for their intellectual and artistic talents, and shunned for being Rastafarian and for not conforming to still-dominant Eurocentric cultural standards. Inside the family’s cramped, rented homes (they moved every year or so), Sinclair’s mercurial, ascetic and volatile father, Djani, and her nurturing, determined yet seemingly submissive mother, Esther, are home rulers caught in a tangle of contradictions. One dilemma she notes was particularly treacherous. “He despised Babylon, while yearning for its trappings,” she observes of her father.
The book grabs the reader because of the beauty of its words, but it sticks because of the thorniness and complexity of its ideas. “How to Say Babylon” exposes the rot in the heart of a not-quite post-colonial nation that also boasts about its distinctive identity. Intimate yet outward looking in style, Sinclair — a poet whose 2016 collection, “Cannibal,” won a Whiting Award and the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — seamlessly plumbs the social meanings of her family’s sometimes devastating experiences while keeping the heart-rending family dynamics in the center of the frame.
These are turbulent waters. Sinclair’s early memories of a crowded seaside home shared with her mother’s family are some of the sweetest: “When I was a girl, my mother had taught me to read the waves of her seaside as closely as a poem. There was nothing broken that the sea couldn’t fix, she always said.” Sinclair admits, “I never loved any place more than this.” But even as a child, she knew that her mother’s home held secrets and danger. Esther’s experiences only bolstered the feeling that there was no true sanctuary for a young girl like Sinclair in Jamaica. And still, despite the fear and cloistering, mother and daughter conspired to ensure that Safiya’s life defied her circumstances: She was a star scholarship girl at 12; a published poet at 16, with “Daddy,” a piece inspired by Sylvia Plath and a local tragedy; a sometimes private-school pariah, sometimes friend to a millionaire’s daughter, fearing her father’s belt but sleeping over in her friend’s mansion in high school. At 17, she was floating between Mobay and Kingston, a fashion model and writer. Sometimes she was locked away; sometimes she was entwined in the larger world.
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While her mother gave Sinclair an escape through books, including her first poetry collection, she could offer only so much help. The author’s relationship with her father was rife with restriction and, for a time, brutal violence. Eventually, she had to hold herself back from the most crushing possibility, that “my father’s love was now so distant it seemed mythological?” Although her father takes Rastafarianism as a way of life (or “livity”) driven by a belief system and not a religion, he views figurehead Haile Selassie as a quasi-godlike figure and his authority as righteous. Sinclair saw Selassie as someone whose flame “burned alive in my father, who was god of our whole dominion, who slept with one watchful eye on my purity and one hand on his black machete, ready to chop down Babylon, if it ever crept close.”
As Sinclair matured, she was always aware of the pain that also burned in her father and of how it grew dangerous and uncontrolled. An unwanted, fatherless child to a gifted teenage mother, Djani Sinclair achieved early success as a young musician, selling out concerts, appearing on television and later signing an international contract, but he was repeatedly exploited financially and ended up mostly performing at local hotels. Scorning Babylon and craving its resources and approval (repeating the cycle that began with his mother and her family), he guards the family he created as his greatest treasure and recompense for those hardships.
By 13, Sinclair saw how her father demanded to be ruler of his domain at home, even resorting to beatings, but quailed in the face of Babylon’s authority. When Sinclair gained a scholarship to an elite private school, it stirred her father’s fierce pride in her excellence and potential for advancement. He reveled in the idea of Sinclair’s going to school with the children of wealthy business owners. But when she was treated unfairly at that school — punished for barely breaching a rule that a nonscholarship girl got away with breaking — both girls gained crucial knowledge: “There were two different systems of punishment at St. James College: one for me, and another one for girls like her.”
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Sinclair’s mother wanted to complain about this unequal justice, but her father decided they must let it slide — going along to get along, to not jeopardize her place. “You’re on a scholarship,” he told Sinclair. “Don’t make no fuss at the people them school.”
Such scenes are unrelenting and incisive. With a style more energizing and electric than pretty, Sinclair’s exploration of language is exquisite. “It was June, in the restless maw of summer,” she writes of a day she was to meet with a mentor, “and everything nursed the need of everything else. The fruit ripened recklessly, perfuming the air with orange trees, overripe jackfruit sweating like men, and the soft, purpling blush of the star apple, beckoned.” Even in prose, Sinclair, now an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University, is a master of metaphor and symbol in discomfiting scenes and juxtapositions.
The memoirist’s journey makes the reader consider how we know what we know and come to believe what we do and to feel what we feel. As Sinclair puts it: “Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours.” This book is overflowing with gorgeous and precise sentences doing heavy work just like that one, capturing the layers and the slipperiness of experience.
Carole V. Bell is a Jamaican-born writer, critic and communication researcher focusing on media, politics and identity.
How to Say Babylon
By Safiya Sinclair
37 Ink. 352 pp. $28.99
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