Once upon a time, memoir was queen of genres. There used to be a catch: Your life story as a Black woman was valuable if you were famous, a Reality TV star, preferably, or if your particular vein of trauma was uniquely compelling. And by uniquely compelling I mean if your rags to riches story was so extreme as to be unbelievable and probably utterly false, which started happening more and more as the genre fell out of favor.
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair is one of the most evident examples of how things have changed. Montego Bay native Sinclair is a stunning poet, author of the award-winning collection Cannibal, which I have not read yet but certainly am going to after reading her story. Her memoir describes a childhood shaped by the beauty and terror of growing up in a picturesque place with a strict Rastafarian father who viewed participation in the world beyond his control as part of the sinful wages of Babylon. This tension affects the whole family — her mother, her sister — for much of their lives.
Before Sinclair shows us more completely how the confines of her father's imagination in tribute to Haile Selassie and Jah confined her until she was able to break free, she offers a beautiful memory, the kind that makes memoir not just a recounting or a retelling, but a song:
The sea was the first home I knew. Out here I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness, stretched out under the almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea's milky lapping. I dug for hermit crabs in the shallow sand, splashed in the wet bank where stingrays buried themselves to cool off. I slept under the ripened shade where the sea grapes bruised purple and delicious, ready for sucking. I gorged on almonds and fresh coconut, drinking sweet coconut water through a hole my mother gored with her machete, scraping and eating the wet jelly afterward until I was full.
Jamaica and Rastafarianism have touched my life as a Black American for decades without me having any intimate understanding of the latter in particular from the perspective of another Black woman, so it was the combination of the lush, harrowing sentences in How to Say Babylon, and my lived experience growing up with a marginal understanding of what it means to live as a Rasta in full that captivated me about Sinclair’s story.
All I knew until I finished this book is that the neat dreads that I wore for 17 years of my young womanhood signaled something of rebellion and surrender. At the time, and until it was time for me to claim my natural hair in a more liberating way as an older woman, that was all that I needed. I came of age loving Dancehall and Reggae, winding and grinding through the 90s, encountering the melting pot of West Indians, Trinis and Jamaicans in the Bronx and knowing I was not one of them, but we were at least in proximity.
Reading this book reminded me of how naive I was to simply view my dreads as a reflection of self-love divinely connected to God; a testament to the belief that my hair offered me Samson-like protection from the wickedness that was always unfolding around me. Real Rastafarians shook their heads at my misunderstanding, but generally, they seemed to respect that I was trying. There’s an element of that same kind of respect that Sinclair offers her father as she comes of age as a poet — a kind of compassionate redemption — that is as deeply moving as it is uncommon.
I completely agree about the way the memoir reads like a song - or a really long poem - it was the most lyrically impressive memoir I have ever read. I read it last month and was so in awe of how she managed to write so beautifully and objectively about her own life, such an incredible skill.
Your recommendations are always spot on for me. This one has been added to my TBR list too.