Review: How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

Initiated by Leonard Percival Howell, who heeded Marcus Garvey’s call to “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King”, the Rastafari movement has been a beacon for the downtrodden since its inception in 1933. Garvey’s prophecy led Howell to Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the only African country to have never been colonised. He declared him God incarnate, sparking a seismic cultural shift. Rooted in a militant belief in Black independence inspired by Selassie’s reign, the movement faced persecution from a Christian society under British rule. Despite its non violent ethos, Rastas were marginalised and subjected to state violence. In 1963, Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante ordered a military crackdown: “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive.” Throughout their history, Rastas endured vilification as the “Blackheart Man” and were ostracised. They coined the term “Babylon” to represent the systemic racism and oppression perpetuated by colonial powers and Western ideologies. Babylon then symbolised the forces of destruction that threatened Rasta communities, and which perpetuated the centuries-long enslavement and oppression of Black people.

Safiya Sinclair’s memoir How To Say Babylon documents her life as a child in a strict Rastafarian household with an authoritarian father who fervently adhered to his own Sinclair sect, and was obsessed with preserving his daughter’s purity. He mandated rules that forbade Safiya to have opinions and worldly riches of her own. For Babylon was always lurking on the horizon, waiting to pounce on his “dawta”. If Babylon had colonised the Rastas, Rasta men would have doubly colonised their women. This memoir is a historical account of the Sinclair family as their eldest daughter, Safiya, navigates her womanhood and tries to find purpose. She writes about the narrative structure of the novel:

“I pull and pull this thread of violence back through the generations of my family, through my marked bloodline, and beyond them, back to Jamaica’s first colonial whip, back to the last Taíno dying of Columbus’ smallpox, back to the first colonizer who put a shackle on a Black woman’s neck, back to the first woman who said “No.”

How To Say Babylon is also a Künstlerroman of an artist realising her potential. Her mother had fed the fire of language in her, “nurtured her love of words, and handed her the first book of poems.” At 16, Safiya stood transfixed after reading Sylvia Plath’s poem, Daddy and thus began her initiation into discovering her own niche of literature. She would read a dictionary for pleasure and then write down all the words that sounded good in the mouth. Language doesn’t just exist on the page, it’s about how you embody and how it feels in the body, how it feels in the mouth. While her days were filled with the violence of the words emanating from her father, her nights among books were a balm to pacify her wounds. Even as she tries to harm herself once, she “walked away from that glass shard to conjure her ‘silver’ poem … Every place here is a place of violence, and I am heavy with poems,” she says. She would soon start seeing Emily Dickinson in her dreams, signalling her growth as a poet.

Questions of a Caribbean selfhood and a feminine body had always been pressing against Safiya’s temple since she was a kid. Being the only Rasta children attending private schools in Jamaica, Safiya and her siblings felt like oddities wherever they went. It also created a certain dissonance. Having to study with highly colonised-Christain Black Jamaican children did not foster a sense of belonging. It was quite a burden and much of that was wrapped up in hair, which had its own weight as a young Rastafari woman: “Hair of my binding, hair of my unbeautiful wanting, hair of his bitter words, hair of the cruel world, hair roping me to my father’s belt, hair wrestling the taunts of baldheads in the street…” Safiya’s dreadlocks made her hypervisible, much to her dismay. She was constantly bullied, called dirty and unhygienic. Back home, “father called his hair a crown, his locks a mane, his beard a precept. What grew from their hair was supposed to be most holy”. Cutting her dreadlocks therefore, was a moral failure and a falling into Babylonian ways.

The book brings to mind Deborah Feldman’s memoir Unorthodox, which tells the story of a Hasidic Jewish woman fleeing an arranged marriage and her religious fundamentalist family. Most interesting is the treatment of religion in both works. The protagonists don’t intend to shed a culture but to forge their own sense of self more or less within its boundaries. Done with a grace that doesn’t vilify any faith, it manages a sharp critique of cruelty to its women. Safiya contemplates and finally declares in the end, “I briefly wondered if I could have ever been a true daughter of Rastafari — was there any version of that woman in white that I would have chosen to preserve? Was there any of her now, that still lived on in me?... I might have left Rastafari behind, but I always carried with me the indelible fire of its rebellion.”

There’s so much I didn’t know about Jamaica until I read this book. The landscape comes to life through the book’s unconscious poetry. Not one word goes to waste. Also visible are the influences of García Lorca’s duende, the spirit of evocation that climbs inside you from the soles of the feet. Language in the book is felt from the bottom up, traversing the veins. It is through language that I understood the landscape of Jamaica. The writer owes a great deal to her mother who “taught her to read the sea like a poem.” Language thus gains materiality. The book also upturns the colonial legacy of the English language by bending it. “Rasta poetics” essentially rejected any English word with a negative connotation. For example, the English/Babylon word “understand” will become “overstand”.

Addressing her poetry collection Cannibal that came out in 2016, Sinclair revealed that she couldn’t “think about Jamaica without thinking about colonialism or imperialism. Getting to Charlottesville there was no way I couldn’t also think about what wounds were there, also what kind of historical hurt was intrinsic to the making of this place, to the building of the University that I walked around every day right which was built by the enslaved but all the glory is given to the enslaver Thomas Jefferson who was at the time was seen in heroic light. So I had to come to terms with all of this on the page.” “There is no American dream without American massacre,” she stresses. How To Say Babylon is Sinclair’s attempt to come to terms with her identity and her Rastafari legacy in Jamaica.

The memoir assumes a wholeness that promises a “history from below”. Safiya talks about an “unspoken understanding of loss in Jamaica where everything comes with a rude bargain – that being citizens of a ‘developing nation’, we’re already expecting to live a secondhand life.” Apart from the use of anticolonial language and oral history, the book also addresses the question of a woman’s interiority. Thinking about Rastafaris doesn’t automatically bring a woman to mind, possibly due to prevalent stereotypes. How To Say Babylon prompts readers to rethink their own hackneyed vision of the world. It is therefore a potent portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.