How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Years later, while retracing the history of my family’s journey into Rastafari, I would eventually come to understand that my mother felt called because she wanted to nurture, and my father felt called because he wanted to burn. Somewhere in between her hope and his fire, there was a united belief. A miracle.”

Howard and Esther’s relationship originally began as solace—a connection that allowed both to find belonging and power, two things they both feel like they lacked in childhood. However, the differences between them were stark even when they were happy together: Esther saw Rastafari as an extension of her instinct to “nurture,” while Howard saw it as an expression for his rage. The fact that he “wanted to burn” foreshadows his fiery and violent nature.

“There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain—that being citizens of a ‘developing nation,’ we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it.”

Sinclair highlights the unpleasant reality that in Jamaica, a country whose primary economic driver is the tourism industry, residents are expected to be thankful for everything foreign white visitors provide. This kind of servile acceptance is counter to how Howard and Esther raise Safiya—we can see in her resistance to this mindset why Rastafari was so appealing to her parents initially, as it supported their desire to encourage—and demand—for their children to be extraordinary and to strive for a better life.

“Hair for the Rastafari signified strength. My father called his hair a crown, his locks a mane, his beard a precept. What grew from our heads was supposed to be most holy. My mother took our blighted scalps as a moral failure, ashamed that we had fallen ruin to Babylon so soon after my father had gone. So, despite what my grandmother had imagined, it wasn’t a question or a choice when the time came.”

This passage explains the importance of hair in Rastafari. As a result, when the children’s scalps are infected with ringworm because of their interactions with the outside world, Esther views it as a blight on their general purity. She believes that she must pull them farther into Rastafari by twisting their hair into dreadlocks to protect her children.

“They followed us and interrogated us. If they could have dissected us alive, I think they would have. And though I was used to children trailing behind my mother like paparazzi whenever she appeared at school, what had once seemed celebratory now felt only like cruelty, Day after day, my selfhood wilted. Outside our gate was a merciless scrutiny, and I longed to hide myself away. For the first time I can remember, I felt ashamed to be myself.”

Before the children’s hair was twisted into dreadlocks, they had anonymity—they could pass through the world as mainstream Jamaicans. Now it is clear to everyone that they are Rasta, which has severely negative connotations in Jamaica. The new discrimination they face allows Howard to preach the dichotomy between the insular—and seemingly safe—Sinclair household, and the dangerous and cruel Babylon. The response of the outside world to her appearance chips away at Safiya’s sense of self-worth, wearing her down.

“Though my father considered himself most closely aligned with the Mansion of Nyabinghi, he never officially became a member of any of the three sects, and over the course of our lives, would draw his own rules and inspirations from all three, creating his own kind of order; his own mansion.”

Howard struggles with authority throughout his childhood and adulthood; therefore, he craves control to feel safe. As a result, he never accepts one specific sect of Rastafari; he changes so he can have as much control as possible over his family. This is a microcosm of what happens to Rastafari more generally: As Jamaica’s colonial government stamped out the religion’s organized core, adherents were left without centralized oversight or any codified version of beliefs.

“There were no spiritual revelations here. Only women taking turns running back to the kitchen, diligently attending to their children and to their men. Their wants pursed and shapeless, their white tie-heads coming undone. Just then, the frayed whisper of a ghost breath caught me. Like a flash of a white wing, a pale figure of a woman, vaguely familiar, fluttered in the curtains against the wall. A thought, hovering just beyond my reach, slowly sucking the air out of the room. I shuddered, then shook the specter away, turned to bolt as quickly as I could back into the festivities.”

At Safiya’s first Kwanzaa celebration, she notices the segregation that happens between the Rasta men and women. While the men celebrate, the women tend to the children and the men’s needs. For the first time, Safiya realizes the inequitable nature of this patriarchal faith and grows uncomfortable with the women’s treatment. The recurring symbol of the Woman in White appears, highlighting that this gender inequity will play a large role in Safiya’s unhappiness later in life.

“In high school, I imagined girlhood as an underworld I had descended, dragged down unwillingly like the women of myths I had been reading.”

As Safiya grows older and enters the world outside of Howard’s influence, she is overwhelmed by the pressure and expectations of her female classmates. As a result, it reminds her of the myths she reads and finds comfort in; here, in particular, the language of being “dragged down” recalls the Greek myth of Persephone, a young goddess abducted by the god Hades and forced to spend six months of each year in the Underworld.

“I observed them as if they had just landed on my shores, studying their strange manners and references, parsing out the upswing of their voices on the end of their sentences. I wished for that freedom.”

Safiya’s female classmates are so unlike her that she begins studying them, jealous at the amount of freedom they have at home and how safe they feel in the world. Additionally, this passage highlights the fact that most of her classmates are not originally from Jamaica, but have instead moved here. This shows that Safiya must navigate two Jamaicas: an impoverished one and a wealthy one.

“I remembered too late what he had told me about hunting. He knew the name and feather pattern of every bird because he’d also made a practice of killing them. He loved his birds as much as he loved shooting them from the trees with his slingshot. I was so busy being the budgerigar that I hadn’t noticed the stone.”

Following Howard’s brutal assault with his belt, Safiya sees that her father views her as an animal he can keep caged up. Additionally, she realizes that he has all the power in their relationship and can, in essence, hunt her down for not acting how he would like her to.

“A girl had no choice in the family that made her. No choice in the many names that followed her, wet-lipped and braying in the street. She was Psssst. And Jubi. And Catty. Mampy. Matey. Wifey. Dawlin. B. And Heffa. My Size. Empress. Brownine. Fluffy. Fatty. Slimmaz. Mawga Gyal. And Babes. Sweets. Chu Chups. And Ting. Machine. Mumma. Sketel. Rasta Gyal. Jezebel. And Daughter.”

As Safiya gets older, she realizes that the world has lots of derogatory and insulting gendered terms for women. Sinclair recreates the experience of being cat-called or bombarded with opinions by listing these names quickly in short sentences; the staccato barrage creates a breathless, syncopated rhythm that at first offends, and then stupefies the reader.

“We all knew, or would all soon learn, that by thirteen or fourteen our bodies no longer belonged to us, our hind parts and innards were now some communal meeting place for review and commentary. We knew who all the schoolboys thought was sexy and why. We knew the details of JonBenet’s underwear and the contents of her tiny stomach.”

By using the second-person plural pronoun “we,” this quote highlights the fact that despite the discomfort of girlhood, young women going through the process of adolescence find solidarity in the shared experience.

“It should have fostered the in-fighting and the wild finger-pointing of shell-shocked children, but instead it brought us together, turning us most fixedly against him in revolt, until we stopped calling him ‘Daddy’ among ourselves altogether, united instead against a man we simply referred to as ‘He’ and ‘Him.’”

This quote highlights the theme of Family Expectations and Dynamics. Amid extreme chaos and hurt, the children find the strength to come together and revolt privately against Howard, allowing them to survive the trauma.

“In the chaos of our rented house, under a borrowed moon, I discovered that a poem was order. It was certainty. And, for the first time, it seemed possible for me to write my way out.”

Safiya finds safety in her poetic work, which allows her to find hope in the future. Additionally, she, for the first time, is granted agency to change her life circumstances—by achieving creative success, she will have the opportunity to earn a living and travel.

“I knew then that I could finally build myself a world that was beyond his reach. That on the page I was not the princess, I was the dragon. I wanted him to see the cruel world nakedly, the way I wanted all men to see the cruel world, their deeds burned to ash on my tongue.”

Safiya begins to use her words as a weapon to fight back against the patriarchal society she has been controlled by for so long. Seeing that she can hurt Howard with a poem she wrote, Safiya feels powerful, especially since the poem is about Howard’s obsession—female sexual purity.

“Foolishly, I had believed that my dreadlocks would make me one of a kind, since I’d never seen a model with locks. But this was a profession in which to be emptied of oneself, and I was still too much of him.”

Safiya’s modeling career comes to a standstill because of her dreadlocks; however, she cannot bring herself to cut her hair, even though she is old enough to make that decision for herself. This is a physical manifestation of her father’s continued control over her life.

“Despite myself, I could feel my anger rising as I listened to her now, fueled by my own shame. This day, long coming, had finally arrived: The roles between us had reversed. Years ago, mother and child had blurred, crossing each other under some ancient arch where she emerged as the one in need of teaching in my impatient hands.”

Esther jokes that she and Safiya have a symbiotic relationship; however, this is an accurate description of their bond. As Safiya spends more and more time out of Howard’s reach, it is necessary for her to educate Esther about the real world and not the world Howard built to contain her. As Esther learns about events like the moon landing in Washington, DC, museums, she sees that much of what Howard has forced her to believe is not true; by ridding herself of his conspiracy theories, Esther gathers the strength to escape from his tyranny.

“All night I wept with the crushing realization: After more than nineteen years, my father still could not see me. To him, nothing I wrote would ever matter. Poetry was the voice I had forged because for so long I had been voiceless; I had written every word because I wanted him to hear me. Now I knew he never would.”

While poetry has saved Safiya many times, Howard can attack her with her work by accusing her of not writing for Black Jamaicans. This leads Safiya to realize that Howard will never see her as the writer she is—he is willing to listen to a fellow Rasta man’s opinion of her work rather than accept the outside world’s acclaim. Howard cannot get over the fact that his daughter is a woman—someone he considers inferior and secondary to men.

“Around me loomed the dark ridge of the mountains, serried and vigilant. Out here was the bread and backbone of our country. The thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born. Voices of runaways still echoed from these impenetrable hills, where a vast network of caves had formed from limestone overrun with bush, and where Maroon warriors waylaid English soldiers who couldn’t navigate the terrain. The English would yell commands, only to hear their own warped voices hollering back at them, until they were driven away in madness, unable to face themselves. Now this chattering night wore me mad, a cold shiver rushing down the bone. A girl, unable to face herself.”

Sinclair highlights Jamaica’s colonial past to demonstrate that the land Safiya grew up in has a history of conflict. Additionally, this passage highlights how Safiya grows more and more frustrated by Howard’s actions and contradictions to the point that it “wore [her] mad.”

“After a few pointed email exchanges where he accused me of ingratitude and lacking humility, we stopped communicating. Like my father, he punished me with his silence.”

At first, the Old Poet seems to be a person who can help Safiya find the freedom she so desperately wants. However, it quickly becomes clear that he is just another man trying to exert power over her. While Safiya has been culturally groomed to placate men, as evidenced in her acquiescing to drink water from his food-contaminated glass, the Old Poet feels no compunction in cutting off a young woman he has sexually assaulted.

“So, we spent our first real hours together in two years painstakingly trying to redeem the hair that was matted within each dreadlock. We three pressed in close together, our legs crossed lotus on the bottom bunk, knee to warm knee, talking as we worked. Three birds appeared above us, weaving in and out, making a nest. This was sisters’ work.”

Howard’s daughters bond over his abuse and over their escape from his control over their hair. The recurring motif of birds appears here, emphasizing that the young women are finding freedom in their work and their new lives—like the birds, Safiya and her sister can weave their own nests rather than being dependent on Howard’s cage.

“All I had were the many poems I wrote about him in those desolate years and all that had happened, still coiling, unresolved in my gut. And now there would be nothing more. At last, I felt nothing. He was a jawbone somewhere in the Kingston mud. He had always told me death was only a problem for the living, but how wrong he had been, even then.”

When the Old Poet dies, Safiya does not feel grief because she is still hurt by his betrayal and predation. However, the poems they wrote together remain, meaning that he was an important influence in her life. The ambiguity is striking—although he assaulted her, he also genuinely believed in her talent and writing skill.

“He looked so small as he raged on, small as a boy, and not at all as I remembered him from only a half hour before. Up in that house alone, he never looked back at me, not once. If he had, he would have seen it. The moment where my body shook under the night breeze, my arms tufted wide, talons outstretched, featherweight and freed, and I turned from the driveway and flew from him.”

Following Howard’s machete attack, Safiya realizes how powerless and tiny he looks—a sign that she will not be permanently traumatized by what has happened to her. When she gets the encouragement she needs to finally leave and find freedom, the motif of birds reappears, indicating she has finally escaped Howard’s cage.

“At last, I understand. There is no American dream without American massacre. Black towns burned, native families displaced, graveyards desecrated, lands stolen, lands ruined: Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence. Here is the original wound. Here I am, homesick in Babylon, and I am angry, so angry at all of it. Because, for the first time since I have left home, I understand how frightened my father must have been for me, a Black daughter walking through the inferno, and now I am all alone.”

Living in Charlottesville, Virginia, forces Safiya to see the world of Babylon the way Howard saw it: as a place that often victimizes and preys on people that look like the Sinclairs. As a result, she gains a lot of compassion for him; however, this bumps against the deep anger and hurt she feels from his abuse and attack.