How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. —GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The more of this world I had discovered, the more I rejected the cage my father had built for me.

“Poetry is the best of what I have come to love about this world,” my mother said.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? —JOHN KEATS

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.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. —TONI MORRISON

Home was poetry and what it had forged of me.