How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

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.

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.

“You’re just a girl,” he had said. But just like Haile Selassie, he, too, was only a man.

exactly

He was just another creature boiling under the tropic heat, collapsing under his carnal and banal desires, like every other man.

And over time, I began to notice subtle swells of agency in my mother, emerging like riptides beneath us.

These workshops, at the height of their popularity, earned my mother her own handsome income for the first time in her life, and I could see her changing then, under the freedom of her own power, doing what she liked best in the world.

She was hurt and so she let him hurt me. An unearthly sound left my body.

My heart broke reading this scene

Somewhere in the span of our lifetime together, love and hurt had been hatched from the same egg, sisters in crime.

sisterhood🥹

My mother, humiliated by the confines of our poverty, had finally sacrificed me to his wrath.

I was terrified of myself. All those years of mistreatment in our house had warped me, and anger had become my first mode of expression. Anger and cruelty.

hurt people hurt ppl

As I walked across the stage, I thought of the women who had come before me, my riverine clan of women known and unknown, whose many futures and possibilities and bodily autonomy had been taken, and I wept as I became the first girl in my family to graduate from college.

WOMEN❤️

Though each of us would deal with our trauma in different ways, my dear Shari would soon grow detached and impenetrable; never expressing her love for any of us again.

Psychology of trauma

Here, I find that every day is a renegotiation of my body. I am reminded of my Blackness in all spaces I enter.

live laugh love america....😐