How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

This was the fantasy tourists wanted to inhabit, sunbathing at hotels along the coast named “Royal Plantation” or “Grand Palladium,” then getting married on the grounds where the enslaved had been tortured and killed. This was paradise—where neither our history nor our land belonged to us. Every year Black Jamaicans owned less and less of the coast that bejeweled our island to the outside world, all our beauty bought up by rich hoteliers, or sold off to foreigners by the descendants of white enslavers who earned their fortunes on our backs, and who still own enough of Jamaica today to continue to turn a profit.

As if it never existed, the red belt was retired and disappeared, and my father returned to sharpening the verbal tools in his arsenal instead.

Remember how I twist Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” into a more modern statement: “trauma remembered and revisited from a place of safety”? That place of safety—you may not yet have that.

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 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.