How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

He understood then what Rastas had been saying all along—systemic injustice across the world flowed from one massive, interconnected, and malevolent source, the rotting heart of all iniquity: what the Rastafari call Babylon.

My skin prickled. I longed to be cocooned in this, to be rooted here indefinitely in the tenderness of her telling. In time, I was laughing along with her, my hand in her hands, the wound in my foot now a faint throb. A new world was slowly opening its lacquered shell to me, its radiance beckoning. Here, on bedrest, nursing my visible and invisible wounds, what my mother pressed into my hands that day was gold.