How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

To carve my own way forward, I had to first make my way back.

Somewhere in this house, or the next, is where my mother keened her first cry, and my grandmother keened her last.

She and her sisters each had a distinct laugh that rang out ahead of them like happy sirens wherever they went, crashing decibels that alerted the whole village to their gathering. Whenever the sisters sat together on the beach talking, I clung to their ankles and listened, mimicking their feral cackling, which not even the herons overhead could escape.

Next to the airport, looming along the borders of our village, were hotels with high walls made of pink marble and coral stone, flanked on top by broke-glass bottles, their sharp edges catching the light in cruel warning: To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.

Now most of Montego Bay’s coastline is owned by Spanish and British hoteliers—our new colonization—and most Jamaicans must pay an entrance fee to enter and enjoy a beach.

So began our first secret, mother and daughter, our own little creation lore, cloistered as a clamshell around us.

In high school she had dreamed of being a chemist and had scored excellently enough on her exams that she was invited to study in Scotland, but there was not enough money to get there, or anywhere. She thought of that mournfully as she pushed her toes into the sand, watching her life wash away. Every day she watched the cruise ships come in and the American sailors disembark, and shuddered. She could see into the windows at Ocean View. She saw all the women who lived there, all the men who came and went. One by one she watched the young women of her village slowly burn away.

On her darkest days, it was always books that gave my mother’s world a clear sort of hope. She couldn’t leave, but she could still escape.

My father had never known his father, not even his name, which created an emptiness that would forever haunt him, a void that my grandmother was unwilling, or unable, to fill.

“Howard Sinclair!” the man cried. When a car stops abruptly on a Jamaican road and somebody unseen screams your name, you do not answer. My father said nothing and started running for a place to hide, racking his mind for what johncrow might be coming to his door at last.

the Jamaican government, still under British rule, thought his brand of transgression dangerous; an empowered Black majority would mean revolution. In 1954, Babylon raided Pinnacle’s ganja fields and seized their five hundred acres of land and money, claiming Howell’s Rasta commune was a cult, and set fire to the anti-colonial movement by reframing the Rastafari as agents of dread, as madmen, as child-killers, as the Blackheart Man. Rasta bredren, sistren, and children were displaced, and Howell’s dream of a unified and self-governing Rastafari movement scattered on the wind.

This splintering would eventually become the painful undoing of my family a generation later, because it encouraged most Rastafari to individualize their livity at home, with impunity. There, in the privacy of their own households, each Rasta bredren could be a living godhead, the king of his own secluded temple.

There was no other option. Being a musician was just about the only way a Rastaman could be gainfully employed in Jamaica.

Like most members of Rastafari, my father believed that a person’s body was Jah’s temple, and should remain pure and uncorrupted, just as the mind should remain vigilant against encroaching evil. Inching ever closer was Babylon and its temptation.

Chief among Dad’s accursed heathens were my two aunties. Their livity wasn’t right, my father said, denouncing them as Jezebels who wore too much “jingbeng”—dangling gold earrings and bangles, false fingernails and bright red nail polish. They had chemically processed hair and wore makeup and tight jeans shorts. They were pork-eaters and rum-drinkers. They liked dancehall and gossiped about the men they dated. To my father they may as well have been the grand architects of Babylon. Unclean women, he called them, and skirted them with a screwface and his nose in the heavens.

“You overstand?” Rastafari rejected any English word with a negative connotation, and took every linguistic opportunity to upend Babylon’s language, so “understand” became “overstand.”

While my father molded our view of the wicked world and its hidden history, my mother shaped our love of learning and our sense of wonder. While he warned us of Babylon, she showed us Zion.

A book, I soon learned, was time travel. Each page held irrefutable power.

Uncle Clive was very mean, which made him more likely to be wrong.

In the beginning we were all young enough to be unplagued by vanity.

The other Rasta children were shy like us. There were about twenty of us there, peeking from behind our mothers’ hems. We edged around each other with giant saucer eyes, all our teeth soft and twisted from a lack of calcium, all our limbs whittled to sticks without vitamin B12 in our Ital diets. But soon enough we abandoned caution and were racing around the shop’s overgrown yard.

I tried to defend Monique and our thin friendship. Beauty was irrefutable evidence of moral good to me back then, like in all the Disney cartoons my siblings and I gulped down like nectar.

My sisters were still too young to be my confidants, and I’d had no real friends my age. Kept indoors at home, I grew curious in my loneliness, wanting to be near other girls, to learn of their strange lives, and live vicariously through them. Instead of heeding my father’s words, I shrouded those growing parts of myself, amassing a trove of all the versions of me he would not like.

discipline always seemed to me the pin that held the butterfly in the display case. Work maketh the man. Day after day, I swung over those words, and saw ahead of me a life withering slowly under all his multiplying decrees. Day after day my heart bucked up against it. I was never going to be the perfect daughter. A grin of mischief opened ever so slyly inside me, a seedling of a voice that said no.

My distress over my tooth was only vanity, my father said, and vanity was a mark of Babylon. I suspect he liked me broken.

I stopped smiling completely. I held my hand across my mouth whenever I spoke. I forgave my brother for what happened, but I could no longer hear his thoughts. Gone was his heart beating inside my heart. Lij had suddenly grown shark skin. Now the truth loomed like the holy trinity right over my head—what he was being groomed to become had nothing at all to do with me. We would have mourned it then, if we could have seen it, our oneself being severed at the root.

Mom came in and sat with me on my bed, her face a ponderous mirror. She studied me for a long time in the daylight, then touched the crown of my dreadlocks. “Anywhere you go, I’m going too,” she said. Her kind face was a mercy. It told me, with her warm eyes searching, that she already knew, somehow, about the nail.

Moms always know

Long after my mother left me to read the book by myself, I thought about what she had said. How poetry could cast a light on a meager world and make it boundless. How pain could be transformed into something beautiful. Monique’s words may have crafted my hurt, but words could also unmake it.

“I man don’t recognize him as nothing Great, he is Alexander the Greek. He was no great man to I and I. Babylon want you to think he was great, but he did nothing but bring war and destruction to Africa.”

I watched her eyes widen as I told her about being scolded for the henna at school, and that Heather’s older sister, Katherine, had a tattoo on her ankle and never got in trouble for it. My sadness was catching, and I watched it darken my mother’s face in a wave of guilt, then anger, and just like that, it metamorphosed into something else. As if she had always known some ugly secret about the world and now watched her daughter encounter it for the first time.

In high school the condition of a girl’s body was always on trial—who was hairy, who was pudgy, who smelled like ketchup, who had no boobs, who was too skinny to have a period. My classmates all believed that my blood had not yet come because I didn’t eat meat and looked underweight. 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.

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

From the outside, his house looked like a foreign sanctuary, a serene villa with arches topped by scalloped Mediterranean red roof tiles and a neatly manicured lawn, his yard frocked with foaming bougainvillea, pink hibiscus, and the verdant crush of fruit trees, all shivering alive with the buzz of insects.

The Old Poet had a helper, a middle-aged woman who greeted me in the foyer adjacent to the kitchen. She helped him “keep house,” the Old Poet said, while he did more pressing things; like run the Literary Arts magazine in the Jamaica Observer, conduct poetry and fiction workshops, and write books of poems and short stories. More pressing things, I remembered later, were separate from the domestic.

I was surprised to find some glee in it—seeing that my words could affect him after all. 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.

It was all quite Freudian, the Old Poet explained. Poets had to sever the umbilicus to write their true self.

Or wait till their deaths

“A real poem,” he told me, according to Nabokov, “registers with the reader not in his head or heart or even his gut, but in his spine.”

The Old Poet climbed out, and I sat with the quiet strangeness of myself, here, in an esteemed poet’s car, grabbing juice. This must be the chapter before she falls, I thought. If my parents taught me anything, it was to keep watch for the next disaster at hand. Happiness was only a trick of the light.

At Bickersteth we nursed on solitude without solace, like all girls forbidden from the world.

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