How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours. Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the ocean that dreamt it. Memory is the sea. Memory is the house on the sand with a red door I have stepped through, trying to remember the history of the waves.

BEHIND THE VEIL OF TREES, night’s voices shimmered. I stood on the veranda of my family’s home in Bickersteth in the small hours after midnight, on the lonely cusp of womanhood, searching for the sea. My birthplace, a half speck of coastline hidden by the tangled forest below, was now twenty miles away in the dark. When I was a girl, my mother had taught me to read the waves of her seaside as closely as a poem. There was nothing broken that the sea couldn’t fix, she always said. But from this hillside town fenced in by a battalion of mountains, our sea was only an idea in the distance. I pressed my face into the air’s chill and listened.

Out here was the bread and backbone of our country. The thick Jamaican countryside where our first slave rebellion was born. These mountains tumbling far inland had always been our sanctuary, hillsides of limestone softened over time, pockets of caves resembling cockpits overgrown with brush, offering both refuge and stronghold for the enslaved who had escaped. Echoes of runaways still hung in the air of the deepest caves, where Maroon warriors had ambushed English soldiers who could not navigate the terrain. The English would shout commands to each other, only to hear their own voices bellowing back at them through the maze of hollows, distorted as through a dark warble of glass, until they were driven away in madness, unable to face themselves. Now more than two centuries later, I felt the chattering night wearing me mad, a cold shiver running down my bones. A girl, unable to face herself.

The countryside had always belonged to my father. Cloistered amidst towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns, this is where he was born. Where he first communed with Jah, roaring back at the thunder. Where he first called himself Rasta. Where I would watch the men in my family grow mighty while the women shrunk. Where tonight, after years of diminishment under his shadow, I refused to shrink anymore. At nineteen years old, all my fear had finally given way to fire. I rebuked my father for the first time, which drove him from the house in a blaze of fury. What would happen to me once he returned, I did not know. As my siblings and moth...

As I stared past the black crop of bush into the night, the eyes of something unseen looked back. Something sinister. A slow mist coiled in the valley below. The air shook across the street, by the standpipe where we filled our buckets with water when the pipes in our house ran dry. There, emerging from the long grasses, was a woman in white. The woman appeared like a birdcatcher spider ambling out of its massive web. Her face, numb and smudged away, appeared to me as my own face. I stood unmoving, terrified as I watched this vision of my gray self glide down the hill toward me, cowed and voiceless in that long, white dress. Her head was bowed, her dreadlocks wrapped in a white scarf atop her head, walking silently under the gaze of a Rastaman. All the rage that I burned with earlier that night had been smothered out of her. She cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man, bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world who cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man. To be the humbled wife of a Rastaman. Ordinary and unselfed. Her voice and vices not her own. This was the future my father was building for me. I squeezed the cold rail of the veranda. I understood then that I ne...

I was being called to listen to what the land already knew. To unwind the hours that led to this catastrophic night, I had to exorcise the ghost of its making; I had to first understand my father and the history of our family. To carve my own way forward, I had to first make my way back. To where the island’s loom and my family’s yarn made one knotted thread. I had to follow until I could find just where this story’s weaving began: decades before I was born, before my father was born. Before he ha...

A cage went in search of a bird. —FRANZ KAFKA

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.

Those high fences first went up in 1944, four decades before I was born, when the government spent years paving our wetlands to build an airport next to the village, while more and more hotels crept up on either side of us. Each new hotel they built was larger than the last, until the resorts resembled our still-standing colonial houses and plantations, many of which served as attractions and wedding destinations for tourists. 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.

But my great-grandfather would not sell our little beachside. He held on to his home, even as the hotels grew grander on both sides of the village, even as we lived deeper and deeper in their shadow, until eventually the coral reefs he fished in blanched and disappeared, his livelihood gone. 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. Not us. Today, no stretch of beach in Montego Bay belongs to its Black citizens except for White House. My great-grandfather had left the land title and deed so coiled...

Living at the seaside meant wonder and danger arrived frequently on the same wind, tugging at me from the horizon. Like an eager kite, I was constantly drawn to danger. The first time I disobeyed my father and walked into the sea alone, I was four years old. The afternoon heat was perishing. My father had already left for work, and my pregnant mother was sweating somewhere out of sight, bathing my baby brother in the same red plastic basin she’d use to hand-wash our clothes, or bending over to feed her own baby sister, her father’s newest newborn, who she’d delivered from his scared teenage girlfriend on our bedroom floor only a month before. While cooling down under the palms outside in the sand, I spotted something glinting in the water, caught under the sun’s glare. Calling me. I slipped away from the shade and walked to the shore. I stood barefoot at the water’s edge and watched the waves heaving, its million eyes glittering, staring down the blurred horizon where I was forbidden to go, and waited. I waited for my mother’s familiar grasp, to be pulled back to the safety of the sand, waited to hear a grown-up screaming for me to get away from the water. But no voice came for ...