How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Babylon was the government that had outlawed them, the police that had pummeled and killed them. Babylon was the church that had damned them to hellfire. It was the state’s boot at the throat, the politician’s pistol in the gut. The Crown’s whip at the back. Babylon was the sinister and violent forces born of western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity that led to the centuries-long enslavement and oppression of Black people, and the corruption of Black minds.

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.

They talked about repatriating to Africa, about being born with a sense of loss, living with the amputated history of the Black diaspora; the grief of not knowing where their ancestors came from, or the name of the home they could return to.

After the news, he would remind us that white people were devils who did everything in their power to prevent Black people from prosperity. They were bloodsuckers, baldheads, and mongrels. Above all, my father’s worst trigger words were “Margaret Thatcher.” Hearing “Margaret Thatcher” meant he would rant for another half hour about England and that vampire Queen Eliza-bat, about how they stole from Africa and from us to fatten themselves. Stole our lands, stole our dignity, stole our riches.

A grin of mischief opened ever so slyly inside me, a seedling of a voice that said no.

I took out my journal and wrote my first lines of poetry in vines of cursive. Wings in the sunlight, wings against my dress. I pulled wing after luminous wing from my mouth. Watching them flutter alive with each word, my hands a vibrant garden.

“Jah will provide,” Dad would say when food was short, and Mom would walk out into the yard and find something astonishing for us to feast on.

I nursed the poem like hibiscus silk. There were no words or blows that could pull me away now, for the veiled world I had first glimpsed when I was ten now opened the slick throat of itself, and pulled me, fully formed, from out of it.

Here, no tree is ever just a tree. Here, every rolling field has been nursed on stolen sweat, every green acre sprung from blood.