How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

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.

Hallowed Rasta elders from the Mansion of Nyabinghi blew the curved war-horn of the abeng, the sacred instrument of the unconquered Maroons who fought and defeated both Spanish and British colonizers. The horns’ groans shook the warm, wet air.

From the man came both myth and mountain, a seismic cultural shift that made the Rastafari a lasting colonial threat. It was a movement that hardened around a militant belief in Black independence inspired by Haile Selassie’s reign, a dream of liberation that would only be realized by breaking the shackles of colonization, and unifying the African diaspora.

And though the Rastafari movement was nonviolent, they were the nation’s black sheep, feared and despised by a Christian society still under British rule, forced to live on the fringes as pariahs. These were the involuntarily landless and homeless, their encampments sacked, their fields burned by a government in service to the Crown.

When Howell built Pinnacle, the largest-ever Rasta commune and a peaceful self-sustaining society, the British government razed it to the ground, staunching the movement’s message of unity and Black independence. They were the unemployed and unemployable, the constant victims of state violence and brutality, the ones the government jailed and forcibly shaved, the ones brutally beaten by the police. In 1963, when a group of Rastas refused to relinquish the farmlands they lived on to government seizure, Alexander Bustamante, the white prime minister then, ordered the military to “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive!” This triggered a devastating military operation where Rasta communes...

From those psalms of Jewish exile came the Rastafari’s name for the systemically racist state and imperial forces that had hounded, hunted, and downpressed them: Babylon. 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. It was the threat of destruction that crept, even now, toward every Rasta family.

My aunts Sandra and Audrey shared a room with my cousin, while my grandfather and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend slept with their three young daughters in their own room.

Come again???

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.

My mother was born with six fingers on each hand, and constantly probed for anything good. Her mother, Isabel, had died unexpectedly from a botched black-market abortion when my mother was only four, leaving her all but orphaned at White House.

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.

Rasta children had not been permitted to attend public schools until the 1980s, so my siblings and I were not only among the first Rasta children to attend school in Montego Bay, but we soon became accustomed to being the only ones.

“Friend and company will lead you astray,” he said. “The same people laugh in yuh face ah the same people who stab yuh behind yuh back.”

Intermittently thinking about the damage unhealed parents inflict on their children while reading this book

I came to realize that what my father wanted, on his return from Japan, was the perfect daughter. And when a Rastaman said daughter, he meant both his wife and his child, as my father called my mother his “dawta” when speaking to his Rasta bredren, who also called their partners their dawtas. For the men of Rastafari, the perfect daughter was everything a woman was supposed to be. The perfect daughter was whittled from Jah’s mighty oak, cultivating her holy silence. She spoke only when spoken to. The perfect daughter was humble and had no care for vanity. She had no needs, yet nursed the needs of others, breastfeeding an army of Jah’s mighty warriors. The perfect daughter sat under the apple shade and waited to be called, her mind empty and emptying. She followed no god but her father, until he was replaced with her husband. The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.

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. She moved to the end of the bed now and placed my feet in her lap. Rubbing her hands together until they were warm, she made a bronze fire in her palms, then touched them tender to my throbbing foot.

This was the first year I resigned myself to sorrow’s permanence, a silent egg that lay in my hollow and stayed, a knotted cough in the throat I could feel but could not expel.

She had always been there, guiding the most crucial moments of my life like an invisible hand.

My dad

But all the ugly things he had said weighed on my mind as heavy as the dreadlocks atop my head. The specter of the woman in white had disturbed something already tenuous between us. My dreadlocks tethered me to her, because they tethered me to him. And every day I longed to be the sharp knife, severing.

Jordan Peele's Us?

I tore through my stacks of books, tailoring my own weekly curriculum, wondering after the first woman who said “No.” Lilith was her name. The First Woman, made from the same clay as Adam, who had refused to be subservient to him. Her defiance led to her banishment from Paradise, her name erased from all biblical accounts. Night monster, they called her. Demoness of Babylon.

When my mother saw the T-shirt, she could only laugh at this unusual and provoking daughter she had birthed, and though my father threw up his eyes to Jah, he knew it could be worse. I could be a Christian.

Lmao facts ("athiest" shirt)

Some years before, my mother had been diagnosed with fibroids and had to undergo a hysterectomy. For her, the surgery and its recovery were a throbbing revelation. Whomever she thought she was in the world, and whatever that woman’s purpose, was suddenly gone. She laughed like a songbird when she called me to tell me she had cut her dreadlocks. “Something just switched off,” she told me. She returned home without her womb, then realized that my father no longer had any hold over her. There would be no more children by him or any man. There was nothing else to bind her to him.

I might have left Rastafari behind, but I always carried with me the indelible fire of its rebellion. And when I returned to America, I would walk taller. Babylon would never frighten a daughter like me.