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.

So many years I had wished for the woman who had almost left him to return.

all I had longed for was my mother to protect me, for someone to speak up for me,

This stuck with me in a deep way because I related so much to Safiya in this moment.

For an entire decade I had lived under his ugly words, cowered under his cruel hands, swallowing his venom in silence. But as soon as he spat that word at me,

Then she laughed. The laugh of a witch in full moon, feeling the earth’s voice as one with herself. All of that love had gone.

The power her mother finally felt is one to dream of some day.