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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.
Zion, the Rastafari’s name for both the promise of liberation and the soil of Africa, to where they believed it was their destiny to repatriate.
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 in coral bone, so swamped under sea kelp and brine, that no hotelier could reach it. This little hidden village by the sea, this beachside, was still ours, only.
There, in the privacy of their own households, each Rasta bredren could be a living godhead, the king of his own secluded temple.
It was almost a decade before I learned my ruin had been fixed all along.
While he warned us of Babylon, she showed us Zion.
calmly listening to this frantic sermon of hellfire and damnation as if it were just an ordinary recounting of her Friday grocery list.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? —JOHN KEATS
except the scripture was as variable as the sky, my father both the god of the sea and the god of the sun.
Instead, he moved cautious and smiling in the face of Babylon, and saved all his fire for us.
He despised Babylon, while yearning for its trappings. And when he did not defend me against Mrs. Pinnock, it struck me how much grace he offered these meat-eating strangers, and how little for us.
She was hurt and so she let him hurt me.
Poets had to sever the umbilicus to write their true self.
Perhaps this terror was the last control he had left, giving him some shabby semblance of power in a world that reminded him every day that he was powerless.
She rolled her eyes and kissed her teeth and called him “a diva.”
There is no American dream without American massacre.
Babylon would never frighten a daughter like me.
