How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

In telling this story, I have followed my river all the way down to the sea, treading as closely as I could to my memory of the people, places, and events that shaped my life.

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 needed to cut that woman’s throat. Needed to chop her down, right out of me.

outlawed and persecuted since the Rastafari movement’s creation in 1933, when a visionary street preacher named Leonard Percival Howell heeded Marcus Garvey’s call to “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King,” who would be the herald of Black liberation.

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 were burned island-wide in a weekend of terror, where more than 150 Rastas were dragged from their homes, imprisoned, and tortured, and an unknown number of Rastas were killed.

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.

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.

This was paradise—where neither our history nor our land belonged to 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 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.

Like many young women born into poverty, the scarcity of her choices made her easy prey.

Just like Leonard Howell’s commune, reggae’s original mission of anti-colonial rebellion and spreading the message of Rastafari had been defanged.

“That vampire Reagan hates Black people,” he scowled each night in front of the television. “He is a murderer. He killed Gaddafi’s baby daughter. She woulda been the same age as Safiya now. Him worse than a mongrel dog.”

There's some truth in what he's saying, but the fury at the injustice of it all is consuming him.This is why it's so important to move the anger through and out the body so you can hold the truth without being controlled by it.

There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain—that being citizens of a “developing nation,” we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it. But there is hope, too, in our scarcity, tolerable because it keeps us constantly reaching for something better.

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.

Shame, too, grew slowly with me now, as I noticed for the first time not only a river swelling between me and my father, but that he was the one who fed its tributaries.

When he called me “gyal” in the froth of his anger, the insult was my fledgling womanhood. My looming impurity.

I had expected his brimstone for the baldheads who had wronged me. I wanted him to defend me on this path he had cut through the jungle for us. Instead, he moved cautious and smiling in the face of Babylon, and saved all his fire for us.

He seemed to care immensely about what people thought of him, and as I grew older, the more his contradictions became plain. He despised Babylon, while yearning for its trappings.

In our cloistered isolation, every moment of instability seemed normal.

By beating us he was no different than the butus and baldheads he railed against. He made my wounds commonplace, just another young girl wanting to absent herself from the world.

Whatever hurt him made him in turn hurt us.

All those months I’d spent out from under his thumb had taught me something crucial. Nothing would deter me from where I was going, as long I could escape him. Ahead of me was a path I would make for myself, and I was ready for the dance.

If I stayed in Jamaica, I would never escape him.

That my father had offered the Old Poet deference and fawning smiles and saved his anger only for us, just as he sang like a prince to the tourists every night, then brought back his worst self to our family.

There was freedom in knowing something for yourself. Just as I had come to learn by leaving the underworld on my own.

My mother’s drowned silence wasn’t a natural aspect of her character but evidence of my father’s force.

All night I wept with the crushing realization: After more than nineteen years, my father still could not see me. To him, nothing I wrote would ever matter.

Even as I comforted her, I was oblivious to the signs of what she had been experiencing my entire life. How one could live under the influence of a partner so long that any other possibility seemed terrifying.

How one could be too shell-shocked to ever leave. How so few women ever made it out.

There was no one in this house to stand up to my father’s terror. My sisters, my brother, my mother; they had all confessed his misdeeds to me because they wanted, as I always did, somebody to defend them. And now there was no one ahead of me except for me.

Only I would shape the woman I was becoming. I didn’t know what it would cost, nor how long it would take, but I was willing to sacrifice everything to do it.

Our repulsed silence grew into repulsed sighs. It was hard to be surprised by what our father did anymore.

“You used to love me once.” “Once,” my mother said, and clutched her belly. 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.

That he thought only of himself in this moment and not my happiness, and certainly not my future. For, if he didn’t want any of us to leave him, what did he really want?

He smiled as he talked, and held his hands clasped behind his back. I looked over at him as he spoke to take in what a true coward looked like.

There in his performance I saw it plainly before me, finally. He knew what it meant to cut me down, was doing it even now as we stood before Babylon. As long as I lived under his roof, he would never respect me. He would never see me as a person with value, my gender forever robbing me of his esteem.

“trauma remembered and revisited from a place of safety”?

I ride around town with a white writer from a Bay Area suburb who voted for Obama, but who sings the n-word out loud to his favorite rap songs. White America, a violence.

There is no American dream without American massacre.

In the bitter months after he had saved me from the machete, my brother had grown angry, believing that I should forgive my father, and that my refusal to speak to him had fractured our family.

I've heard that same tired ass argument a thousand times and it will never be true