How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

mahoes

At nineteen years old, all my fear had finally given way to fire.

this journey, perhaps the emperor recognized himself in the long claw of history, saw himself caught between the weight of being the heir to the Solomonic dynasty and the true freedom of being Chosen as the Messiah. What did it mean, after all, to be the living answer to the fraught question of Black survival?

Not us. Today, no stretch of beach in Montego Bay belongs to its Black citizens except for White House.

precept

livity,

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.

livity.

precept

irie

colossus,

wining

hydra.

shuttered sixth-grade classroom as I walked

held my head up, held it straight.

orphic

Ital

irie,

verdant

budgerigar

pariah,

no

started writing some of those love songs on Rocking You that

Polygamists

buoy,

precept. “You guys make me so irie,”

sight of me. “I man know who you are,” he said. He spat

Eurydice,

would spend the years of limbo that followed wishing I hadn’t been too embarrassed to ask her for help. My mother

They should have helped

Eurydice,

unseen

mogeller.”

maw

Your dad is of a very different generation than me, he wrote. He will always need something to rage against. The way the

viscous

corvid

verdigris

adder,

livity,

mawkish.

rue

efflorescing,

us, weaving in and out, making a nest. This

sisters’

chapbook

acolyte

Nokia

curio,

gasp awake in a country birthed from one terrible wound and then another, and I am unable to ignore America’s own red lineage. Here, no tree is ever just a tree.

Later they will hang on my every thought about the film. Here,

Yep

am reminded of my Blackness in all spaces I enter.

Yep