How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Here in Charlottesville, I am finally learning how to say bloodsucker. How to say baldhead. How to say heathen. Here, every street, every house, gapes another maw of trauma. Wound after wound, I cannot escape.

Dad was right

georgette.

solder

White America, a violence.

The US government reminds me that I am a “non-resident alien.” I need their permission to work, permission to move, permission to leave.

Bridge: NIGGER scrawled in red next to enlarged male genitalia. I pull that thread, following its vein down to pulping ventricle, and start to believe my father at last was right—red with baldheads, red with bloodsuckers, red about all of it. I hear his voice in my head, scorching with thunder

brimstone, reminding me that he had spent a lifetime teaching me how to say it— This place is

Bab...

Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence. Here is the original wound. Here I am, homesick in Babylon, and I am angry, so angry at all of it. Because, for the first time since I left home, I understand how frightened my father must have been for me, a Black daughter walking through the inferno, and now I am all alone.

Rita

Dove

red.

What does the color ref symbolize

unfilial

wanted more, so much more than this fixed inheritance. I

But when I thought of my niece, I picked up instead. “Hello?”

obeahed

them

I them every one is his not seperate

jumbie bird

born right yah ah yard. When

prodigal

Hillocked

umoja

“I man spent so much of the time worrying about you and you sisters them, but ah really wish I had been cooler. Wish I coulda see that I and I had nothing to worry about.” I closed my eyes as he spoke, sitting for a time with the

anthuriums,