How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

She showed me how to suckle language from each bloom.

This was the first year I resigned myself to sorrow’s permanence, a silent egg that lay in my hollow and stayed, a knotted cough in the throat I could feel but could not expel.

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

I might have left Rastafari behind, but I always carried with me the indelible fire of its rebellion. And when I returned to America, I would walk taller. Babylon would never frighten a daughter like me.