How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.

Once, I tried linking my fingers into the sacred sign as well, but my father reached down and firmly peeled my hands apart. He shook his head at me, his gaze stern as His Majesty’s above me, and said, ‘This is not for you. This is only for bredren.’ I crumpled away, wondering why I was unworthy, and let my hands hang limp as a soaked flower.

Would I, too, walk through the fire? I wondered. What did Jah-Jah have in store for me?

Music for him, I understood then, was not only prayer, but a way to be loved.

‘Friend and company will lead you astray,’ he said. ‘The same people laugh in yuh face ah the same people who stab yuh behind yuh back.’

‘Laugh and the world laughs with you,’ he said, his voice cool and snarling, as he pointed at each of us. ‘Cry and you cry alone.’

With us at home, he could still be king. All sights and sounds were his, all words were his.

Those evenings when he beckoned for me, calling out, ‘Budgie. Come and help me now, Princess,’ I would pause my homework and go to him, because my hands were his.

So, there were many ways to read a father’s face I was learning.

‘Don’t pay him any mind, sweetheart,’ she said to me over the loud chatter of the room. ‘He was just acting crazy because he was drunk.’ I frowned at her. ‘That doesn’t make it okay.’ ‘No. But that’s how all men act when they’re drunk. Just try to avoid him for the rest of the night,’

I know how to end things, I wrote. I just never know where to start.