How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

the Rastafari movement’s creation in the early 1930s, 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.

When Howell built Pinnacle, the largest-ever Rasta commune and a peaceful self-sustaining society, the British government razed it to the ground, staunching

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

Now most of Montego Bay’s coastline is owned by Spanish and British hoteliers – our new colonization

and most Jamaicans must pay an entrance fee to enter and enjoy a beach. Not us. Today,

Rastafari, though still shunned and outcast by their own people, became the living mascots and main cultural export of Jamaican tourism, with barely any profit to the Rasta community. It must have wounded my father to see his entire ethos and spiritual source diluted and commercialized for the foreign masses while painfully maligned at home.

had written every word because I wanted him to hear me. Now I knew he never would.

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.