How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours. Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the ocean that dreamt it. Memory is the sea.

Where I would watch the men in my family grow mighty while the women shrank. Where tonight, after years of diminishment under his shadow, I refused to shrink anymore.

The more of this world I had discovered, the more I rejected the cage my father had built for me.

From those psalms of Jewish exile came the Rastafari’s name for the systemically racist state and imperial forces that had hounded, hunted, and downpressed them: Babylon. Babylon was the government that had outlawed them, the police that had pummelled and killed them. Babylon was the church that had damned them to hellfire. It was the state’s boot at the throat, the politician’s pistol in the gut. The Crown’s whip at the back. Babylon was the sinister and violent forces born of western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity that led to the centuries-long enslavement and oppression of Black people, and the corruption of Black minds. It was the threat of destruction that crept, even now, toward every Rasta family.

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

This splintering would eventually become the painful undoing of my family a generation later, because it encouraged most Rastafari to individualize their livity at home, with impunity. There, in the privacy of their own households, each Rasta bredren could be a living godhead, the king of his own secluded temple.

What the tourists couldn’t discern, as they drank and ate dinner while my father sang and flashed his dreadlocks onstage, was his true motivation for singing. Night after night he sang to burn down Babylon, which was them.

as I grew older, her refusal to be diminished would subtly come to shape my own sense of place in this world.

Though I was too young to understand that my father believed the sanctity of my soul was at stake, I was petrified of becoming unclean. It was almost a decade before I learned my ruin had been fixed all along. Rasta bredren believed women were more susceptible to moral corruption because they menstruated. I was destined to be unclean. But at five years old, I wanted only to be good for him. I wanted to be worthy.

We listened until we knew Haile Selassie’s name meant Power of the Trinity. Knew Ethiopia was the only African nation never to be colonized, despite the efforts of Mussolini and the Vatican. We knew the pope blessed Mussolini’s army and their poison gas, blessed their bombs and bullets before Italy invaded in 1935. We knew white people were evil. Knew Christianity to be wicked. We knew Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were white devils. That Gorbachev bore the mark of the beast. And Queen Elizabeth, in Rasta wordplay on her villainy, was Queen ‘Eliza-bat’.

Soon we knew a petunia from an oleander from a bougainvillea, all of them nourishing the garden of ourselves.

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.

There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain – that being citizens of a ‘developing nation’, we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it. But there is hope, too, in our scarcity, tolerable because it keeps us constantly reaching for something better.

Uncle Clive was very mean, which made him more likely to be wrong.

We edged around each other with giant saucer eyes, all our teeth soft and twisted from a lack of calcium, all our limbs whittled to sticks without vitamin B12 in our Ital diets.

The more Rastas I met, the more I realized there was no singular or accepted gospel among Rastafari bredren. Each man crafted his own credo, paved his own road.

there are three main sects of Rastafari. The Mansion of Nyabinghi is the oldest, and the one from which all the other sects were born. Nyabinghi is militantly Pan-Africanist, believing in Haile Selassie as the reincarnation of God on earth, in Black unification, liberation, and repatriation to Ethiopia. The Twelve Tribes of Israel is the most liberal Rastafari sect, welcoming wayward uptown Jamaican youth and white foreigners as members; they eat meat and believe in Jesus Christ. The Bobo Shanti, the newest sect of the three, live closed off from society as a self-sufficient group, adhering to Jewish Mosaic Laws from the Old Testament, including observing Sabbath, and special separation laws for menstruating women.

Before I turned back to run into the chattering yard, I observed the Rasta sistren. All their faces were drawn and exhausted, their hands burned and calloused from housework like my mother’s were. Almost every sistren held a baby and a toddler on her arms; some were pregnant like my mother. Some were so busy minding children that they could barely talk among themselves. Unlike the bredren’s circle, there were no wails of ‘Jah Rastafari!’ erupting from their midst. There were no spiritual revelations here. Only women taking turns running back to the kitchen, diligently attending to their children and to their men. Their wants pursed and shapeless, their white tie-heads coming undone.

Because discipline always seemed to me the pin that held the butterfly in the display case. Work maketh the man. Day after day, I swung over those words, and saw ahead of me a life withering slowly under all his multiplying decrees. Day after day my heart bucked up against it. I was never going to be the perfect daughter. A grin of mischief opened ever so slyly inside me, a seedling of a voice that said no.

She almost never talked about this part of her life. Sharing none of her suffering, she kept these stories bottled away. But now she saw me slipping away to something heavy, and she was here to pull me back.

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.

Calling someone a ‘gyal’ was a marker of her unworthiness, used with the intent to hurt and belittle. When he called me ‘gyal’ in the froth of his anger, the insult was my fledgling womanhood. My looming impurity. For weeks I felt that word like a knife between my legs. Gyal. A dirty word. Pinning me to that moment.

Beyond the hazy light of the veiled world lives this moment of my life diverging – I went one way, and the other girl, the girl I never became, went the other, with all her mysterious possibilities, all her unknown and possible worlds.

As I grew older, I knew I would never be his perfect Rasta daughter. I was too headstrong, too curious. Too much of myself, and not enough of him.

My father was born in the throes of Jamaica’s rebellion, the island’s Black citizens now orphaned by the circumstance of being Caribbean, mothered by nothing but our own dream of independence. Free to author any future they wanted, some Jamaicans still chose the cramped confines of the past, dusting and preserving those old colonial rooms, while some like my father razed all that came before them, setting fire to the curtains of the master’s house.

Here in the gathering numbness was our matrilineal mark: each of us turned to stone overnight. Thrown, ripple after ripple, into the same strange sea. Delivered by some grief the night before. Here, the women of my family all met under one sign, stamped by what confining fates we had been handed.

He was still talking now, but I had grown numb, my ears jungled, the noise so loud that his words went through me like ghosts. I had left my dumb husk there next to him on the settee, nodding and pliable, while I slipped away and down into the damp shadow of her, now growing scorching and impatient, pacing the catacombs of myself, my hands over my ears, biding my time.

The girls made me small and that made my parents no taller.

He had tried to beat the Babylon out of me. Snuff out the woman I was becoming, the one he envisioned splashing him with dirty rainwater on some future street. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ my father told me when it was over. But there was nothing of me left to spoil, nothing to spare.

Of course, she didn’t know what she had, because she had always had it.

I was surprised to find some glee in it – seeing that my words could affect him after all. I knew then that I could finally build myself a world that was beyond his reach. That on the page I was not the princess, I was the dragon. I wanted him to see the cruel world nakedly, the way I wanted all men to see the cruel world, their deeds burned to ash on my tongue.

‘A real poem,’ he told me, according to Nabokov, ‘registers with the reader not in his head or heart or even his gut, but in his spine.’

But I could not see. For there was nothing then beyond the half-light of the afternoon filtering in through his window, each day held like a velvet petal in my mouth.

Everywhere we dreamt with the heat boiling our blood unruly, a bushfire of impolite bodies.

At first glance Jahdami was a typical Rastaman, drawing what he needed from the larger tenets of Rastafari and moulding the rules to fit his own household’s livity, with himself as godhead and ruler of all things. But to my eyes, he was an outlier in the way he also drew from extremist ideology and harmful archaic practices to suit his purposes, constructing his own violent interpretation of an austere version of Islam most commonly known as Wahhabism, which then started to grow popular with my father and some of the other Rasta bredren. Jahdami moved through the world not with peace, as Howell originally envisioned, and as many Rasta bredren island-wide did, but with violence. He believed in polyamory for Rastas, with multiple wives and girlfriends on the side. He believed he was righteous in punching his son with a closed fist or beating him with the flat side of a machete, and he believed in disciplining women and daughters alike with a striking hand or foot. He cheered on terrorist attacks and supported female genital mutilation. He was the man my father now spent most of his days off with, the one whose voice seethed through their long conversations on the phone.

All night I wept with the crushing realization: after more than nineteen years, my father still could not see me. To him, nothing I wrote would ever matter. Poetry was the voice I had forged because for so long I had been voiceless; I had written every word because I wanted him to hear me. Now I knew he never would.

Even as I comforted her, I was oblivious to the signs of what she had been experiencing my entire life. How one could live under the influence of a partner so long that any other possibility seemed terrifying. How one could be isolated from your family, controlled, and made powerless. How one could be too shell-shocked to ever leave. How so few women ever made it out.

‘Don’t tread on my name.’

The thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born. Voices of runaways still echoed from these impenetrable hills, where a vast network of caves had formed from limestone overrun with bush, and where Maroon warriors waylaid English soldiers who couldn’t navigate the terrain. The English would yell commands, only to hear their own warped voices hollering back at them, until they were driven away in madness, unable to face themselves.

I shivered as I watched my grey self glide down the hill, placid in her white georgette dress. All the rage had been smothered out of her. Gathering her long skirt with the day’s shadows, all her dreams set to fire long ago. She cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man, bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world who cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man. Next there was a baby in her belly, and a baby on her arm, while her Rastaman squirmed in bed with another woman. To be the humbled wife of a Rastaman. Ordinary and unselfed. My voice and vices not my own. This was the future my father was building for me.

I think my father realized it just then. That nothing Rastafari moved through me anymore. I had fought and snuffed that woman out of the world completely. The one he wanted me to be. I had cut her throat. I watched her hands at her severed neck, still trying to speak, soundlessly. Her pale silhouette fading into the wall, taking that forsaken future with her.

as long as I had a poem in my head and a pen in my hand, I believed all this strife would shake out right in the end.

As I walked across the stage, I thought of the women who had come before me, my riverine clan of women known and unknown, whose many futures and possibilities and bodily autonomy had been taken, and I wept as I became the first girl in my family to graduate from college. Whatever came next, I promised myself, I would do for them. In my hands, their names and lives would never be forgotten.

Then she laughed. The laugh of a witch in full moon, feeling the earth’s voice as one with herself.

Remember how I twist Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ into a more modern statement: ‘trauma remembered and revisited from a place of safety’? That place of safety – you may not yet have that.

Spring blows in like a blousy bitch.

At last, I understand. There is no American dream without American massacre. Black towns burned, native families displaced, graveyards desecrated, lands stolen, lands ruined: Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence. Here is the original wound.

I was determined to write myself back into the frame, to grab hold of the bull and stamp my name on his tongue. To never cower to my father, or any man, again. Now my niece was coming, and the way forward was clear. This book I was envisioning, I would write for her. I would write for every Sinclair girl who was still to come. For them, I would try to point the compass forwards: to change the shape of our lineage, the weight of her legacy. So she who comes next would never have to know the fire. So she who comes next would always know herself.

I could keep pulling the thread, spend years unravelling all that unravelled me, or I could pull it all through the needle’s eye, and stitch.

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.