How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir

by Safiya Sinclair

Howell followed Garvey’s arrow back to the Motherland and found Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the only African nation never to be colonized, and declared that God had been reincarnated, walking among them in the form of a Black man, born Ras Tafari Makonnen. From the man came both myth and mountain, a seismic cultural shift that made the Rastafari a lasting colonial threat. It was a movement that hardened around a militant belief in Black independence inspired by Haile Selassie’s reign, a dream of liberation that would only be realized by breaking the shackles of colonization, and unifying the African diaspora.

So, when Rastas read the biblical accounts of Jewish persecution and strife, they recognized a similar suffering in their own tribulation. 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.

This was as close as they would ever get to Zion, the Rastafari’s name for both the promise of liberation and the soil of Africa, to where they believed it was their destiny to repatriate. Rastas leaned on the wheel of the emperor’s plane, smoking ganja from giant chalices, chanting See how God stop the rain! See how God stop the rain!

Already at twenty-six his thick beard and riverine dreadlocks gave him the wizened look of an augur whose tea leaves only foretold catastrophe.

Next to the airport, looming along the borders of our village, were hotels with high walls made of pink marble and coral stone, flanked on top by broke-glass bottles, their sharp edges catching the light in cruel warning: To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.

This was paradise – where neither our history nor our land belonged to us. Every year Black Jamaicans owned less and less of the coast that bejewelled our island to the outside world, all our beauty bought up by rich hoteliers, or sold off to foreigners by the descendants of white enslavers who earned their fortunes on our backs, and who still own enough of Jamaica today to continue to turn a profit.

‘Rasta is not a religion,’ my father always says, echoing the edict he drilled into me and my siblings growing up. ‘Rasta is a calling. A way of life.’ There is no united doctrine, no holy book to learn the principles of Rastafari, there was only the wisdom passed down from the mouths of elder Rasta bredren, the teachings of reggae songs from conscious Rasta musicians, and the radical Pan-Africanism of revolutionaries like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.

My father found himself most called to the unwavering discipline of the Mansion of Nyabinghi, the strictest and most radical sect of Rastafari, and constructed the man he would become around it.

He rooted his belief in Jah, always aiming to reach higher heights of consciousness and righteousness, to enrich his livity, which was Rasta dialect for the tenets and principles of living Rastafari. Rastafari didn’t use terms like ‘faith’ or ‘religion’, as those were Babylon’s terms for worship. Instead, Rasta had livity, his trust in Jah, and his way of life.

‘I and I was meant to meet you this time. This time is the only time.’ There was no singular or selfish ‘I’ in Rastafari livity, it was always a plural ‘I’ – for Jah’s spirit was always with a Rastaman.

They reasoned about Rastafari and about family, about Haile Selassie, about reggae music. They talked about repatriating to Africa, about being born with a sense of loss, living with the amputated history of the Black diaspora; the grief of not knowing where their ancestors came from, or the name of the home they could return to.

Howell, known as the First Rasta, lived peacefully at Pinnacle with an estimated three thousand other Rastas, preaching Black independence and togetherness. But the Jamaican government, still under British rule, thought his brand of transgression dangerous; an empowered Black majority would mean revolution. In 1954, Babylon raided Pinnacle’s ganja fields and seized their five hundred acres of land and money, claiming Howell’s Rasta commune was a cult, and set fire to the anti-colonial movement by reframing the Rastafari as agents of dread, as madmen, as child-killers, as the Blackheart Man.

Sections of the movement eventually broke off into three main groups: the Mansion of Nyabinghi, the Bobo Shanti, and the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

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.

Under the tenets of Rastafari, a woman’s divine purpose was to bear children,

‘For a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots,’ he said, quoting Marcus Garvey.

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.

The police force had been target-training with pictures of Rastafari for years, so when Bustamante finally gave them the power to drag Rastas away at gunpoint, many Rasta bredren did not make it back home. The police captured hundreds of Rastas and forcibly shaved their precepts and cut their dreadlocks. They jailed, tortured, and injured as many as 150 Rastafari, and killed an unknown number of Rasta bredren. Soon after this, ‘Babylon’ came to permanently replace the word for ‘police’ in Jamaican patois. I was never taught one word of this in school; the massacre has been all but erased from Jamaican history, with very few among us aware of these atrocities, but the term for police being ‘Babylon’ remains.

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. Some Rastas, I learned decades later, did, in fact, refuse to travel in motor vehicles or operate Babylon’s machinery. Some did not touch Babylon’s money, except with gloves or a plastic bag.

It was then I learned that 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.

My father only used regal honorifics for the women in his life. Empress. Princess. Budgie. Dawta. The word ‘gyal’ was an insult in Rasta vernacular and was never used for a girl or woman who was loved and respected. 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.

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.

We were the family he had made for himself. But we were just children. I was barely twelve, and my siblings even younger. In our cloistered isolation, every moment of instability seemed normal. Like the afternoon my parents gave us spliffs to smoke, they had established this strange sect of Sinclair for so long they could not see when unhealthy boundaries had been crossed.

But just like Haile Selassie, he, too, was only a man. Plain as the purple glare on his face, the truth, hasty and pitiful, now revealed its innermost parts to me – a Rastaman was not ascetic or untouchable or particularly saintly. He was just another creature boiling under the tropic heat, collapsing under his carnal and banal desires, like every other man.

if Jamaicans wore an immutable furrow, Trinis seemed to bear an immutable smirk.

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.’

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.

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.

Each day I am learning to live in a town built on the bones of the enslaved. I gasp awake in a country birthed from one terrible wound and then another, and I am unable to ignore America’s own red lineage. Here, no tree is ever just a tree. Here, every rolling field has been nursed on stolen sweat, every green acre sprung from blood. For months, I pull at the terrible thread of America’s past, put my ear up to the gutted voices of Charlottesville’s history, trying to hear lost families in the scattering shrill of cicadas.

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. 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.