Caim’s Reviews > How to Say Babylon > Status Update

listening on Libby has helped a lot!

DNF — I’m bored and the poetry doesn’t work for me as a book read.

“Chief among Dad’s accursed heathens we’re my two aunties. Their livity wasn’t right, my father said, denouncing them as Jezebels who worse too much ‘jingbeng—dangling gold earrings and bangles… Unclean women, he called them…”

“At twenty-one, my mother looked at my father and saw only the man who had made of her a miracle, and she decided to devote herself to him and this life, without ever wondering what it migh cost her. Or her daughters.”

A 13 year old who never accepted motherhood… sad for the generations to come.

“His selfhood was a garden, flourishing some days, withering on others.”

“Through reggae music (Burning Spear & Bob Marley) he began to identify his own helpless rage at the history of Black enslavement at the hands of colonial powers, and his disgust at the mistreatment of Black Jamaicans in a newly postcolonial society. In the island-wide abuse lobbied against the Rastafari, my father soon began to see himself.”

“Like a rite of passage for every Jamaican youth, my father went searching for his fortune in America and met his misfortune instead.”

“Like many young women born into poverty, the scarcity of her choices made her easy prey.”

The irony: “Somewhere between her hope and his (fire), there was a united belief… She has been (warming) the world with those hands ever since.”