Chapitre 1
Breaking Free: A Daughter's Journey Through Rastafari
Imagine a young woman standing on a veranda at midnight, searching for the distant sea beyond a veil of trees. She has just defied her father for the first time, driving him from the house in fury. In the mist below, she sees a vision of her future self-a voiceless woman cowering under a Rastaman's gaze. This powerful moment from Safiya Sinclair's memoir "How to Say Babylon" captures the essence of her journey: to cut that submissive woman out of herself and forge her own path. Named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2023 and praised by The New York Times as "a masterpiece of a memoir," Sinclair's story resonates with anyone who has struggled to find their voice against oppressive traditions. The book has become a cultural touchstone for discussions about patriarchy, religious extremism, and the liberating power of art-showing how poetry can become a lifeline when everything else is taken away.
Chapitre 2
The Birth of a Rastafari Family
Before Safiya Sinclair's story begins, there was a pivotal moment in Jamaican history that would shape her family's destiny. In April 1966, torrential rain fell on Kingston's Palisadoes Airport as a hundred thousand Rastas overran the facility, awaiting the arrival of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. These were Jamaica's persecuted-followers of the Rastafari movement who believed Selassie was a living god. Though nonviolent, they had been feared and despised by colonial society, their communes destroyed, their people jailed and beaten in government crackdowns.
When Selassie's plane appeared, the rain miraculously stopped. Believers trampled security barriers to swarm the aircraft, and the emperor wept at the sight of the crowd. Though Selassie told Rastafari leaders he was not God, they interpreted this as further proof of his divinity-only God would deny his own godhood. His visit transformed Jamaican history and one family in particular-Safiya's, whose father would become among the most devout Rastas.
Safiya's parents found each other as parentless teenagers in 1980, both seeking higher purpose. Her mother Esther, born with six fingers on each hand, was orphaned at four when her mother died from a botched abortion. Abandoned by her father at White House, a tiny fishing village, she endured hunger and cruelty from her stepmother. At eighteen, she received devastating news from a nun at a clinic: a medical condition would prevent her from having children. This loss sat heavy in her chest until she met Howard.
Howard (who would later rename himself Djani) called himself a wildflower, untethered and searching for belonging. At sixteen, he had been a teenage heartthrob in the band Future Wind, but discovered the manager had stolen his royalties. After being deported from America, he discovered the speeches of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey in New York libraries, awakening to what Rastafari call Babylon-the systemic injustice against Black people worldwide. On his eighteenth birthday, he twisted his Afro into dreadlocks, embracing Rastafari not as religion but as "a calling, a way of life." When his mother refused to let him live with her unless he cut his locks, he found himself homeless with just $10 and a duffel bag.
After months of rejection, Howard's isolation ended when his friend Roy Park spotted him on the road. At a party in Mount Carey, he met Esther on a balcony. When she reached to touch his hair, he caught her hand and, as he tells it, "never let go." After weeks of letters and visits, Esther asked her father if Howard could live at White House. Three months after meeting, the nineteen-year-old couple journeyed to the hills, joining a Rasta commune where they lived in a bamboo house, eating an Ital diet from the earth.
When Esther revealed her infertility diagnosis, Howard dismissed it immediately: "Rasta don't believe in Babylon system. Their doctors want Black people to be infertile." Looking into his face burning with conviction, Esther touched her stomach and closed her eyes. A year later, she discovered she was pregnant. At twenty-one, she devoted herself completely to him, never considering what this might cost her or her future daughters.
Chapitre 3
Paradise Lost: Childhood in the Shadow of Rastafari
Safiya spent her early childhood in wild happiness at White House, the tiny fishing village hidden from tourist Jamaica. She dug for hermit crabs, ate fish eyes like candy, and gorged on sea grapes and coconuts while wearing dresses her mother stitched by hand. She cherished her mother's readings by kerosene lamp and the raucous laughter of her aunts gathering on the beach.
Her father, however, never felt at home there. A strict Rastafarian with thick beard and dreadlocks, he had the look of a somber prophet. He'd bring his guitar to the sand, singing reggae songs that warned of impending peril for Black people, cautioning villagers about Babylon's ever-present threat with a penetrating gaze that would come to define his children's childhood.
When Safiya was five, her father grew increasingly distrustful of the "baldheads" (non-Rastas) around them. One night, without telling her aunts, grandfather, or cousins, they packed their belongings into a pickup truck and left White House. As they departed in darkness, Safiya glimpsed only the ghost outline of waves, saying goodbye to the only place she still calls home.
They moved to Bogue Heights, a hillside community overlooking Montego Bay, where they rented two modest rooms in a two-story house. Though their living space was small, they had an enormous yard bursting with fruit trees that became their private kingdom. Here, her father intensified their Rastafari education, teaching them about Haile Selassie's magnificence, that Ethiopia was the only uncolonized African nation, and that white people, Christianity, and Western leaders were all evils of Babylon.
Her father renamed himself Djani, meaning "King" in Swahili, rejecting his birth name. Their African names were like protective amulets: Safiya Jamila ("Clear-minded, pure, beautiful"), her brother Lij Tafari ("Blessed child, highly respected"), and baby sister Ife Kibibi ("Little Lady of Love"). Her mother became Makini Nassoma ("Strength of Character, Queen"), though she remained Esther Norman to Safiya, never taking the Sinclair name since "Rasta don't believe in marriage."
While her father warned them of Babylon's dangers, her mother taught them the poetry of nature, taking them on morning walks to identify plants and animals. She nurtured their love of learning, becoming known in Montego Bay as "the light-skinned Rasta lady with the three bright children." Every Saturday she took them to the public library, sometimes "borrowing" books permanently, including a leatherbound Encyclopedia Britannica.
The siblings excelled academically, topping their classes and skipping grades. Books became Safiya's time travel machines-she'd open the encyclopedia and fall right in, teaching her siblings about cuneiform, Mesopotamia, and Hannibal. Inspired by their academic success, her mother started S.P.I.C. (Stimulation Program for the IQ-raising of Children), teaching neighborhood children using word games, poems, and nature exploration.
But paradise began to crack. Her father's weekends with them changed as his work at Hedonism II resort wore on him. Initially peaceful when arriving at their gated sanctuary, he gradually returned with a heavy mood, complaining about disrespect and "nastiness" at the hotel. His frustration at being unable to protect them from Babylon shook their walls while they cowered.
Chapitre 4
The Tightening Grip: Control and Resistance
As Safiya turned ten, her father's attention increasingly focused on molding her into a proper Rastawoman. Though still years from puberty, he scrutinized her growing height with disapproval, ordering her to "Go change outta those tights." Without objection, her mother purged their drawers of pants and shorts, replacing them with below-knee skirts and dresses. Pierced ears, jewelry, nail polish, and makeup were forbidden as "garish trappings of Babylon."
Safiya realized her father wanted the perfect daughter-a term Rastamen used for both wives and children. The perfect daughter was whittled from Jah's mighty oak, cultivating holy silence, speaking only when spoken to. She was humble, without vanity or needs, yet nursed others' needs. She followed no god but her father until replaced with her husband, becoming merely a vessel for man's seed.
Despite these constraints, Safiya and her brother Lij remained inseparable at home. When their father was at work, they resumed their ramping-racing around the yard, challenging each other's brightness. One day, as Lij chased her with a giant mantis, she ran sideways into the house. When she turned laughing to face him, his momentum drove her jaw hard against the bathroom wall. She felt her front tooth crumble to chalk in her mouth. When her father returned home and learned what happened, he looked at her with disgust when she continued crying: "Yuh not in pain. Yuh not dying. All of this bawling is just vanity."
At Catherine Hall in fifth grade, Safiya befriended Monique, a popular sixth-grader with long black braids. Despite her father's warnings about "friend and company" leading her astray, her loneliness drove her to seek companionship. Curious in her isolation, she craved connection with other girls, wanting to learn of their strange lives.
After winning a scholarship to St. James College, a private school founded by rich white Jamaicans, Safiya's dreadlocks made it impossible to hide. One morning, Mrs. Pinnock, the science teacher, scolded her for "walking around looking like a mop." She then noticed the henna designs on Safiya's hands, demanded she wash them off, and made a public example of her at morning assembly. Lunchtime further highlighted the social divide-the wealthy girls ate pizza, beef patties, and American snacks while Safiya unwrapped her sweaty cheese sandwich and imitation chips from a cheap nylon lunch bag.
When Safiya told her mother about the henna incident, she grew visibly upset, pacing and repeating "It's not right." She promised to speak with the principal. But to Safiya's shock, her father instructed them not to make "no big commotion" because she was on scholarship. "Keep your head down, do your work, and don't cause no trouble," he said. Her mother silently lit a spliff and left the room-her typical response when disagreeing with him. Safiya realized her father saved his fire for his family while moving "cautious and smiling in the face of Babylon."
Chapitre 5
Cracks in the Foundation: Doubt and Discovery
Living inland in a cramped rented house, the family no longer saw the sea. The tightly packed neighborhood felt stifling compared to their paradise in Bogue. Safiya's father's contradictions became increasingly apparent-he mocked neighbors as "butus" at dinner but engaged them politely outside, despising Babylon while yearning for its trappings. His moods darkened with the unpredictability of a musician's living, yet Safiya still craved the moments when he'd smile and call her "Budgie," the nickname he gave her as a baby.
One afternoon, Safiya and her siblings discovered unripe green cherries on a tree and filled their shirts with fruit. Their father returned unexpectedly, furious that they'd stripped the cherry tree bare. "The I them took every green cherry offah the tree," he thundered. "Yuh understand seh green cherry make you sick? So you think I man have money for doctor or hospital bill?" He unbuckled his new red leather belt-something he'd never done before-and wrapped it around his fist. "Fruits fi eat when dem ripe," he said. "Let every fruit ripen on Jah tree." Despite their pleas and apologies, he whipped the belt across their backs, then forced each of them to hold out their hands.
The morning after the beating, Safiya awoke to her sister Ife singing the same hymn that had comforted generations of women in their family through their own traumas. Like the caterpillar in the jar beside their bed that had hardened into a lifeless brown thorn, she couldn't imagine anything beautiful emerging from this darkness.
By ninth grade, Safiya spent mornings hiding in the library until classmates arrived. Cassandra, another scholarship student, found her there one morning. When Safiya admitted doing nothing on weekends because "My father doesn't allow me" outside, Cassandra was incredulous. "Man, Rasta strick, eeh?" she laughed. "I would just go out anyway and take the punishment later." She spoke of her own father's beatings and her absent mother, dreaming of America while Safiya watched the privileged girls glide in, discussing their weekends at members-only beaches, their paths already certain.
After three weeks of Cassandra's absence, Safiya grew concerned while her classmates seemed indifferent. When she finally pressed them about it, they revealed the truth: "Cassandra isn't coming back... she's pregnant." The word collapsed in Safiya's body like a ruined bell. Soon it was as if Cassandra had never existed, blown away to nothing in the breeze.
Lying awake one night thinking of Cassandra's fate, Safiya promised herself she would never be ordinary, would rewrite the history of women before her. When her father returned home from work, she crawled down the corridor and discovered him watching naked Black women dancing on television. Something severed between them as she realized everything he told her was a lie. He watched stone-faced, then suddenly raged, "This could be I and I daughters doing this, Rasta. My daughters will never do this." Yet he kept watching, not turning away.
Chapitre 6
The Breaking Point: Rebellion and Reckoning
At fourteen, when Safiya discovered her first menstruation, she innocently told her father. His reaction stunned her-palm raised to keep her at distance, he said, "Don't ever talk to the I about that stuff. Talk to your mother bout that." His scornful expression revealed he was indeed one of those men who viewed menstruation as unclean. She felt a river growing between them, carrying her away from the father whose body had created hers.
The distance between them hardened into bitterness. He introduced the family to Primrose, a yellow-skinned seamstress who trembled under their collective gaze. Months later, he took Safiya and Lij on a hilltop walk overlooking Montego Bay. After praising their academic achievements, he asked what they thought about Primrose becoming their "second mother." They instantly rejected the idea, standing firm: "We already have a mother."
A week later, their father burst into their room in panic-their mother was leaving. They rushed outside to find her marching away in a pink housedress with a bag of clothes. Their father fell to his knees begging. Her face, contorted with unprecedented fury, was almost unrecognizable. Watching her stand there with her humble possessions, Safiya felt the earth moving beneath them. Yet seeing her father collapse while her mother claimed her power, she felt reborn, willing to let her world burn if it meant her mother's freedom. But she also felt pity for her-standing there with nowhere to go, no money, no car, no friends to rescue her. Looking down the road to freedom, then back at her crying children, she finally clutched her stomach as if yanked by a tether, and with slumped shoulders, walked back through the gate.
After her mother's failed escape attempt, she receded into the walls like a ghost while terror lay dormant in their household. Beatings became a fact of life-unpredictable, without reason or pattern. Rather than driving them apart, the abuse united the siblings against "Him"-their father whom they stopped calling "Daddy" among themselves.
When their father was gone, the house breathed free. During his overnight hotel stays, their mother jolted back to life, rebuilding her protective cocoon around them. After breakfast, she'd press play on the CD player and they'd dance wildly to the Cranberries, screaming "This is not Hollywood!" at full volume.
One Saturday, when Safiya told her mother she didn't like the new sneakers she had brought home, her father erupted. Weeks earlier, he'd had a dream that she would grow up to reject him. Now, seeing her rejection of the shoes as confirmation, he grabbed his red belt. As the lashes tore across her back and chest, she screamed and fell to her knees. Her mother stood in the doorway and pushed her back toward her father when she tried to escape. When it was finally over, she showed her mother the welts on her back, seeking acknowledgment, but she merely said "You're so funny" and left her alone with her pain.
Chapitre 7
Finding Her Voice: Poetry as Salvation
The morning after the beating, Safiya was hollowed out. She'd lost everything-her mother had sacrificed her to her father's wrath, her brother was too small to protect her, her sisters had learned to stay silent. She withdrew into herself, becoming angry and self-destructive, until her principal, Mrs. Newnham, called her in after she'd been suspended for refusing PE and writing a defiant essay.
Mrs. Newnham showed her a defaced yearbook photo with crude comments about her appearance. When she gently asked if Safiya was okay, she finally broke down and admitted, "I hate myself, Miss." She handed Safiya a notebook, encouraging her to write her feelings. Safiya poured out her self-loathing-hating her dreadlocks, her broken tooth, her body, her poverty, her life-finding unexpected relief in expressing these thoughts she'd never voiced before.
After high school graduation, Safiya fell into a deep depression, spending her sixteenth year mostly confined to their house with no clear future path. Despite her academic achievements, she had no college prospects or guidance. Desperate for purpose, she turned a donated desktop computer into her salvation, using Encarta encyclopedia and the internet to create her own education. Late at night, she devoured entries on philosophy, astronomy, botany, and literature, finding particular resonance in Sylvia Plath's poetry.
Plath's poem "Daddy" spoke directly to Safiya's troubled relationship with her father, and her raw, personal verse showed her how poetry could channel pain into art. After discovering Plath, she built poetry as a home for her most private parts. One afternoon, her father confronted her about her apparent idleness, dismissing her writing as worthless despite its similarity to his own reggae songwriting. His cruel words demolished the beautiful world she'd been building.
That night, standing on the stony hill behind their house, she contemplated suicide with a glass shard pressed against her wrist. In her desperation, she cried out for help, and when moonlight caught the glass, poetry came: "Silver flows through my veins." She wrote feverishly, discovering that poetry was order and certainty amid chaos. A week later, she mailed three poems to the Jamaica Observer Literary Arts supplement, taking her first step toward salvation.
Weeks later, the editor of the Observer Literary Arts called, his Trinidadian accent lilting with joy as he praised her poems and asked to meet immediately. This led to her meeting with the Old Poet, who became her mentor. Under his guidance, she discussed literature and poetry, receiving his worn copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems as her first assignment. He invited her to weekly poetry workshops and private sessions at no cost.
With her mother's support, Safiya moved to her grandmother's cramped house in Spanish Town, commuting by taxi to the Old Poet's Kingston home twice weekly. There she learned meter, scansion, forms, and rhythm while he edited her work. Away from her father's control, she flourished in this freedom, writing poems by candlelight.
Chapitre 8
Breaking Free: The Journey to Self-Determination
The freedom Safiya found with the Old Poet ignited her desire to escape her father's house completely. After high school graduation, with no clear path forward and her parents unable to afford university tuition, she confessed to the Old Poet, "If I have to stay here in Jamaica, I don't believe I will survive it." Desperate for escape, she attended a model scouting event where Deiwght Peters, founder of Saint International modeling agency, spotted her and immediately signed her. Despite her father's silent disapproval, she began modeling, learning to "glide with one heeled foot in front of the other" and "walk tall in all the things that made me singular."
That summer brought newfound recognition, with her name appearing in newspapers. While her siblings pursued their own talents, she balanced modeling in Kingston with poetry sessions with the Old Poet. Her increasingly militant father watched her with reptilian quiet. When her father once drove her to a music video casting where they were told to dress "fun and young and sexy," he couldn't look at her in her short pleated skirt and tank top. Before she left the car, he delivered the crushing words: "I'm ashamed of you." Despite his rejection, she walked forward with determination, dust splattering her heels, choosing her own path over his approval.
At nineteen, Safiya finally confronted her father after he called her a "Jezebel." Something broke inside her, and she refused to back down even as he threatened her. He ordered her to leave his house, but that night, her mother found her on the veranda and made a powerful promise: "As long as I'm living, no child of mine will ever be on the street." The next morning, her mother stood firm against her father, declaring "Wherever she going, I'm going too." Unable to imagine life without her mother's labor, her father relented.
When Safiya returned from a trip with her hair relaxed, wearing lipstick and gold earrings, her father froze in disbelief. In that moment, he realized "nothing Rastafari moved through me anymore." She had "cut the throat" of the submissive woman he wanted her to be. Instead of fiery rage, her father responded with cold silence. For a full year afterward, he wouldn't speak a single word to her.
His silence spread like fog, weeks turning into months as he looked through her "like an apparition." Gradually his punishment transformed into a kind of freedom. In solitude, she wrote poems and devoured books, connecting with Lilith-the First Woman who refused to be subservient to Adam and was banished from Paradise. "I, too, was the first exile," she realized, embracing her role as outcast.
She crafted a defiant persona to provoke her father's discomfort-wearing pantsuits, red lipstick, and black nail polish. When invited to read her poem "Silver" for the Prime Minister at the National Youth Awards, she refused her father's request to contribute to the "family pot," reminding him he'd said poetry would never get her anywhere.
After years of waiting, Safiya received an acceptance to Bennington College with financial aid. After six years of confinement since high school graduation, living under her father's restrictions, she finally had her chance. She celebrated for all her past selves: "the girl who read the dictionary and encyclopedia night after night," who "birthed herself from the veiled world into possibility." After years of confinement, she would finally "study. I would write and dream and kiss and learn."
Chapitre 9
Coming Full Circle: Reconciliation and Release
At her Bennington graduation, Safiya became the first woman in her family to complete college, her mother clutching her diploma and repeating joyfully, "Mi glad bag buss!" Her mother cut off her own decades-old dreadlocks, a profound act of self-liberation after her hysterectomy made her realize "my father no longer had any hold over her."
After returning to Jamaica post-graduation, Safiya applied to MFA programs abroad, determined to escape Jamaica "for good." When she excitedly shared news of her acceptances, her father's face fell. "So the I just goin go weh and leave I and I here alone?" he asked, revealing his vulnerability. He lamented that everyone was leaving and confessed he'd imagined buying a house where they would all live together forever.
The final confrontation that led to violence began when Safiya overheard her father calling her "damn lazy" for not helping enough with packing for another move. Standing tall in his doorway, she demanded he stop "treading on my name." When he sneered that she was "nothing but a little girl," she unleashed years of resentment, taunting him about her mother leaving him. This provoked him to attack her with a pillow, punching her with such force that her teeth burst through her lip. In the aftermath, she grabbed a knife and nearly lost herself to rage while her father wielded a machete. That night, she and her siblings fled to stay with her brother Lij.
Five months after leaving Jamaica, Safiya was haunted by nightmares of her father murdering her. In Charlottesville, she struggled through her MFA program, where she was one of only two Black students. When she confronted her father on the phone, she demanded he acknowledge the truth about his violence. Though he apologized, claiming the landlady "obeahed" him, she insisted he take responsibility.
In 2018, six years after fleeing her father's machete, Safiya returned to Jamaica to read from her debut poetry collection at the Calabash Literary Festival. Her father and brother traveled three hours to see her read, bringing photo albums filled with their family's past. Her father confessed he wished he had been "cooler" and less worried about them, entrusting her with the family albums as the keeper of their stories.
Standing alone in the spotlight at Calabash, she faced a sea of darkness filled with hundreds of people. For her final poem, she addressed her father directly: "This is the first time I'm reading this poem with my father in the audience... I hope you hear me." She read a poem that spoke of his harshness, his "black machete," and ended with the plea "Father/Let me in." The audience cheered and wept when she finished. Her father pulled her into their first deep embrace in over a decade, holding her shoulders and looking at her with dampening eyes before whispering, "I'm listening. And I hear you."
At dawn in Montego Bay, Safiya walked to the beach thinking about what the Calabash night would have meant to her younger self. Swimming out toward a buoy, she turned back and witnessed a vision of her own history: her smallest self being rescued from the waves by her mother; her mother as a girl digging for food; her own grandmother watching the sea in a wind-worn dress. She saw generations of women stretching for miles and decades-"all the women who had put one foot in front of the other and pushed their hands into the dirt. Women who had survived. The women who made me." Accepting what she'd been gifted, she faced the horizon with nothing ahead but "unending waves" and "all of tomorrow's sun, all mine."
Chapitre 10
The Inheritance of Words: A Poet's Legacy
Throughout her journey, Safiya Sinclair's relationship with language remained her constant salvation. From her mother's early readings by kerosene lamp to her discovery of Sylvia Plath, from the Old Poet's mentorship to her own award-winning poetry, words became her pathway to freedom. Her memoir "How to Say Babylon" represents the culmination of this journey-a testament to the power of storytelling to heal generational wounds.
The title itself carries multiple meanings. "Babylon" in Rastafari tradition represents the oppressive systems of Western colonialism, but for Safiya, it came to represent her father's patriarchal control as well. Learning "how to say Babylon" meant finding her voice to name and therefore resist these systems of oppression. It meant reclaiming the narrative of her own life.
What makes Sinclair's story so compelling is not just her escape from religious extremism, but her nuanced portrayal of her parents. Her father, despite his controlling nature, instilled in her a rebel spirit and intellectual curiosity that ultimately gave her the tools to break free. Her mother, though unable to leave her marriage, ensured her daughters received education and opportunities she never had. Both parents, in their own ways, contributed to the poet Safiya would become.
The memoir also illuminates the complex intersection of race, class, and gender in Jamaican society. As a light-skinned scholarship student at an elite school, Safiya navigated multiple worlds-the strict Rastafari household, the wealthy white Jamaican social circle, and the literary community that ultimately became her salvation. Her story reveals how these social structures both constrained and enabled her journey.
In the end, "How to Say Babylon" is not just about escaping a controlling father or a restrictive religion. It's about a young woman discovering that she can be the author of her own story-that through poetry and prose, she can transform her suffering into art that speaks to universal human experiences. By writing her truth, Safiya Sinclair has created a powerful testament to resilience, a roadmap for others seeking to break free from their own Babylons, and a celebration of the liberating power of words.
