Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the year, a Washington Post Top 10 Book of 2023, a TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2023, one of The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, and one of President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023. How to Say Babylon was also named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and Barnes & Noble, among others, and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine.
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Beyond the crisp blue shores, the all-inclusive resort with devoted and placidly smiling staff, beyond the tourist box braids with tiny color beads swinging at the end of your hair, the tropical breeze licking at your golden tanned skin, and beyond the dancehall music that swings your body in new and unusual directions, there’s another side of Jamaica. In Safiya Sinclair’s memoir, How to Say Babylon, she introduces us to the other side of paradise where a nation and its citizens economically and culturally stagger to become independent after years of British colonization. For most of her life, Safiya and her Rastafarian family contentedly dwelled on the other side, rejecting the gaze and intrusion of Babylon. But as she came of age and started wrestling with Rastafarian culture in which women and girls were “supposed to be silent, obedient, and compliant, not voicing their opinions,” Safiya knew she had to carve out her own position in life. She had to venture on the other side. How to Say Babylon is a coming-of-age memoir of a nation, a family, and Safiya. She became a poet and her poetry became her tool of liberation. Ultimately, leading her to craft a life away from her domineering father, and the patriarchal value system of Rastafari.
Leslie-Ann Murray: Safiya, thank you so much for this gorgeous, lyrical, and beautiful memoir. I underlined many descriptions and phrases to read them independently of the book, just to savor and partake in the poetry. Also, your memoir allowed me to reminisce about my childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, and my fight against my culture’s patriarchal norms to find my voice and identity.
Safiya Sinclair: It’s nice to have readers who’ve lived similar lives, not necessarily being Rastafari, but who have lived in some sort of fundamental religion share their stories with me. My book is a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica with my militant father. As I grew older, I began to question some of the rules of Rastafari, which were quite repressive to young girls and women. It restricted what we could wear, how we could think, and what we could do. I began to rebel against these rules as I got older. The book is also about my journey to becoming a poet and how that helped me find my voice and figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be outside the confines of Rastafari teachings.
LAM: How To Say Babylon centers around your family and how your father used his bellicose Rastafarian beliefs to imprison and disempower everyone in the household, but especially your mother and sisters. But your memoir also explores the ramifications of colonization, American neoliberalism, and thwarted dreams these systems have invoked on individuals and their communities.
SS: The tourism industry and the hotels are the new colonialism in Jamaica. They own most of our beaches and our seaside. Being born at the seaside and growing up there, I saw three Jamaicas. There was one for the rich and upper class, one for the tourists, and another one for the rest of us. I wanted to explore this in the book and how it affected my family. My father, of course, is a musician, and to keep our family going, he had to play music in the hotels. He had this very strained relationship with the hotel industry that he saw as Babylon, which is the Rastafari term for the oppressive systems and ideology of the western world, rooted in imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. But he had to go there and play his music to provide for our family. There are a lot of nuances and a lot of complexities that inevitably occur in any nation, in any family, in any life, and I wanted to touch on all of these through the lens of thinking about, as you say, colonialism and American imperialism.
LAM: Your memoir is the first of its kind to explore and expose the ramifications of growing up Rastafarian in Jamaica. We learn about the symbiotic relationship between a newly independent nation, this impact on its citizenry, and about Rastafarianism beyond the touristic gaze.
SS: Jamaica is an island that was under British colonial rule until 1962, which was the same year my parents were born. They were born in the year of Jamaica’s independence. But I think for the next few decades after that, Jamaica had to figure out what kind of nation it was going to be outside of its colonizer. I think a lot of Jamaicans at that time were kind of at this crossroads of where to go, and who to be. My parents, of course, adopted the revolutionary idea of an independent and unified Black nation and found hope in Rastafari, which upheld all of these anti-colonial ideals. I wanted to provide a historical context and then within that, I wanted to write about what it’s like growing up in Jamaica as a young girl in Rastafari. When people think about Rastafari, they only think about the men. I don’t think anyone imagines a woman when they think of Rastafari, and it was important to paint a portrait of what a Rasta woman’s life is like, and what a young Rasta girl’s life is like. I wanted to expand the global view of Rastafari and its intersection with womanhood.
LAM: While so many folks, especially young people in the West, lean into Rasta culture for its irie vibes, its acceptance of weed, and its naturalistic living, they can pick and choose what aspect of Rastafarian culture they want to adopt and leave, as opposed to someone who was brought up inside of that culture. What do you choose now as an adult who has come into your own? What do you push away?
SS: Well, not to spoil the book, but I pushed all of it away. Almost all of it. As you say, it’s different growing up inside of it, rather than just being on the outside and admiring it. Growing up, it was pretty clear that there was a system of who was in power and who was not—women and girls were at the bottom of the pile and were treated that way. People always want to know my relationship with religion now. “I have none,” I say. But that’s not quite true. I’m a poet and poetry is my own kind of prayer, my own small divination of the world, and I make my way through the world and understand most of my experiences through poetry, so that’s my spirituality. I keep the good things from Rastafarinsm, the things that you just talked about, this idea of Black pride. I was never afraid to walk tall in my Blackness from the moment I touched U.S. soil. There’s a line in the book where I said, “I would always walk taller because I’m a daughter of Rastafari, Babylon could never frighten a daughter like me.”
LAM: You dispel the myths and truths about growing up Rastafarian, shedding light on its paternalistic and domineering value system towards women and girls. Not to mention that your memoir is contributing to the Caribbean feminist canon.
SS: I know that I’m a womanist; I’ve always been a womanist, even when I was getting in trouble for it at home. The first time I said the word feminist to my father, he said, “That’s Babylon crap.” He was so mad that I’d been brainwashed by Babylon, by even saying the word. But I always classified myself as a womanist, and I’ve always tried to impart those ideas and thoughts in the work that I do. There was no other way to write the book than to delve into the history of the women who came before me, and those who made the sacrifices that were expected of them, so I could have my life. In many ways, my book is a tribute to Caribbean women, Black women, Jamaican women, and the women in my family. They came before me and made space for me. A large part of my writing the book revolves around this idea of futurity. I love Audre Lorde’s quote about poetry being a bridge across our fears of the unknown into a better future. So the book wasn’t just writing about my history or writing about family wounds or trauma; I’d hoped that in writing the book, any young girl who comes next in my family would not have to walk through the same fire I walked through.
LAM: I think it’s important to break the cycle, and I love that this is what the book is attempting to do, but in doing so, you’re exposing your life and your family. How do you deal with people who now feel they have access to you without truly knowing you?
SS: Oh girl. It’s interesting when I get this question because I’m a poet who has always been exposing myself on the page, so to speak. For me, the interior landscape of my experiences has always been the paint that I’m using on the canvas. And so it’s not an unfamiliar mode of expression for me. But now it feels different because it’s in prose. A lot of the time people don’t know what to do with poetry. Is it real? Is it not real? Is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? But in prose, in a memoir, I had to go deeper into a lot of the things that happened and not just use a metaphor and jump away from the thing that happened. I had to stay there. I had to write a scene, I had to remember the dialogue. I had to flesh out my family as people who feel skin-close on the page. There’s a lot of vulnerability in that, particularly in portraying my family. I’m fine with being open about myself; I’ll throw myself on the firepit, but I’m very protective of my family. I wanted to be very tender and deliberate about the way that I wrote about them in the book, so that my love for them would be very apparent to whoever read it, and readers would know that I wouldn’t be here without my family, without my siblings, without my mom. I wanted to make sure that when my family opened the book, they would see themselves there and they would feel the love I have for them and see this book as a tribute to them.
LAM: In your memoir and this interview, you’ve continued to mention the importance of finding and owning your truth. We are living in such a post-truth world in terms of our politics and culture, but when I interview writers, they always talk about the importance of sticking to the truth. Why is the truth important to you as a writer, especially with your memoir?
SS: Oh, why wouldn’t it be? John Keats said that truth and beauty are all we have in this world. What more is there? If we don’t write while approaching some sort of truth or while saying something honest about our experiences of the world, what else do we have as human beings? That’s just what I believe as a poet. I am trying to approach and share my experience of the world with someone else with as much vulnerability as I can, and as closely as I can through imagery, metaphor, and expressions of beauty in the ordinary, and all of that amounts to truth.
LAM: Finally, when I read your book, I kept thinking about Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. In the work, she said “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” How are you creating dangerously?
SS: I mean, I don’t necessarily think about doing what I do as dangerous. But I do think about the ways that I can disrupt the systems that have been laid out for us. I’m always thinking about this idea of disruption and yeah, I think that’s creating dangerously. I think a lot about how in the tropics, nothing grows politely, not even our very landscape. It’s not neat. It’s not tidy. The trees are growing into each other. We have vines that are bursting and blooming everywhere. We’ve got lizards and ants inside the house and outside the house. Everything kind of exists in this very unruly harmony that is a kind of disruption in this western idea of order. I look at the landscape of Jamaica, the Caribbean as a whole, as something that I draw from that I can mirror in my work. And then I think of the body, especially the female body, as a mirror to that unruly landscape, that impolite landscape. I write from that idea of the impolite body and think about ways I can draw that disruption, that very feminine danger, across the page.
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Leslie-Ann Murray is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. She also produces a monthly newsletter, Come Get Your Diversity. Leslie-Ann is working on her first novel, This Has Made Us Beautiful. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, Ploughshares, Brittle Paper, Obsidian Literary Magazine, and Salamander Literary Magazine. Lastly, Leslie-Ann is a cyclist, an aunty, and a smoothie enthusiast.