Book Review: “How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir”

Across the African diaspora, there are texts—literary and otherwise—sifting through histories and revealing the violent price of girlhood. Released in 2023, Safiya Sinclair’s memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” offers her recollections about coming of age as a girl child in a Rastafarian household. Sinclair shares her own family history alongside the political and religious histories of Jamaica. Between the ongoing domination of the island—by the monied and powerful—and the religious persecution of Rastafarians by the government, we find the story of a woman who learned at a young age that her life, as she wished to live it, came at a cost.

How to Say Babylon was the last book I read in 2023, and its lyricism and candor compelled me. Sinclair opens up her family history, detailing the sexual violence suffered by her elders and the neglect imposed on her mother, and shares the abuse she suffered at school, at home, and in literary spaces. It’s clear that because of her age, Blackness, girlhood, and her family’s commitment to being Rastafari, Sinclair is isolated.

There are few moments where we, the audience—the witnesses—aren’t staring down the realities of colonialism, imperialism, child abuse, or sexual coercion. We are ushered into an intimate story of Black girlhood framed by colonial domination and religious persecution. Sinclair writes, “These were the nation’s downpressed and downtrodden” early in the memoir to make clear that Rastafari people are targets of ongoing discrimination while drawing us deeper into understanding what she, and others, face in Rastafari homes. For those of us who are witnessing these recollections while holding stories of our own survival, this memoir may stir up our own memories of terror. 

Among the recollections of abuse is Sinclair’s complementary experience of self-soothing, discovery, and building a life on her terms. She credits her mother, a community educator who taught children across Jamaica, instilling lessons about literature and media. From a young age, Sinclair studied vocabulary and enjoyed reading about current events from newspapers. Her curiosity quickly turned into mastery as she grew her skills. The memoir explores the evolution of Sinclair’s scholarship as she dutifully cultivated it with her mother’s support and the resources of predominantly white schools. 

Sinclair’s memoir adds to an ever-growing collection of Black writing that shares family histories and coming-of-age stories to help us, a larger community, make sense of our conditions. She joins Bessie Head, Maya Angelou, and Jesmyn Ward in illuminating the truth of Black girlhood while simultaneously acknowledging the violence(s) that shape Black life all around the world. Sinclair, like her predecessors in this tradition of self-recollection, makes sense of her life alongside a thorough assessment of the violent conditions that makes her abuse possible. 

Nature is integral to Sinclair’s retellings. Frequently, she describes foliage and other features of the different landscapes her family calls home throughout the island. Readers familiar with the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker will find similarities in how Sinclair brings her environment into the frame of her storytelling. In many ways, nature and her mother’s compassion are Sinclair’s safe havens for much of the memoir. In one chapter Sinclair writes, “When she wasn’t reading poetry or swimming, she was smoking, walking with yogis who subsisted on sunlight alone, plastering a brown mixture of egg yolk and honey on her head, a concoction to help soak up the sun she was always chasing.” She invites us into her own memories and her mother’s, exploring her mother’s garden and sharing this journey with us. 

When Sinclair describes her relationship with water, we learn she is descended from fishermen. Sinclair understands that she, like her mother and her grandmother, is born along a precious coast—precious in its spiritual significance and precious in its material dividends. Sinclair writes, “Our history was the sea, my mother told me, so I could never be lost here” while clarifying that private resorts and corporations own most of the Jamaican coastline. 

The coast, where Black fishermen once fished and Black people swam, was almost entirely inaccessible to native Jamaicans. Here, the audience contends with how pleasure—vacations, weddings, and luxury—for tourists thrives because of the subjugation of native populations. We are reminded that glamour comes at a cost to those who work the land, steward nature, and die fighting against corporations. The balance Sinclair strikes between personal narrative and her role as a witness of Jamaican history works well throughout the text. Neither perspective suffers for the inclusion of the other. 

Reading the memoir, we get to know the writers who shaped her literary canon as a teenager. In this way, the book offers us intertextuality. We get to read about the life of Sinclair, a writer, while learning about other distinguished women writers along the way. While reflecting on her development as an artist, Sinclair points directly to the works of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. From these moments, we learn that Sinclair is an avid reader of women who grapple with their sorrow and the haunting condition of humanity. The link is set between Sinclair and the gothic poets whose work she devours. 

There’s no way to finish this text without contending with the stakes of Black childhood. For most of the text, Sinclair wades through her childhood and the stories of children around her. Even in her rage about her own childhood, Sinclair is still careful to recognize the constraints of her parents’ childhoods that led them to their partnership and their approach to caregiving. When reflecting on her mother’s girlhood she says plainly, “Like many young women born into poverty, the scarcity of her choices made her easy prey.” 

Sinclair’s writing also causes us to reflect on when childhood ends and adulthood begins. As she grows older, she is not saved from the terror of childhood vulnerability and the feeling of powerlessness because the people she loves are still vulnerable to patriarchal violence. Age has not shielded her from heartbreak. Once she reaches adulthood (while some consider this salvation), she struggles to shield her siblings—her younger brother and two younger sisters— from their own suffering. And still, beyond Sinclair’s immediate family, there are moments where she recalls how children around her—neighbors and old classmates, all Black children—disappeared. 
How to Say Babylon is compelling because it does not turn away from the horror of Black childhood. Sinclair strips childhood of the narrative of innocence often thrust upon it and delves deep into strife. Readers searching for evocative nonfiction about Black childhood, Black girlhood, and the history of Rastafarians in Jamaica will be captivated by this memoir. Sinclair is candid about the cost of enduring the terrors of structural violence and the intimate violence that stares children down at home, on the streets, and in schoolhouses constructed in the image of white patriarchal violence.