Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon is a memoir that has been called “lushly observed and keenly reflective” by the Washington Post and very warmly reviewed elsewhere. It tracks the author’s childhood in Jamaica, where she was raised by a strict Rastafai father, the potential escape that a nascent career in modeling might have offered her, and the foreclosed possibility when her father forbade her from cutting her dreadlocks. It is a coming-of-age story, but as Sinclair’s fellow Jamaican writer, Patsy author Nicole Dennis-Benn, says in this interview, it is also an invitation to talk about the things that make that country both an exceptional and a challenging place in which to be a young person. Here, the two writers discuss the new book.
NDB: Esther, your mom, is one of the strongest women I ve ever encountered in a book. What was it like for you to write about her?
SS: My mom has a different way of showing strength than I do. I ve always been the outspoken daughter, the rebellious one. She was more patient, like the calming tides in the household. Growing up, I saw that as a weakness most of the time. But writing this book made me fully appreciate that she was the one who allowed me to leave the country and study poetry, the one who found some way to allow me to pursue modeling. In many ways this book couldn t have been written without her. I wouldn t even be a writer without her.
NDB: How to Say Babylon is a very forgiving book to who we are as a people, to our postcolonial scars. You call the book a love letter to Jamaica.
SS: I think most people would be surprised to know that Jamaicans didn t gain our independence until 1962. For a long time, we had no say in our own national character, our own cultural uplifting. It was important for me to dive into that. My parents are a direct representation of the first generation who were born after our independence; how their own lives and livelihoods were shaped by colonialism, and then by independence, ultimately shaped the choices and decisions that they made to turn to Rastafari, which then ultimately shaped my life.
Both of my parents were born in 1962, right in the throes of Jamaica s rebellion. For Jamaican women, some of the old patriarchal ideas left over from the days of colonialism still persist. This idea that girls should be silent and do as they are told. There were all these rules about what a lady should look like, what she should wear, how she should act when she leaves the house. How she must enjoy handling household duties. All of this is seen as part of a woman s virtue. This idea that if a woman can t cook or clean then something is ruined in her still persists in Jamaica.
I was also thinking about the tourist industry. Regular Jamaicans, particularly people like my siblings and me–who grew up in Montego Bay, which is essentially a tourist center–lived side by side with hotels that were towering over our village, hotels that we were forbidden to go to, beaches that we were forbidden to go to. We would be on the way to school and see tourists in bikinis on the street. This kind of dual existence was also something I wanted to inspect. The first-world idea of paradise in Jamaica comes with a price for average Jamaicans. There are parts of our island that still don t belong to us. It’s a kind of new colonialism where the hotels and the beaches and the beauty of our homeland belong to foreign investors and hoteliers.
NDB: You also delve deep into issues of the sexualization of girls and women in Jamaica. In the US there’s the #MeToo movement, where people are held accountable for their actions, whereas in Jamaica it’s like, Oh, it happened, but hush! hush!
SS: Yes, in Jamaica we have this idea of Keep your family secrets to yourself and also Keep your nation’s secrets to yourself. To project an idea of perfection. I think it s a latent part of being a postcolonial nation. We have parental and familial violence, state and government violence, and colonial violence. They re all linked. I also think of the patriarchal violence inherent in the idea that, Oh, this is just how men are, and we, as women, have to accept and be quiet about it. The idea is that saying anything will harm you more than it will harm him. It s been passed on from generation to generation.
I think of that moment when I told my mother what had happened to me with the Old Poet at the party and how it made me so uncomfortable–and she had this faraway look, then she just swatted it away. “Don t pay that no mind. That s just how men are.” In hindsight, I know she said that to try to protect herself, and in some kind of strange way to try to protect me, too. And I know now that she had memories of her own moments of sexual assault. For a long time, I didn’t talk about it. Once I processed it, though, I said, This isn’t okay. I feel so angry and disgusted by this. I didn t want to pass that hurt down to anybody else, and I didn t want to be silent about it anymore. I had to write about it because it s not only about me– it s about who comes next. I don t want anybody who comes after us to ever feel like they have to be silent about these things.
NDB: Thank you so much for writing that. It s empowering, and hopefully it will inspire a lot of people to process their own experiences. Your Auntie Audrey was one of my favorite characters. We re talking about female empowerment, and here there’s a woman in your family who was speaking up all the time. She wore makeup, she wore her batty rider shorts. All these Babylonian things that you were told to stay away from.
SS: I love Auntie Audrey. She was definitely a vital part of my evolution into the woman and the writer I became. She was my first example of what an outspoken woman could be–completely free in her choices, her thinking, her clothing, what she ate. She was so vibrant. She filled the room with laughter. Ever since I was young she has been kind of like my North Star. I really admire Auntie Audrey for her wildfire independence! How unabashedly herself she is when she walks through the world. Late in the book, there s a crucial chapter where I see her for the first time after not seeing her for ages–witnessing how she interacts with her husband, how she disagrees with him, and how she stands up for me. I was like, Wow, this is what it can be like.
NDB: I want to shift gears a bit to talk about the meaning of hair. In your family, and the Rastafari culture you come from, dreadlocks have meaning. I have dreadlocks, but my dreadlocks are just me embracing my Blackness, embracing my natural hair.
SS: The question of my hair has been such a fraught one from the day I was born. There were times where it felt like it overtook everything in my life. Every day it was something that I had to think about. As you say, the Rastafari wear their hair in dreadlocks–it’s not a choice for them. For my siblings and me, it was a decree that came down from my parents. For Rastafari, hair signifies their strength, their purity, their reverence. It s a sacred marker of their devotion to Jah, who is, as you know, the Godhead figure of Rastafari, rooted in the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie. Wearing dreadlocks is similar to other religions in which devotees wear a habit or a turban or any kind of religious garb, a signifier to outsiders that you’re faithful to this particular religion. Inside my household, dreadlocks were supposed to signal my virtue, holiness, and purity, but once I stepped outside, it was the thing that put an X on my back, a mark for taunting and prejudice. My teachers treated me differently because of my dreadlocks–they were horrible to me. The students at my school mocked my siblings and me because of our dreadlocks. When I went out on the street, men called after my sisters and me, “Empress! Empress!” After I had my hair locked, it was the first time I felt doubt and shame. Instead of walking tall, I walked a little bit smaller every time I left the house.
On the flip side, when I was inside the house, it became this thing that bound me to my father and the other Rasta bredren, the thing that kept me under his control. When I was nineteen, I decided that I wanted to determine for myself how I wore my hair, who I wanted to be, whether I even accepted any of these Rastafari principles. And so, I chose to cut my dreadlocks. My father didn t speak to me after that. He looked right through me, like I was a ghost. I didn t exist to him. I d become Babylon.
NDB: That scene of you cutting your hair was one of my favorites. I wept. It was so visceral how you described the experience–ceremonial and reverent. I could feel that heavy load coming off of your shoulders. On another note, you almost became not Safiya, the poet, the writer, the memoirist that I love, but Safiya, the supermodel of Jamaica. That was a difficult scene to read—that you gave up this modeling dream, which seemed to be right there in your grasp. You’re sitting with the modeling agents and you had to say, “Well, I can t cut my locks,” and that was the end of it.
SS: It was so painful. We were poor. And for a lot of Jamaicans, especially if we re not born privileged or to financial stable parents, we don’t always see a pathway to a future outside of that poverty. People from backgrounds like mine are often looking for a way to break that cycle, to get their families out of poverty, to have the freedom to travel and dream and become whoever you want to be, to achieve your full potential. I was a teenager. I was in the modeling office, and all my hopes and dreams were hanging there, and the agent said, “Can you cut the dreads?” She said it so flippantly, because to her it should be no big deal, right? Most people think it s just a hairstyle. And then I asked my father, and he said, “Absolutely not!” I just watched that dream blow away in the wind. It was crushing. I had to close that chapter of my life.
NDB: I felt that heartbreak. There was also that painful scene of your front tooth falling out while playing with your brother. You couldn t even smile for a long time, and so you just sort of disappeared. Readers see a young girl coming of age, but then curling into herself, like a flower blooming but also withering at the same time.
SS: For many of us who were born in the Caribbean, our lives and our trajectories are so often not a straight line. There are many ups and downs that we have to get used to, which seems to be the nature of living in a “developing country,” still coming out of the grip of colonialism. It would have been wonderful if I could have written a narrative that was one upward arc. But it didn t happen that way, and for a lot of us in Jamaica it doesn t happen that way.
This is why I wanted to begin the book with this moment of looking at the future version of myself, that possible shadow self. That ghost of a woman who s compliant and obedient, who has no wants or dreams, who is only the wife of a Rasta bredren with her head bowed, her only purpose to have children and tend the house, to never bloom. I wanted to begin there, where I m looking at this alternate future. And saying that I knew I had to cut her throat, I had to cut her down to go where I was going. And then eventually to show that it was through poetry that she first emerged, this woman that I was slowly becoming. Through poetry I found my voice. Through poetry I found that there was worth in my life, and value in what I had to say.
NDB: I, too, feel like through writing I found my voice, and that writing saved me. I wasn t Rastafari, but I grew up in that same kind of situation of silence and shame. I understand that there are the ugly sides of Rastafari, but there are also the beautiful sides. In the last half of the book, when you’re in the US, you see something through your father s eyes and realize, Oh, that s what he meant. You show all of the complexities and layers.
SS: It was interesting. When I came to the US, as a Black woman—and I talk about this a lot—I had to think about my Blackness for the first time in a different way than we had to think about it in Jamaica, where we re a primarily Black country. In Jamaica our town squares celebrate the runaway slaves, and we celebrate emancipation. There’s no question about what monuments we have, who our heroes are. And so, particularly coming to a place like Charlottesville, VA–where, at the time when I was there, they still had a Robert E. Lee statue up in the square–I was like, Wow! Where have I come to? A lot of the time I felt isolated or exoticized. But the thing that Rastafari gave me, and that my father instilled in me and my siblings, was this kind of Pan-African pride. That pride in my Blackness is fundamental to who I am, and it has been crucial to who I am since I could speak. That was my daily lesson—to be proud to be Black. And so when I came to America, I always walked tall. Even though others might have felt like, Oh, who does she think she is? I never once felt that I needed to cower or bow my head. I was always unapologetically proud of who I was, and of my Blackness. Fundamentally, that is the most important thing that I take away from Rastafari–this strength in my Blackness, and in who I am. Babylon, never go frighten me.
NDB: We re in 2023 now and women are still fighting for our power, our voices, our bodily autonomy. Your book helps us open up our minds, our eyes—especially Caribbean women. These kinds of conversations are just beginning in Jamaica. What you are presenting to us is the freedom to talk about these matters openly.
SS: I wrote this book for Jamaican women, Caribbean women, Black women, and for women everywhere who might feel like their voices aren t heard or their voices are suppressed, or their bodies are being controlled, or they live under repressive ideals. I hope they can feel seen in this book. If, in any way—through my journey of thinking through patriarchal repression, of coming to my own voice and liberation and autonomy—if anybody can feel even a little bit seen, and know that they, too, have the power to speak, and that what they have to say is important, then I m grateful that I had the chance to share my story.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.