Say the word ‘Rastafarian’, and many people will think of Bob Marley and reggae. Beyond the catchy, unmistakeable rhythm of the songs, few people in America, including myself, know much about the Rastafari religion.
Safiya Sinclair’s arresting new memoir, How to Say Babylon, describes her childhood in a Rasta household. It opens with a wonderful description of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica in 1966 and gives the reader an immediate sense of Sinclair’s vivid and quite distinctive voice.
Settling above the gathering flock like its own heady stratosphere, a thick fog of ganja smoke hung on the air. The ministers expected some Rastas to attend, but they did not anticipate that every single Rasta on the island would pack natty to natty into Palisadoes. […] Dressed in regalia fit to meet their deity, the faithful were emblazoned in holy garb, head to toe in the roaring red, gold and green of the Ethiopian flag, the adopted symbol of Rastafari, worn by Rasta bredren in dashikis, rain-soaked tams, and military insignia, and Rasta sistren in ankle-length whites, bright scarves and tassled headwraps. […]
They were the unemployed and unemployable, the constant victims of state violence and brutality, the ones the government jailed and forcibly shaved, the ones brutally beaten by the police.
(see some great photos from Selassie’s visit to Jamaica in Life)
Sinclair grew up in extreme poverty in a small Jamaican village near the sea, in a three-bedroom house containing her own parents and siblings, her aunts and cousin, and her grandfather with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend and their three young daughters. There was no electricity or running water. But this is not at all a predictable tale of woe.
I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness, stretched out under almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea’s milky lapping. [..] Each day my joy was a new dress my mother had stitched for me by hand.
Sinclair’s father was a musician. For a few years he worked in Japan and the family lived relatively well, but when that project fell through, he returned to playing reggae (‘the same 10 Bob Marley songs’) for the tourists in the hotels. As his fortunes fell, his religiosity increased, and he turned to increasingly tight control over his family, especially his daughters. The ascetic Rasta lifestyle meant no drinking, no smoking, no meat or dairy, foods from the earth only. As his children grew, he mandated dreadlocks, then more and more strictures for the girls: no pants, only skirts and dresses made from Kente cloth, no jewellery, no makeup, no potentially ‘immoral’ friends. As Safiya grew towards puberty, the isolationist rules became even tighter.
The portrait of Sinclair’s mother is striking. Every incident in the book indicates her unusual brilliance, yet it is a study of contrasts. She was a bright student who avoided the early-pregnancy trap and read widely on her own, but had no academic options beyond school. As a mother of four, she spends her days cleaning, cooking, and feeding her children with few resources, and yet she has the mental and physical energy to teach her own and other children, to find a way to live despite constant moving, increasing isolation, and very little extended family support. She spends much of her children’s childhood quiet, subordinate to her man, in a cloud of ganja smoke, responding to his talk with ‘hmmm-mmmm’, and does not object to his physical punishment, but when the children are seriously threatened, she is quietly resolute in protecting them. Capturing the complexity of her mother must have been one of the most difficult aspects of this memoir, and it is an astonishing accomplishment.
Safiya and her siblings were all brilliant and hardworking, always at the top of their classes despite their incredibly limited resources, fiercely encouraged by their parents. (“Academic excellence, they always told us, was a way to escape a run-down life. “) At age 10, tormented by bullies, Safiya is lying miserably in bed when her mother gives her a book of poetry.
I was bewitched. [..] I sounded the lines out aloud, the rhymes growing delicious on my tongue.
It seemed that these remarkable children would explode out of poverty, but in fact the step from school to college was a huge leap. It is heartbreaking to read how Safiya graduated high school at fifteen, then languished in isolation at home for years because there was no way to pay for college and scholarships only covered part of the need. There is a glimpse of hope when she is optioned as a model, but it falls through because of her hair: “the dreads just aren’t versatile enough”. Her burgeoning independence is an engrossing journey for a reader to follow.
This review would be incomplete without mentioning the dialogue: distinctly Rasta in style, and very eye-catching.
“I and I not goin by the names Babylon gave me no more,” he told us. “The I is now called Djani.”
Sinclair provides the occasional snippet of linguistic explanation, but mostly lets it stand for itself.
“You overstand?” Rastafari rejected any English word with a negative connotation, and took every linguistic opportunity to upend Babylon’s language, so “understand” became “overstand”.
Occasionally the memoir veers into the metaphorical, as when she sees the vision of a woman in white:
I watched this vision of my gray self glide down the hill toward me, cowed and voiceless in that long, white dress. Her head was bowed, her dreadlocks wrapped in a white scarf atop her head, walking silently under the gaze of a Rastaman. [..] She cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man, bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world who cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man.
Throughout the book there are startlingly vivid descriptions that made me pause and re-read, despite the urgency to know what happened next.
I studied the sated quiet of my mother’s face as she listened.
The humidity bloomed thick in our lamb’s-wool hair.
[Cassandra, a fellow student who got pregnant] hadn’t been as wily as I thought she was, hadn’t snipped or retwisted those threads that authored the downfall of girls like her. Girls like us.
clutching my portfolio in the sterile Wilhelmina Models office, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows and glass tables with all my glass hopes
The delicate dance of disremembering the bruise from the night before
Outdreaming the confines of our small world
This memoir is enlightening about the history of Rastafari, the legacy of colonialism, and the relentless subjugation of poverty, but along with all that, it is a brutally honest, rich, lyrical and very unusual personal history.
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