How to Say Babylon | Safiya Sinclair

This is a memoir that doesn't mince words. It burns with fear and desire for freedom and I found it to be incredibly powerful. Safiya Sinclair is Jamaican and grew up in a strict Rastafarian family, led by her father whose rage and righteousness burns on the page and through the family. His demands to control and protect his family, especially his daughters, from the outside world are extreme, and Sinclair's descriptions and experiences, harrowing. Sinclair is a poet, and her writing is powerful, lyrical, especially describing her homeland. It's clear that she loves Jamaica with all her heart, and even with everything that happened, she loves her father.

Alongside the story of her father is her mother, who quietly introduces Safiya and her siblings to the arts and provides some balance. She's not the only one to recognize Safiya's brilliance. In what will become a long list of accomplishments, Safiya wins a scholarship to a private school that takes her, for the first time, in contact with whites. She is selected to work with a famed poet of Jamaica who teaches her about poetry, and earns scholarships to American universities.

Sinclair describes how her family functioned to maintain itself with their very volatile father, checking how "the weather" was in the house. Sinclair's father is also an artist, a musician, who for a time was a member of a very popular group that had a contract with a Japanese recording studio. So you can see where her creativity comes from.

The end of the story is quiet and what was interesting to me is that Safiya took a good share of power from her father that ultimately seems to be helping them reconcile. Sinclair is now 40, living in the United States and an Associate Professor at Arizona State. I was left wanting to know a bit more about her siblings and especially her mother, all of whom left Jamaica to build lives elsewhere. But this is Safiya's story, not theirs, so it makes sense that it stops where it does.