Safiya Sinclair’s mother and father grew up as lost souls in Jamaica, dealing with mistreatment, abuse and abandonment – then they found Rastafarianism and each other.
This could have been a beautiful story.
But as Sinclair portrays her own childhood in “How to Say Babylon,” her father, Howard, a talented reggae musician whose record deal went sour, became bitter, controlling and even violent. Sinclair and her siblings, especially she and her sisters, were increasingly subjugated and isolated, even as their mother tried to find ways to nurture them.
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While the memoir is deeply personal, Sinclair, a Whiting Award-winning poet, blends the racial and social history and geography of Jamaica and the Rastafari with the turbulence of her childhood and her discovery of her own voice through poetry.
She spoke recently by video from her home in Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Q. You’ve written about your family and your trauma in your poetry, but a memoir is different. What made you willing to go back and relive everything you went through in such detail?
I was thinking first that this might be cathartic, a way to alchemize the chaos and hurt, a mode for a hopeful change in my family, breaking the cycles of trauma.
I’m also writing this for younger girls in that same place of isolation and doubt and questioning themselves because we live continually in this patriarchal system that puts these confines on our bodies and our autonomy.
Also, there was so much to be said about Jamaica because people in the U.S. just don’t know about it. I’ve had so many conversations with people who are so excited to tell me they had dreadlocks in college and loved Bob Marley at one time. I thought maybe there was a way to expand the knowledge people have about Rastafari culture and Jamaican history and the way they’re intertwined.
Q. What was it like to sit down and write it?
I didn’t know what I was in for. While writing, I was heading toward a catharsis but it meant reliving the pain in the hope that at the end it would evaporate into something else — a sense of release, of processing what happened.
There were many times it was difficult sticking with a scene and giving the details because I had to dive into the memory and stay there so the reader would feel immersed in my experiences. I wanted the text to feel skin-close and I wanted the reader to feel breath caught.
Q. How did writing the book change the way you look at your life and your relationships?
The thing that changed most is my relationship with my father and how I think about him. He was this grand authoritarian figure who loomed so large; he never humanized himself to us when we were growing up.
I had to think about his trauma and his wounds — his childhood and why he came to Rastafari — in a way I never had before.
If I had begun the book when I first started thinking about it ten years ago, I would have written a different book. I never thought of myself as a forgiving person but writing this book, I learned to be more forgiving and patient, to give more grace.
Q. Near the end your father says, “I’m listening and I hear you.” He wasn’t ready to go there ten years ago so maybe you couldn’t have been forgiving then because of his behavior.
I probably wouldn’t have even finished writing the book if that hadn’t happened. It was after he said that and made these gestures of change and took steps to apologize that I felt I could start writing the book. Those were the first steps to healing; it’s not perfect but we’re on the road. Without that, it wouldn’t have been the same book and I wouldn’t have had the same capacity for forgiveness.
Q. You write about understanding your mother quite differently, too. Back then, you seemed more angry and incredulous that she’d stay in a relationship with someone who mistreated her children so badly.
I learned to see and appreciate her in new ways while writing. When I was a teenager, it was, “Why did she do this?” or “Why didn’t she do that?” With time, and a little more wisdom I can see she was always strong in her own ways and always doing things to make our world so much larger — we weren’t allowed to have friends or leave the house but our mother gave us this love of books and encouraged my writing and somehow got my father’s approval to let me try modeling. I never thought about her sacrifices or how she made these things happen until I was writing the book and I saw her strength and how expansive she made our world.
Q. Your father’s religious beliefs are harshly misogynistic but they seem in keeping with extremists in other faiths.
These extremist ideas, no matter where they are geographically or how new or old the religions are, tend toward the control of women’s bodies and thoughts. For these men to maintain power somebody has to be diminished. The chains and shackles run deep and strong in the patriarchy, not just in Rastafari.
Q. Did writing the book change your poetry?
It pushed me toward being less narrative. I started craving to go back to the kind of poetic incantation, the intoxication of the lyrical. I feel renewed and restored.
Also, I had to capture the way my father speaks because Rastafari have their own vernacular, which is not something I’ve explored in my poetry before but now it has ignited my poet’s mind. I’m thinking about the anti-colonial linguistics — my father says “overstand” instead of “understand” and the idea is about turning the English language on its head as an act of rebellion. So I’m calling it Rasta-poetic and thinking about what I can do with that framework.
Q. You’ve lived in America for years. What about Jamaica stays within you?
When I say home, I mean Jamaica. I go back several times a year. When I think about it, it’s the sea village of White House, where I was born. I have all these dreams about the sea, especially now that I’m living in the desert in Arizona. In all of my poems, there’s not one line that doesn’t begin with the heartbeat of the sea behind it.
