Review: How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

Bob Marley's dancing and singing Could You Be Loved was a phenomenon and perhaps the only gateway for many into the life of a Rastafari. She writes about the narrative structure of the novel: “I pull and pull this thread of violence back through the generations of my family, through my marked bloodline, and beyond them, back to Jamaica’s first colonial whip, back to the last Taíno dying of Columbus’ smallpox, back to the first colonizer who put a shackle on a Black woman’s neck, back to the first woman who said “No.” Bob Marley was perhaps the only gateway for many into the life of a Rastafari How To Say Babylon is also a Künstlerroman of an artist realising her potential. It was quite a burden and much of that was wrapped up in hair, which had its own weight as a young Rastafari woman: “Hair of my binding, hair of my unbeautiful wanting, hair of his bitter words, hair of the cruel world, hair roping me to my father’s belt, hair wrestling the taunts of baldheads in the street…” Safiya’s dreadlocks made her hypervisible, much to her dismay. I might have left Rastafari behind, but I always carried with me the indelible fire of its rebellion.” Author Safiya Sinclair There’s so much I didn’t know about Jamaica until I read this book. Safiya talks about an “unspoken understanding of loss in Jamaica where everything comes with a rude bargain – that being citizens of a ‘developing nation’, we’re already expecting to live a secondhand life.” Apart from the use of anticolonial language and oral history, the book also addresses the question of a woman’s interiority.