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I had mentioned in a recent column that I was hesitant to review Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, because I was afraid I would gush too much.
My friend, Patrick, had quickly messaged me to object. He wanted to read my full response, he said. “Write the thing, in two parts if necessary.” He suggested I sit on it for a couple of weeks.
Patrick is a man of few words, but they are precious and sound. I decided to take the leap after he shared that he’d bought copies for friends, just as I had done.
Yet, I had to reflect on why I was reluctant. It wasn’t simply the idea of being too effusive. It had more to do with the way it had messed with my head. I didn’t think I could get into it without delving into the cauldron of connections it had unearthed.
Patrick was right, as he usually is. I should take it in two parts because I cannot extricate myself from the book I read, and the curdled memories it exposed. And as I always do when I venture into personal territory, I ask myself, are these common enough experiences that would make them of public interest, or public good?
Obviously, I was persuaded, so bear with me as I navigate this powerful memoir and slip back and forth.
First, a bit on the writer. Sinclair was born in 1984 in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She’s just turned 41.
Her first poetry collection, Cannibal (2016), won a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.
In 2024, she won the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for How to Say Babylon. It was not an easy read. In fact, it left me with bruises every few pages.
Why did it have such an impact? Her story is about her life in Jamaica, growing up rigidly within the Rastafari faith.
She was persecuted at school by students and teachers. Bullying at its cruellest. Her father, disfigured by his own issues with abandonment, embraced his faith with a dread righteousness that draped a stifling shroud over the household.
Her mother, facing her own history of abuse and neglect, found her internal salvation through books. She taught Safiya to find freedom in the ideas and beauty of words. This, she said, was her saviour.
What had transfixed me were the conflicts, especially with her father and the spiritual beliefs he was forcing down her throat. The parenting, in a nutshell.
I had resolved to give it some time, but then it occurred to me that Father’s Day was approaching and it might be an opportune moment to take the plunge.
For a few years, I’ve been grappling with conflicting ideas about how to approach the memoir I want to write. I have settled on a rough structure, but I did not know how to address the difficult relationships I’ve had with my parents.
I could not tiptoe around it, nor could I get into all the details. But Safiya’s approach settled it.
In the first half of his life, my father was a selfish, creepy, domineering man. He beat my mother regularly; he was a notorious womaniser; he was a horrible father.
He left us in my mother’s care when I was nine (he did not speak to me for more than two years until I was about 12), and he set up a new life with the wife of his “best friend”.
I cannot say that he supported us financially—if he did, it was a pittance, and there were four of us, but he felt he had the right to impose laws on our household from his distance.
In the later part of his life, he became a Jehovah’s Witness and found a new way to stoke his ego by being regarded as a senior member of the congregation.
Yet, he had mellowed, and he was easier to be around. Still, as much as I could see the difference, I could not avoid the bouts of memory that were triggered by simple things.
Things erupted one time, mainly by him declaring to a gathering that he had raised his children and was proud of them. My mother was in that audience, and I was incensed at his gall.
Afterwards, I told him that it was not right to lay claim to that role as it was my mother who had struggled to raise us. He was angry and said I had no right to tell him anything. I should know my place, because he was the father and I was the child. We did not speak for a couple of years afterwards.
In the old days, before everyone had cars, rainy weather such as we have been having would have meant many of us were forced to remain at home.
As our teachers did the roll call on mornings, you would hear, “Absent! Absent! Absent!” as the names were called.
I often associate those words with the role of fathers in our society. Their names might be on the register, but they’re absent at the first raindrop.
If they were truly absent, it might be better than the dysfunctional relationships that emerge, and the damaged humans living in a darkness that haunts them
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
