Artful memoir 'How to Say Babylon' examines Black freedom and personal growth

A love letter to Black Caribbean girls and women, only some of whom have survived crushing, sexist violence and abject poverty. An exploration of Rastafarianism, a little known religion and subculture, and its nefarious effects on families. A meditation on language's ability to safeguard the most tender parts of our inner lives. A note of caution to people who exploit girlhood and a sacred sense of womanhood for personal gain.

All of these statements describe Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair's searing debut memoir, "How to Say Babylon." And yet, the book is so much more than any of them.

"What did it mean, after all, to be the living answer to the fraught question of Black survival?", Sinclair asks early on. She is ostensibly referring to Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian head of state who was regarded as a god by Rastafarians. But Sinclair is also asking this dangerous question of her father, who built his life under the strict edicts of a Rastafarian sect.

He was a man who demanded that his children and all females in his family bow under the weight of his demands or suffer the consequences of beatings or even banishment. A man for whom Babylon — England and its legacies of colonialism; white people and their seemingly insatiable appetites for Black pain; makeup and even mildly revealing women's clothing; meat and diary — was heretical and profane.

In the well-worn confines of the memoir genre, the writer sticks to their personal story, occasionally giving historical context, primarily to highlight the first-person narrative. Not so in "How to Say Babylon."

Sinclair's concerns are broad: What does Black freedom mean in the context of Jamaica's and the U.S.' tortured racial and colonial histories? But she doesn't just examine them by sifting through the origins of Rastafarianism, her parents' stories or the exploitive Jamaican tourism industry.

What interests Sinclair are the different ways people like her parents grasped at community and belief systems in order to survive and to make sense of Jamaica's post-colonial mess. She's interested in what this has cost them and what it has given them. Sinclair's questions cannot fit inside the rules of the genre, so she busts them open through gorgeous language and a relentless energy that pulls the memoir forward, chapter to chapter, inciting incident after penetrating analysis.

The book also asks whether forgiveness is possible after certain lines have been crossed. Whether there are things we can still honor from people who have broken us repeatedly. Whether it's a kind of sickness to keep coming back.

At the end, while singing her father's reggae songs with him in a nightclub after a tremendous reading of her poetry, Sinclair writes, "I might have left Rastafari behind, but I always carried with me the indelible fire of its rebellion. And when I returned to America, I would walk taller. Babylon would never frighten a daughter like me."

This conclusion rattled me with its perhaps unearned clemency. But it also sat in my gut with a kind of undeniable — if fleeting — wisdom. This is the kind of tension we can hold only with the most accomplished pieces of art.

Shannon Gibney's newest book (co-edited with Nicole Chung) is "When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology," due Oct. 25.

How to Say Babylon

By: Safiya Sinclair.

Publisher: 37 Ink, 352 pages, $28.99.