How to Say Babylon

A Jamaican Memoir

By: Safiya Sinclair

Narrated by: Safiya Sinclair

Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

An extraordinary and inspiring memoir of family, education and resilience, from award-winning poet Safiya Sinclair.

There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.

Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path.

Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya’s imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how?

In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes listeners inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning. How to Say Babylon is an unforgettable story of a young woman’s determination to live life on her own terms.

©2023 Safiya Sinclair (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

‘Dazzling. Potent. Vital’ TARA WESTOVER

‘To read it is to believe that words can save’ MARLON JAMES

‘I adored this book … Unforgettable, heartbreaking and heartwarming’ ELIF SHAFAK

The writing is wow.

“I try to write the ache into something tangible’ — @safiyasinclair

In How to say Babylon, Safiya does this remarkably. This memoir is truly a Jamaican memoir. Safiya is the first-born to young parents who looked to the Rastafarian faith as path to freedom.

In this book, Safiya writes for “every Sinclair girl who was still to come… to point the compass forwards: to change the shape of our lineage, the weight of her legacy”

In the most lyrically prose, Safiya unburdens herself and searingly recounts her childhood, growing up in poverty and under the authoritarian control of her father. Their lives moulded by him creating “the lifetime of wreckage that had almost pulled us under”

In many ways, it was Esther, her mother that fought her husband to create a path to freedom for her daughters, and ultimately for herself. First, by cutting her daughters’ hair. Second, by cutting hers, and cutting her ties to him. Finally, by belonging to herself.

In the end, this memoir is the story of “all the women in my family who bear blood-wound fixed deep by tragedy.”

It is a story about love, healing, forgiveness and redemption in all its complicated ways.

Safiya can craft a pulchritudinous sentence. Her writing is devastatingly visceral, every emotion, every moment of violence and harrowing memory excavates deep within as you page through the book.

Every word, every line is a love letter. This book has made an indelible impression on me.

Wow. Just wow.

What an exceptional book, narrated so beautifully by the author. It had me mesmerised, spellbound, entranced and enchanted.
Her words, her language, the story she tells - just wow.