Safiya Sinclair: How To Say Babylon

The Cheeky Natives

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In this beautiful memoir, Safiya Sinclair writes about her childhood and adolescence in Jamaica with parents in the Rastafari faith. In an act of personal excavation, she brings forth the hidden histories of a people pushed to the margins by colonisation, oppression, and religious intolerance, all exacerbated by patriarchy.

Raised in difficult socio-economic conditions by a father who increasingly becomes more militant in his practice of Rastafari, Safiya and her siblings find refuge in her mother’s creativity and love for literature.

We are drawn to the discovery of Safiya as a scholar and poet while navigating her intimate relationship with her family, the first site of turmoil and conflict between the author and the people she loves. Truthful but graceful, we embark on the journey to humanise her parents in the face of the difficult upbringing that she has.

The beauty of Safiya’s writing is the tenderness with which she handles the contradictions of an upbringing that cuts its children’s joys and ambitions small but also finds love and joy in many of these moments.

All of this take place with the ever foreboding threat of Babylon, encroaching in their personal lives and their relationship with the outside world. We are struck by the ways in which even the most vehement opposers of Babylon, accede to its rules in the world of work and life – a metaphor for the ways in which people survive.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A New York Times Notable Book
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness, Goodreads, Esquire, The Atlantic, NPR, and Barack Obama
The 2024 OCM BOCAS PRIZE non-fiction winner
Shortlisted for the non-fiction prize for the women's prize.

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