HAVING RITA DOVE declare you her literary “heir” is no small matter, as Safiya Sinclair is the first to acknowledge. When the New York Times Style Magazine featured inter-generational pairings of women artists in its April 2023 issue, the legendary writer and former U.S. poet laureate did just that, an experience Sinclair describes as “still surreal” to her. Dove wrote that her initial encounter with Sinclair’s poetry, in the poet’s application to the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 2012, “took the top of my head off.” She added, “I was electrified by the soul and the muscular elegance of the poems.” Sinclair’s subsequent MFA thesis led to the 2016 publication of the poetry collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press), which includes a subversive retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Seven years later, with many awards and a PhD in comparative literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California in hand, Sinclair returns with How to Say Babylon, published by 37 Ink in October, her searing memoir of growing up in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica—a journey, as she writes, to become “the bard dreaming up my own salvation.”
It is a family story with her father, a Rastafarian, in a leading role. A reggae musician, Howard Garfield O’Brien Sinclair built his family around the principles and beliefs of the Rastafarians, their central tenet being opposition to Babylon, “the sinister and violent forces born of western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity that led to the centuries-long enslavement and oppression of Black people, and the corruption of Black minds,” as Sinclair writes in the memoir. A noble goal in theory perhaps, but in the Sinclair household it meant that the father was king (he took the Swahili name Djani) and that “dawtas,” which referred to both wife and girl children, were forbidden to voice opinions; it meant living in a deliberately closed and isolated community within a ferociously patriarchal system that often devolved into emotional abuse and physical beatings for any perceived transgression of the rules of the kingdom. Sinclair remembers those rules as strict binaries: “It was Babylon outside, purity and goodness inside; you were either a perfect dawta or a Jezebel, a weakheart or a lionheart.”
Yet in , Sinclair manages not to demonize hera musician in Jamaica’s luxury tourist hotels, where his music was not appreciated as culture, let alone art, but solely as commercial entertainment. For several years he and his band spent time in Japan with the promise of a record deal that never materialized. Embittered and hurt himself, he often hurt those nearest to him, at times through hypocrisy and at others through cruelly misogynistic behavior.
