How to Say Babylon

March 1, 2023

Author of the Whiting Award-winning poetry collection Cannibal, Sinclair was raised by a reggae musician father who followed a strict sect of Rastafari that sought to counter corrupting Western influences ("Babylon") and assure female purity. Here she explains how she freed herself from an upbringing that was initially a source of comfort and finally painfully repressive. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from June 5, 2023
Poet Sinclair (Cannibal) recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir. Forbidden by her militant Rastafarian father from talking to friends or wearing pants or jewelry, Sinclair and her sisters were subject to his unpredictable whims and rage. After her mother gifted 10-year-old Sinclair a book of poems, she turned to writing poetry, drawn to the medium’s structure and emotive capabilities: “In the chaos of our rented house, the poem was order.” With the help of scholarships, she attended a prestigious private school in Jamaica to study poetry, and eventually left for college in America (the proverbial “Babylon” of the title, and the main target of her father’s rage), where she funneled her conflicted feelings about the move into her work: “I try to write the ache into something tangible.” In dazzling prose (“There was no one and nothing ahead of me now but the unending waves, the sky outpouring its wide expanse of horizon, and all this beckoning blue”), she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon, declining to vilify her father even as she questions whether a relationship with him might be salvageable. Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
A tale of reckoning and revelation focused on the author's fraught relationship with her father. Sinclair, a poet whose 2016 collection, Cannibal, won multiple prestigious awards, mines her peripatetic Jamaican upbringing as the eldest of four children raised by a father who adhered to a strict brand of Rastafari. She rebelled against her father's expectations that she be a woman who "cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man, bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world who cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man." The bulk of the book describes Sinclair's chaotic childhood, during which she, her mother, and siblings felt terrorized by her father. "Beatings became a fact of life, like dirt and air, and they arrived without warning, without reason," she writes. "There was no pattern, except the chaos of my father's interior life." Less frequently, the author attempts to depict him as sympathetic: "Through reggae music, he began to identify his own helpless rage at the history of Black enslavement at the hands of colonial powers, and his disgust at the mistreatment of Black Jamaicans in a newly postcolonial society. In the island-wide abuse lobbied against the Rastafari, my father soon began to see himself." Despite his strictness, however, her father sometimes broke the rules. "In the months that had passed since I snooped on my father watching television," the author writes, "the more I had grown disillusioned with his lessons of purity, and the more my questions about him swarmed." Sinclair found solace and release through writing poetry, and she overcame her father's objections, along with other obstacles, to attend college in the U.S. Even after leaving, the author has continued to be haunted by her father. "The scorch-marks of his anger were everywhere I looked, my family withered and blistered." Sinclair's gorgeous prose is rife with glimmering details, and the narrative's ending lands as both inevitable and surprising. More than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023
In the immediately absorbing prologue in poet Sinclair's (Cannibal, 2016) striking memoir, we meet the author at 19, reflecting on the shores of her childhood homeland at the moment her "fear had finally given way to fire." What follows is a stunning story of coming-of-age, complicated family dynamics, and finding one's path through literature, all set against the lush background of Jamaica. With Rastafari parents raising her as one of four siblings, Sinclair's upbringing was rife with both joy and heartbreak. The tumultuous relationship with her strict, religious father parallels his increasing militancy and fervor for Rastafarianism as she grapples with feeling both rebellious towards his way of life and sympathetic about his causes. "My father was born in the throes of Jamaica's rebellion, the island's Black citizens now orphaned by the circumstance of being Caribbean, mothered by nothing but our own dream of independence." Her complex feelings of loyalty to her family and deep desire to explore the world beyond her island, known as Babylon by her father, permeates Sinclair's beautifully written and insightful narrative. A radiant story of family and self-discovery told through the sharp eye of a talented poet.

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