Poured Over: Safiya Sinclair on How to Say Babylon

By Jenna Seery / October 5, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Language doesn’t just exist on the page … It’s about how you embody it”

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair is a poetic memoir about growing up as a Rastafari woman in Jamaica and how words and writing empowered her voice. Sinclair joins us to talk about the literary connections in her poetry, shedding light on the reality of her upbringing, and the identity that comes with writing and reading with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Featured Books (Episode):
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Educated by Tara Westover
The Star-Apple Kingdom by Derek Walcott

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and if you’ve been following book news for the fall of 23, one of the author’s names you’ve been hearing quite a lot of is Safiya Sinclair and she has a memoir coming out called How to Say Babylon. But you may also know her as poet and if you haven’t read Cannibal and poetry is your thing. You really, really need a copy of Cannibal, it’s University of Nebraska Press. It’s a Prairie Schooner poetry book award winner, just want to make sure I got that all on one. We’re going to start this episode with language, right? We’re going to start talking about the actual poetry first, before we get to the memoir, because the way you talk about language, in Cannibal is really, it’s a terrific collection, and I’m a little late to the party, I will totally admit that I’m a little late to the Cannibal party. But let’s start there.

Safiya Sinclair

I love that though. The Cannibal party.

Right. Okay, so let’s start with the title. And then let’s bring in Shakespeare and The Tempest, because I think all of it is a piece that we need before we set up How to Say Babylon.

Yes, the title, like I say in the note at the beginning of the book, is directly linked etymologically to the word Caribbean. The word cannibal is the English variant of the Spanish word cannonball, which comes from the word carry ball, a reference to the native Carib people who call this thought eat human flesh when he, you know, happened upon the archipelago that he then named the West Indies. And so from this word, carry ball comes the word Caribbean. Linguistically, when I discovered this in the first stages of writing the book, I was kind of stunned. I’d already been thinking through ideas of who gets to be seen as noble and who gets to be seen as savage or monstrous. And how that relates to Blackness and womanhood and Black womanhood. Coming across this idea, this fact that the word Caribbean is directly linked to the word cannibal kind of blew my mind and also shaped a lot of how I was thinking through the poetry collection.

And you grew up in Jamaica, and there are a lot of folks who think of Jamaica, honestly, is just a vacation destination. Yes, and you know, where you go to a little resort, and you basically never leave the little resort, essentially, in someone brings everything you need, poolside. And the idea that you’re examining the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica, which is complicated and messy and hard. In this collection, and you bounce from Jamaica to the US to Jamaica, I just how long did it take you to put this collection together? Before it was because it was published in ‘16? Yes, but you’ve been working on it for quite some time.

I can say that. Of course, a lot of the poems and the way I was thinking through ideas of Caribbean selfhood, and particularly the feminine body is something that, you know, has been like a lifelong kind of obsession. But I began in earnest to write the manuscript that would become Cannibal. When I was at UVA, I was getting my master’s in poetry. And I just left home. And if you’ve read the book, you know, there’s this moment where I leave home in this really kind of harrowing and traumatic way. And I leave home and I went to Charlottesville, Virginia. And so that was kind of a heck of a place to land, you know, coming out of this kind of traumatic exit from home. And when I got to Charlottesville, it was hard there was there was no way for me to not then think about I’d already been thinking about home and can’t think about Jamaica without thinking about colonialism or imperialism. But then getting to Charlottesville, there was no way. I couldn’t also think about the wounds were there also what kind of historical part was kind of intrinsic to the making of this place, to the building of the university that I walked around every day right which is built by the enslaved, but kind of all the all the glory is given to the enslaver Thomas Johnson, who was, at the time when I was there, anyway was seen in this very heroic light. And so I had to come to terms with all of this on the page. You know, and it was it was one of the first times to that I had to think about my blackness in a different way for the first time being an American being in Charlottesville, when I was there. I mean, the statue of Robert E. Lee was still in the park. And so kind of walking around with this, this violence that was, you know, present every day, I began to write the book, you know, as part of my thesis, and most of it was written in those two years in Charlottesville as my MFA thesis.

There’s a poem early in the collection called Dreamy and Foreign after Caliban. And of course, Caliban being the Caliban from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. How old were you the first time you read The Tempest? I mean, you read it early.

I think I was 16. 15 or 16. The first time I’d read The Tempest.

And you had a moment, though, where you sort of understood immediately, where you were in the play and who you stood with.

Yes, with, you know, Caliban, that sort of figure, his island was taken from him, his mother was exiled from the island, her magic was stolen and that used against her and he becomes Prospero’s kind of sniveling, servant, and is described as sort of inhuman and savage and monstrous. And immediately, I was so fascinated by that depiction of Caliban, the native who’s also the servant, and the monstrous. And so, it seemed to me quite natural that the tempest or interrogating the tempest would be the natural frame for writing through Cannibal. And Caliban, of course, is an anagram for cannibal like Shakespeare did that. Purposely. So, you know, I saw these all sort of connecting. When I sat down to put the book together.

It took me a really long time to appreciate Shakespeare in a different way. And actually, it took Ayad Akhtar telling me that no, no, you have to actually watch it performed, you have to see the physicality of the words in front of you, and you can’t just read the plays on the page. So I’m always really fascinated when someone tells me that as a teenager, they were like, No, this was my jam immediately. You’re not the only person I’ve heard say this, and some are writers, some are not. And I’m always kind of like, wow, because I didn’t I just I was not that kid connecting. Yeah, I was late to it. I mean, I raised by wolves, what can I say?

Well, yeah, I was kind of raised by wolves too.

Well, we’re gonna, your wolves are a little different than mine, we’re gonna get to yours.

But you know, language to me was always so intoxicating. I literally would go through the dictionary when I was a teenager, I would read the dictionary, literally. And then I would write down all the words that sounded good in the mouth. And so it’s not, it was never only for me, language doesn’t just exist on the page, right? It’s about how you embody it and how it feels in the body, how it feels in the mouth. So I agree with, you know, that advice of like, need to hear it and you need to kind of embody it. And I always think about this idea of doing the — Lorca has this idea of “duende” the that the poem, if it’s working well, it needs you need to feel it moving from like, the root of your foot to the top of your head, you know, kind of like the current of the poem moving through, you know, only happens if you really speak it, you know, like an incantation. And so for me, language is always that it had that power.

You published your first poem when you were 16. You publish it in a newspaper, and Sylvia Plath — So you read The Tempest by William Shakespeare, you’ve also got Daddy, this sort of legendary Sylvia Plath that breaks your brain wide open. So I just love the fact that you’re taking all of these elements from very disparate places and saying, Well, actually, I’m going to make a new thing.

My own thing.

There you go. But it’s 16. You’re you have the self-possession too, now that you would like to do this thing. You have the talent, obviously, to do it. You’ve never not been a writer and so far as I can tell. I mean, it seems like you’ve been doing it since you could hold a pencil.

Yes. Which is, you know, always so odd to think about, you know, whenever I talk to some of my peers or colleagues, and you know, we’ll ask the question like, well, when did you first start writing and you know, a lot of people still in college and so on. And I’m like, oh, you know, like 10. But it has been such a large part of my life. And thankfully, because it was also such a large part of my surviving, in my becoming. So I owe so much to it, and to my mother, who really fed this like, fascination set the fire of language in me.

You do some pretty cool things in Cannibal in terms of taking the language of imperialism, taking the English language, the language of colonialism, the language of imperialism, and turning it into a new kind of art that blends sort of, is it fair to call it patois, a Jamaican Patois with sort of what we would consider a more standard, you know, British English kind of thing. Okay. So you’re actually working in two separate languages, sometimes in the same poem, right? You get to the states, though, and you’re at Bennington, as a student, and this is not translating, well, literally not translating Well, for some of your classmates. And part of me wonders, you teach poetry? Now you have a PhD in literature, you’re teaching undergraduates, I mean, you graduates and graduates, okay? What do you get from teaching poetry that you don’t get from writing it? yourself? I mean, it’s not the easiest discipline out of the gate. And then, let’s call it a translation problem to be polite for a minute, right, then you’ve got the sort of unbearable whiteness of the academy. Yes. And who can pursue an advanced degree? And who can’t? Yes, but clearly, you must get something out of teaching the art itself.

I love poetry, I love talking about poetry. So I could do it all day. And that’s part of what I enjoy. With the teaching of it is kind of, for undergrads, sort of, if this is their first encounter one of their earliest encounters with poetry to sort of inspire them through my own kind of nerdy fascination and obsession, poetry, and to introduce them to, you know, the different forms and structures of poetry that they are numerous before but also more importantly, to expand their idea of the canon because I get a lot of undergrads come in, and their idea of poetry is like, oh, it’s all dead, white people or dead white men. It’s static, you know, it rhymes. And part of what I love is saying like, well, no, why don’t we look at this Jericho Brown poem? You know, why don’t we look at this Natasha Tretheway poem, let us read some Rita Dove. And to see this, you know, this kind of light come on, like wow, this poetry can be this and like, I see myself here or I hear my voice here I see a vernacular here that is familiar to me. That poetry too can be my own language, and my own kind of currency of talking about the world or finding meaning in my own experiences in the world. And so I just I love that I love being surrounded by this there is a kind of like, like even electric reference that that is in a poetry workshop or poetry class that isn’t always the same and like approach class, there is something specific about the kind of currency of poetry that as it lends itself to expansion, imagination to incantation that makes it so completely intoxicating and transformative.

Transformative actually is exactly the word I was just looking for. Because the things that you can do with language on the page with poetry and how it transforms when it’s spoken. And I’m not specifically referring to spoken word. That’s a whole different discipline but taking one of the poems from Cannibal. And for you to deliver that verbally in front of a roomful of people it does, it changes the experience. And I love the idea that you can build off of very sort of traditional art form, and turn it into an entirely new experience, especially for someone who doesn’t necessarily always think of themselves as someone who reaches for poetry. I mean, I’ve never studied poetry formally. I do like to read it just for breaks between long stretches, I’ve read a lot for my job. And sometimes I just need to get lost in language. And so I just keep a couple of shelves of poetry. And it’s, you know, some of it is exactly what you expect to Lucille Clifton, there’s some Louise Glück and Mary Oliver, I try to expand my experience of poetry as much as I can, but sometimes I just want Langston Hughes sometimes, you know, sometimes I just I was ready to go back, right? Like just, and again, I never studied poetry formally, I’m not sure I would have survived if I did, I wasn’t that discipline to student history was much. History is a thing you can play with in a different way, you don’t really have to memorize. I mean, you memorize dates and places, but it’s not learning a form. Right? Like you write an essay, you do your paper, you do whatever. But poetry really is a discipline, it starts as a discipline.

I think the foundations are in discipline. But I think my own thoughts are that you only, I think it’s only important to learn the foundation, so you know how to break them. And that’s something to that I, I tell my students something that I believe in my own work, that it’s not something that only exists in this kind of construct of the form, I think the thrill of it, is in the uncertainty of the lyric and of what the line can do in the library can do and also breaking the form as its own kind of language, or way of, of expression.

Poetry was your first love is your first love. It’s clearly something that you get a great deal of joy from. And here you are, though, with a first memoir, you’ve switched to prose for this memoir, and it’s not like you haven’t covered some of this mean, your parents appear throughout Cannibal your family, as a unit appears throughout. You have touched on this all before. But you switched from poetry to prose, and I’m wondering why you felt like you had to do that.

In this case, you know, I don’t even think about it as a switch. You know, I think of it as an expansion. It’s really just an expansion of, of what, as you say, I’ve already been writing about in my poetry, and touching on but, you know, telling the story about growing up Rastafari in Jamaica was one that I wanted to approach in prose, because there was so much, you know, national history, cultural history, personal history involved, that I thought that the form of prose would be an interesting way, and probably a more accessible way to tell it. And that’s not to say that I’m not also going to be writing about those same things in poetry are, you know, that they’re not that my next poetry collection isn’t going to be in dialogue also with a memoir, but, you know, I wanted to see what I could do with the space that prose gives me on the page on the line, to tell some to talk some more about Jamaica and expand this sort of global idea and perspective of what Rastafari is in Jamaica, you know, which involves a lot of kind of historical context and research that I think is, is better served by the form of prose.

You have a great line early in the memoir that where you say your mother taught you to read the sea, like she taught you to read a poem, and I’m just like, you know, I like you already and I just the way you set up a complicated childhood like this. There is some complications and you know, as you guys kept moving houses to smaller places further away, I mean, it’s clear that your parents are not doing well financially and that is always a stressor on a family, right? But at the same time, there’s a lot of love in this book. You’re very sharp and your commentary. I mean, school doesn’t sound like it was all that much fun for you. But you did you had teachers who were looking out for you. But then you’re also saying your parents were putting you in a cab for three hours. I mean, you really had to travel. To go to school. This was not just like wandering down the block and going to the local, this was a commitment.

Well, I mean, this is common for a lot of Jamaican children. That you, you have to kind of wake up early if you live in the country, which I did when we were I was in high school, and, you know, yes, go quite a ways to get to school. That is a common experience.

There’s so much I didn’t know about Jamaica until I read your book. And certainly Rastafari is a big part of that. So would you just give us a little sort of explanation of maybe an umbrella picture of what that culture is, and also what it meant for you? Because it sounds like you, your family, we’re sort of living on the fringes a bit because it’s not sort of part of the mainstream culture in Jamaica.

Yeah. I mean, Rastafari? I think most people when they think of Jamaica, you know, they think Rastafari is the thing that defines Jamaica, you know, Rastafari has this kind of broad space in in the global imagination. But in Jamaica, Rastafari actually, historically, a persecuted minority, they make up, like 1% of the population, you know, maybe 100,000 or a few 100,000 Rastafari live in Jamaica. And historically, they have been the outcasts, Jamaica is a very deeply Christian country. The majority of people that are Christian and when Rastafari first formed in the early 1930s, the movement, you know, all the all the people in the movement were outcasts. They were kicked out of their homes, turned away by their families, they were forbidden from getting jobs. They were forbidden from walking along the beach sides that were being developed for tourists. In the 60s, we had a white Prime Minister that issued an order to the army to bring me Rastafaris dead or alive. And this led to one of the most horrific incidents in Jamaican history where the Rastafari were kind of forcibly taken from their homes, they were jailed, they were tortured. Their dreadlocks were forcibly cut, their beards were cut and an unknown number of them were killed. And this is a part of Jamaican history. And you know what, that that incident is one that the government has only recently apologized for. And it wasn’t something that was taught in schools. It’s only now that it’s becoming more a part of the conversation in Jamaica. But yeah, the Rastafari have been, you know, the pariahs of Jamaica, even though our cultural export is very large. In Jamaica, the Rastafari have almost no, no agency or voice or space, this kind of persecution continued. When my siblings and I were born we were among the first Rastafari children to integrate public schools. In the 80s, because Rastafari children weren’t allowed in schools, right? So when we got to school, we were the only Rastafari children in the classroom. In the school, we were the only children on the street, in the supermarket, at the beach. And so for us, that was kind of a shock, you know, going from one day, we didn’t have dreadlocks, and then we did have dreadlocks, which is kind of the sort of exterior and sacred marker of Rastafari that kind of claims to the world that you are Rastafari that you’re, you’re devoted to Rastafari and our classmates teased us, taunted us on the streets, my teachers were very unkind because, you know, it was Rastafari and so, it was quite a heavy burden to bear. And a lot of it was wrapped up in the dreadlocks in the hair that had its own weight as a woman and rest for a young woman.

Your dad was rejected by his own mother when he converted, and you’ve got a really painful scene actually, where she’s essentially driving off with her new husband and his siblings and saying, Well, you just can’t come with us. No, I that’s a really deep schism that I think there are people who can relate to that worldwide, certainly. And Jamaica is hardly the only place with you know, the only place that can claim patriarchy as an issue.

Exactly.

That is a marker worldwide follows all, that every culture has some experience with that you can pretend you don’t but every culture has it.

Every single one. Absolutely.

But when did you decide that you needed to tell the story— you won a Whiting Award right after Cannibal came out, which delights me to know end.

It was actually before Cannibal came out. In my mind, I was like, how is this possible?

Okay. Okay, so before Cannibal and you and I have some mutual acquaintances in common, but you’ve been talking about this book for a really long time. And I’m just wondering, when you said, Okay, I’m going to give myself permission to do it. Because in a way you kind of do for a memoir like this, you do have to tell yourself, it’s okay to chase a complicated story.

Yes, and to feel that I’m in a place of safety to do it. And so I think that was the most important thing, because when I got to Charlottesville, you know, after leaving in this really harrowing way, that was the first time that I began to think about writing a memoir, and that was in 2013. That was 10 years ago, I’d written an essay, and a chapbook that I had come out. And that was that essay was, which is the country town that we lived in, that was kind of my first exploration of telling the story. And, you know, thinking about our lives in this narrative way that include that included, you know, scenes of dialogue, and so on. And when I got to UVA, I began to think about expanding that essay into a longer project, I didn’t have that place of safety that my professor said, my professor, or he said, I think you need to have a place of safety to write this. I didn’t have it, you know, the hurt was very fresh, very present. I didn’t think I could do it. And well, I thought, if I did it, it might destroy me. And I didn’t want to, I also didn’t want to write the book from a place only of hurt. You know. And so I kind of put it aside. And then five years later, I went back home to Jamaica, at this point Cannibal was out for two years. And I this was like my first poetry reading back home, you know. And I invited my father and brother to come and hear me read for the first time. I have a poem in Cannibal called Poco Mania, but it’s addressed to my father, and has this refrain of like, you know, Father, Father, father, and I decided that that was the last poem I was going to read, and I was going to read it to him. And hopefully, that would be the first time that he actually heard my voice or heard anything I had to say, and, you know, nervously read the poem. I have no recollection of even getting off the stage. And, you know, he hugged me. And he said, I’m listening, and I hear you. And it was in that moment, that I actually felt this like rush of catharsis, like a burden had been lifted. And I thought, now I can begin, because I know where it ends.

How much time did you spend with your parents digging through family history? I mean, you do have to take notes, right. So I mean, part of it is going back, and maybe comparing your notes to theirs or getting more because, you know, and this is sort of famously for anyone, like do you ever really think your parents are people? Right? They’re your parents. They exist only because you write like, yeah, it’s ridiculous. And no matter how old you are, it’s always kind of like, well, you know, younger siblings are always the babies. And your parents are just your parents, but you really have to sit down with a bigger idea.

Yes, I did. And, you know, it involved having long recorded conversations with my parents. Some of it happened here and COVID at you know, I wrote a large portion of the book during the pandemic. And so I would have this long these long calls and conversations with them. Because they knew that in order to sort of tell the story of my connection to Rastafari I that I had to also tell the story of their connection to Rastafari because they’re, you know, it’s it is through them that I had this this childhood. And I didn’t know like, why, why did you choose this? Or how did you come to this? I never asked them before. And so now I had to, and I sat down and asked all these questions and, and had them kind of relive their own adolescence and their own feelings of longing and yearning to belong to something and their own feelings of solitude, that kind of, I think, crushed them together that when they met each other,

Yeah, it sounded like it.

Yeah, you know, that they had found, they found each other and then they found Rastafari? And I think, for them, they thought that they, they had found what, what was their guiding purpose in life. So it was fascinating to sit down and talk to them, and record these things and hear them tell me these stories that I’ve never heard before. You know, that scene you mentioned about my father, being turned away by his mother. I never knew it before. But I asked him, and he told me and almost exactly as it appears on the page was how he told it to me, you know, all the details, all the emotion. And that I was moved to hear him to hear him talk about that. And I really wanted to make sure I captured that, you know, on the page the way that he was cast out, because he chose Rastafari you know, whenever, I think how things might have gone differently. If he hadn’t had been…

How much of the writing of How to Say Babylon was rewriting though. I mean, you’re interviewing your family. You’re you grew up with portraits of Haile Selassie in the house, and I didn’t realize he had a connection to Rastafari, like, I always thought of Haile Selassie as the emperor of Ethiopia.

He was the emperor of Ethiopia, godhead figure of Rastafari, you know, the founder of Rastafari, the man they call the first Rasta, his name was Leonard Percival Howell he was a big follower of Marcus Garvey’s who was, you know, Pan African, like liberationist, Garvey is known to have said that we needed to look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king, there will be the redemption of Black people. And so when Haile Selassie was crowned emperor, Leonard Percival Howell saw that there was a Black ruler in Africa, the only Black ruler in in the world, and in Ethiopia, which was the only African nation to never be colonized. For them, this was the sign that, you know, the Messiah had been born, that he was this Black emperor in Ethiopia. And so the movement kind of hardened around this idea of Haile Selassie, as you know, herald of Black liberation of also an aspirational figure of, you know, a Black ruler who sent a nation that had never been colonized. Though, Italy and Mussolini did try, but they failed. From there, it kind of just expanded and Haile Selassie has grew in prominence as this messianic figure to the Rastafari movement. And to me, yes, it was the picture of the man I saw since the day I was born as if it was a grandfather like his portrait was there, you know, on the wall, every wall many portraits you know, and for a long-time instilled fear in me. You know, is a binary from my father. Things what you shouldn’t do, you shouldn’t eat, you shouldn’t, where you shouldn’t think, you know, the kind of woman you should not be. And so the thoughts you should not have. And so, you know, there was no kind of gray area it was either you were pure and righteous, and you believed in Haile Selassie as Jah, the ruler, or you are unclean, and you are heathen. And so there were times where he just seemed to his eyes just followed me wherever I went, because this stern faced man who I’d never met or knew, looking down at me, every day of my life.

I think that idea, though, that you don’t have agency, right like that. Books kind of blow that idea. Right? When you connect with the thing, whether it’s The Tempest, or it’s Sylvia Plath, or in your case, Derek Walcott, and you sent me back to Walcott, Star Apple Kingdom and The Gulf actually. And it had been a minute, since I’ve read Walcott, it’s an influence that I get, but he’s also wrestling with a lot of this diaspora, especially one of them opens with on a ship where essentially, you know, colonial capitalism, it’s all happening in the span of a very tightly written poem. Yeah, so here you are writing about diaspora, right? Like, you’re a little kid. Yeah, going to school three hours away, you’ve got some great teachers, you’ve got some classmates who are a handful. But you’re building your own world,

I’m so thankful for it. And that I could kind of fall into the world of the books, you know, especially, you know, in high school, my teachers weren’t all so great. They made me feel very small, and they made me feel unheard. And then at home, I also felt unheard. And so silence ruled a lot of my waking days. And it was only in books and in poetry, that that voice, you know, started to grow stronger, and sort of nurture itself on what I was reading and what I was fascinated by, and then eventually, when I wrote my first poem, and I was like, Okay, well, you know, it can actually alchemize hurt into something else. I knew, that’s when I knew poetry was the home that I had been searching for the home I was making for myself, the voice that I was, you know, building and nurturing as part of my own becoming. Yeah, that was through the love of books and a love of poetry and reading and, you know, I read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t always easy. In Jamaica, you know, when I was growing up, we didn’t really have access to a lot of books. You know, the, the traditional bookstores in Jamaica only mostly sold books for school. The books on the curriculum was sold, right. So I would kind of like if I heard a relative was coming from foreign or, you know, friend was coming from foreign. And he’d be like, Well, can you give them a book list? Like, can you buy these books for me? You know, that was my kind of treasure, to me. That was everything.

I get it. I totally get it. Actually, I have been that person bringing books. But I’ve also been the person shipping back crazy, like books, and I’m a college student. You know, buying ridiculous editions of things that, you know, did I really didn’t know. But I mean, I studied abroad for a semester in college. And did I send back two boxes of books? Yes, I did. And my parents look at me and say, really, really what this is, and I was like, Well, I couldn’t fit them in my suitcase. I had a plan, but there’s a reason I’m a bookseller.

There’s a reason that you and I are sitting right here. I think back to those two young people by you know, kind of discovering this like vast universe through a book.

It starts with language. It really, I mean, I had Horton Hears a Who in English and Japanese. I mean, Dr. Seuss, do I know how accurate the Dr. Seuss translation was into Japanese? I do not. But I just enjoyed listening to both versions. I was okay. But, you know, certainly not all of it stuck. Let’s put it that way. But the idea that we can start with language right and build entire universes out of language out of words and experience I just I love, we get to do this? I love that we get to have conversations about this. And I do think world building is a phrase that has been limited to sci fi and fantasy. And we need to take that back and just use it for literature in general, right? Like, I felt very grounded in How to Say Babylon. And yeah, there were there are some moments where it was a little rough. And I had to take a minute to sit for a second with what I’d read. But it was not unlike reading, Educated by Tara Westover, where you have this sort of sense of freedom and change and transition, and there is a genuine arc for you, that does come back to the poetry and the books, and Shakespeare and everything else, and the opportunities that you made for yourself. And it’s really exhilarating to see that on the page. I mean, there’s a reason that readers come to memoirs like this, where it’s like, you really want to root for the person who’s telling you the story. That’s really what it came down to, for me. I mean, as I said, earlier, in the show, I did not know very much about Jamaica. In fact, I’ve never been there. But I felt like I understood the time and the place and the experiences that you had, because of the language because of the way you tell the story. And I was like more please. More, please. I would like to know, even though you know, there are there’s some stuff that is not necessarily the easiest thing to read. But I’m curious, though, what’s home because you’ve referred to Jamaica as home, you’ve lived in the States. Okay, Jamaica is home no matter what, because you’ve been in the States for almost 20 years, right? I mean, you got here in 06.

In 06 for my Bachelor’s, and then I went back home for like a year. But in my mind, I, you know, the point where I left and I thought, Okay, this might be a more permanent leaving, which we see in the book was when I left for Charlottesville, so that was 2012.

Okay, but still, that’s 10 years ago.

Yes, you know, I still go back home, you know, once or twice or several times a year. Just cause my brother’s still there. And my niece is there who is so part of the reason for the writing of this book. Um, but I mean, from now till my last day, Jamaica is home, will always be home

Place is such a funny thing, right? Like, there’s stuff where you’re like, Oh, I could leave this, I could leave this in a minute, this is horrible. I cannot stand any of this. And yet, you know, I have some fondness for New England, even though I will probably never live there again. It’s part of me, you know, all of that experience is part of me, and, you know, the knee socks and the dress codes and the field hockey sticks all of it, it’s, you know, it’s not something you leave behind it is also something.

Absolutely. You know, for me, it’s also the landscape that is always calling me back home, you know, this board by the sea, I think of my sea village as my home, you know, when I think of home. And so, for me, that was something that I wanted to give readers a sense of, like groundedness or rootedness in the book, you know, that to look at this landscape that we have. And it’s not just resorts and beaches, you know, a lush and green interior with mountains and flora and fauna and vines, and blooms and plants. And, you know, it was from there that my love of poetry and what I wrote about began and, you know, the natural world of Jamaica is probably my first love, you know, and the sea that is always calling me back home is home.

What are you hoping the readers take away from How to Say Babylon?

I really hope that you know, you’ve said, there was so much, you didn’t know what Jamaica that, you know, you learned through the reading of the book. And to me, that was so gratifying to hear because that’s one of the things that I hoped for most, when I sat down to write the book was to kind of expand the idea of Jamaica. On this postcard idea of, you know, a tourist playground. I wanted to renounce to devise these kind of narrow ideas of what Jamaica is and what Rastafari is and how Rastafari culture is related to Jamaican history, but also to give a view of what young Jamaican womanhood looks like, what growing up as a Rasta girl, or a young Rasta woman looks like most people when they think of Rastafari they think of the men, they probably think of one particular man. And, you know, most people don’t really in their minds have this idea of a Rasta woman or what is her life like? What is her inferiority like, what are her days like. Part of writing the book was wanting to give an expansive view of Jamaican girlhood, Jamaican womanhood and a lived experience to lend a voice to some of those women and Rastafari who have never been allowed to speak for them are allowed or have been seen, you know, whether nationally or globally. You know, that’s one of the things that I hope the book can do. And also to speak to, you know, Jamaican woman, Caribbean women, Black women, women all over anybody who’s ever felt like their autonomy had been taken from them, that their voice was kind of silenced, or that they didn’t feel that they had a place in the world because of their womanhood or they felt diminished or lessened by their womanhood. I hope that the book kind of reaches them. And in some way shows them that they too have something to say and what they have to say as well, you and that we can sort of celebrate our womanhood instead of being diminished by it.

I really felt like you were reclaiming your home. Yes, starting with Jamaica, but just in general, just reclaiming your home, reclaiming your family, reclaiming your sense of self. It’s an incredible reading and experience. This book is going to surprise you in lots of really wonderful ways. And it is worth every penny. There is not a wasted word. This is the beauty of reading a memoir by a poet. Y’all do not waste the words. Y’all do not. There is no messing around. Every word is every word matters.

And it’s like Jenga, like when my editor would come back and be like, well, like, sentence out. I was like, no, no, what are you saying? Like, once we pull this out, I have to rebuild the whole thing. You know, the poet’s mind. There is a difference, I think between the prose writers mind and the poets mind, like I agonized over, I read a lot of the book out loud and writing. I also then recorded the audio book a month ago. So you know. But, yes, I’m very, very thankful that the writing comes across that way, because that’s also, you know, that’s something that poet wants wanted to connect, that the language itself can take you on a journey.

It does. It absolutely does. Safiya Sinclair, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, How to Say Babylon is out now. And like I said earlier in the show, if you haven’t read Cannibal go back to that. There’s also the poetry chapbook Catacombs, which contains the essay that Sofia mentioned earlier. So thank you again. This was so much fun.

Thank you so much.