Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir

This is easily one of the best memoirs I've ever read. The prose is beautiful, the story is captivating, and as someone with only very superficial knowledge of Rastafari, it was fascinating to learn more about the lived experiences of someone who grew up in that movement. I absolutely recommend this book.

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readandfindout's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.75

Style/writing: 5 stars
Themes: 4.5 stars
Perspective: 4.5 stars

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okiecozyreader's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Written by an award winning poet from Jamaica, this is a beautifully told lyrical memoir. Safiya Sinclair describes what it was like for her to grow up in a Rastafarian household, how Rasta women were expected to behave and how they were ostracized from their community. She describes the love of her mother for her, in the midst of her father’s growing anger. I really love how she narrated the audiobook - her lyrical reading of it is just beautiful to listen to, even though the topic is hard.

“To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.” Ch 2

“There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. While my mother had saved me from the waves and gave me breath, my father tried to save me only by suffocation…” ch 4

“There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain—that being citizens of a “developing nation,” we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it. But there is hope, too, in our scarcity, tolerable because it keeps us constantly reaching for something better.” Ch 5

“We pushed our heavy boulders up the same punishing hill, passing each other and pretending we were alone in our misery. We each carried our weight in silence until it consumed us, collapsing, as all things must, into a black hole. One Saturday afternoon I decided to let that boulder go. Let it crush me if it must.” Ch 16

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fkshg8465's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Oh wow. Speechless. Ending was not what I expected. So much intergenerational anguish and fighting for survival. And I loved all the poetry too. Hoping to read more of her works after having finished this one.

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internationalreads's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

5.0

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not_another_ana's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

4.0

After more than nineteen years, my father still could not see me. To him, nothing I wrote would ever matter. Poetry was the voice I had forged because for so long I had been voiceless; I had written every word because I wanted him to hear me. Now I knew he never would.

I find it tricky to cast judgement on a memoir. How can I sit here and judge what happens when it's not just plot but someone's actual life and experience, it feels voyeuristic. At the same time the author is handing me their life on a platter, is asking me to come and see and experience. In How to Say Babylon Safiya Sinclair presents us the story of her life growing up in Jamaica under the control of a domineering abusive father who used Rastafarianism to control and terrorize the family. We're taken on this journey to her childhood, her struggles and how she persevered and became an award winning poet. She also explains what Rastafarianism is, how it got started, what are the practices and beliefs, and how that affected her.

I could not put this down, I read it in four days. The prose is beautiful and fluid, you could probably infer her background as a poet. If you don't enjoy purple prose, this might not be a good fit for you, for me it worked because I felt like I was right there in her head with her as the events happened. And boy did things happen to her, this is a book that deals with such complex and heart wrenching abuse. Verbal abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse, at times it felt so heavy and anxiety inducing. I was at a roller coaster right before the drop, or a balloon inflating with no sign of stopping and then... Well the drop didn't happen, the balloon never popped.

That was my only real issue with the book. The pacing brught us to this dazzling height only to gently let us down. To me it felt like perhaps she could have waited to write this memoir, there were a lot of painful memories she had to face and put to paper and the more recent ones just didn't come across as robust as the past. By this I mean I felt like she's too close to the point in time where her book ends to have been able to pull it apart and analyze it, process it. There's a lot of silence at the end, like the story was cherry-picked in some spots.

I'm obviously talking about her father. In a horribly distressing scene she depicts a night where he almost killed her, a night that traumatized her youngest sister and put her at odds with her older brother. And yet the book skips any meaningful conversation about this event, jumps right into her life in the USA and then into a reconciliation with her abuser. She spent the whole book painting this boogeyman, this dangerous figure that mistreated her and then did nothing to show the painful path towards forgiveness and personal growth. I don't want to speculate, but I do wonder if she has actually processed everything that happened, if she's been to therapy. It felt like she bent the knee after a full book of standing up for her younger self.

As I said at the beginning, it's hard to judge people's personal choices from my outside point of view but after being so in her head and life the ending felt empty of the same fire.

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solenodon's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

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