Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir

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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adawada's review

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3.5

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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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jenniferw88's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative tense medium-paced

4.25

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erickaonpaper's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense slow-paced

"Anything else you'd like to add?" Storygraph asks, unknowing that I may have many, many things to add re this memoir...

part love letter to jamaica, part good-bye letter to her rastafarian upbringing, part forgiveness letter to her parents (particularly to her father), part prayer, part poem, this memoir from safiya sinclair moved me to tears multiple times over the course of journeying through everything mentioned earlier. every time i finish a memoir, i'm grateful for the writer who delivered, and this time is no different. although i refuse to rate a memoir, i will effusively thrust this one into many readers' hands. bear in mind: some of the writing is so obviously coming from a lauded poet, and if poetry isn't your jam, some of the long, meandering sentences and narrative throughlines may ward you off. but do not let that deter you from wading through churlish moments, as safiya herself did not. to face your upbringing, to face your oppression in this way... what a gift. what a gift!!!

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