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A review by peripetia
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
4.0
The reviews for this book are overwhelmingly positive, and for a good reason. The negative reviews, however, do reflect some of the issues I had with this book - but not all. Overall, it's a good book. But.
First of all, I don't think it's strictly speaking a memoir, but more a story of her family, as she calls it towards the end of the book. She "remembers" things she wasn't a part of, like what people thought when they saw her father before she was even born. The majority of the book takes place when she is very young, yet she remembers in vivid detail things that happened, the reactions of the adults around her, and the very poetic thoughts she had about these events. I don't think a memoir is ever a perfect representation of the past, nor should it be, but I feel like in this specific case the writer took a lot of artistic liberties.
In the reviews, the memoir is called "lyrical", in almost every single one of them. That is definitely is. The writer is a poet by profession, which is evident.
For me, it was a bit much. Sometimes it felt like she forced metaphors and complex descriptions into the text, which made them a bit nonsensical at times. When she breaks her tooth, her mother peers into her mouth and into her future". What? She dreams of the tree in her school's yard, and it dreams of her. Again, what? You can overanalyze these as much as you want and find profound meaning, but to be fair, you can do that with Pitbull lyrics if you so wish.
Ironically, when she is older, she meets with a famous poet who tells her that putting line after line in poems doesn't give the poem room to breathe and the message loses potency. She still does this in her writing. She pushes too many unnecessary detailed, lyrical descriptions onto every scene, which first of all makes the book longer than it needs to be, and even made me forget what we were even talking about by the time she made it to the end of her tangent.
She dragged on every writing device, which did make them lose potency. She describes cutting her dreadlocks and how they held all the memories and events of her past. That was very potent, but as she kept on describing more and more and more events entangled in her hair, it just got dull. And then she did the exact same thing to describe how her mother cut her dreadlocks. This habit got very repetitive.
What I did like and why I'm giving it four stars was her story itself. She was an incredibly bright and hard-working child and teen and she still couldn't make it to college, or anywhere, for years. That was devastating even to me as a reader (or listener). She described her growth in her family and away from so well.
First of all, I don't think it's strictly speaking a memoir, but more a story of her family, as she calls it towards the end of the book. She "remembers" things she wasn't a part of, like what people thought when they saw her father before she was even born. The majority of the book takes place when she is very young, yet she remembers in vivid detail things that happened, the reactions of the adults around her, and the very poetic thoughts she had about these events. I don't think a memoir is ever a perfect representation of the past, nor should it be, but I feel like in this specific case the writer took a lot of artistic liberties.
In the reviews, the memoir is called "lyrical", in almost every single one of them. That is definitely is. The writer is a poet by profession, which is evident.
For me, it was a bit much. Sometimes it felt like she forced metaphors and complex descriptions into the text, which made them a bit nonsensical at times. When she breaks her tooth, her mother peers into her mouth and into her future". What? She dreams of the tree in her school's yard, and it dreams of her. Again, what? You can overanalyze these as much as you want and find profound meaning, but to be fair, you can do that with Pitbull lyrics if you so wish.
Ironically, when she is older, she meets with a famous poet who tells her that putting line after line in poems doesn't give the poem room to breathe and the message loses potency. She still does this in her writing. She pushes too many unnecessary detailed, lyrical descriptions onto every scene, which first of all makes the book longer than it needs to be, and even made me forget what we were even talking about by the time she made it to the end of her tangent.
She dragged on every writing device, which did make them lose potency. She describes cutting her dreadlocks and how they held all the memories and events of her past. That was very potent, but as she kept on describing more and more and more events entangled in her hair, it just got dull. And then she did the exact same thing to describe how her mother cut her dreadlocks. This habit got very repetitive.
What I did like and why I'm giving it four stars was her story itself. She was an incredibly bright and hard-working child and teen and she still couldn't make it to college, or anywhere, for years. That was devastating even to me as a reader (or listener). She described her growth in her family and away from so well.