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A review by okiecozyreader
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
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
“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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Drug use, and Infidelity