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Title details for How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair - Available

How to Say Babylon

A Memoir

by Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 2 copies available
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A New York Times Notable Book
Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper's Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother Jones * Barack Obama
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick

"Impossible to put down...Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer." —People

With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a "lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle" (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author's struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms.
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman's highest virtue was her obedience.

Safiya's extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya's voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya's rebellion against her father's rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is "a melodious wave of memories" of a woman finding her own power (NPR).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 3, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797157115
      • File size: 483338 KB
      • Duration: 16:46:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 5, 2023
      Poet Sinclair (Cannibal) recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir. Forbidden by her militant Rastafarian father from talking to friends or wearing pants or jewelry, Sinclair and her sisters were subject to his unpredictable whims and rage. After her mother gifted 10-year-old Sinclair a book of poems, she turned to writing poetry, drawn to the medium’s structure and emotive capabilities: “In the chaos of our rented house, the poem was order.” With the help of scholarships, she attended a prestigious private school in Jamaica to study poetry, and eventually left for college in America (the proverbial “Babylon” of the title, and the main target of her father’s rage), where she funneled her conflicted feelings about the move into her work: “I try to write the ache into something tangible.” In dazzling prose (“There was no one and nothing ahead of me now but the unending waves, the sky outpouring its wide expanse of horizon, and all this beckoning blue”), she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon, declining to vilify her father even as she questions whether a relationship with him might be salvageable. Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 10, 2024

      Poet Sinclair (Cannibal) recounts her journey from her strictly traditional Rastafarian background toward a new life in the United States. She begins her story by describing her parents' efforts to overcome barriers in Jamaica, though they ultimately put different barriers before their children. She hauntingly describes her father's hatred and fear of Western influences--the Babylon of the title--which was the bogeyman of her youth, invoked to justify restraints on women's individuality and freedom. Sinclair's skills as a poet are on full display, offering prose that sings, rages, and soothes in equal turns. Narrating her own memoir, Sinclair speaks with a light Jamaican accent and adopts her parents' more rhythmic accents when required. Listeners will be rapt, hanging on her every word as she brings her memories vividly to life. Sinclair writes a highly personal coming-of-age story, but it's also a commentary on generational trauma, patriarchal injustices, and Rastafarianism's rejection of colonization. This work is a testament to her mother's love and educational prowess, as well as Sinclair's own lion heart. VERDICT This book is an audible joy and will have wide appeal to memoir readers.--Laura Stein

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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