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A review by kendragaylelee
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.75
How to Say Babylon is a coming-of-age novel full of lush language and a longing and love for the Jamaican landscape. It's about being Rastafarian in Jamaica; it's about being a woman under the godlike rule of an unhappy and self-righteous father; it's about loneliness and doubt and family.
It's a powerful and difficult read.
Safiya Sinclair highlights the complexities of being raised in a strict religious household: misogyny tangled up in love, self subjugated to oppressive ideology, crushing self-doubt and alienation. But the triumph of this memoir is Sinclair's ability to make the reader feel the fear and loss inherent in walking away from religion when that religion feels inextricable from family. She seeks over and over to find the love that underlies family, even in the face of violence and intimidation.
I've read a lot about leaving American Evangelicalism, and in some ways the otherness inherent in growing up Rasta in Jamaica mirrored the isolation and self-righteousness that I experienced as an evangelical kid in the in the 1980s. But the othering of Rastafarians was real and often violent (as opposed to the imagined threat to our "values" that evangelicals experience in America). The loss that comes with liberating oneself from the kind of religion that renders you valueless is an emotional turmoil that is complete and upending. And Sinclair had the ability to make me feel that confusion, longing, frustration, desperation, and loss.
But ultimately, as I'm beginning to understand is true so many times in life, there is triumph in survival. And there is something even more powerful in weaving the story into art, into connection, into a new reality that takes pain and makes it a touchstone for something transcendent and freeing.
Support Bookish and buy How to Say Babylon here: https://bookshop.org/a/4334/9781982132347
It's a powerful and difficult read.
Safiya Sinclair highlights the complexities of being raised in a strict religious household: misogyny tangled up in love, self subjugated to oppressive ideology, crushing self-doubt and alienation. But the triumph of this memoir is Sinclair's ability to make the reader feel the fear and loss inherent in walking away from religion when that religion feels inextricable from family. She seeks over and over to find the love that underlies family, even in the face of violence and intimidation.
I've read a lot about leaving American Evangelicalism, and in some ways the otherness inherent in growing up Rasta in Jamaica mirrored the isolation and self-righteousness that I experienced as an evangelical kid in the in the 1980s. But the othering of Rastafarians was real and often violent (as opposed to the imagined threat to our "values" that evangelicals experience in America). The loss that comes with liberating oneself from the kind of religion that renders you valueless is an emotional turmoil that is complete and upending. And Sinclair had the ability to make me feel that confusion, longing, frustration, desperation, and loss.
But ultimately, as I'm beginning to understand is true so many times in life, there is triumph in survival. And there is something even more powerful in weaving the story into art, into connection, into a new reality that takes pain and makes it a touchstone for something transcendent and freeing.
Support Bookish and buy How to Say Babylon here: https://bookshop.org/a/4334/9781982132347