Safiya Sinclair’s mother and father grew up as lost souls in Jamaica, dealing with mistreatment, abuse and abandonment – then they found Rastafarianism and each other.But as Sinclair portrays her own childhood in “How to Say Babylon,” her father, Howard, a talented reggae musician whose record deal went sour, became bitter, controlling and even violent.
I was thinking first that this might be cathartic, a way to alchemize the chaos and hurt, a mode for a hopeful change in my family, breaking the cycles of trauma. There were many times it was difficult sticking with a scene and giving the details because I had to dive into the memory and stay there so the reader would feel immersed in my experiences. I wanted the text to feel skin-close and I wanted the reader to feel breath caught.The thing that changed most is my relationship with my father and how I think about him. He was this grand authoritarian figure who loomed so large; he never humanized himself to us when we were growing up.
Q. Near the end your father says, “I’m listening and I hear you.” He wasn’t ready to go there ten years ago so maybe you couldn’t have been forgiving then because of his behavior. I learned to see and appreciate her in new ways while writing. When I was a teenager, it was, “Why did she do this?” or “Why didn’t she do that?” With time, and a little more wisdom I can see she was always strong in her own ways and always doing things to make our world so much larger — we weren’t allowed to have friends or leave the house but our mother gave us this love of books and encouraged my writing and somehow got my father’s approval to let me try modeling.
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