★ 06/05/2023

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. (Aug.)

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

“The book grabs the reader because of the beauty of its words, but it sticks because of the thorniness and complexity of its ideas.”—The Washington Post

“[A] breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets.”—The New York Times

“In this remarkable memoir, Sinclair, an award-winning poet, conjures coming of age in Jamaica with her father, a reggae musician who embraced a strict sect of Rastafari and sought to protect his family from the evil and pervasive influence of the West—what Rastafari call Babylon—and coming into her own as a poet, a writer, and a young woman in charge of her own destiny.”—The New Yorker

"This memoir is a melodious wave of memories and interrogations that illustrates Sinclair's skill as both a poet and a storyteller....The magical way she strings sentences together, on its own, is reason enough to indulge in this memoir 10 years in the making.... There were numerous attempts to silence her, but Safiya Sinclair came out on the other side, victorious against patriarchy and colonialization; roaring from the hills like the lioness that she is."—NPR.org

"A courageous memoir of breaking free from a father’s oppression – and how poetry can be a salve against chaos....A story about hope, imagination and resilience."—The Guardian

"The strength of Sinclair’s memoir lies partly in its refusal to assign simple, individualized meaning to hallmark coming-of-age moments....?How to Say Babylon—also captures remarkable, intensely labored journeys toward forgiveness. Far from being a trite solution to traumas, Sinclair’s striking memoir is a testament to her craft and her capacity for self-preservation." –The Atlantic

“Intensely candid, multidimensional, and altogether dazzling.”—The Millions

“Sinclair recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir.... In dazzling prose ... she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon.... Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Sinclair’s gorgeous prose is rife with glimmering details, and the narrative’s ending lands as both inevitable and surprising. More than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Sinclair’s rich, harrowing memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” is a story about home and its fragmentation.”—LA Times

“Safiya Sinclair knows just how to make a reader feel the intensity of every word on the page.”—Shondaland

“A true stand out.”—Good Morning America

“I cried so many different kinds of tears reading Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon. In addition to the deep love, courage, intelligence and compassion of her writing, what caused me to well up repeatedly was the understanding that I was in the presence of an enormous soul.”—Tracy K. Smith in the New York Times

“Dazzling. Potent. Vital. A light shining on the path of self-deliverance.” —Tara Westover, author of Educated

“An essential memoir. Sinclair’s devotion to language has been lifelong, and How to Say Babylon is the result. This book is lit from the inside by Sinclair’s determination to learn and live freely, and to see her beloveds freed, too.”—Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend

“With strikingly stunning prose, How to Say Babylon crackles with both urgency and intimacy. Sinclair is a gifted and poetic voice whose lyrical story of personal reclaiming will inspire generations.”—Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch

"How to Say Babylon is a narrative marvel, the testimony of an artist who literally writes her way out of a life of repression, isolation and abuse into one of art, freedom, love and wonder. To read it is to believe that words can save, words can heal, and words can imbue us with near divine power."—Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the Man Booker Prize and Black Leopard, Red Wolf

"Safiya Sinclair possesses a rare gift: her prose is gorgeous and lush but she has such exemplary control of her craft that not a word is wasted. Every sentence sings. This is the coming of age story of an artist born to parents who yearned to be free of the legacies of slavery and colonialism in Jamaica, and who sought that freedom through faith and resistance. Sinclair finds her own freedom through a brilliant imagination and deep moral courage. With this book, she joins the pantheon of great writers of the Caribbean literary tradition, standing alongside authors like Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid. Simply stunning.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Winner of the National Book Award

"How to Say Babylon is one of the most gut-wrenching, soul-stirring, electrifying memoirs I've ever read. It shatters every perception we have about Rastafari and lays bare our post-colonial wounds as Jamaicans with lyrical power, unflinching truth, and grace. A necessary testament filled with rich, poetic detail that haunts and dazzles."—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun and Patsy


Some memoirs grab you by the throat with their truth-is-stranger-than-fiction storylines. Some mesmerize with the power and beauty of the writing. Every once in a while, a book comes along that does both. Sinclair has told a story that is at once universal-who has not struggled with their family at some point— and uniquely her own, a story of growing up as a voiceless girl in a strict Rastafari household. Both beautifully rendered and an incredible story, How to Say Babylon is a tour de force.—Natasha Trethewey, New York Times bestselling author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

When a gifted poet applies her hand to prose, magical, even revelatory things can result. Happily, this is the case with Safiya Sinclair of. In this lyrical, startling, and magnetic memoir about growing up Rastafari, she weaves a story rich in unsettling visions that goad and haunt while waves crest and soar in the background, beckoning a young girl toward a mysterious future. Her words sparkle like silver or pour like lava, depending on the need. —Jabari Asim, author of Yonder, a 2021New York Times Notable Book

How to Say Babylon is a poet's memoir, a daughter’s lyric, a love letter, a rebellion, and an incantation. From the material of history and mythology, both personal and political, Safiya Sinclair has gorgeously and lovingly assembled a story with radiant transformative power. I couldn’t put it down. —Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

Author/narrator Safiya Sinclair emphasizes the poetry of her words as she narrates her memoir. Her soft Jamaican accent sounds like gentle waves…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

Author/narrator Safiya Sinclair emphasizes the poetry of her words as she narrates her memoir. Her soft Jamaican accent sounds like gentle waves. Sinclair begins by defining "Babylon," the term that Rastafarians coined to refer to the corrupting influences of Western culture--white oppression, in particular. Her father, a musician, became a strict Rastafarian who expected women to obey the men in their lives. Early chapters describe growing up in a close-knit Jamaican family. When Sinclair reaches puberty, her rageful father turns on her and rains down abuse. She describes her terror as his beatings become a constant threat. The memoir's throughlines are Sinclair's depictions of her mother's gentle love, her siblings' tenderness, her own determination, and the poetry that grew within her. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

★ 2023-05-27
A tale of reckoning and revelation focused on the author’s fraught relationship with her father.

Sinclair, a poet whose 2016 collection, Cannibal, won multiple prestigious awards, mines her peripatetic Jamaican upbringing as the eldest of four children raised by a father who adhered to a strict brand of Rastafari. She rebelled against her father’s expectations that she be a woman who “cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man, bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world who cooked and cleaned and demurred to her man.” The bulk of the book describes Sinclair’s chaotic childhood, during which she, her mother, and siblings felt terrorized by her father. “Beatings became a fact of life, like dirt and air, and they arrived without warning, without reason,” she writes. “There was no pattern, except the chaos of my father’s interior life.” Less frequently, the author attempts to depict him as sympathetic: “Through reggae music, he began to identify his own helpless rage at the history of Black enslavement at the hands of colonial powers, and his disgust at the mistreatment of Black Jamaicans in a newly postcolonial society. In the island-wide abuse lobbied against the Rastafari, my father soon began to see himself.” Despite his strictness, however, her father sometimes broke the rules. “In the months that had passed since I snooped on my father watching television,” the author writes, “the more I had grown disillusioned with his lessons of purity, and the more my questions about him swarmed.” Sinclair found solace and release through writing poetry, and she overcame her father’s objections, along with other obstacles, to attend college in the U.S. Even after leaving, the author has continued to be haunted by her father. “The scorch-marks of his anger were everywhere I looked, my family withered and blistered.” Sinclair’s gorgeous prose is rife with glimmering details, and the narrative’s ending lands as both inevitable and surprising.

More than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation.