Florencia: Do you consider that you grow up in a strict family?

Respondent 1: With the Haitian community and raising children, it's a lot much more restricted and stuff like that.

Respondent 2: I have more of a sense of urgency as an adult. I can make decisions easily because I was allowed to make my own decisions from when I was young.

Respondent 3: I'm Nigerian. I was raised in a Christian home. Back then, it's very strict, but I think that was for good because, you know what? I became very disciplined.

Respondent 4: I grew up in Philadelphia, a mixed Black family, but I'm African. I grew up with my culture. I didn't get to explore what I could do with my life as a child. I said, "I'm not doing this no more."

[music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. I'm talking this week with Safiya Sinclair. She's an award-winning poet and essayist who teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and who grew up in Jamaica in a household governed by Rastafari teachings under the strict rule of her father. Rastafari is much more and much different than how it shows up in pop culture as reggae music or as a style choice or just as an appropriated vibe in bad movies. It's actually an anti-colonial, pro-Black way of living.

For Safiya, it was also a complicated, often painful childhood. She revisits that time and tries to learn from it in her new memoir, How to Say Babylon. She joins me to talk about the book about her journey and about the history of Rasta. Safiya, welcome to the show.

Safiya Sinclair: Hi, Kai. Thanks for having me.

Kai Wright: Place is a really big part of your writing, so let's start there. Where is home for you?

Safiya Sinclair: Whenever I get asked this question, I always say, home for me is Jamaica. Home for me is Montego Bay. We call it the second city in Jamaica. It's the second-largest city. It's a coastal town. Most people know it as this tourist destination, but for me, it was where I was born, where my family was born. I was born in this small sea village, close to the airport in Montego Bay called White House. That's where my mother is from and her family of fishermen are from. My grandfather actually had a hand in the name of the town because when he arrived there almost a century ago, and my great-grandfather, he painted his house on the beach white, and from there came the name of the town, White House.

Kai Wright: [laughs] Wow.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes. [laughs].

Kai Wright: Do you remember when it registered for you that you were Rastafari, that that's how you were being raised?

Safiya Sinclair: I always knew my parents were different because they were the only people I saw when I was a child who had dreadlocks, who talked about Haile Selassie, who had different rules about what they ate and different rules about how my mother dressed, and so I knew they were different. I had that concept as a child, but it was when my parents decided that they were going to-- My mom twisted my hair into dreadlocks, me and my siblings. That was the first moment where I was like, "Oh, okay. I'm like part of this thing, Rastafari." It really registered because after that Christmas after my mom twisted my hair into dreadlocks and I went back to school for the first time, I was mercilessly teased.

Kai Wright: No, and really-- You were how old?

Safiya Sinclair: I was eight. There was this one student, or a couple of students, at school who would follow me around and taunt me and sing this song, Lice is killing the Rasta, over and over. I was like, "Wow." That was the first moment of realization of like, "Okay, I'm not only different like I always knew my family was different, but okay, now there's this new consequence or frame to it." I started to think about my selfhood in a different way for the first time.

Kai Wright: At what point did you begin to realize that not only did being Rasta make you different from other kids but also being a girl who is Rasta meant something particular?

Safiya Sinclair: I would say around nine, I started to see it. My brother and I were only two years apart, and we were very close when we were growing up. I remember there was a moment where I felt that there was a shift in the way the paths that we were both on. I remember there was-- We used to climb trees all the time. I was wild.

Kai Wright: [laughs]

Safiya Sinclair: I was up in the trees, but I remember there was a day my father said, "You can't climb trees anymore. It's unladylike. That's done," but not my brother. I was like, "What is this? This makes no sense." Then when I was nine, made the decree that none of his daughters would ever wear pants or shorts again and told my mother to throw them all away, which she did.

Now there were these rules of, you can only wear long dresses and long skirts, and that was nine. Then I began to see, "Oh, it's not just that I have dreadlocks now, it's more." I never had made this connection. Even though I'd seen all these rasta sistren who had their hair wrapped up in-- We call it a tie head in Jamaica, and they did dress this way. I was nine. I didn't think that had anything to do with me until then it did. That's when I began to think about it when I saw the rules diverging between me and my brother, and it happened simply because I was a girl.

Kai Wright: What was your relationship to your mother within the context of this as someone who was an enforcer of these changing roles?

Safiya Sinclair: I never, when I was growing up, thought about her as an enforcer in that way because she also made my world-- For me and my siblings, she made the world feel so expansive. When I talk about all these rules, it would seem like, "Wow, your world was getting smaller," but it was through my mother that, for a long time, it just felt like the world was still ours for the taking. When we were home, she gave us the love of books and of literature and of imagination and play and a love of nature which she actually made into her own curriculum. I always saw her as someone who expanded my world.

Kai Wright: It was your mother who introduced you to poetry, right?

Safiya Sinclair: Poetry was always a natural part of my growing up. Jamaica itself, culturally, we celebrate poetry and elocution across the island. We have even contests where that's aired on national TV where students go and recite poetry for medals. This is also entrenched in our nation as culturally important. In my house, my mother was the one who first handed me that first collection of poems. She told me what poetry meant to her, and this was in a moment of deep hurt. I was 10 years old, and someone I thought was my friend said, "I don't want to be your friend. I don't want to be friends with Rasta."

Kai Wright: Oh, wow.

Safiya Sinclair: I was so hurt. My mom could feel that hurt and she handed me this collection of poems, and she said poetry had always expanded the world for her. Poetry had always made the world feel wider and warmer for her. She said, "I think you might like to read this." Yes, I began reading the poems, and I came across a poem. I just remember the feeling of like, I could feel that hurt evaporating or this idea of that whatever I was feeling could be alchemized into something else through poetry. I wrote my first poem like around that time at 10 years old. It just continued from there.

I began writing poems about my love of Jamaica, of the landscape, of the sea. In adolescence, then I discovered Plath and other poets who were confessional, and I thought, "Oh, the gaze also can turn in word," that there is an interior landscape here that could be explored. I began to write poetry from the self, from the sort of-- Think of it as the catacombs of myself. There, two poems can come. Then I published my first poem when I was 16 in the newspaper in Jamaica. It just went from there and never stopped.

Kai Wright: A poet at 10-

Safiya Sinclair: Poet at 10.

Kai Wright: -and a published poet at 16. Okay, everybody, get to it.

[laughter]

This is a high bar that has been-- What a wonderful act of parenting to give your child a poem to try to heal. Do you recall what that collection was or who was the poet?

Safiya Sinclair: It was a collection called Poems From a Child's World. The poem that I remember that struck me the most was a poem called The Tyger by William Blake. "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright. In the forests of the night." I just remember the image just obliterating any hurt I'd been feeling. I was like, "What is this strange magic?" Like, "What is this sorcery happening on the page?" I went to the encyclopedia. We had one of those old ones that was like an actual book.

Kai Wright: [laughs]

Safiya Sinclair: Flipped through looking at, who is this William Blake? It said he had died almost 150 years ago. I was like, "What?"

Kai Wright: Wow.

Safiya Sinclair: I was like, "Wow, so this is what poetry can do. Poetry is a way to outlive myself and what I can leave behind me." There was no looking back after that [laughs].

Kai Wright: Right. You encountered that kind of power, you were like, "I'm doing that. That's what I mean." [laughs]

Safiya Sinclair: This is what I need to be doing.

Kai Wright: That's great.

[music]

After our break, Safiya Sinclair shares one of her poems, and we learn the history of Rasta. This is Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. Stay with us.

[music]

[POEM: Safiya Sinclair: Planet Dread]

Dreadnought, I. Dread from the sea I was drawn, I blue as dread, tender dread, taloned as our future dread.

Dread the constellation I was born under, dread I slept under, dread the waves of history, blustering red.

Dread my mother’s calm. Dread the harpy’s song. Dread she nursed me, dread she named me. Dread my girlhood under sugar cane. Dread the hurricane.

I was a child of dread a psalm of dread, dread pressed into my palm like the blessed herb. A divine dread, Rastaman said.

Before I could speak there was dread, before I could stumble.

Dread roamed the shore a ghostly spume, dreadless thread of the woman I’m erasing, dread my one coastline crumbling to sea rise, to abyss.

Dread my dead tooth unmaking the veil, dread the ointment I, dread the wound I, dread the wail I, dread the johncrow’s eye, smoke of black clouds heralding only dread.

Skirmish of youth, my constant banner of dread. Dread at home, dread to the bone, my father dangling his guillotine of dread.

Dread as daily bread. Nursed dark by decades of dread, teachers recoiled at my knotted thorns of dread.

How the white girls blanched with dread. Scorned for the hair on my head.

Beware my Blackheart of dread, the reckless haunt of my dread, girl born of nothing but salt-air and dread. Girl who bore nothing but a vision of dread.

Such a savage, dread. Thrum of the natty dread. Congo Bongo dread. Martyred was the dread. Brother still the dread. Blood of my dread.

Babylon maiming families of dread, pastors railing against our dread, dread the crown of heavens I wear upon this head.

Dread at the root, dread of the fruit. Sister of the dread. Daughter of the dread. First woman giving birth to her dread. A gorgon stoning every baldhead, dead.

Kai Wright: This is Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. That was poet and essayist Safiya Sinclair reading her poem Planet Dread. Her new memoir, How to Say Babylon, revisits her childhood as a girl being raised Rastafari in Jamaica. Safiya, the line in that poem, "My father wielding the guillotine of his dread," tell me about that.

Safiya Sinclair: With the poem, I wanted to explore all the different ways that dread defined my childhood and all the different ways that we can explore dread. I grew up in a pretty strict, authoritarian household that it was connected to the Rastafari movement and the rules that were imposed in every household, which changed from house to house. There's no overarching, there's no book, there's no Bible of Rastafari.

From the basic tenets of Black liberation, the purity of keeping your body, your temple, clean and pure for Jah. Beyond that, most Rasta bredrin are like the godhead in each household and they change and shift the rules to however they see fit. Growing up, I have two sisters. My sisters, my mother, and I, we had different rules about how women were supposed to be inside of Rastafari. That manifested in how we should dress, how we should speak or not speak. Silence and obedience were the virtues of womanhood.

We were supposed to cover our arms and our knees. We were not supposed to wear jewelry or makeup. Any adornments were seen as the vain trappings of Babylon. I grew up bent under this silence of womanhood in my adolescence. When I'm thinking about this idea of the guillotine, it represents the rules and how I felt. They severed me from myself when I was growing up, or severed me from the self that I wanted to be.

Kai Wright: That's so powerful. I think we actually need to back up and talk more about Rastafari itself because the sad truth is that, for a lot of us, our understanding of it is very basic, like, to a comic book level. For instance, even the idea that Rastafari and Jamaican are not the same thing, that you would be seen as different as a Rasta kid in Jamaica. Can you just talk about that for a minute?

Safiya Sinclair: I think I knew when I sat down to write the book, that most people would be surprised to know that Rastafari are not actually a majority in Jamaica, but in Jamaica, the Rastafari are historically a persecuted minority. The Rastas make up 1% or less of the Jamaican population. There's probably a few hundred thousand Rastafari. When the movement began in the early 1930s in Jamaica, Jamaica was still under British colonial rule, and the Rastas were outcast. They were pushed to the fringes. They were seen as pariahs. They were constantly threatened, turned away from their families.

In the '60s, we had a prime minister that gave the Jamaican army the directive to, "Bring me all Rastas, dead or alive." This led to the worst atrocity in Jamaican history, where they rounded up all the Rastas, they tortured them, forcibly cut their beards, cut their dreadlocks, an unknown number of them were killed. It wasn't something that was even taught in schools as history. I learned it through my father and through growing up Rastafari. Only recently has the Jamaican government started to make amends for that, what they call the Coral Gardens massacre and Bad Friday.

This is all part of Jamaican history, that Rastafari from the beginning were seen as the black sheep. The police did target practice with pictures of Rasta bredrin. It became so bad that even now in Jamaica, in Patois, when people say Babylon, they mean police. We say, "Babylon down the road." That means police is down the road.

Kai Wright: Wow.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes.

Kai Wright: You go through a lot of this history in the course of the memoir. That's one of the important parts of the book, is that you're putting your life in this historical context. You said 1930 is when Rastafari began. Give us that story a little bit. How and where did Rastafari develop?

Safiya Sinclair: It's funny because I only had the broadest strokes of this history before I began to write the book, and I feel like I, in the writing of it, had to become a Rastafari scholar from scratch because there isn't a lot of written material about this. There's no written book of tenets of Rastafari. Most of it is just the wisdom and the knowledge of the history passed down from bredrin to bredrin.

Kai Wright: It's an oral culture.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes. It wasn't really passed down to the women, so I had to-

Kai Wright: There's that.

Safiya Sinclair: -step in and pass it down to myself. It began in the early 1930s with a street preacher named Leonard Percival Howell, who was a fan of Marcus Garvey, the Pan-African abolitionist, who was also Jamaican. Marcus Garvey had given one of his last speeches. He said, "Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king, for he will be the redeemer." Around the same time, the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, had been coroneted in Africa.

When Howell heard news of this, he took it as a sign because Haile Selassie was the only Black ruler in the world at the time, and Ethiopia was the only African nation to never be colonized. The movement of Rastafari began to harden around this man, Haile Selassie, this Black ruler, who then was an inspirational, aspirational figure for Black people. Just remember, at the time, in the 1930s, Jamaica was still a colony of Britain. We didn't have our independence yet.

For them, Haile Selassie represented this dream of Black liberation and Black independence, of building something outside of the British Empire. The movement of Rastafari really gathered strength from there. Howell, in Jamaica, started going around and preaching about Haile Selassie as this Godhead figure, this aspirational figure of Black liberation, and it went from there. Then, immediately, the British government attacked them.

Howell had a commune where he had about 3,000 Rastafari people living there peacefully, and the British government came and burnt it to the ground. They declared it was a cult. They came and just burnt it.

Kai Wright: As they would do to a Black liberation movement.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes.

Kai Wright: You hinted at this a little bit in talking about your parents, but this is a political, a religious movement. What do Rastafari believe? I recognize that's a ridiculously broad question.

Safiya Sinclair: That's a broad question because Rasta would be like, "I don't believe in nothing." To them, words like believe, faith, religion are colonial words. Those are the words of Babylon. They don't say Rastafari is a religion. My father would say Rastafari is a way of life, and they call it livity. When they talk about walking the path of Rastafari, they call it their livity. The whole philosophical and spiritual idea of being Rastafari is wrapped up in this idea of livity.

Stemming from this anti-colonial root of where the movement began, Rastafari, mostly, it has roots in this Pan-African idea. A lot of Rastafari yearned for repatriation to Africa. They are for the liberation, upliftment of Black people all across the diaspora. They also have specific rules about what they eat. They don't eat meat, fish. They completely have a vegan diet that they call ital. They, of course, wear their hair in dreadlocks, which is for them not a style, it is an absolute must. It's a sacred marker of their reverence to Rastafari and a marker of their purity and devotion to Jah, which is what they call the Godhead figure.

Kai Wright: You mentioned Babylon a number of times. Just in case-- I don't want to assume understanding of the idea of Babylon. Explain, when you refer to Babylon, what that means.

Safiya Sinclair: Babylon represents all the systems that the Rastafari see as tied to the repression of an enslavement of Black people. When it began in the 1930s, it was tied directly to British colonial empire. It's tied to ideas of Western ideology, Western theology, Christianity, slavery. They see this all as one system, all connected, that is working to repress Black people. That's Babylon. Everything that Rastaman sees as evil, as impure, as hedonistic, that's Babylon.

Kai Wright: What about all of this do you think was so powerful and appealing to your parents? Both of my parents, they were both born in 1962, which was the year that Jamaica gained their independence from Britain. They were born at a time of great uprooting in Jamaica, a kind of cultural revolution where Jamaica was at that point going to figure out what kind of nation they were going to be now that they were free of the shackles of colonialism.

It was around this time, in the '60s and '70s, where reggae was at the height of its popularity. Reggae, of course, is directly tied to Rastafari and its ideals. Reggae is the musical manifestation of the prayer of Rastafari. Both my parents, who grew up almost orphaned, I think in their youth were searching for something, like a lot of Jamaican youth in the throes of this rebellion and revolution. Rastafari, I think, provided for them a place where they felt safe, they felt at home, they felt included in a movement that gave them a power as Black people, that they never had before.

Kai Wright: We had a show a couple of weeks ago, where we were trying to define what is Black freedom.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes.

[laughter]

Kai Wright: Well, we asked callers, in general, what is freedom to them, but we were specifically talking about what is Black freedom. I don't have a definition of it.

Safiya Sinclair: I don't either. It's a broad one.

Kai Wright: It sounds to me like, to your parents, this was a potential definition. That's one of the things that appeals to it.

Safiya Sinclair: Absolutely. I think for them, it did feel like a kind of freedom. Howell's idea of having a Black nation live in harmony and work toward this goal of ultimately upliftment was something that also appealed to them. Yearning for feeling. All of us who are Black in the diaspora feel this strange amputation from our roots or where we came from. I think for my parents, feeling like there was a place where they could look to and say, "That's where we came from and that's where we belong and that's where we want to be," had potency for them.

[music]

Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright. I'm talking with Safiya Sinclair about her new memoir, How to Save Babylon. After a break, her decision to leave Jamaica and the road to healing with her father.

[music]

Rahima Nasa: Hi, everyone. My name is Rahima, and I help produce the show. I want to remind you that if you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Here's how. First, you can email us. The address is notes@wnyc.org. Second, you can send us a voice message, go to notesfromamerica.org, and click on the green button that says "Start Recording." Finally, you can reach us on Twitter and Instagram. The handle for both is Noteswithkai. However you want to reach us, we'd love to hear from you and maybe use your message on the show. All right, thanks. Talk to you soon.

[music]

Kai Wright: It is Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. I'm talking with poet and essayist, Safiya Sinclair, about her new memoir, How to Save Babylon. It's as much a history of Jamaica and the Rastafari movement as it is her own family story. Safiya, at what point did you decide to leave Jamaica?

Safiya Sinclair: For me, I don't think of my leaving Jamaica-- It did not happen until 10 years ago where I had this moment where I thought, "Okay, I have to leave or I won't survive this." I began to rebel against the rules. Let me say that.

[laughter]

In case it wasn't clear already.

Kai Wright: At some point, you're like, "I'm climbing the tree."

Safiya Sinclair: I'm climbing the tree. I questioned everything and I rebelled. This led to a lot of clashes between me and my father because a woman who voices her opinion is an instrument of Babylon. When I was 19 years old, I decided to cut my dreadlocks. Like I'd said before, I think most people don't realize how important the wearing of dreadlocks is to the Rastafari.

To my father, this was the way that you expressed your devotion to Rastafari. In the same way that a nun might wear a habit or someone wears a turbanmm, that is what the dreadlocks represent to the Rastafari. It was never a choice for me and my sisters. When I was 19, I decided, as I began to think about who I wanted to be, what was the future ahead of me? If I continued on this path that my father wanted me to be on, who would that woman be?

I tried to follow the path all the way. This kind of woman bent under silence and pliance and obedience was not the woman I wanted to be. I cut my dreadlocks and my father was not pleased. He didn't talk to me for about a year. We were living in the same house. He looked through me like I was a ghost. I had become Babylon. Then my middle sister cut her dreadlocks, and then my youngest sister cut her dreadlocks, and then my mother, who had been growing her dreadlocks since she was 19 years old, when she first met my father, cut her dreadlocks. I think that pushed my father to the edge. I think he saw me at that time as, I guess, maybe the bad seed or the ruin of this idea of the perfect rasta family.

Kai Wright: If you were Babylon and you were Babylon in his home, that's what Babylon would do, right?

Safiya Sinclair: Yes.

Kai Wright: It would destroy black freedom in this way of thinking.

Safiya Sinclair: He got violent, and that was when I decided I had to leave Jamaica to go out and nurture that woman that I could become and nurture that voice and nurture that strength so that when I did return, I would return in a way that I could speak to him eye to eye.

Kai Wright: Was there truth to the fact that you were the catalyst for the other women in your family saying, "Hey, I don't have to do this?"

Safiya Sinclair: I think so. I think after I did it, then they got over the fear of doing it also. We talked about it before and always felt that we didn't feel ourselves within these rules and strictures within Rastafari. We didn't feel like there was a space for us. It wasn't something that we would've chosen for ourselves. I think, yes, after I did, then everyone felt that, "Okay, maybe I can do it too."

Kai Wright: How did you think in real time about that act of rebellion? I use that word on purpose. I think so many of us in our lives have these moments where we want to have an act of rebellion against something that's put upon us. It's very scary and hard and most of us don't do it. I just wonder how you processed what you were doing at the time.

Safiya Sinclair: I just felt free.

[laughter]

I was like, "If this is how it's going to be, then this is how it's going to be, and that's fine," because the alternative was not for me one that I wanted. I'd rather have the strife and the struggle with my father and him not seeing me, not hearing me, not acknowledging me than feeling that I was shackled or restricted under these rules that I didn't feel myself anyway. I'd rather be myself and be cast out than to be, I guess, choked under the silence of the rules.

Kai Wright: You wrote this book to process a lot of this in public?

Safiya Sinclair: Yes.

[laughter]

Kai Wright: Thinking back to your childhood, having written the book now, are there memories of your father of your childhood that you're like, "Oh, I understand that differently now because I've done this"?

Safiya Sinclair: I would say that not necessarily memories of my own childhood, but in writing the book, where I had to not only contextualize the history of Rastafari in a broad sense but also think about how I'm tied to this history of Rastafari. The tether is my father. In the writing, I had to explore that. I had to ask him, "Well, why? Why did you feel called by Rastafari?"

I had to do a lot of interviews with him for the first time to hear about his connection to Rastafari, and he told me about his childhood and his adolescence and how his mother kicked him out because he decided to be a Rastafari at 16, 17. She left him on the street. I learned a lot having those conversations with him that I didn't necessarily know before in that way, in that detail. Then I began to think about his own traumas in a way that I'd never thought before. I would say that's the biggest thing I learned in the writing.

Kai Wright: When you say in a way that you never thought before, what was that shift?

Safiya Sinclair: Like I was talking about before, my father loomed so large in our lives. He was the entire son. He was the whole world in the house. For a long time, I never really saw-- I never humanized him in my mind because he was this authoritarian. He was this figure that all the rules came from and all the words came down from him. We never talked father to daughter, person to person in a close way. It was always, "This is what I'm saying you should do. This is what you should think. This is who you are." We've never had--

Kai Wright: Which is to say he dehumanized himself actually.

Safiya Sinclair: Actually.

Kai Wright: He made himself into a figurehead instead of a person.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes. Then I had to do the work of reversing that and seeing him in a way that I'd never seen him before. For me and how I was thinking about writing the book, it wouldn't work the way I wanted it to work if I didn't have that chapter or those moments of, well, how did he come to this?

Kai Wright: As his own act of rebellion against what he was supposed to be? [crosstalk]

Safiya Sinclair: Yes, against his Christian family. Yes.

Kai Wright: What was his reaction when he learned you were writing the book? You had to go interview him and be like, "Hey, Dad, I'm going to-- [chuckles] We're going to talk about some stuff."

Safiya Sinclair: We're going to talk about some stuff. I think my family, by that point, was used to me writing about them. They're like, "Okay, this is just what she does." [laughs] I had written poems about them in my poetry collection, so they were used to that. I'd been writing and publishing poems since I was 16. I don't think he necessarily understood all the facets of what writing a memoir was going to mean until, I think, a little bit later. I think he was very happy to actually have me call him and ask him about Rastafari and ask him about his adolescence and his childhood. I think he was happy to be able to speak about it for the first time to somebody.

Kai Wright: It's so funny that he had years to invite you into that conversation. This isn't to judge him, but it's just us as humans. He had all those years raising you to invite you into a conversation about a Rastafari that it turns out he deeply wanted and wasn't inviting you into.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes, it's an interesting one. By the end of the book, I was like, I wonder how this all would have gone if I had felt invited into the conversation from the beginning. The wisdom and history of Rastafari, as I said before, is passed down from bredrin to bredrin. Women aren't necessarily invited into the circles of their spiritual talks that they call reasoning, where Rasta bredrin meet and talk about things, talk about the world and their philosophical desires. Women aren't invited into those reasonings. I did wonder if I had felt welcome and invited the whole time, how would this have gone? I don't know. Yes. [laughs]

Kai Wright: What is your relationship to Rastafari now? How do you think about Rastafari now?

Safiya Sinclair: I think about it as something that completely defined a large part of my life, how I grew up and shaped me into the person I am now, for better or for worse. I do think about the things that I take away from Rastafari that are good, that are positive, which is rooted in this anti-colonial thought and this idea of celebrating my Blackness and Black liberation as the vision that we have for the future. I take that away. When I came to the US for the first time and I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, and having to reckon with that history of racism in the US, I always walked tall as a Black woman because of Rastafari. Let's say that.

Kai Wright: Wow. You have the tools to reach for to protect your Blackness, if not necessarily your womanhood?

Safiya Sinclair: Yes. Exactly.

Kai Wright: What about your relationship to your father? What's that like now?

Safiya Sinclair: It's an interesting one. I think that he, over the years, has definitely softened. He's definitely began to make amends. I think he's proud of me. I know that because he said that. I think he's happy that I am writing about Rastafari and this thing that is so deeply crucial and important to him and his life. I think in the writing of the book, it has begun to be this conduit for healing.

Kai Wright: What about for you, though? How do you feel about him?

Safiya Sinclair: Oh, how do I feel about him? Kai, that question could change day-to-day [laughs].

Kai Wright: Rightly and truly.

[laughter]

Safiya Sinclair: Today, I feel good about him. I was home a month ago, and we sat down and we had a very nice conversation. He apologized to me for the first time about a lot of the things that had happened or the way that he chose to manifest the rules in the house. I think we're on a good path. That was a good step. We're on a good path to some kind of change.

Kai Wright: Lastly, your relationship to Jamaica. You said both that Jamaica is home and that you felt like you had to leave to survive.

Safiya Sinclair: I had to leave my home, my house, my family's house. Jamaica, for me, is always home. I dream about the sea every night. Yes, it's always calling me back, and I go back. I'm there very often. Jamaica will always be home for me.

Kai Wright: I saw somewhere that you described your poetry and your writing as you wanted to evoke the lushness of Jamaica, which I hear it.

Safiya Sinclair: [laughs] Yes. In the crafting of everything, I take direction from home and its landscape as how I want to weave the sentences across the page and how I want the reader to experience Jamaica. I want you to feel as skin-close to Jamaica as I do, that you could feel the humid kiss of my homeland when you read my work.

Kai Wright: I love that language.

[laughter]

It's so great. Safiya Sinclair's memoir is called How to Say Babylon. Thank you so much for this conversation, Safiya.

Safiya Sinclair: Thank you so much for having me.

[music]

Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios. Follow us wherever you get your podcast and on Instagram at Noteswithkai. You can always talk to us. Go to our website at notesfromamerica.org and look for the little green record button. Just click and leave a message for us right there. I'd really love to hear what came up for you while listening to Safiya's story, so give me a shout.

Rahima Nasa produced this episode. Mixing and theme music by Jared Paul. Our team also includes Karen Frillman, Regina de Heer, Suzanne Gabber, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. André Robert Lee is our executive producer, and I am Kai Wright. Happy Holidays.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.