How to Say Babylon

Safiya Sinclair grew up in Jamaica as the daughter of a militant Rastafarian father who policed every aspect of his wife and four children's lives, calling the outside world Babylon and forbidding contact with it. How to Say Babylon follows Sinclair's childhood under his rule in Montego Bay and White House, her mother's quiet resistance, the modeling career her father destroyed, the poetry she discovered as a teenager that became the way out, and her eventual departure for college in Virginia. The book moves between Sinclair's personal story and the history of Rastafari as a Caribbean response to colonialism, building a memoir that is also a reckoning with the patriarchy her father weaponized in the name of resistance.