HOW TO SAY BABYLON

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.