Anguish, Agony, Babylon: On Safiya Sinclair's "How to Say Babylon"
Read my review of Safiya Sinclair's memoir "How to Say Babylon" in which I describe how her father hoped to avoid the conventions of colonialism in his household...
…but instead infused his family life with a worldview based on the oppositional binaries we now consider the legacies of empire. Sinclair's book painstakingly details the repression she, her siblings, and her mom confronted in their male-dominated home.
To help us understand the abuse, trauma, and inherited trauma Sinclair discloses, I juxtapose her ideas with those of Boston Marathon Bombing survivor Zach Semel who wrote a 2023 essay titled "Why I Wasn't Ready to Go to AWP This Year." I enlist Melanie Brook's book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma in order to better understand how writers like Edwidge Danticat, Kyoko Mori, and Jerald Walker bring tragedy to the page. Finally, the book Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement by Daive Dunkley helped me fill in the historical context in which Sinclair's book is written.
My review is published at Litro Magazine, and it’s a great entry into the memoir by Safiya Sinclair. I eagerly hope that you read both.