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“I’m happy to be in front of an audience where I don’t have to explain what Babylon means,” Safiya Sinclair told the crowd gathered under the stars at Treasure Beach on Friday. “What it means when you say it. What it means when you chant it down.”
With those words, Sinclair — the Montego Bay-born, globally celebrated poet and author — began reading from her critically acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon, for the first time in Jamaica. Sinclair shared passages with a Jamaican audience that understood the coded and layered meaning of “Babylon” — not just the colonial construct or oppressive force, but the spiritual and emotional weight that shaped her childhood.
“There’s something about not needing to translate yourself that makes the truth hit different,” explained Sinclair.
Her reading was part of the festival’s ‘Truth and Dare: Memoir’ session on the opening night of the literary festival. Seven years after she first stood on this stage in 2018 as a rising poet, Sinclair returned transformed — a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction. Her memoir, which chronicles her upbringing in a rigid Rastafari household, has become a literary phenomenon. But it was here, at home, where her words finally landed with the weight of shared understanding.
Sinclair recounted the early history of Rastafari, noting how Rastas were once banned from beaches, denied employment, and hunted by state forces. She recalled the often unseen pain of growing up Rasta in Jamaica — ostracised by schoolmates, misunderstood even by fellow Jamaicans, and tethered to a movement both powerful and punishing.
A piercing moment of the evening came as Sinclair read a passage about the betrayal of a childhood friend and the brutal, silent pain that followed. In primary school, she received a note from a girl she thought was her friend. “I don’t want to be friends anymore with a Rasta,” Sinclair recalled. She paused before reading that line, letting the memory settle like dust in the air. “It wasn’t just a child’s cruelty,” she told the audience. “It was Babylon — that system of shame, of rejection, that tells us we are less than.”
Sinclair read, voice steady but thick with memory, about stepping on a rusted nail at school — on purpose — just to feel something deeper than heartbreak. The gasp that rose from the audience was a mixed emotion of shock and of recognition. “Everyone believed the nail was an accident,” she read, “and I let them believe it.”
That memory — one of the most tender in the memoir — was a turning point. Her mother’s nurturing, her poetry, and the gift of language became the seeds of Sinclair’s future. “So much of the book is not just about growing up Rastafari,” Sinclair told the crowd, “but about my journey to becoming a writer … and all of that I owe to my mother and the books that she gifted me. This reading is in tribute to her.”
Then came the climax that pierced the air — the reading of a pivotal scene in which Sinclair, now a teenager, cuts off her dreadlocks. It was an act of defiance, identity, and rebirth. “My dreadlocks fell around me like ruined limbs, I was new again, unburdened. Someone different. I told myself, a girl who could choose what happened next.”
For Sinclair, reclaiming her story has been an act of survival and self-definition. “I still identify as Dread. Though I no longer wear locks, that identity — the resistance, the roots, the truth — it lives in me ... stronger now, because I chose it.”
And Calabash — the festival where she once stood as a young poet, still in the midst of thinking about writing this book — became the sacred place where past and present collided.
In the memoir’s final chapter, Sinclair describes her début on the same stage in 2018 — Sinclair spoke of writing the book’s final chapter while overlooking Treasure Beach, her father and brother driving three hours to watch her read for the first time. As she stood on the stage in 2018 and again last weekend, the circle of reclamation closed.
“Home was poetry,” she read, “and what it had forged of me.”
She closed with a powerful declaration that extended the spirit of rebellion beyond the page, rooting her words in global solidarity.
“Rastafari was born out of the anti-colonial idea of freeing Black people and all downtrodden people from ‘downpression’. As a daughter of Rasta rebellion, I know that none of us are free until all of us are free. We say, fire burn Babylon, which means I wish to see all don’t press people free from the shackles of colonial violence. I long to see an end to the genocide in Gaza, and I wish to see a free Palestine in my lifetime. A free for them, a free Congo.”
English (US) ·