How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

"Yes, this is Safiya Sinclair’s first work of prose, I think. She’s a poet. And you know that when you read it, because her prose is astonishing. This is a story of her upbringing in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica, and it exposes the subjugation under which she lives. The father is the god of the household. Women are tightly controlled in what they can wear, what they can do, who they can be. It explores her parents’ story and her experience of growing up in this environment, her breaking free, and the role of poetry in that. It’s lyrical, a completely delicious read. And it has had a lot of attention for the quality of the telling. Yes. I feel very strongly about this. Let me give you some of the data. When the prize was announced a year ago, the Women’s Prize commissioned research that found that, in 2022, only 26.5% of the space given by national newspapers to reviewing nonfiction was given to books by women. In the best books of the year round-ups, they found only a third of the books recommended were by women. Over seven nonfiction prizes over the course of ten years, only 35.5% of the books shortlisted were by women. Perhaps the most shocking is the gender pay gap, which is 14% across all industries in the UK, but among writers has worsened from 33.3% to 35.7%. So, either women simply write less well than men, or something structural is going on here. I think it was Mary Ann Sieghart has called “ the authority gap ”: that women are still expected not to be able to talk with expertise in the same way that men are, after more than a couple of millennia of men being in positions of authority. When it comes to non-fictional subjects, women aren’t considered the authority figures. The Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is an intervention which aims to try to change the literary landscape. One thing that was very interesting was that, as a historian, I know the ways in which women are making interventions in meaningful ways in the factual environment. Yet publishers generally send in the sorts of books that “do well for women.” So we called in a lot of books as well, and I feel we finally ended up with a good representation of what has been published. But publishers found it hard to understand, exactly in the way that the problem exists, that women can speak to subjects with expertise as well as beauty and power. Absolutely. The quality of the work is out there already. We read an enormous number of wonderful books. Please, take a look at our longlist of 16 incredible books . I’m also hoping that the upshot of this prize will be that publishers commission more of this stuff, by women, because they know there’s a place now where it might be recognised."

"This memoir is another story of literary self-liberation in many ways, as Safiya Sinclair finds poetry as a pathway out of her abusive, extremely restricted, patriarchal upbringing. Growing up in Jamaica, Sinclair must live by her increasingly paranoid father’s rules. Her physical appearance is controlled: she can’t wear pants, only skirts or dresses. She’s told she’s too outspoken, that she’ll never be a perfect Rasta girl. Her father beats her and her siblings in fits of rage at imagined transgressions. But Sinclair’s love of reading and poetry enable her to do well in school and she eventually frees herself from her father’s control. Sinclair is herself an accomplished poet, and she uses the literary skills of poetry in the telling of this story. Despite the harsh subject matter, her sentences are just gorgeous! For example, she writes, “The hiss of crickets prickled the night,” and, “My father’s silence spread like a fog over everything,” and, “The pale owl of my past still chases me down…” This is a book that deserves to be savored sentence by sentence. Sinclair opens her book with the 1966 visit to Jamaica of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom the Rastafari believed was a living god. She explains how this came to be. The Rastafari movement began in 1930 as a way to resist colonization and white supremacy and the Rastafari believed that a Black Messiah would come from Africa to save them from western society, that is, Babylon. Since Ethiopia had never been colonized, when Haile Selassie was crowned as Emperor, the Rastas came to believe he must be the Black Messiah that they’d been waiting for. So there was a huge turnout of Rastas at the airport for Haile Selassie’s first ever visit in 1966. Sinclair uses this moment to show how many historical forces were coming together, both personal and global. For example, Bob Marley’s wife, Rita, was present at the airport, and she later persuades Bob to join the movement. Meanwhile, Sinclair’s father was just a toddler at the time but he was inspired by Marley’s music to join the Rastafari. Sinclair is particularly adept at bringing a personal lens to these larger historical forces and vice versa. It’s a really fascinating memoir."