At nineteen, Safiya Sinclair cut off the locks she had worn since childhood. Her mother helped. To someone else this might have been a change of hairstyle; to her father it meant abandoning faith. He did not speak to her for a year, though they continued living in the same house.
Sinclair later recalled this in an essay. A haircut readily becomes the turning point of a coming-of-age story: remove the hair, leave the past, begin anew. A year of silence under the same roof makes that explanation too easy. The daughter had decided, but still had to live daily with the consequences. Her mother's help did not mean the mother could leave her own circumstances behind.
How to Say Babylon, Sinclair's 2023 memoir, concerns this kind of growing up. Born in Jamaica, she had a reggae-musician father who was a strict Rastafarian. He regulated his daughter's clothing, relationships, and conduct. Her desire to make decisions intensified the conflict. Yet reducing the book to a girl escaping a controlling father and becoming a poet misses its hardest entanglement: some of the language of resistance, love for home, and sensitivity to injustice also came from that household.
The World Her Father Feared
To understand the title, we need to know what her father meant by Babylon. Within his faith, the word named an oppressive outside world, encompassing colonial history, racial discrimination, and the Western ways he distrusted. Locks marked religious commitment. He wanted his children to keep them and remain apart from perceived dangers.
For readers unfamiliar with Jamaica, reggae and locks can easily stand for an entire island. Sinclair emphasizes in interviews that Rastafarians are a minority there. Her siblings did not wear their hair that way because everyone else did. On the contrary, it exposed them to mockery at school. Their father's account of hostility was not entirely imaginary. Leaving the house did not immediately deliver a welcoming world.
This complicates domestic conflict. If outsiders truly despise us, parental protection can seem more justified. But does being hurt outside mean children must accept every arrangement at home? When the daughter chooses clothes, friends, and a future, her father can read those choices as external invasion. She must then explain more than the life she wants: she repeatedly has to demonstrate that she has not rejected her family.
Sinclair also asks how her father became this person. In an interview, she recounts his mother's rejection of his youthful religious choice. Rastafari offered belonging and a way to understand himself. That does not explain every later outburst, but it shows that faith was more than doctrine to him. He had used it to resist an elder deciding for him. When his daughter wanted to choose, he did not leave her equivalent room.
Something that once helped a person escape humiliation can become an instrument for requiring another's obedience. Her father opposed a world that placed Black people below others, yet denied his daughter comparable freedom of judgment at home. Justified resistance in the first case does not justify domination in the second. A daughter need not prove her father's life entirely worthless before she may oppose him.
Nor is this a simple choice between backward religion and enlightened society. Society outside can humiliate her too, and home contains more than injury. She needs a way to refuse her prescribed life without erasing where she comes from.
The Books Her Mother Put in Her Hands
While her father used language to divide safety from danger, her mother used books to open other places. Sinclair repeatedly locates the beginnings of her writing in the poetry her mother gave her. Poetry did not arrive as rescue only after departure. It was already in the house, supplied by another person's care.
As she grew older, she read dictionaries, recorded unfamiliar words, and practiced their sounds. Her account is not simply about increasing vocabulary. Language has sound and movements felt by lips and tongue. A girl accustomed to watching her father's mood gradually discovered choices about how to speak.
A dictionary could not resolve domestic conflict, but it introduced things her father had not already named for her. She could learn a word and try to clarify an indistinct feeling. She could write without an audience or preserve words she did not yet dare speak. That differs from winning one chance to address an authority. Written words can wait until she returns to ask what her earlier self experienced.
Yet language itself has history. She writes poetry in English, which is also bound to Jamaica's colonial past. Requiring a language wholly untouched by outside influence before she could truly speak for herself would leave her unable to begin. Her work instead brings Jamaican voices, memories, and rhythms into an existing language. Who uses it, and whose life it tells, matters more than an imagined purity of origin.
Notice also how the memoir writes the sea, plants, and childhood bodily sensations. Sinclair is a poet. Jamaica's landscape is not background that can be removed once an address is established. The place she loves overlaps with the place of injury. Readers impatient for escape may see such passages as delays, missing why leaving was difficult.
The memoir consequently does not distribute attention evenly across every stage of her life. It spends considerable effort returning to childhood and adolescence; life after moving to America is not its center. Readers seeking a poet's full career may want more of the later period. Its deepest attention remains with the girl trying to leave while repeatedly being drawn back. Her father appears first through a daughter's experience, not through an exhaustive biographer's view.
Recognizing that perspective does not oblige her to write a balanced report on someone who hurt her. Truthfully naming injury is not conditional on simultaneously displaying every parental virtue. We can question how memories are arranged without deciding beforehand how gently an injured daughter should speak.
Retelling Does Not Mean Owning the Past Alone
In her PEN America interview, Sinclair describes practical preparation: comparing memories with siblings and recording both parents. Their meeting was reconstructed through interviews, not presented as something she witnessed. Family members also helped verify Jamaican usage and spelling. One person's memory repeatedly encounters what others remember.
This changes the meaning of telling one's own story. She is recovering suppressed speech, but her origins do not belong to her alone. How her mother entered the household and what her father experienced as a young man are not meaningful only because their daughter later succeeded. Especially her mother cannot disappear once she has delivered books and helped cut hair. She has an earlier life, wishes, and choices that deserve attention.
A book about a controlling father can keep him perpetually central: he rages and others fear; he forbids and the daughter resists; finally everyone waits to see whether he changes. Sinclair's attention to her mother and the storytelling of women in her family offers another path. We can ask not only how she answered her father but who taught her to observe, remember, and speak. Other lives cease to be footnotes to his character.
Jamaican writer Diana McCaulay's response identifies a further difference. A white woman who also grew up under a father's domestic rules, she recognizes some of the daughter's anger. But passages involving tourists and skin color confront her with privileges supplied by the very world Sinclair's family faced. Similar feelings about family do not cancel different circumstances.
McCaulay's essay is useful to read alongside the memoir. “I experienced that too” can bring us close to another life. If recognition ends there, however, that life becomes another version of ours. Her response alternates between proximity and discomfort: the book reveals both herself and burdens she did not have to bear. Discomfort can make understanding more precise rather than obstruct it.
How to Say Babylon thus offers more than a girl finally finding courage to speak. It shows the work that follows speaking: separating love from control, acknowledging origins without accepting everything inherited, and making room for other family members within one's memory. “Be yourself” leaves all this work unmentioned.
At the haircut, mother and daughter could do only something limited. They could not ensure understanding, immediately change their home, or remove future fear through one decision. But a change to the daughter's body finally followed her own wishes. Her later account prevents the haircut from being defined only by paternal anger. It also records the life she wanted, and the mother who helped her make that choice.