66 pages • 2 hours read
Safiya SinclairHow to Say Babylon: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Girlhood and Womanhood
Girlhood and womanhood are mysterious and often frightening throughout the memoir. Safiya’s burgeoning sexual maturity becomes the greatest source of conflict between her and her father: Howard is so obsessed with what will happen to his daughters when they become women that he descends into rage and violence. He is constantly afraid his daughters will have early sexual experiences like his mother, so he exerts his power over them to keep them isolated.
While Safiya struggles to fit in at St. James because of her socioeconomic background and scholarship status, her female classmates perform a kind of girlhood that is completely foreign to her. She is used to seeing Rasta women being subservient and docile. In contrast, her classmates are boisterous and opinionated; she observes their “strange manners and references, parsing out the upswing of their voices on the end of their sentences” while wishing “for that freedom” (129). No matter what she tries to assimilate—their language or their clothing—Safiya is always seen as other because of Howard’s demands and restrictions. Her classmates’ ease with their girlhood gives them power over Safiya and drives her further into isolation. Her only source of comfort is the written word.
However, Safiya does find power in womanhood. Her recurring nightmare hallucination of the Woman in White—a possible future version of herself—shows her womanhood that feels unbearable: domestic, subservient, voiceless, and devoid of color. As a result, Safiya realizes she must kill that image to free herself from the expectations Howard has set. When Safiya reclaims her agency as a young woman by modeling, where she is praised rather than shamed for her beauty, and by writing poetry that is lauded and wins awards, she finds the power to confront Howard on his misogynistic beliefs. Additional inspiration comes from her female ancestors and the generations of women yet to come. Drawing on the force of the women who came before her, Sinclair finally gets the strength to write her memoir: “I saw them—all the women who had put one foot in front of the other and pushed their hands into the dirt. Women who had survived. The women who made me” (329). The main reason she documents her experiences is to protect and uplift her descendants: “I would write for every Sinclair girl who was still to come. […] So she who comes next would never have to know the fire. So she who comes next would always know herself” (315). Being part of the transition from painful past to optimistic future allows Safiya to overcome girlhood to find peace in womanhood.
Family Expectations and Dynamics
While Safiya finds comfort in specific members of her family, for the most part, her nuclear family is a source of extreme tension and isolation. Howard attempts to compensate for his lack of a stable nuclear family growing up by ratcheting up restrictive and oppressive rules; this mindset only makes his paranoia and need for stifling control more extreme, leading him to create an abusive and traumatizing home environment.
Part of the Sinclair family’s dynamic is based on history. Adherents of Rastafari became more individualized after Jamaica’s colonial government began viewing the religion as a threat and attempted to disband it: This “encouraged most Rastafari to individualize their livity at home, with impunity. There, in the privacy of their own households, each Rasta bredren could be a living godhead, the king of his own secluded temple” (40). Without an organized religious system, there is no oversight of Rasta men, each of whom is free to create his own version of Rastafari, leading to extremely varied experiences for Rasta families. Safiya’s family suffers because Howard decides to be “a living godhead” to the fullest, expecting his children and wife to be as deferential as they would be to a deity. The children learn “from [their] mother” that “there was only one answer to whatever [Howard] said. Yes, Daddy” (46). The fact that Howard requires everyone—including Esther—to call him “Daddy” shows that he puts himself above every other member of the family. “Daddy,” a term of endearment, becomes a sign of extreme fear as the Sinclairs perform obeisance to assuage Howard.
Howard’s failure to be the perfect father and husband that he imagines himself to be destroys his family. When Mama Lee reaches out to Safiya and reveals that she is actually married to Howard and has a child with him, Esther is undone by this multi-faceted betrayal. Not only does Howard maintain a second family, but also he married Mama Lee after telling Esther that they couldn’t get married because he doesn’t believe in marriage. The idea that Safiya now knows about Mama Lee shocks Esther out from under Howard’s control for good. Esther cannot forgive Howard for failing to protect his children from being exposed to his mistakes, leading her to leave him and completely dissolve their nuclear family.
Literature as a Form of Liberation
Amid so much chaos and trauma, Safiya finds that the written word can heal some of her pain. Interestingly, it is Esther who first introduces Safiya to poetry. After Safiya purposefully steps on the rusted nail as a form of self-harm, Esther gives her daughter a poetry collection and tells her, “Something about poetry always soothed the ills of the world for me” because “poetry made [the world] seem wide and wild and warmer” (115). By giving Safiya the gift of literary creativity, Esther expands her daughter’s horizons and her sense that there is a wider world outside the restrictive prison of Howard’s strict household.
Once Safiya meets the Old Poet, she gets the resources and opportunity to leave Howard’s home, both literally and figuratively. To attend her private lessons and weekly workshops with the Old Poet, Safiya moves in with her grandmother Sweet P, whose house has none of the strictures Howard imposes on his daughters. Away from Howard, Safiya flourishes, becoming more confident in her writing and in her personhood. Additionally, she finds that she can use her words as a weapon. After she writes a persona poem about a girl who was sexually assaulted by her father, Howard is devastated, especially because Safiya does not warn him of the poem’s content. Safiya realizes she “could finally build […] a world that was beyond his reach” and is delighted to force “him to see the cruel world nakedly” (208). She simultaneously finds agency in being able to build a world free of Howard and the ability to hurt him within the written word.
However, trauma following Howard’s physical attack with the machete causes Safiya to struggle with her writing for the first time. While in graduate school, she tries repeatedly to write her memoir but is unable to complete it because she hasn’t gotten any emotional distance from the horrible events she wants to describe. When her thesis advisor suggests she take a break from her work, she thinks, “I tell myself he has lived through worse and would know better. I abandon the book, abandon my memories. Turn away from myself. I long for tranquility” (313). Taking her advisor’s advice requires abandoning the tranquility Safiya has found in literature.
The memoir ends with Safiya reclaiming her ability to transform her experiences into written expression. While in graduate school, Safiya reconciles with Howard, as distance and scholarship have given her the space to find peace with him. Eventually, she returns to the memoir project, but only when she has the clarity and closure in her family life to truly feel free to write what feels authentic.
