How to Say Babylon

How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster), the debut memoir by Safiya Sinclair, winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, is a tempestuous reckoning with the author’s Rastafari upbringing beneath the yoke of a didactic patriarch. Sinclair juxtaposes the natural beauty of her girlhood’s Jamaican landscape with the strict, often punitive edicts issued by her father to the rest of her family. Plotting a course for autonomy, the author charts a journey of resistance through fear, championing self-determination despite pain and sacrifice.