Safiya Sinclair | How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
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In conversation with Philadelphia Poet Laureate Airea D Matthews
Hailed by Tara Westover as “Dazzling. Potent Vital. A light shining on the path of self-deliverance,” Safiya Sinclair’s memoir How to Say Babylon recounts her struggle to break free from her rigid Rastafarian upbringing and her father’s repressive control, set against the backdrop of a larger story of colonialism in Jamaica. Sinclair is also the author of the acclaimed poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, among other honors. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, and Kenyon Review.
Airea D. Matthews is the 2022-23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulacra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews’ other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Addressing themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories, Bread and Circus combines poetry, prose, and imagery to tell an intimate story about the author and her family.
Recorded October 5, 2023
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Safiya Sinclair is a powerful, riveting writer. Her use of language and imagery blows me away. The interviewer ask very insightful questions and elicited interesting responses as to how this amazing writer weaves poetry and cultural history into her memoir. I can’t wait to read her poetry.
I am on the last chapter of your memoir and I am savoring these pages as the tears flow. I see my father in your father being a Caribbean woman myself. I identified with this book so much although not Rastafari but my father was all about black empowerment in post-colonial Trinidad. Thank you for this touching memoir Safiya!
I am reading How to Say Babylon now and I am very moved by the story and the way it is told. It resonates in me most among all the memoirs I have read so far. Beyond the differences between Ms Sinclair’s and my childhood in Japan of 1960s and 1979s, our stories are very similar as young ambitious girls wanting to define us with our own words yearning to be educated and become independent. Thank you for such an inspirational book.
What a brilliant interviewer, sensitively bringing out the best from Safiya Sinclair and allowing her the perfect platform to talk about her life, story and poetry.
One of the best books I have ever read. So moving, so powerful, so haunting.
The interviewer asked absolutely the best questions.
Love this. Amazing piece of history
The memoir is absolute genius!
Wow !! An Absolutely Well Spoken Drop Dead Gorgeous Jamaican Woman 😃 😚😍
I wonder how Dr. Sinclair would characterize The Rastafarians by Leonard Barrett Sr. and Rastafari: Roots and Ideology by Barry Chevannes. I met Dr. Chevennes's daughter, Amba, through an exchange program between the University of the West Indies and Spelman College.