How to say Babylon, Safya Sinclair

My obsession with the Caribbeans continues. I've been both in a reading and writing slump, confessing to you, hidden and unknown reader, how in my stressed and melancholy state I result to the buying of more books and frequenting the public library instead of resting in the abundance of my own. 

There in the city library, by the statue of a young maiden, I found both Jean Rhys biography and that of Safiya Sinclair, how strange! This white creole woman and and a young black one, with clearly white ancestors (a great grandmother i suppose) and I a lazy reader hanging like a broken jungle bridge between them. 

After Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy I was yearning to know more about the women from the Caribbeans hence it felt like destiny when Safiya's biography gravitated into my hand as if of some magical force. As you might remember from my last post I had some ideas about white western women and black Caribbean women being different because of privileges. Since my last update I've been haphazardly reading How to say Babylon and each time been gripped in my inmost being, not only by her language but also by her relationship to her father. Safiya describes her actual life, and how it was growing up in Jamaica with her Rastafari parents and siblings. Hers is a story of a woman becoming independent and breaking free under the destruction and oppression of her fathers rule and the myriad of ways how his destructive ways affected her. I felt like I was looking into a mirror and seeing myself. I too, have had painstaking encounters with mine. I felt Safiya's pain, I understood her young struggles into becoming a woman of her own, and I understood so much of my self that I am still processing. 

In my quest for understanding the Caribbeans and the women born from those islands, I struck gold. I realized that they're not different,  that there is no cultural finesse that separates the black life from mine, so pale, rather in every sentimental and mental way, the breaking free of a caged bird is the same. 

In her girlhood and later, more frequently in her young adult life she saw a ghostlike vision, a woman who emerged from walls, and appeared under the fruit trees, much like in Gilman-Perkinsons Yellow Wallpaper. The woman was Safiya as the father would have her grow up, as a submissive Rasta wife, worn out and dead.  And how at a very early age Safiya understood that she'd have to kill the vision of who she didn't want to become. The element of struggle for a woman to live a free life. Yet she beautifully described the cuts and wounds that her father inflicted on her soul each time he belittled her and rejected her. 

Safiya's biography made me to understand another thing, the price of sacrificial love when the mother choses to stay. However there are many ways to be rescued, there is a multitude of happy endings, when the woman has the guts to break free, as she did, as did I. 

I felt like the circle closes as regards the topic of The Caribbeans, for now, I'm satisfied in seeing that the nature and people of The Caribbeans is as diverse as in any place, and that even in such a natural paradise as Jamaica men can still make life a living hell for women and children. 

I listened to a performance by Howard Sinclair on YouTube, such a small man. I felt sorrow and pain in seeing him, a violent man, there is a few things I loathe more than men who beat women and children. 

How to say Babylon was refreshing, for me it was healing, it was light despite it's darkness. I loved it for her language, it was as if I was there, watching her grow up and then break free, and I stood there on the sideline saying "You go girl!"

Lastly, I'll cite the poem that deeply moved Safiya in the early days of her becoming a poet, 

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.