Safiya Sinclair > Quotes

“There is no American dream without American massacre. Black towns burned, native families displaced, graveyards desecrated, lands stolen, lands ruined: Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“There was hair. So much hair. Dead hair, hair of my gone self, wisps of spiderweb hair, old uniform lint hair, pillow sponge and tangerine strings hair. A whole life pulled itself up by my hair, the hair that locked the year I broke my tooth, hair that locked the day we caught cane ashes in the yard. Hair of our lean years, hair of the fat, pollen of marigolds hair, my mother's aloe vera hair, my sisters weaving wild ixoras in my hair, the pull of the tides at our sea village hair, grits of sand hair, hair of salt tears, hair thick with the blood of my own cut wrists. Hair of my binding, hair of my unbeautiful wanting, hair of his bitter words, hair of the cruel world, hair roping me to my father's belt, hair wrestling the taunts of baldheads in the street, hair of my lone self, hair wrapped atop the ghost woman in white's hair, red thread of hair, centuries of hair, galloping future of incorrigible hair, all cut away from me.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“The word "cannibal," the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from whom the word "Caribbean" originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all "West Indian" people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.”
― Safiya Sinclair, Cannibal

“There was more than one way to be lost. More than one way to be saved. While my mother had saved me from the waves and gave me breath, my father had tried to save me only by suffocation. With ever increasing strictures, with incense smoke, with fire. Both had wanted better for me, but only one of them would protect me in the end.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“A book, I soon learned, was time travel. Each page held irrefutable power.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Here, the women of my family all met under one sign, stamped by what confining fates we had been handed. A girl had no choice in the familythat made her. No choice in the many names that followed her, wet-lipped and braying in the street. She was Psssst. And Jubi. And Catty. Mampy. Matey. Wifey. Dawlin. B. And Heffa. My Size. Empress. Brownine. Fluffy. Fatty. Slimmaz. Mawga Gyal. And Babes. Sweets. Chu Chups. And Ting. Machine. Mumma. Sketel. Rasta Gyal. Jezebel. And Daughter.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“I was curious. I touched the flame simply because it was burning. Because discipline always seemed to me the pin that held the butterfly in the display case.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“The more of this world I had discovered, the more I rejected the cage my father had built for me. There, in her frayed outline, I saw it, finally: If I were to forge my own path, to be free to make my own version of her, I had to leave this place. If I were to ever break free of this life, I had to run. But how would I ever find my way out? How would I know where to begin? Here, in the same hills that had made my father, now sprung the seed of my own rebellion.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“On this journey, perhaps the emperor recognized himself in the long claw of history, saw himself caught between the weight of being the heir to the Solomonic dynasty and the true freedom of being Chosen as the Messiah. What did it mean, after all, to be the living answer to the fraught question of Black survival?”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“A thought, I understood then, and its incendiary mind, could outlive itself. A well-made word could outspan carbon, and bone, and halved uranium.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“Behind me, walking into the sea was my smallest self, a baby girl throwing herself into the waves. Behind her I saw my mother, flying in footsteps to pluck me from the water. My mother's cut foot trailed a red spool of blood in the sand, weaving to the small figure of my mother as a girl, crouched and digging for food, waiting for the sea to offer her something to believe in. Wandering behind my mother I saw her gone mother, watching the sea in a wind-worn dress. Out in the distance was another young woman, and another, each walking beside their own mothers and sisters now, tall women, stern women, a woman whose name I did not know, her upturned face a copper sun, marking me. I bobbed transfixed, neck-deep in waves, watching the women weave and stretch for miles and decades beyond me, beyond and beyond, marking a line that trailed out from our little strip of beach and into the sweltering city, up into the hills and the green backbone of our country. Walking behind her and behind her, 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.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“There was nothing broken that the sea couldn’t fix, she always said.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours. Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the oceam that dreamt it. Memory is the sea. Memory is the house on the sand with a red door I have stepped through, trying to remember the history of the waves.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir: A Jamaican Memoir

“I was still young enough to keep approaching him, a kicked dog slinking back, doing as my mother did.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“How would I know where to begin? Here, in the same hills that had made my father, now sprung the seed of my own rebellion.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Day after day, I swung over those words, and saw ahead of me a life withering slowly under all his multiplying decrees. Day after day my heart bucked up against it. I was never going to be the perfect daughter. A grin of mischief opened ever so slyly inside me, a seedling of a voice that said no.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“I knew then that I could finally build myself a world that was beyond his reach. That on the page I was not the princess, I was the dragon. I wanted him to see the cruel world nakedly, the way I wanted all men to see the cruel world, their deeds burned to ash on my tongue.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“As someone once said to me, a poem is a thing… a cathedral of sound and imagery, and writing a poem is often like having the wind of some great power rush through you. I always find myself empowered, a mortal on the other side, with verses of immortality.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“I knew then that as long as I had a word that leapt aflame in my mind, I would always be living in an age of wonder.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. —GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the ocean that dreamt it.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“While he warned us of Bablyon, she showed us Zion.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“our persistent isolation became an integral part of the sect of Sinclair, and one that warped my value in traditional friendships, which I once saw as disposable as the rented homes we left behind”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“her hope was the faint kerosene lamp she blew out every night, only to light again the next evening.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“Here in the gathering numbness was our matrilineal mark: Each of us turned to stone overnight. Thrown, ripple after ripple, into the same strange sea. Delivered by some grief the night before. Here, the women of my family all met under one sign, stamped by what confining fates we had been handed. A girl had no chouce in the family that made her. No choice in the many names that followed her, wet-lipped and braying the street. She was Psssst. And Jubi. And Catty. Mampy. Matey. WIfey. Dawlin. B. And Heffa. My Size. Empress. Brownine. Fluffy. Fatty. Slimmaz. Mawga Gyal. And Babes. Sweets. Chu Chups. And Ting. Machine. Mumma. Sketel. Rasta Gyal. Jezebel. And Daughter.
Born under the same relentless sun, we were kindred. Pinned by the weight of our inheritance, the crucible of Black womanhood I had not yet passed through.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“The word “cannibal,” the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from whom the word “Caribbean” originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all “West Indian” people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.”
― Safiya Sinclair, Cannibal

“Here, the women of my family all met under one sign, stamped by what confining fates we had been handed. A girl had no choice in the family that made her. No choice in the many names that followed her, wet-lipped and braying in the street. She was Psssst. And Jubi. And Catty. Mampy. Matey. Wifey. Dawlin. B. And Heffa. My Size. Empress. Brownine. Fluffy. Fatty. Slimmaz. Mawga Gyal. And Babes. Sweets. Chu Chups. And Ting. Machine. Mumma. Sketel. Rasta Gyal. Jezebel. And Daughter.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

“I would pause my homework and go to him, because my hands were his.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir