Jamaican novelist Safiya Sinclair, who won the OCM Bocas Prize, expressed her disbelief at the news. Sinclair book’s How to Say Babylon: A Memoir was the recipient of the One Caribbean Media-sponsored 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which carries a $10,000 cash prize.
During a recent award ceremony held at Esperenza Alta in St Ann’s, Sinclair expressed that she authored the book with the intention of reaching out to Caribbean women, especially her father.
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She further remarked, “Everything I write and feel, and dream is for the Caribbean. I wrote How to Say Babylon for all the Caribbean women whose work and deeds so often go unseen and unsung, women who are overlooked and forgotten in the margins of history. I wrote this book for all the Caribbean who gave us the wildfire of our dialects and our folklore.”
She noted, “In many ways too, I wrote this book for my father and the rest of bredren like him who gave me the fire of my linguistic rebellion, to say what the I mean and mean what the I say. I wrote this in hopes that my father may understand me a little bit better, that he might finally hear me.”
In addition, she claimed to have written the novel as an homage to her childhood home and to her siblings.
“I wrote this book for my siblings, my sisters Ife and Shari, and my brother Lij. I’m so thankful for their strength, their laughter, their hope, the sunlight we found somehow, somewhere, under the shadow of our circumstance.”
Sinclair shared with her audience “And I wrote this book for Montego Bay, Jamaica, the red poinciana I was born under, the blue sound and music of my Caribbean Sea.”
She praised her fellow contestants, Nicole Sealey, who took home the poetry prize for The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, and Kevin Jared Hosein, who won the fiction category with his book Hungry Ghosts.
She expressed her gratitude to the writers who came before her, such as Edwidge Danticat, Lorraine Goodison, Sylvia Wynter, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin, Nicole Sealey, and others, for serving as an inspiration.
“With you, with all of you, we continue to create this matriarchal language, and with you, I’m leaving my small part of work.”
Regarding her fellow authors from the Caribbean, Sinclair had some advice.
“I want to say, being born in someone else’s idea of paradise, we’re often encouraged not to dream too far, not to think too big. But I think the very essence of being Caribbean is that when we’re told what’s impossible, we still reach for the sun anyway.”
He noted, “I wrote this book for all of you, for home. I write in hope we continue to defy colonial powers and continue to interrogate the violent history of the narratives that we were handed.”
She declared her desire for an end to colonial atrocities everywhere.
“I wish to see an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza. I dream to see a free Palestine in my lifetime, a free Congo, a free Sudan, a free Haiti.”
Sinclair spoke about how colonial violence shaped the Caribbean.
“When Columbus came to this archipelago, he miscategorized the West Indies. He also mischaracterized the natives he found there as Caribes, cannibals, and perhaps there is some sense this is what we are as Caribbean, ferocious in our survival because we fight for our land, our life, and our selfhood. Every freedom song is ours, forged in the wail of history.”
Sinclair concluded by thanking her mother for influencing her.
“Thank you for igniting the fire of poetry in me, for paving the way to make all of this possible. Thank you for showing me how to read the sea like a poem. It was you who first taught me that as long as I knew the memory of the waves, I could never be lost. As long as I listened to the voice of the seas, I would always find my way back home. And like Walcott said, I write the sea because the sea is history.”
Renowned writer Edwidge Danticat, a native of Haiti, served as the main judge. Additionally, poet Canisia Lubrin from St. Lucia, novelist Rabindranath Maharaj from Trinidad, and scholar Daliassa Trotz from Guyana provided support.
The judges said, “How to Say Babylon,” in their official reference, “is a memoir that reminds us of the expansive possibilities of creative nonfiction, bringing to the fore, with unforgettable poetic verve, a voice that is fierce, courageous, deeply intelligent, and empathetic, its nerve endings vibrating out from a specific experience of Rastafarianism into the currents of the wider world.”
“Embodying the finest traditions within Caribbean writing, yet standing on its own as a unique and astonishing work of witness, this is a work of reparation attending to both uneasy colonial legacies and difficult contemporary departures.”
According to Google Books, “How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.”
In the prize’s fourteen-year history, this is just the second occasion that a nonfiction book has taken home the top honor. Sinclair’s first book, Cannibal, awarded her the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.
