Safiya Sinclair, a poet, was raised in a devoted Rastafari household in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her reggae artist father ran the household, regulating what she should eat, how she should dress, and who she could and couldn’t socialize with. Women were treated as property, and everyone who wasn’t a Rastafarian was viewed as a heathen.
Sinclair was excluded from society outside her home as a result of her Rasta identity. She was treated differently by teachers and had her dreadlocks teased by students at school. She first encountered a new universe when her mother gave her a book of poems when she was eleven years old.
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She shared how poetry had helped her to transform her sorrows into something pleasing to the eye and ear, “I realized that poetry could alkalize the hurt I was feeling into something different, into something beautiful” She further noted, “It was through the discovery of poetry and discovery of some particular poems when I was a teenager that really lifted me from what I call the catacombs of myself.”
Sinclair started producing her own poems while also challenging the Rastafari ideology she was nurtured in. She chopped her long-growing dreadlocks when she was 19 years old, which enraged her father.
In Jamaica, having dreadlocks is an indication of being a Rastafarian to anybody who sees you, according to Sinclair. She says that after getting her hair cut, “I did not exist to [my father]. I had become Babylon.”
Sinclair claims that she was unable to envision herself as an adult until she separated from Rastafari. She received a scholarship to study at Vermont’s Bennington College, where she later earned a PhD. She is currently a professor at Arizona State University.
Cannibal, Sinclair’s debut book, was a compilation of poetry. She reflects on her early years and her break with Rastafari in her new memoir, How to Say Babylon.
When asked about her thoughts of Rastafarians being considered as outcasts in Jamaica the author/poet responded, “The movement began in the early 1930s when Jamaica was still a colony of Britain. And Jamaica itself is a deeply Christian country, which I think is something that most people don’t know. … Because Jamaica is this predominantly Christian country when the Rastafari movement began when we were still being ruled by the British Crown, the Rastafari were seen as pariahs. They were seen as un-Christian. They were pushed to the fringes. They were kicked out of their homes by their families.”
She added, “They were forbidden from walking along the beach sites that were being developed for tourists. … They were forbidden from having jobs. And so I think they were seen as the nation’s black sheep. They were seen as everything anti-Christian and anti-colonial. And that was also a deliberate route of Rastafari to be anti-colonial and anti-Christian. But in a Christian society that was also seen as very transgressive and so they were not accepted.”
On being raised pure which is a part of the Rastafari culture Sinclaire shared, “Purity was about how one kept your mind and your body clean. It defined what we ate. We had to eat a specific diet: … no meat, no dairy, no fish, no eggs, no salt. That was part of the purity of the diet. Then it was about keeping your mind and your thoughts pure and dedicated to thoughts of Jah, of Black liberation, of working toward repatriation to Zion, which is the Rastafari term for Africa, seen as the motherland.
She added, “For women in particular, purity also extended to a kind of restriction on our bodies. And so what I wore was part of my purity. I had to cover my arms and knees. I could wear no makeup, no jewelry. All of that was seen as the garish trappings of Babylon. And eventually, I was not allowed to have friends. Any kind of outside influence was seen as corruptive. Most essentially, I was not allowed to question my father.”
When asked about her journey of cutting ties with the Rastafarian culture, she remarks, “I had this moment when I was 19 and I just tried to look into the future of, OK, if I continued on this path of Rastafari, if I did all the things my father wanted me to do, if I became the woman he wanted me to be, who is she? Who would she be like? And she appeared to me as this, like, bent and broken Rasta woman who was silent, whose only value in this world is to be domestic and to be in the kitchen and to have children and to be sort of the extension of our Rasta brethren, who was the Godhead of his household.”
Sinclaire added that to truly achieve her passion she had to take the step of separating herself from that rastafarian culture which means removing her dread, a symbol of the religion, “She would have no dreams or desires. She would have nothing to say in the world. She would have no art. She wouldn’t have her poetry. That is the vision that came to me, and I realized I had to completely cut this woman down. I had to cut everything about her and her possibilities away from me. And that’s when I decided to cut my dreadlocks and to sever the tie between me and Rastafari, and between me and my father, and to really try to offer a future that was mine, only, to make.”
When questioned on her current views of Reggae music and dreadlocks the poet states, “I always look at it with amused curiosity. Being from Jamaica, everybody wants to tell me their story that they know about Jamaica, when they went on vacation to Jamaica and how much they loved Bob Marley in college and things. … But I always hear my father’s voice, funnily, when I see people wearing the dreadlocks because knowing how much it means to him and the other brethren of Rastafari and other people of Rastafari, what significance it has to them. But so many people around the world aren’t aware of that significance or aren’t aware of all the nuances of Rastafari culture beyond reggae music and Bob Marley.”
