Poetry as a Path Out of Domination

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I just finished an astonishing memoir by Jamaican poet Sophia Sinclair.

It’s called How to Say Babylon, and it’s the story of being raised in a home dominated by her strict Rastafarian father.

And he tries to keep their family isolated from what he and his fellow Rastas regard as the sinister forces of Western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity, or what they call Babylon.

And her memoir is about the struggle to break free of her father’s control and find her own identity.

And Sinclair’s family is close and they’re devoted to one another, and she details all of this in lovely passages about their life in Montego Bay.

But her father becomes increasingly domineering and full of rage, and she and her siblings come to fear his unpredictable wrath.

And their mother, who’s a teacher, often steps in between to try to absorb the worst of it.

And she also endures taunts at school because Jamaica is a predominantly Christian nation where the Rastafari were considered outcasts.

And so by her early teens, Sinclair becomes despondent and even self-destructive.

And that is when her mother gives her a book called Poems of a Child’s World and gently suggests that she read it.

And her mom says, poetry is the best of what I’ve come to love about this world.

And that’s when Sinclair discovers how, as she puts it, poetry could cast a light on a meager world and make it boundless.

And she also begins to read the dictionary page by page.

And as she puts it, gathering the meaning and root of each known word, gems clinking in my heavy sack.

And poetry becomes her way out. And there’s so much more to say, Grant. I don’t want to give away any spoilers. Let me just say that this is a deeply insightful, very sensuous work. It’s a memoir that reads like a novel. It’s sometimes searing, but it’s also full of love and hope. It’s about family and forgiveness and resilience. And it’s also about the difference that mentors can make, whether on the page or in person.

And one of those mentors tells her at one point, the best way to really understand a poem is by embodying it. So Sinclair determines to make herself a sacral vessel, as she puts it. She memorizes dozens and dozens of poems. And she’s since become an internationally acclaimed poet herself. And I’m sure that that’s what makes her prose writing so great, being able to draw on that store.

And I’m thinking I don’t have much of anything memorized in terms of poetry. I have a lot of Bible verses from being a preacher’s kid, but I find myself really wistful about the way that some people can just pull out a poem for an occasion or, you know, a poem comes back to them when they’re thinking about a topic.

I don’t know. Do you memorize many poems?

No, not since I was required to in school.

I’ve always been one to know where to look things up or how to find them.

And it just hasn’t seemed like a necessary act.

I do wonder about the time spent memorizing a poem and how that feels to her.

Does she feel that it’s a chore? Does she feel that it’s a joy? Is it something she takes bit by bit so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to memorize?

I’m just curious about her process and what emotions she has as she’s doing it.

Well, I think, you know, if you read the book, you understand that she hangs on every word.

And she just has this store of poems.

At one point, she meets the great poet Derek Walcott.

And they’re talking about his poetry.

And he asks how many of his poems she has memorized.

And she says, oh, about eight.

I just, I can’t imagine, you know, meeting a famous poet and saying, oh, I have eight of your poems memorized.

No, it’s just not a part of our culture anymore to memorize Shakespeare or great poems or the ancients, you know, the classics.

Yeah, and I think it just, when I’ve done it in the past for school, I think that it’s just made me think in different ways, more rhythmically, more musically.

And that reminds me that if you’re thinking about listening to this book as an audio book, I would heartily recommend it.

She’s an excellent reader.

And at times she slips in and out of Jamaican patois.

And it’s just a gorgeous read, whether you’re listening or reading it on the page.

I would highly recommend it.

And the book and the author are? It’s called How to Save Babylon, and it’s by Sophia Sinclair.

We will link to that book from our website like we do all of the books that we mention.

We would love to hear about your experiences with poetry.

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