How to Say Babylon
How to Say Babylon
Chapter 1: The Man Who Would Be God
Overview
The chapter opens on a rain-soaked April morning in 1966, as over a hundred thousand Rastafari faithful swarm Kingston’s Palisadoes Airport, defying storms and state authority to witness the arrival of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Seen by Rastas as the living incarnation of God (Jah), Selassie’s visit ignites a seismic clash between the marginalized Rastafari community and Jamaica’s colonial-era power structures. Against a backdrop of drumming, ganja smoke, and fervent chants, the scene becomes a visceral symbol of resistance—a marginalized people demanding recognition, liberation, and divine validation. Interwoven with this historic moment are glimpses of the Rastafari movement’s origins, its persecution by the Jamaican government, and the personal legacy of Selassie’s visit for the author’s family.
Faith Under Fire
The Rastafari at Palisadoes embody decades of systemic oppression. Branded outcasts for their beliefs, they’d endured raids, forced displacement, and violence from a state aligned with British colonial interests. Their gathering is an act of defiance: draped in Ethiopian colors, they reject the sanitized protocols of the prime minister’s delegation, reframing the airport as sacred ground. The tension between the Rastas and the authorities—referred to as Babylon—mirrors their broader struggle against racism, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure.
A Messiah’s Mirage
When Selassie’s plane emerges through storm clouds, the crowd interprets the sudden break in rain as divine intervention. Chaos erupts as Rastas surge toward the tarmac, desperate to touch the emperor’s plane. Selassie’s delayed exit and eventual choice to step onto mud instead of the red carpet deepen their conviction in his humility and godhood. Rita Marley’s account of a stigmata-like mark on his palm cements her conversion, later influencing her husband, Bob Marley, to spread Rastafari teachings through reggae.
Propaganda and Paradox
Despite Selassie’s insistence that he is not divine, Rastas reinterpret his denial as proof of divinity. Folklore proliferates: rumors of cursed “coffin” gifts to officials and blessed medallions for Rasta leaders blur myth and reality. These stories, alongside the emperor’s stoic presence, fuel a cultural renaissance. The visit becomes a catalyst for Rastafari’s global rise, transforming it from a persecuted sect into a symbol of Black liberation.
Seeds of a Personal Apocalypse
The chapter closes by tracing Selassie’s enduring influence on the author’s father, who evolves from a toddler in rural Jamaica to a zealous Rasta patriarch. The emperor’s image—painted on shanties and revered in homes—becomes a haunting presence in the author’s childhood, foreshadowing their father’s fanaticism and the family’s eventual fracture. Selassie’s visit, though fading from national memory, lingers as a spectral force, binding personal history to a movement’s turbulent arc.
Key Takeaways
- A Revolution in Waiting: Selassie’s 1966 visit crystallized Rastafari’s identity as a movement of resistance, merging spiritual fervor with anti-colonial politics.
- Myth as Survival: The Rastafari reinterpreted Selassie’s actions and words to affirm their faith, illustrating how marginalized groups reclaim narratives under oppression.
- Legacy of Contradiction: Selassie’s denial of divinity clashed with his mythic status, highlighting the tension between human fallibility and symbolic power.
- Personal Cost of Devotion: The chapter foreshadows how fervent belief—in Selassie, liberation, or paternal authority—shapes and fractures families, embedding history into intimate spaces.
How to Say Babylon
Chapter 2: Domain of the Marvelous
Overview
This chapter immerses readers in the author’s early childhood within White House, a secluded Jamaican fishing village steeped in family history and resistance. Far from the tourist-brochure ideal, the village is a tight-knit enclave of survival, where generations of fishermen battle encroaching hotels and fading reefs. The narrative paints a vivid tapestry of communal living, Rastafari principles, and the sea’s dual role as sustainer and threat. Through intimate anecdotes—like a near-fatal encounter with the ocean—the author reveals how resilience, familial bonds, and cultural identity are forged against the backdrop of colonialism’s lingering shadow.
A Hidden Coastal World
White House exists just beyond the gaze of Jamaica’s tourist economy—a cluster of weathered homes shielded by gnarled trees and cinder blocks. The village’s isolation is both a refuge and a battleground, where the author’s family has clung to their land for generations. The sea dominates daily life, its rhythms dictating meals, work, and play. Yet even here, the hum of planes overhead and the glint of hotel walls serve as constant reminders of a paradise under siege.
Family Ties and Communal Living
Cramped quarters bind the family together: three generations share a handbuilt house with zinc roofs and crimson-stained floors. The author sleeps beside parents and siblings, while aunts, cousins, and her grandfather’s teenage girlfriend navigate their own intertwined struggles. Laughter and hardship echo equally through the walls, as pregnancies, returns from the city, and communal meals weave a fabric of collective endurance.
Daily Rhythms and Survival
Fishing defines existence. Uncles mend traps and haul glittering catches—sharks, snappers, eels—while the village transforms into a bustling market. Children and strays scavenge scraps, and meals cooked over coal fires unite everyone around Dutch pots. The author’s childhood is a sensory feast: coconut jelly, fish eyes as treats, and the thrill of stingrays buried in sand. But scarcity looms; even bathwater is hauled from a standpipe.
Absence of Modern Conveniences
Electricity and plumbing are absent. A shared pit-latrine lies far from homes, and children use plastic “chimmies” emptied daily into the sea. Showers are taken outdoors behind plywood, and kerosene lamps cast flickering light on bedtime stories—and accidental burns. The author’s scars become markers of a rugged upbringing, where even mosquito bites morph into festering wounds.
A Father’s Austere Influence
The author’s Rasta father stands apart, his dreadlocks and prophecies of Babylon’s evils contrasting with the villagers’ pragmatic existence. He avoids fish, adheres to strict Ital practices, and serenades tourists at hotels he deems oppressive. His warnings about the sea haunt the author, foreshadowing her rebellious curiosity. His absence for work deepens the divide between his ascetic worldview and the village’s earthy vitality.
Encroaching Shadows of Tourism
Hotels with “broke-glass” walls metastasize around White House, their names echoing Jamaica’s colonial past. The author traces how foreign developers and local elites erase Black ownership of the coast, leaving White House as Montego Bay’s last free beach. Her great-grandfather’s refusal to sell—burying deeds in coral and kelp—becomes an act of defiance against a new wave of colonization.
A Brush with the Sea’s Wrath
At four, the author nearly drowns after venturing into the waves alone. Her mother, bleeding from a gashed foot, rescues her in a moment of primal urgency. The incident becomes a secret between them, a bond forged in survival. The mother’s fierce protection contrasts with the father’s unspoken fears, hinting at future clashes between safety and freedom.
Stories as Anchors
The sea is both teacher and lineage. The mother recasts the near-drowning into legend, weaving tales of resilience into the author’s identity. Through stories of Haile Selassie, conch shells, and their Rastafari awakening, she stitches together a narrative where the sea is home—a legacy no hotel can claim.
Key Takeaways
- Resistance Through Roots: White House symbolizes Black Jamaicans’ fight to retain land and culture against tourism’s erasure.
- Communal Fortitude: Survival hinges on shared labor, laughter, and intergenerational bonds in the face of scarcity.
- Sea as Dual Force: It nourishes and threatens, embodying both freedom and peril.
- Legacy of Colonialism: Hotels built on enslaved labor’s graves market “paradise” while displacing locals.
- Storytelling as Survival: Family myths transform trauma into strength, anchoring identity in history and place.
How to Say Babylon
Chapter 3: Fisherman’s Daughter
Overview
In the rugged landscape of 1980s Jamaica, two souls navigate worlds shaped by abandonment and defiance. Esther, a bookish outcast branded barren by a nun’s diagnosis, scavenges hope from discarded novels and mystic practices, her light skin and refusal to conform marking her as an oddity in a village steeped in scarcity. Across Montego Bay, Howard—a disgraced reggae musician turned Rasta exile—burns with fury against Babylon, the oppressive system that cheated him of fame and family. His mother’s final rejection catapults him into the bush, where dreadlocks and devotion to Jah become armor against a hostile world.
Their collision feels fated: at a chaotic party, Esther challenges Howard’s guardedness, sparking a bond forged in shared rebellion. She offers shelter; he earns her fisherman father’s respect. Together, they embrace Rastafari livity—chanting Nyabinghi hymns, eating Ital foods, rejecting societal norms. But utopia fractures when Howard’s temper clashes with commune elders, forcing them back to Esther’s hostile family. Yet amidst the strife, a miracle blooms: Esther’s pregnancy, once deemed impossible, becomes proof of divine favor, cementing her faith in Howard’s vision.
The shadow of history looms. Leonard Howell’s shattered 1940s commune—a blueprint for Black self-reliance crushed by colonial forces—echoes in their fleeting communal idyll and Howard’s growing authoritarianism. Their story, like Howell’s, teeters between collective hope and individual rigidity. Esther’s reclaimed motherhood and Howard’s war against Babylon unite them, but beneath the triumph simmers tension—between medical certainty and faith, communal ideals and control, rebellion and the fragile art of building a family. The sea that witnessed their pain now carries whispers of storms ahead.
A Childhood Forged in Scarcity
Esther’s early life in White House, Jamaica, was marked by abandonment and survival. Orphaned at four after her mother Isabel’s death from a botched abortion, she was left with a transient father who deposited new siblings into the household before vanishing. Her striking resemblance to Isabel—a mixed-race mistress—made her a target for her stepmother’s cruelty, forcing her into relentless domestic labor by age eight. She raised her siblings, wore donated clothes until they frayed, and scavenged for dignity in a world that offered little. A traumatic encounter at seven, when a man assaulted her and callously revealed her mother’s death, cemented her understanding of loss.
The Diagnosis That Shattered Hope
At eighteen, Esther visited a free clinic run by American nuns, desperate for answers about debilitating menstrual pain that had derailed her education. The nun’s examination ended with a quiet devastation: infertility. The diagnosis drowned her in a “wave of water,” symbolizing the collapse of her dream to nurture her own children. Already a surrogate mother to her siblings, the news left her adrift. She retreated into mysticism, smoking ganja and studying yogic practices, while clinging to books salvaged from tourist trash—her only escape from a future as a maid or sex worker at Ocean View brothel.
Shadows and Survival
Esther’s resilience masked deeper wounds. Weeks after the clinic visit, her bedridden grandfather sexually assaulted her, a secret she buried for years. Her isolation grew, compounded by her “oddity” as a bookish, light-skinned woman in a village of scarcity. Her sister Audrey’s attempts to coax her into normalcy failed; Esther’s world narrowed to the beach, the sea, and the pages of discarded novels. Yet her refusal to conform—rejecting makeup, covering her hair—hinted at a rebellion yet unnamed.
From Reggae Dreams to Rastafari Awakening
Across Montego Bay, Esther’s future husband, Howard, grappled with his own exile. Once a teenage reggae star in Future Wind, he’d been cheated by his manager, leading to the band’s collapse. A stint in America ended in deportation but ignited his political consciousness. Immersed in Harlem’s libraries, he devoured texts on Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, and Leonard Howell, seeing Rastafari’s fight against Babylon—the corrupt system oppressing Black people—as his calling. Returning to Jamaica with budding dreadlocks, he faced rejection from his mother, Pauline, who prioritized her new husband’s disdain for Rastas over her son.
Exile and the Embrace of Jah
Homeless and shunned, Howard drifted between friends’ couches and the bush. A final plea to his mother ended in humiliation: she offered him $10 and drove away in the rain. “Jah Rastafari!” he cried, the invocation becoming both lament and lifeline. Nyabinghi drum circles and reasoning sessions with Rasta elders solidified his resolve. He embraced asceticism, rejecting Babylon’s “ism and schism,” and channeled his rage into a spiritual arsenal. For Howard, Rastafari wasn’t just faith—it was war.
Converging Currents
By 1980, Esther and Howard stood on separate shores of despair. She waded through the aftermath of stolen motherhood; he burned with righteous fury. Their paths hadn’t yet crossed, but both carried the weight of being outcasts—she, the nurturing soul branded barren; he, the revolutionary cast out by blood. The sea that framed their lives whispered of futures unspooling, waiting for the moment their tides would collide.
Breaking Ties with Family
Howard’s plea for shelter from his mother ends in rejection, reigniting the abandonment he’d felt since childhood. Her refusal to let him stay—even for a night—culminates in his explosive outburst: “FIRE BUN!” The phrase, repeated like a curse, severs their bond completely. Disowned and homeless, Howard retreats to a derelict house in the hills, surviving on wild fruits and embracing solitude. His Rastafari identity deepens as he nurtures his dreadlocks, beard, and connection to Jah, viewing society as “Babylon”—a corrupt system intent on crushing the righteous.
Reconnection and Redemption
Months later, Howard’s old friend Roy Park tracks him down, urging him to return to music. Reluctantly, Howard attends a party in Montego Bay, where he’s greeted as a prodigal son. Amid the chaos, he escapes to a balcony and meets Esther—Audrey’s sister—who challenges his guarded demeanor. Their instant connection sparks hours of conversation about Rastafari, loss, and dreams of Africa. Esther, defying her reserved nature, invites Howard to stay at her family’s beach house. After proving his worth to her fisherman father, Howard moves in, marking the start of their partnership.
Building a Rastafari Life
Howard and Esther join a Rastafari commune, adopting an Ital diet, Nyabinghi chants, and a life rooted in nature. The harmony shatters when Howard clashes with an elder over perceived disrespect toward Esther. Forced to leave, they return to White House, their dreadlocks and Rasta principles alienating Esther’s family. Tensions flare, but the couple remains defiant, convinced their “livity” (righteous way of life) shields them from Babylon’s corruption.
A Miracle Conception
Haunted by a nun’s diagnosis of infertility, Esther hesitantly shares her fears with Howard. He dismisses it as “Babylon’s trick,” urging faith in Jah. Months later, a lab test confirms her pregnancy—a revelation that feels like divine validation. Overjoyed, Esther sees the child as proof of Jah’s plan, solidifying her devotion to Howard and Rastafari.
Historical Context: Leonard Howell’s Legacy
The chapter contrasts Howard and Esther’s journey with the origins of Rastafari. Leonard Howell’s 1940s Pinnacle commune—a utopian vision of Black self-reliance—was destroyed by colonial forces, fracturing the movement. This history mirrors the couple’s fleeting commune idyll and foreshadows future struggles: Rastafari’s emphasis on individual “livity” allows Howard’s authoritarian tendencies to flourish, planting seeds of familial strife.
Key Takeaways
- Howard’s break with his mother symbolizes his total rejection of societal (Babylonian) norms, anchoring him deeper into Rastafari.
- Esther’s pregnancy becomes a spiritual triumph, defying medical authority and reinforcing their faith.
- The legacy of Leonard Howell underscores the tension between communal Rasta ideals and individual interpretation, a theme that will shape the family’s future.
- Their relationship, born of shared rebellion, sets the stage for both unity and conflict, as Howard’s rigid beliefs clash with the complexities of family life.
How to Say Babylon
Chapter 4: Unclean Women
Overview
This chapter paints a vivid portrait of the narrator’s early childhood in the seaside village of White House, dominated by her father’s uncompromising Rastafari beliefs. His rigid moral framework—rooted in devotion to Haile Selassie and disdain for “Babylon” (Western corruption)—shapes every aspect of family life. Tensions simmer between his ideals and the “unclean” influences of the outside world, particularly embodied by the narrator’s aunties. The family’s eventual abrupt departure from White House underscores the father’s escalating fear of moral contamination and sets the stage for the suffocating control that will define the narrator’s upbringing.
The Father’s Righteous War
The narrator’s father, a Rastafari musician, views himself as a spiritual warrior battling Babylon’s corruption. Working night shifts at tourist resorts, he performs reggae not as entertainment but as a sacred act of resistance. At home, he enforces strict purity standards, teaching his children Black history and Rasta doctrine while condemning dancehall music, meat-eating, and “baldhead” (non-Rasta) influences. His paranoia intensifies as he struggles to shield his family from the “heathen” villagers, including the narrator’s aunties, whom he deems morally bankrupt.
Clash of Convictions
Auntie Audrey emerges as the father’s fiercest critic, challenging his control over the narrator’s mother and rejecting his judgment of her lifestyle. Their fiery arguments reveal deeper rifts: Audrey accuses him of hypocrisy (citing infidelity) and brainwashing, while he brands her a “Jezebel” for her love of dancehall, makeup, and independence. The narrator, caught between admiration for her aunt’s boldness and fear of her father’s wrath, begins to internalize his warnings about female impurity—a concept she doesn’t yet fully grasp but senses as a looming threat.
The Mother’s Silent Sanctuary
The narrator’s mother exists in a state of resigned detachment, using ganja to mute the chaos around her. Pregnant three times in four years, she avoids conflict, embodying the “clean” woman her father idealizes—silent, compliant, and spiritually guarded. Her passivity becomes a refuge for the children, though it leaves them vulnerable to their father’s escalating dogma. Her silence contrasts sharply with Auntie Audrey’s defiance, hinting at the limited roles available to women in this world.
The Seed of Fear
A pivotal moment occurs when the father forbids the narrator from replicating the sacred Rasta hand gesture, declaring it “only for bredren” (men). This exclusion—rooted in Rasta beliefs that menstruation renders women spiritually vulnerable—plants a seed of shame in the narrator. She becomes hyperaware of her potential to become “unclean,” a fear her father weaponizes to justify isolating the family from White House’s community. His lectures about Babylon’s dangers morph into a self-fulfilling prophecy, culminating in a secretive nighttime escape from the village.
Escape and Erasure
The family’s abrupt departure under cover of darkness symbolizes the father’s desire to erase their ties to Babylon. The narrator mourns the loss of the sea, her aunties, and the only home she’s known, while her father insists the move will “be better.” Yet the chapter closes with haunting foreshadowing: his paranoia will only deepen, and the mother’s protective silence will prove insufficient against the suffocating strictures of his faith.
Key Takeaways
- Control vs. Corruption: The father’s rigid Rastafari beliefs, while rooted in anti-colonial resistance, become a tool of control—particularly over the women in his life.
- Gender and Purity: Rasta teachings frame female bodies as inherently “unclean,” shaping the narrator’s early sense of unworthiness and foreshadowing future struggles with identity.
- Community vs. Isolation: The family’s flight from White House highlights the cost of ideological extremism—erasing community ties in the name of protection.
- Mother’s Complicity: The mother’s passive compliance offers temporary shelter but ultimately enables the father’s dominance, setting up future tensions between parental influences.
- Babylon’s Shadow: The chapter critiques how resistance movements (like reggae/Rastafari) can be co-opted by the systems they oppose, leaving individuals trapped in cycles of fear and purity politics.
