Poet Safiya Sinclair: ‘As a girl I felt small within Rastafari’

Award-winning poet Safiya Sinclair, 39, teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, but she was raised in a strict Rastafari home in Jamaica, where her reggae musician father used faith and control to keep her from absorbing outside influences. Smart and bookish thanks to her mother’s love of literature, she soon began thirsting for independence and a voice of her own, eventually escaping to college in the US. She chronicles her embattled becoming in How to Say Babylon, an electrifying memoir that embraces not only the role of women within Rastafari culture, but also what it means to grow up poor in a “paradise” scarred by slavery and colonialism.

How did you know you were ready to write this book?
I felt called to it a little bit over a decade ago now, but there were a lot of wounds that were still fresh, and I didn’t want to write from a place of hurt or vengeance. In 2018, I went back to Jamaica to do a reading and my father came to hear me for the first time. I read a poem that I had written for him, and when I got off the stage, after years of feeling I’d been diminished and never heard by him, he whispered in my ear: “I’m listening and I hear you.” In that moment, I just felt this catharsis – a literal, physical release of burdens from my body – and I said: “OK, I think I can actually begin this book because I know where it ends.”

What were the most challenging sections?
The sections where I am an adolescent were just punishing. It’s such a turbulent age but throw in being ostracised at school for being Rastafari, and then going home and feeling like I didn’t belong inside its strictures – it was a hard and heavy place to return to. Some of the later chapters, when I talk about the decision to finally cut my dreadlocks and leave, and my father’s hurt and anger and violence – those were really hard to write as well. I was typing and weeping.

You write near the end that you’re slowly trying to forgive your father. Has writing the book helped with that?
It was a gift that in writing it, I had to talk to my father about his own childhood and how he came to Rastafari, and then sit in his head and express his feelings, humanising him in a way that he’d never allowed me to do because he’d just loomed so large as an authority figure. The big revelation has been my capacity for forgiveness because before, I would not have said I was a particularly forgiving person.

The book’s dialogue is so vivid.
In Jamaica, we have a patois and then the Rastafari also have their own vernacular, some of which I tried to capture. It stems from this anticolonial linguistic rebellion – they’ll say “overstand” instead of understand, “apprecilove” instead of appreciate. It’s what I will be writing about in my next poetry collection, thinking through what I’m calling Rasta poetics. This anticolonial lyric frame was also something that inspired my own sense of linguistics and my personal poetics.

There’s some strikingly beautiful nature writing on these pages but it’s not without tension.
I really wanted to renarrativise this postcard idea of Jamaica. It is a strange thing, having all this beauty and natural wonder but not being able to access it and pay the price of living in, quote unquote, “paradise”. The beaches in Jamaica are owned by the hotels, they’re private – Jamaicans have to save up to go.

What’s your relationship with Rastafari like these days?
I don’t really now have any deep connection beyond my father and brother being deeply devoted Rasta bredren. As a girl, I felt small within Rastafari, I had no voice. Obedience and silence and being compliant were seen as the highest virtues a woman could have, and I’ve never been obedient or silent or compliant.

Have any of its teachings stayed with you?
The most positive thing was this very deep and affirming Black pride. My siblings and I would learn the speeches of [political activist] Marcus Garvey and we were always entrenched in this idea of Black upliftment. I’ve always walked tall and proud in my Blackness.

Your father made a living playing reggae in hotels. Was it a musical home?
Every day, pretty much, we’d wake up and hear guitar strumming. Our mum encouraged us to write and perform our own songs, and we even had a little family band once, travelling around Jamaica performing these songs about saving the environment.

Tell me about the role of literature in your childhood.
For me, poetry was survival, a crucial, life-saving place of order in a household that was ruled by uncertainty and chaos. My mother always had us reciting and memorising poems and reading books. Because of that, the world felt expansive to us, and writing was a big help expanding the possibilities of my own life. I can’t talk glibly about literature and poetry because it’s an actual fact that it changed the trajectory of my life.

The poems you recited were by the likes of William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and it wasn’t until you were much older that you discovered West Indian poets such as Derek Walcott. Do those first literary loves still hold meaning for you?
I will never lose a love of any book, any writer, any poem that was a guiding light to me on my journey of being a poet and finding my voice. It began in Jamaica with the dead white men, and it’s to me crucial and critical that I know them – and where they live so I can burn their houses!

What book are you reading?
I’m reading a novel called Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. He’s thinking about this dystopian future where prisoners are forced to fight each other for sport, televised, and it’s rooted in the history of racialised violence in America, and also this fascination with televised violence. It’s fantastic and I encourage everyone to read it.

Are there any books we’d be surprised to find on your shelves?
My siblings and I loved Marvel comic books growing up. Even now we have a group chat where we’re talking about all that. I also really love video games so I have books about Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda.

Is there a text that you regularly reread?
I reread Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider several times a year. Lorde, for me, is a very foundational writer and crucial to my own thinking as a poet and a womanist. I also reread Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison as often as I can. Those are my two touchpoints.

What do you plan on reading next?
Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend. She’s my favourite living writer. There’s a sumptuous feast of language there for me as a poet, which I don’t always find with a lot of novels. I come away feeling deeply inspired to push myself and the possibilities of language on the page.

Do you have another prose project on the go?
I have a multigenerational novel about Jamaican history, told over 600 years, beginning with the arrival of Columbus and the decimation of the native Taino people, and ending in the near future, thinking about the oncoming climate collapse. It’s told through six women and it’s called If We Must Die, from a really intense Claude McKay poem about colonialism and slavery.

• Safiya Sinclair will be in conversation with Ayanna Lloyd Banwo about her book on 18 October in south London. Book a space here

• How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair is published by HarperCollins (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply