Two must-reads on being born girl in Jamaica

Safiya Sinclair’s How To Say Babylon and Sean Godfrey’s Sasha Knight are emotional roller-coaster journeys that linger long after their reading.

While both are mainly grounded in the Jamaican experience, with a bit of life in the United States (US) included, Sinclair’s offering is a memoir, while Godfrey’s is fiction, told from the perspective of a first person narrator named Matthew, who begins his obsessive retelling of his and Sasha’s story, at the age of nine when he meets Sasha for the first time.

From this, Sinclair’s first public foray into prose, I was hoping for writing that was alive, electric and pulsing, that felt urgent, since, as poet, that is what Safiya Sinclair does. I was not disappointed, as, through How to Say Babylon, she has marvellously flexed her prose muscle, and I suspect there is more Sinclair prose to come.

Although Sasha Knight is not a memoir, having read it after reading Sinclair’s offering, there are moments that do have that memoir inclination, as it is written so intimately in the first-person narrative voice.

In Sasha Knight, Matthew, Sasha’s childhood friend, is male, yet she, Sasha, who disappears mysteriously, is the focus, the obsession, the main pain point of the story. Through Matthew’s retelling of the treatment of his best friend Sasha by her mother, we are reminded of the double standard often upheld in raising girls ,as against boys, in Jamaica. At the same time also, through Matthew’s obsession with Sasha’s memory and dedication to ‘finding’ her, we are reminded that there are also males out there who recognise that the gender scale can be terribly imbalanced, even tragically so.

How to Say Babylon also, through Sinclair’s experience, shines the light on the not too gender-progressive aspect of some sects, or ‘houses’ of Rastafari. Indeed, it is hard, having read both books consecutively, to resist the term ‘toxic masculinity’.

By the end of How To Say Babylon, however, we know that Sinclair, having harnessed and maintained her voice, is breaking the glass ceiling with her small and large victories, including her degrees, her reading at Calabash — ,one of the world’s best loved literary festivals, with her father in attendance and listening. We also know what happens after – the memoir, the appearances on BBC, The Today Show, etcetera. So, yes, the book chronicles the plight of being born girl in Jamaica, but it also testifies that the Jamaica-born girl, even within a strictly patricidal family structure, can triumph.

On style, we see both authors deploying a haunting ephemeral female figure that, in Godfrey’s case, at one point also acts as a conscience when Matthew almost succumbs to his worst animal self. For Sinclair, the figure is a docile woman in long white garb, or traditional Rasta dress — the woman she fears her father and the Rastafari sect wants her to become: the woman she resists.

I repeat, both books are emotional tours de force. In Sasha Knight, the mystery around the disappearance of Sasha leaves you with that unsure, dizzying feeling that may illicit an unexpected torrent of tears or ‘cow bawling’, as we say in Jamaica, when you arrive at the end — the last unravelling.

For Sinclair’s How To say Babylon, you may very likely rage with her when she rages; feel anguished when she is anguished, and feel betrayed, in at least two circumstances, when those who should have offered a safe space to this young woman, trying to find her voice, failed her.

The readers will feel close to both Safiya Sinclair and Sasha Knight. I, in fact, now carry them both with me. Like Matthew, I grieve the feisty Sasha’s absence, but I celebrate Sinclair’s successes and her well-earned and well-deserved literary prowess and, of course, her rejection of the docile life in white, subservient to a Rasta ‘Kingman’.

Again, both are marvellous reads.

Ann-Margaret Lim is a poet and has penned two poetry publications, ‘Kingston Buttercup’ and ‘The Festival of Wild Orchid’.