Rewriting Roots 

with Safiya Sinclair

Writer and poet Safiya Sinclair describes her childhood growing up in a Rasta family in Montego Bay, Jamaica. In this live conversation, Kate and Safiya explore what it is like growing up in more fundamental families, with worldviews we didn’t get to pick, and how—through it all—we become ourselves…somehow.

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Safiya Sinclair

SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was included on over 17 Best Book of 2023 lists, including the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the year, the Washington Post Top 10 Books of 2023, TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023, and The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023. It was a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick and named one of President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023. How to Say Babylon was also named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and Barnes & Noble, among others, and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine.

She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper’s BazaarGranta, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Show Notes

Learn more about Safiya’s books, including How to Say Babylon

Learn more about the history and beliefs of the Rastafari Movement and Marcus Garvey

Read Psalm 137

Read the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling

A big thank you to Chautauqua Institution and Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference for hosting this event.

Listen to Kate and Kwame Alexander’s Episode, “To Be Loved Like That”

Read the James Baldwin quote on how books help us to not feel alone in our pain.

Find more resources in our Complicated Families and Painful Childhood Support Guides

Discussion Questions

1. Safiya found courage to redefine her family’s identity by cutting her dreadlocks, which inspired her family to reimagine their own future. How would you describe your family’s story? Have you ever felt the need to break away from it, and if so, what gave you the strength to do so?

“Poetry, for me, was a space of wonder. And I thought, if I can always follow this feeling, this sense of wonder, I’m always going to be okay.” —Safiya Sinclair

2. In Mark 10:13-16, Jesus embraces a childlike sense of wonder, blessing children as they come to him. Where do you experience moments of wonder in your life? How do these moments inspire or guide you?

3. Safiya reflects on realizing the uniqueness of her family and sometimes feeling friction because of their choices. This led her to seek a sense of wholeness and hope within her family. Have you ever explored the beliefs that shape your family’s worldview? Do you find it easy or difficult to love them as a result?

Transcript

Kate Bowler: Hello, I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So today I have an extra special treat for you. A few months ago, I was invited to join Kwame Alexander, who was a podcast guest, which you will love. He started a writing conference that he was putting on at the Chautauqua Institute. Kwame is one of the most insanely creative people that I know. So any time I get to learn from him, with him in any way, I feel so lucky. During our time at Chautauqua, I had the privilege to have the conversation I’ve wanted to have with the absolutely incredible Safiya Sinclair. Safiya was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and she is a poet and the author of a completely stunning memoir named How to Save Babylon, which won basically every single book prize, as it should, and was named everybody’s favorite book of the year, including by Barack Obama. She describes her childhood growing up in a Rasta family, and it was a topic I didn’t really know nearly enough about. But the truth of her story is, well, it feels both particular to her, but utterly transcendent. She tells the story of growing up in a more fundamentalist culture in attempting to make sense of something that was both a family religion and a worldview that she didn’t get to pick, and in a culture that put walls around what women can do or contribute. In a world defined by her dad’s overzealous beliefs and strict adherence to dos and don’ts, and how, through it all, we can become ourselves somehow. We taped this conversation in front of a live audience so you’re going to hear that in the background and frankly, it was just too good to cut, so that’s my gift to you. We’re going to air the whole conversation for you today without edits, just as is. And I hope that you really enjoy it. You can also watch it on YouTube if you’d like. And I’m at @Katecbowler and we’ll link it in the show notes. So without further ado, Safiya Sinclair.

Kate: Thank you so much for doing this with me.

Safiya Sinclair I’m so happy to meet you and to talk to you.

Kate: I kind of wondered if we could start with the love story that begins with you growing up in Jamaica and how your story becomes woven into this profound account of a young country coming to know itself and it settling into the heart of your family’s story. Tell me why, like, why Jamaica? Let’s start there.

Safiya: Why Jamaican? I mean. I don’t know. I had no choice. One day, my consciousness came up and I was there, you kbow, But it it. It was impossible to tell my story without also telling the story of Jamaica and the way that Jamaican history intersects with colonial history, with, you know, with the history of Rastafari, which is an anti-colonial history. And so when I sat down to write the book and I began to think about where does the story begin now, you know, there’s a there’s a there’s a part in the book where I talk about I’m really, really good at ending things, but beginning them, I’m terrible and so I thought for a long time, where does the book begin? Where does the book begin? And I began to think about, as you say, the ways that my family’s story and my story is inseparable from Jamaican history. And so I wanted to talk about Jamaica’s independence from Britain. We gained our independence from the UK in 1962, which was the same year both my parents were born. You know, there were born in this wail of rebellion, as I say it, and this shaped them and their lives and this shape their futures in such a great way. And it also was something that sharpened the necessity for Rastafari, which is what called my father to it, because Jamaica was just, you know, newly independent, still figuring out what kind of nation we were going to be. And a lot of the young people at the time were trying to figure out also for themselves, what did freedom look like to them and to my father, Rastafari was the thing that gave him a sense of selfhood and this sense of a future defined by freedom and black liberation. And so I thought, okay, this story begins there.

Kate: For people who are unfamiliar with this story, like the deep history of Rastafarianism.

Safiya: I don’t say Rastafarianism because Rasta don’t believe in ism and schism.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: So we say Rastafari.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. I I’m going to learn a lot of words. Keep teaching me. Keep teaching me because there’s words that sound familiar when you use them and then they sound so unfamiliar. Like one of the themes in American religious history that we hear a lot is in these in the sometimes binaries between people who will feel like they belong at the center of the story. They are the city on a hill. And then those who feel like they are exiled. And so some of these themes are so immediately apparent in words like Babylon and words like science, I wondered. Teach me these words in that context.

Safiya: And these are words that defined my childhood and defined my adolescence. So when the Rastafari movement began in the early 1930s, there was a street preacher, a black street preacher whose name was Leonard Percival Howell. And he had heard one of Marcus Garvey’s final speeches and Marcus Garvey, for those of you who don’t know, but you should know who Marcus Garvey is, he was a Pan-Africanist revolutionary who kind of believed in the repatriation of Africa. And this preacher heard one of his final speeches and Garvey said, look to Africa for the crowning of a black king, for he shall be the redeemer. And so in the early 1930s, Jamaica was still under British colonial rule and black people in Jamaica did not have freedom. They didn’t have human rights. They were living in poverty. And this is around the same time that the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie as crowned. He was coronated. And he was the only black ruler of the world in the world at the time. And Ethiopia was the only African nation to never be colonized. And so Howell saw Haile Selassie and thought, this is him. This is the Messiah. And so he kind of the movement of Rastafari then hardened around this idea of Haile Selassie as a black messiah, as an aspirational figure for, you know, black liberation. But the Jamaican government that was still under British rule did not take kindly to the Rastafari movement. And so the Rastas, once the movement began, they were you know, they were called a cult. They were treated as outcasts. They were targeted by the army, targeted by the police. They were kicked out of their homes, turned away by their families. They were forbidden from walking along the beach sides that were being developed for tourists. And so the Rastafari in Jamaica historically were persecuted and they were seen as pariahs, really. And this made the Rastafari turn inward. Everything that they saw that was against them, they called Babylon. They looked to the Bible for these examples of Jewish exile and Jewish strife and they found that struggle as parallel to what they were going through. And so this is where this Babylon comes from, from the Bible, from Psalm the Psalms 137, where, you know, these people were exiled to Babylon and they said, you know, our oppressors have us here in Babylon and they ask us to sing Songs of Zion. But how can we sing songs of Zion when we are in a strange land? And so, yeah, so the Rastafari, like these concepts and these those stories really made sense to them, to the realities they were living. And so I grew up kind of hearing that Babylon was everything that was tied to the outside world, the evils of Western society, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, ism and schism. That’s Babylon. And everything that we hoped for, the future that we wanted this idea of of black freedom and black hope. That was Zion.

Kate: And to feel home and not at home, like to feel cast out. That there is a sacred story that you demand to be part of. Your book really belongs, in my opinion, in an American religious history survey, because it really taught me about because I guess one of the other themes that really I didn’t have any vocabulary for was the feeling of Sacred Family, too, that when you are cast out but you’re still called to something like where does that live? Where do you go to feel your purpose? And your family had a very intense story about purpose.

Safiya: Yes. It feels like my whole life was shaped by a purpose. What my purpose was supposed to be. And for a long time, that purpose was kind of the one that was handed down to me by my father.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: And then I kind of had to figure out for myself what I thought my purpose was.

Kate: Yeah. Can you tell me the, like, ideals? Like, what would sacred manhood look like in its ideal form?

Safiya: I think there’s the main some of the main tenets of Rastafari and this idea of what is sacred. You know, my father and all the rest of bredren are very concerned with the purity of the body. And they see the body as your temple. And the body is supposed to be fortified against the temptations and the evils of Babylon. And so this involves sort of how you dress and how you present yourself in the world and also what you eat and what you read and what you listen to and what you think. And so for, you know, the Rastafari, they live a very, they eat a vegan diet, what we call vegan. But the rest of us call it a Ital, which means you eat no meat, no fish, no dairy. But also in my household, it was also like no salt, no sugar, no MSG. It was extreme veganism. And, you know, for Rasta women, a lot of those rules were even more intense than they were for the rest of bredren. And so for Rasta women and girls, those rules of purity and the body as the temple extended to wearing modest clothing that covered our arms and our legs. And you could wear no pants. You could only wear skirts and long dresses. I realize now I’m dressed very much in a way that my father would be very happy.

Kate: Yes.

Safiya: Some Rasta women also had to cover their hair. A lot of of Rasta bredren also covered their hair. My father wears a tam on his head. If he’s going out into the world with people that he does not know that he thinks are impure, he will cover his dreadlocks with a Tam.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: And also, the growing of the dreadlocks is not just like a hairstyle choice. It is very much connected to this idea of the sacred. It’s the sacred marker of Rastafari. The way you kind of signal your reverence and devotion to Jah, which is the name of the Godhead figure, Haile Selassie

Kate: One thing that always strikes me as so wild and so familiar is that the people that we love come into faith sometimes by very different paths. And then under the same roof doing sort of similar things. And your parents had very different journeys into the same shared story.

Safiya: And it was something that was important for me to tell as well. Thinking about where the story begins.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: Because I wanted to know, like, why did my parents choose Rastafari? And for those of you who don’t know, you know, I spoke about the historical persecution of Rastafari. But I think most people outside of Jamaica kind of think of Rastafari as the thing that defines Jamaica. You know, Rastas in Jamaica are 1% or less of the population. They’re less than a couple hundred thousand in Jamaica. And so it is not a normal thing for somebody to choose Rastafari in Jamaica. And my father himself was, he was disowned by his mother, who is a Christian, disowned by his family because he chose Rastafari when he was 17. And so growing up, this had just been my reality. And I never actually, like asked my parents, how do we get here? And it was luckily in writing the story that I had to ask them. And I sat them down and I asked them, tell me how we got, how you got to Rastafari. And then my father, of course, says, well, I and I don’t choose Rasta, I and I was born Rasta, you know, And I’m like, okay, but like how? Tell me some more. Yes, I understand you were born Rasta, but like how did you… And you know what, his calling to Rastafari I think is something that he even now talks about as his life’s purpose. My father is a reggae musician. He’s a very militant Rasta man. He speaks in this way, in this deep Rasta vernacular, but he grew up fatherless. He grew up, you know, a little bit abandoned in his family. And I think that he really was looking for something to belong to. And it began with the music for him. It began through reggae music. But he found a calling and then, you know, became deeper in the sort of militant Rastafari sect called Nyabinghi. But I think it really started for him in this place of wanting to belong somewhere. And I think Haile Selassie for him really represented that patriarchal figure that he was inspired by in lieu of this sort of fatherless boy.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: But my mother, I mean, she straight up just says I was a hippie. Like I was a beach bum. She’s like, I would have been a beach bum just smoking on the beach if you weren’t born. You know.

Kate: I would say that everywhere she goes. She like starts a school.

Safiya: She does. She really, really does.

Kate: It sounds like people gather around her.

Safiya: They gather around her. Children gather around her like the Pied Piper but good, you know, like.

Kate: I did forget that story. But yeah.

Safiya: But for her, I think it also began in this place of yearning. She always wanted to be a mother. And when she was 16, a nurse told her, a nurse who was also an American Catholic nun told her she was infertile and she couldn’t have children. And she really believed it. And it created such an ache in her that she was searching also for something to believe in or belong to. And in the book, I say she was searching for something or someone, and she kind of met my father, who was this militant Rasta man. And he was like, don’t believe what Babylon nun tell you. Like, if you want to have a baby, you can have a baby. And she was like okay. And then I came so, which,  spoiler alert. And so I think that kind of solidified her belief in him initially of where the family that they both wanted and the path of righteousness that he intended for us to go on.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: So, you know, initially she thought this look, this is the man who changed, you know, changed my life. And gave me the thing I wanted. And so I think they both were two young people, 21 years old, know and embarked on this journey. Yeah.

Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. It’s never clear to me exactly when kids know the strangeness of their own family.

Kate: And. We all discover it one way or another.

Safiya: One way or another, eventually.

Kate: Yeah. And there’s a, I think always a kind of I mean, in different ways, but like that second hand embarrassment of seeing your family through other people’s eyes and then simultaneously, like an intense defensiveness and homicidal love. Where you’re like, how dare you? How dare you? They’re perfect. You had some really lonely years in elementary school and where you kind of had to you had to live in that in the world. And then in the world your family had made.

Safiya: Yes. For a long time I thought our life was this kind of idyllic life. We lived in this yard that my siblings and I kind of ran around in, we climbed the trees. We picked all our mangos and apples and avocados from the trees. And, you know, our mother really also fostered our sense of play and imagination. And she created her own system of education around me and my siblings, which she then imparted to all the other parents in Montego Bay that were like, how are your children so bright? Like, how can we, like, get so with it? And she sort of created her school after people started asking. So, you know,  there wasn’t friction all the time. But I would say that when we grew our dreadlocks because my siblings and I didn’t always have dreadlocks and there was a moment where my parents decided that we would grow our dreadlocks because we were supposed to be a perfect Rasta family. And my father said, this is what we have to do. As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines is what he said. I was eight years old and I never forgot it because I was like, What does that mean for me? You know? And so when we went to school, that was the moment where I began to feel things. I was like, well what. It was, it was a conceptual thing. When my parents said, You’re going to grow your dreadlocks. And then when we return to school–

Kate: I see.

Safiya: –With the dreadlocks, then it was a reality and I was like, whoa, I didn’t understand what this would mean for me. So again, for those of you who don’t know, you might be surprised that my siblings and I were among the first Rasta children to integrate in the public schools in Jamaica. Before that, Rasta children were not allowed to be in schools. And even now in Jamaica, as recently as like last year, the government has now lifted the rule that Rasta boys can go to school without their dreadlocks covered. There was a young young girl who went to school one day with dreadlocks. The principal took her into her office and cut all of her hair off. Without telling her parents. And it became this big, big legal case in Jamaica. And this was just a few years ago. And so when I got to school, it wasn’t just the children. It wasn’t just my classmates who would point at us and try to pull on our hair or sing, you know, nasty songs about us. It was also the teachers who treated us badly. And so when we whenever we left the house, we felt like outcasts. And that was the moment that the friction began, because I felt for the very first time, ashamed to be myself.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: And I wasn’t sure. Why, like, why. Nothing about me essentially had changed. It was just now how I looked outwardly. So I’d say it began there.

Kate: Yes. Thinking about your story, it really felt like that. I mean, the temperature just kept going up.

Safiya: Yeah.

Kate: And all these choices kept costing your family more and more. It sounds like the success your father had musically had these moments of, like, glittering joy for all of you. And but it also became combustible because of, I mean, so many things that just really like the financial betrayal by his colleagues that it became unsustainably painful in many moments for all of you.

Safiya: Yes. And again, you know, this is something that when I was growing up and living inside of it, I kind of had no perspective. I was just like, you know, because his music career didn’t go the way he wanted it to go, and it began wildly successfully. He was in this popular, I guess, what we would call a boy band in Jamaica that would travel around Jamaica, girls screaming and, you know, and he was the lead singer. And apparently you can actually like watch a video of them performing on YouTube, which I didn’t know of, but several people have been like, Hey, I watched your father’s band. I was like what? The band is called Future Wind. And so and then he, you know, he went to Japan and he recorded an album. And, you know, he was touring in Japan. And then, you know, his band mate things went sideways because his band mate made a, you know, side deal for the royalties and kind of tricked him. And basically the band broke up and everything went bad. I think everything in my family kind of shifted. And so when I was growing up inside of that, it felt that all of these tumultuous things were happening. And I didn’t quite understand why and all that. I’m outside of it, and I’m older and I’m an artist myself. I can in some ways understand the disappointment of an artist, the disappointment that my father must have been feeling. Now, he didn’t deal with that disappointment well at all. But in many ways, I can. I can feel the hurt of that disappointment.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: Now that I am older and outside of it.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. There’s pain in being old enough to know the bitterness of our parent’s hopes and wanting it so much. Especially when you’re in a moment of when you’re blooming. When did you know that your words were so powerful?

Safiya: I don’t know when I knew they were so powerful. I’ll say I began to feel that the words that I could conjure, the words I had inside of me were important after my mother introduced me to poetry, right, and so as part of our education with her, she would always have us memorize and recite poems. Like, for me, poetry was always a big part of my life.

Kate: Did she do it at home where she was, where you were like, because I sometimes I would get like two weeks on like War and Peace, and my dad was like, Come back to me when you’re done this. And I was like, there’s so many nicknames. Did you get, like, two weeks in a poem? How did they.

Safiya: No it was, she would read the poems to us or she had poems that she had memorized herself. And she would do this thing with me in particular, because I, you know, you might not be able to tell this but I have a temper and it was so much worse when I was younger and whenever I would that, you know, I would start to like flare up in these furies, she would just start reciting these poems to me. And one of them she loved was, If by Rudyard Kipling, and it was like, if all around those are losing your head, losing their head, keep your cool, you know? And so she would say this poem over and over to me. And so for her, she had those poems memorized. And then for us, when she read us the poems, we started to memorize them naturally as well. And then I just wanted to do it more. And she gave me a book on prosody. Right. And for those who don’t know what prosody is, it’s it’s the stuff that makes poems. So it’s kind of like knowing what, what rhythm is, what rhyme is, what meter is, what alliteration is, what metaphors. So it’s like all of the stuff of poetry. And so she gave me a book called Sound and Sense on Prosody when I was like 11 years old. And again when I was writing the memoir and I was writing all these moments, I was like, my mother made me into a poet, you know, she had me memorize the poem. She gave me the book on prosody. She handed me my first collection of poems called Poems From a Child’s World.

Kate: It’s like unlocking all the doors.

Safiya: Unlocking all the doors. And then she would take us, me and my siblings on these nature walks through sort of the green and beautiful country side of Jamaica. And she would point out to me the name of every plant, every flower, every insect, and I would just document, document, document. And then I would write my poems about all the trees and plants and flowers that I loved. And I call it in the book, I call it the green language of poetry, because for me now, my poetry is very much rooted in the lush and idenic landscape of Jamaica. And then my mother also would sort of take me by the seaside where we were born and kind of show me how to sort of read the waves. And she would tell me the story of our lives and where we came from. And so she was sort of the historian of the family of telling me these stories over and over. And I was like, Well, I need to write this down. And it was around ten where I wrote my first poem after I had this really painful experience at school where, you know, a young girl I thought was my friend said to me, I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to be friends with a Rasta. And I was so sad, ten years old and I harmed myself and my mother, who, even though I told her a different story about how I’d come to the wound I had, she knew. And she gave me this collection of poems. And she said, poetry for me has always been the thing that made my world wide and wild and warmer. And I think it’ll do that for you. And then she told me that was alliteration. And I said, What is alliteration? And all of the deliciousness. And she explained that, you know, this sort of stuff of poetry. And I read this poem by Blake, The Tiger, and I felt physically, viscerally the hurt from being outcast by this girl at school leave me. And instead, my imagination was filled by all of the imagery and all of you know, the magic of this poem. And I sat down and I wrote my own little poem, which was like an imitation of the tiger called the Butterfly. And then I knew this is what words can do. And poetry for me was a space of wonder. And I thought, if I can always follow this feeling, this sense of wonder, I’m always going to be okay.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: And so I guess there was the power.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: That was the first time.

Kate: Yeah. That’s so good. You saw the little breadcrumb path.

Safiya: I saw it, yes.

Kate: Yeah. Yes. Never like a superhighway, is it? It’s just like little bits of something.

Safiya: It felt like, it felt like a window opening to another world, you know, that’s kind of unknowable. But also whispering like deep and ancient magicks in my ear. And I was like, That’s cool. I like that.

Kate: It’s funny. I thought of you. I thought of your book last week. I saw a bookstore had a beautiful quote by James Baldwin, who had escaped to Paris to escape so much of the worst of American racism. And he had a quote about writing that made me think of something you’d written. He said, You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. There is like, a mystic thing that happens through the eyes of others. Which is so odd. Like it is through the eyes of others that we can even sometimes begin to pull out these parts of ourselves that we realize are universal.

Safiya: Yes. And I mean, that’s kind of the magic of literature, right? That it it does kind of bridge space and time. That what we feel, our feelings and our emotions and language and beauty as vessels for meaning, is really at our essence the most crucial thing we have as human beings.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I want to ask you a bit about, you know, there’s a really interesting literature about submission and the way that as women we’re not really sure how to frame agency in relationship to templates of surrender. And you had this very early moment in your life when you had to decide if submission wasn’t ideal for you anymore. And I wondered how you because the like constructive version, which we can see in all kinds of versions, there’s all, you know, wonderful literature about, you know, women and Islam and my areas and conservative Christian women in which there’s a kind of engaged surrender is that people step into worlds in which they have they have very little control and they accept the moments of small possibility and they find beauty and purpose in that. And they and we and we call that choice and agency. And then there’s the feeling of the avalanche in which you’re being taken over by a set of choices made for you that you can’t possibly experience yourself inside of.  And that none of that is news to you. You were you were trying to make these choices all along. But I, I wonder about the moment when you decided that this version of submission was just not, that there was a flame of who you are that would be maybe extinguished by it?

Safiya: Yes. I can pinpoint to two early moments, very early. I mean, the first one one was when I was around eight years old, and I remember it was one of the rare gatherings I’d gone to of, of Rasta people in Montego Bay because, you know, the Rasta movement scattered apart in the, in the 60s because the government there was, there was a commune of thousands of Rasta people who lived in Kingston called Pinnacle. This was Leonard Percival Howells kind of dream. And they lived there, you know, in unity and they had their own like crops. They had their land. And the army came still under British rule. The army came and burnt it all down. And after that, the movement really scattered. It was no longer unified. There was no one meeting place. There was no one sort of book or set of tenants that unified Rastas anymore. It divided into three separate sects, one that’s extremely like strict, which is the one my father adhered to the most and most of what Rastafari looks like now is that the Rasta bredren, as is sort of the Godhead and the head of the household, and he kind of divines the rules and interprets these different tenets of Rastafari, which is what my father did.

Kate: Is that the same as saying like the fatherly role and the prophetic role? Unified?

Safiya: The same. Exactly. Yeah, so he was like, you know, our God of his, I think in the book I say something like, He’s our God of history, our God of media, our like the God of truth. He was sort of the, the everything in the world and how we understood it had to go through him first. And it came from his mouth first. So this gathering was rare because it wasn’t something that we did often. My father didn’t even want us to be around Rastafari people. He wanted to be the only person who was in charge of our moral architecture. So he didn’t even trust them.

Kate: Yeah. What a phrase, moral architecture.

Safiya: Yeah. But when he was gone to Japan recording his music, we went to this gathering. And I remember there was the Rasta bredren outside. They were eating, they were talking, they had, you know, drums. They had a drum circle. They were sharing their wisdom with each other. They would invite the young boys in to get some of the wisdom. And then the Rasta women were inside. They were in the kitchen. They were making the food and handing the food to the men, and they were minding the young children and I was like, well, they have no opportunities to share wisdom or reason or invite young women into their circle of of wisdom because they were they were doing the labor. And so I remember being at eight being like, okay, this sort of chill came over me and I was like, this is weird. This is kind of weird. And then I just shook it off and ran outside, you know. And so that was like one of the first moments. And then by the time I was nine, my father, my brother and I were super close and we used to, like, run around the house and like, do everything together, climb our trees and stuff. And my father came to me one day and he said, How tall are you now? And he kind of measured me next to him. I’d grown tall and he said, That’s it. You’re not climbing trees anymore. That’s over. Girls don’t do that. You’re not wearing pants anymore. No daughter of mine is going to be a Jezebel. And he told my mother, Throw out all the pants, all the shorts in our house. That’s over. And then that was that was really the moment where I was like, Well, this doesn’t sound right.

Kate: Yeah.

Safiya: Because there were there was no rules like this placed on my brother. And I was like, Well, why not? That’s so unfair. Already, siblings are like, That’s unfair. But for me, I was like, No, that’s really unfair. I don’t think so. And I began to think then, Yeah, well, what kind of woman did my father envision me to be? And is that the kind of woman I want to be?

Kate: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that early outrage feeling of, like, am I not yours? Will you really make me into something else, right?

Safiya: And why?

Kate: And why. One of the scenes in your book I found to be so beautiful and emotional is when you decide that your hair is no longer going to be the symbol of your family identity. I wondered if you feel comfortable if you could read the moment, the moment where, set the scene.

Safiya: Yes. Which is, you know, a defining moment in my life and the one we see here on the cover. Right when I decided to cut my dreadlocks and I’d been asking my whole life. And my mother said, no, no, your father would not allow it. He won’t allow it. And finally, when I had this vision of myself, and if I followed the path my father had for me, this, I would be this cowed, silent Rasta woman who was the wife of a Rasta man who had no dreams and no desires. And I said, Mom, I don’t think I don’t think I can do it. I said, Mom, I need your help. And she said, okay, what can I do? And she helped me cut my hair, my dreadlocks. There was hair. So much hair, dead hair, hair of my gone self. Wisps of spiderweb, hair, old uniform lint hair, pillow sponge and tangerine strings hair. A whole life pulled itself up by my hair. The hair that locked the year I broke my tooth. Hair that locked the day we caught cane ashes in the yard. Hair of our lean years. Hair of the fat. Pollen of marigolds hair, my mother’s aloe vera hair, my sisters weaving wild exoras in my hair. The pull of the ties at our sea village hair, grits of sand hair, hair of salt tares, Hair thick with the blood of my own cut wrists. Hair of my binding, hair of my own beautiful wanting, hair of his bitter words, hair of the cruel world, hair roping me to my father’s belt, hair wrestling the taunts of bald heads in the street, hair of my lone self, hair wrapped atop the ghost woman in white’s hair, red thread of hair, centuries of hair, galloping future of incorrigible hair, all cut away from me. When they were finished my head and neck were so light, they swung unsteady. The tethers had been cut from me and I was new again, unburdened. Someone different, I told myself. A girl who could choose what happened next.

Kate: Well, it sounds like a baptism.

Safiya: And it felt very much like that.

Kate: To be new. To be new. It’s so wild to be new in any way in our lives and to like for you to have to sort of, like, forcefully start a new chapter.

Safiya: Start a new chapter, yes, and decide this is what I wanted to do no matter what the consequences were going to be. I was willing to do it to get to get to where I needed to go.

Kate: I don’t know how to ask this question because I don’t have quite the right words for it. But there is, there’s such a tenderness in the way that you describe how your mom’s love for you and hope for you was not like fully born out in the in the story she lived for herself so far. But she was handing you something that felt like a path, even though she was. I mean, she she couldn’t have mapped it exactly like she couldn’t pick your college she just knew that there was like a moreness to you.

Safiya: I think that’s right.

Kate: And then you had to somehow absorb enough courage to do something wildly different than seemed. I mean, the world that you’re living in now requires so much courage. And a lot of it sounds like throwing yourself off cliffs and then hoping there would be like a small…

Safiya: Hoping I could fly. Glad I did. Glad I could.

Kate: You flying squirreled the crap out of that.

Safiya: So the poet in me would not go with Flying Squirrel. That’s not the image I would choose. Could be a sparrow on the wind.

Kate: I am restricted in my metaphors. Did every time that you just sort of, because, because the right word, I don’t think is an ambition but the moreness of it, like.

Safiya: I think, you know, it was just wanting more, wanting more for myself and wanting better. You know, I looked at my mother and I love her. I love her so deeply and so dearly, but I knew she wasn’t happy all the time with her. Like, you know. The shape of our lives, or the shape of her life also. And I thought, I don’t want that path. But the thing that also pushed me was I’m the eldest of four, and I have two younger sisters. And I was like, well, I don’t want the things I’m going through to happen to my sisters. It was it was something that really, really motivated me. And so I was like, if I can kind of change the path, if I could go this way instead of that way, then they then they’ll have choices, too. They don’t necessarily have to go down my path, but they’ll have a choice which is something I never had in front of me. And so, you know, like, I just read that the passage where I cut my dreadlocks, and after I did that, my middle sister, she cut her dreadlocks. And then my youngest sister, she cut her dreadlocks, too, and left home. And then my mother, who had been growing her dreadlocks since she was 19 when she met my father, she cut her dreadlocks too. And had this moment of newness again that she could choose for herself for the very first time what she would make of Esther. Her name’s Esther, what she would make of her of her future.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately, this is a story about deep forgiveness. What do you think it was that made your love return back to wanting to experience, like, wholeness with your family?

Safiya: Yeah. I think you mean with my father in particular. Right. I’m the oldest. I knew him first and loved him the most. And believed always that he could be worthy of love, of my love again. And, you know, I’ll just say, when I cut my dreadlocks, this was kind of the breaking point between me and my father. He didn’t speak to me for a year. We lived in the same house. And he looked through me like I was a ghost. I did not exist to him. And after my siblings cut their dreadlocks and my mother for him, he kind of saw me for a long time as a sort of black sheep. I was someone who represented the ruin of his vision for the perfect Rasta family. And he he responded with fury and with violence. And this was the point where I felt like I needed to leave Jamaica to survive. I don’t think I would have survived it if I had stayed. But there was something in leaving and having that distance and that time to really think about everything that had happened, to think about our story, to think about wanting to write this story. And when I began to think about writing this story ten years ago, it was not the story I wanted to write, because all of all of what I was feeling was still too fresh, too wounded. It was still it would have been a story written from a space of hurt or maybe anger or maybe even vengeance, you know? And I didn’t want to write that story. That’s not what I wanted to leave to the world. And so I put the I put the book away. Thankfully, I had a really great professor. His name’s Gregory Ore he was my mentor at UVA, a wonderful poet. And he said, you need to write this book from a place of safety. And I don’t think you have that yet. He was right. And it was five years later. This was 2018. I went back to Jamaica for the first time. And spoiler alert also, because this is the end of the book. But I went back to Jamaica to read my poetry for the first time. And I invited my father to come and hear me read for the first time. And I read this poem I had written for him. And I said before I read it, I said, you know, I spoke to him the wish I had always for my poetry and for my words is that Father, I just want you to hear me. And I read the poem. And I remember I got off the stage and he embraced me to him. And he looked at me. It felt to me for the first time, eye to eye as an equal. And he said, I’m listening and I hear you. And then this was the moment that I felt, yeah, so much had been released from me and I felt I had that place of safety and that I was ready to begin to write this book because it would I could write it from a place of hope.

Kate: I cannot tell you what a joy it has been to see you, to hear you become so courageous. What a gift it’s been to talk to you tonight. What a gorgeous human being. Well done.

Kate: Besides Safiya, of course, I think one of my favorite characters in her story is her mom, a mom who showed her a world unlike her own, a future she couldn’t totally grasp for herself, but she could imagine for her kids. A world cracked open through books and words and poems. So it made me want to ask, what or who opened you up to a new world? Maybe it was a parent or teacher or writer or poet or a friend. Tell me. Write me on social media at @katecbowler or leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. And a big thank you to the Chotakwa Institute and Kwami Alexander’s writing lab and conference for hosting this event and to my team and our partners for the work that they put into this episode. Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School, thank you so much. And a massive shout out to my endlessly superlative, deserving team. I was trying to come up with more and more superlatives, but we’re just going with superlatives. Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putnam, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azario, and Katherine Smith. You deserve all the adjectives. Good. Great. Perfect. I’ll work on it. This is Everything Happens with me, kate Bowler.

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