How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair review – escape artist

‘I understand how frightened my father must have been for me, a black daughter walking through the inferno’ … Safiya Sinclair. Photograph: Steve Craft/The Guardian

Like any Caribbean person with a religious upbringing, I had three notions of Babylon: the city mentioned in the Bible, the figurative empire of false gods and the all-encompassing, anti-black system that I learned about from my Rastafarian friends in the 1970s. So, when I started poet Safiya Sinclair’s memoir How to Say Babylon I thought I knew what to expect.

But this is a story about another Babylon altogether – the cruel and relentless oppression of women, particularly black women. It’s also a story about hope, imagination and resilience.