How to Say Babylon A Memoir Safiya Sinclair

A Word That Leapt Aflame in My Mind

“I sounded the lines out aloud, feeling the rhymes growing delicious on my tongue.  Later I went to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and looked up William Blake. I couldn’t believe it.  He died nearly 170 years before me, but his words grew a thriving forest in my head. A thought, I understood it then, and its incendiary mind, could outlive itself. A well-made word could outspan carbon, and bone, and halved uranium.  Until now, I imagined the world divided in two halves: the world of the spiritual, of my parents: Jah and levity, vibrations, energies, and chakras.  And then, there was a world of things I could measure and understand, visible and knowable.  Now, I felt there was another world just out of reach.  A gossamer wing flashed against the bedroom window.  I took out my journal and wrote my first lines of poetry in vines of cursive.  Wings in the sunlight, wings against my dress.  I pulled wing after luminous wing from my mouth. Watching them flutter alive with each word, my hands a vibrant garden. The poem was called ‘The Butterfly,’ the first to pull itself from the soft veil between all worlds, a seam to slip through to any place, any time. I knew then that as long as I had a word that leapt aflame in my mind, I would always be living in an age of wonder.”

from How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

relationships

Looking for Love

I just finished watching the latest season of Home for Christmas (Hjem til Jul on Netflix) in which Johanne continues her quest for her best mate. While the closure of finding said mate is certainly psychologically and emotionally satisfying, a la Hallmark heaven, the writers did well to celebrate her individuation and actualization before the final coupling.

Having both her future beau and her family affirm how very special she is, in ways that have nothing to do with beauty or societal successes, made my female-mother-of-four-daughters heart happy for the lesson the whole world could stand to hear even in this modern day and age. That there is more to self worth than suitability as and success in scoring a mate.

Still, in related news, as I watch said daughters navigate the romantic landscape, I have many thoughts about finding someone who treats one with respect and honor. Many. But I won’t do a deep dive. Not today anyway.

We’ll start with just a few guidelines to consider before entering into a relationship:

The Bob Dylan Test

Make a reference to a Bob Dylan song or lyric. See if they pick up on it. Or perhaps that’s level two. Maybe just ask them point blank to name a Dylan song. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” doesn’t count. Also, be wary of information acquired only through Timotheé Chalamet.

* substitute any musical artist that shows good taste and cultural cred in your family as you see fit.

Physical Intimacy ≠ Emotional Intimacy

Just because a potential mate shows the ability to get jiggy with it, doesn’t mean all systems are functioning at a mature level. All muscles are not developed equally. Are the emotional muscles as developed? When I was teaching junior high, I used to say, ‘they aren’t coordinated enough to open their lockers, how can they be having sex!?’ Obviously different adolescents mature at different rates and in different ways. But I’m a firm proponent of not playing in the big leagues until all faculties are on board. Determine whether a potential mate is willing – or able – to go all the way in all the ways you need before making any decisions or taking any actions.

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck . . .

It’s not always a duck. They may be doing all the right things. Opening the car door. Sending cute texts. Even bringing you home to meet mom. But is the Hollywood romcom treatment as two-dimensional as a movie screen? Does your potential mate understand what it really takes to make a relationship or are they going through the motions? Will they grow with you and the relationship? Or are you at least chasing after the same duck?

So this got more serious than the original tongue-in-cheek tone I was going for, but I’ll bring back the humor (hopefully) with the following clip. Saying I wouldn’t share all my thoughts on the subject brought the catchphrase ‘don’t get me started’ to mind, which (incorrectly) made me think of Rodney Dangerfield. [Yes, I do know what his most famous catchphrase is; my dad was a big fan]. While fruitlessly looking for a clip of that, I found the one below, which is oddly, ironically of course, apropros.

Living, Mental Health, Survival

Five Years On

I’d like to blame my current malaise on COVID.

Not the having of the virus, though two times was punishment enough. (I know, it certainly could have been worse. Believe me, I know.)

And while the pandemic and attendant lockdown messed with my time-space continuum royally, it started in the months before.

When I let myself get so low, I had a near-panic attack just going to the doctor’s office to ask for meds.

When I got so low, I let my mind trick me into thinking needing meds was a moral failure on my part.

When I stumbled around in a fog so thick, I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.

And then as I climbed out, I felt the need to tell the story.

I knew I needed to explain how I’d gotten there – for the mental health narrative and for my own mental health.

But the story was so huge. The path so steep and craggy, I knew not where to begin or how.

And the more time passes, the harder a thing is to tell. Details forgotten, edges dulled.

And then the world stopped.

We were all in survival mode. Myself acutely.

I thank God for the fortuitous timing of that first appointment.

For if I hadn’t started meds when I did –

thrown into ‘homeschooling’ and online learning and personal loss from afar. . .

But after months of bizarre, those details began to be forgotten and those edges dulled.

And this was life.

We were expected to pick up the baton and keep time

when time was wonky, hearts were broken, and psyches scarred.

Five years on

I’ve picked up bad habits, sloth and sipping alcohol.

Smack-dab in the middle of perimenopause

and the slog of midlife.

What started as peeling back the layers of over-exhaustion and exertion

flipped the other way into inert.

Achieving perfection and avoiding failure by not attempting at all

has settled into paralysis.

And now, what is life, but this fragile thing that can be taken and wrenched dry in mere months.

When the acute sorrow is gone and you’re left with nothing but the days

and another load of groceries to unpack.

Five years on

and I still can’t tell you how I got here.

But I have begun.

Survival

To those of us in middle age

Who curse out our parents for ‘giving it to us’

– whatever it may be:

diabetes, depression, attention deficit disorder –

and then turn around to our teens cursing us out for giving it to them.

Who move children into college

and come home to crap they’ve left behind.

Who are exhausted in every sense of the word.

Whose friends are going through it.

Whose parents are ill or actively dying.

Who alternately sweat or shake with chills or shit after drinking wine

It all feels like too much –

but this is life for a lot of us right now.

We are not alone and we will survive.

Weekend Write-Off

To Again Become

When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept: the one she shared with her parents until the age of thirteen, the ones at the university residence and the Annecy apartment facing the cemetery. She starts at the door and makes her way around the walls. The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts: in her room at the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor, the mirror over the sink where some boy counselors had written in her red Diamond Enamel toothpaste, ‘Long live whores’; the blue lamp in her room in Rome that gave her an electrical shock each time she turned it on. In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel. Or she sees a silhouette, a hairstyle, movements – leaning out of a window, washing her hair – and positions – sitting at a desk or lying on a bed. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body, not the way one is in dreams, but more as if she were inside the ‘glorious body’ of the Catholic religion, which was supposed to resurrect after death with no sensation of pain or pleasure, heat, cold, or the urge to urinate. She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time.

The Years, Annie Ernaux

Poetry

Reptile in Amber

If I get a pet snake
I'll name him Nigel

inspired by "Making Plans for . . ."
as I drove home late at night
reminded of Geoff

who like a frustrated spouse
told me I didn't discipline our campers enough
and always made him the heavy.
But we laughed together when we heard 
XTC sing about Nigel
on our lunch break.

And I think of him every time I hear it
his laugh ever present in the quirky name
though some crazy cancer
took him before he could ripen into a man old enough to carry a name like Nigel

Poetry

True Pops of the Fourth

Not the fireworks

But the smash and crash of the

Glass Monday morning

Living

Supporting Details

There’s a fine line between staying out of the media stream for self-preservation and sticking your head in the sand.

I don’t get direct feed nightly news to the kitchen table like I did when a kid.

Part of that is by choice. Being told to hold a story until Tom Brokaw had said his piece made an impression.

Part is logistics. Having cut the cord on cable and not hoisting a big enough antenna high enough on the house means over the air locals don’t always come to visit.

Part is self-preservation. With an electronic rubber-necker in my hot little hand, I make conscious decisions to not seek out tragedy, violence, and discontent.

Call me uninformed, a bit ignorant. I call it regulating my hope and mental health.

But not poring over the details of disaster does not mean I am not aware of what is happening in the world. That I am not worrying over brash acts of global consequence.

Yes, I can put down my phone and think that land is far away; that I will never step foot on it; that I will never meet its people.

But no matter where on earth is home, humans have the same needs and desires. Life being topmost.

If we take the position that we are safe in a bubble, a mushroom cloud can burst that in an instant regardless of geographic distance.

But even without that threat, we cannot bury our heads in the sands of our privilege – be it distance, race, resources. Whatever.

To be a good human means to care for other humans. Regardless of the details.

Writing

Am Writing

When one is task oriented and working to deadlines,
the work becomes scripted and static.

Sure there are moments that shine,

but they're in the initial spark of the idea
or reserved for the intro or concluding paragraph.

Never in the middle, in the meat of the piece.

When one is free to write for writing sake, 
the work becomes invisible
         or even ceases to exist.

When creativity has no bounds

it often flies away.

Living, Uncategorized

Beautiful and Terrifying

Outside

moss consumes everything.

Entire branches swallowed down and in.

To extract takes an unearthing you didn’t even know was needed

until the last.bite.left crunched underfoot.

At night

whales swam overhead, a beautiful and terrifying snow globe effect

as tidal waves stacked up on the periphery,

walls of water threatening your wooden stance.

There is beauty and potentiality

in design

intention

in terror.

You just have to keep the forces of nature at bay.

Chopping Potatoes

and other metaphors for motherhood

Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile