From the Mate’s Slot to the Daughter’s Vantage: Wynter, Rastafari and Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon

Abstract

How does a daughter write the life of a living, devout father whose faith was itself a refusal of empire? Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (2023) recounts a Rastafari childhood under a father who refused “Babylon”, the colonial West, and governed his daughter’s body in that refusal’s name. Reviewers have already seen that the memoir resists patriarchy and colonialism at once; what remains unexplained is where the daughter’s account stands. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s afterword to Out of the Kumbla, this article distinguishes a slot, a position a code assigns, from a vantage, a position achieved from which a code can be seen as a code. Wynter reads Caliban’s woman as the “physiognomically complementary mate” whom the colonial character system leaves absent. The father’s counter-order fills that absence: it assigns the daughter the mate’s slot, the humbled wife of a Rastaman “bringing girlchild after girlchild into this world”. Reading the child who records the order against the adult who judges it, the article argues that the memoir turns that slot into a vantage. The father tutors her as Prospero tutors Miranda, a literary mentor repeats the tutelage, and the metropolitan validation the memoir narrates is real; yet the book closes in Jamaica, with a provisional hearing between father and daughter and a line of surviving women behind her. Against Kaiama Glover’s account of refusal without promise, the memoir shows a vantage held, provisionally, in relation.