I do a trivia question every week. It’s usually a history question of some sort, and the stakes are low; you can get the answer any way you want except for asking me (it’s literally impossible to cheat) and if you get it right you get a piece of candy on Friday. If you get it wrong nothing happens. Some kids do it every week, some when the mood strikes them or a friend offers them the answer, and some will pretend in late May that they never heard me mention it.
I usually theme the questions at least a little bit, and since it’s Black History Month I figured I’d highlight some figures from history and see how many the kids could identify. My building is pretty diverse, which I’m not using as a code word for “mostly Black,” I mean genuinely pretty well-mixed. That said, I’m not really expecting many of them, if any at all, to immediately recognize that fine gentleman up there; my theory was they’d either take a picture of the picture and ask some adults or do a reverse Google Image search, which I believe has been the process for the handful of correct answers I’ve received so far.
(Yes, I know “Who is this?” is not a trivia question in the classic sense of the term. Shut up. It’s my game and I can do it however I want. Next week will be Mae Jemison, I think.)
Anyway, the insistence from the first several kids that gave me answers that that was either MLK Jr. or fucking Steve Harvey has me questioning my sanity. And it wasn’t like it was white kids being clowns, either. At least one Black student asked me in apparent seriousness if it was King. I’m not supposed to give them help one way or another but I needed to shut that down immediately if I planned on surviving the week.
So. Without any research or double-checking, do you know who that is?
It won’t actually take all that long for me to dispense with the “review” part of writing about Safiya Sinclair’s How To Say Babylon. You should check it out. There you go. Sinclair grew up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the daughter of a Rastafari reggae musician, and the book is partially about her escape from grinding poverty to ultimately achieve a Ph.D in the United States and become a celebrated poet, and partially about trying to grow up female in a home dominated by an abusive misogynist. Sinclair, as one might expect from an award-winning poet, is a beautiful, lyrical writer, and her story is fascinating. I can’t imagine someone picking this up and not at least finding it tremendously interesting. I don’t recall how it crossed my radar, but I jumped on it, and it’s a pretty fast read.
That said, the book itself isn’t why I’m writing about the book, which ended up fascinating me but perhaps not for the reasons Sinclair intended. All the dialogue in the book is rendered as spoken, meaning that 90% of the dialogue is in Jamaican English, and I want to take a deep dive into Jamaican English grammar rules now that I’ve read this book. The dialect’s use of pronouns is kind of fascinating, and it was endlessly entertaining to me the way I was hearing anything her father said throughout the book. And, actually, after doing a light bit of Googling just now, it’s possible that there is some translation going on, because Jamaican patois is significantly more difficult for an American English speaker to understand than the dialogue in this book, which is unfamiliar but not incomprehensible. So maybe she pulled back a bit to simplify what people were saying, or perhaps conversation in their house was closer to American English than it might have been in other places. All four of the Sinclair kids ended up with university educations, so it’s clear that education was highly prized in the house– by their mother, as the book makes clear– so it’s entirely possible that a certain level of code-switching was taking place from the beginning.
The other thing is reading through this book and realizing I didn’t know anything at all about Rastafari. I went through a heavy Bob Marley phase in late high school and early college that was more or less responsible for everything I know about it, and I hadn’t appreciated just how unusual the … religion, and I’m using that word under some small amount of protest, really is. Rasta is wholly decentralized, for starters; it recognizes the Bible as Scriptural but there is no Rasta text to rely on and it emphasizes individuality to a degree where concepts like “orthodoxy” can barely even exist. In other words, Safiya Sinclair’s father was a devout Rasta, but that doesn’t mean that his practice of Rastafari lined up with anyone else, and while Jamaican culture as a whole tends toward the patriarchal, it wouldn’t be strictly accurate to say that Rasta was the reason her father turned out to be the man he did, or that it was responsible for how he treated his children and, particularly, his daughters.
(Also interesting: there are pages devoted to all four of the women in Sinclair’s family deciding to cut off their dreadlocks. There is not a similar scene for her brother, although there is a poignant moment where he declares his newborn child is going to decide on their own whether to follow Rastafari or not.)
On top of that, I absolutely wasn’t aware that Haile Selassie had traveled to Jamaica and explicitly rejected Rastafari’s belief that he was, in some way, God. Sinclair’s father appears to have believed that he was literally God on Earth; some of Marley’s lyrics lean that way as well, and Selassie straight-up said it wasn’t the case, at which point a whole lot of Rastas turned around and said that only God would be humble enough to deny he was God.
Which … wow.
And, like, think about this, right? Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia. He was not, himself, a Jamaican, and there are no Rastafari in Ethiopia, or at least there weren’t when Selassie was alive. So this guy is Emperor of one country, and this group of people halfway across the globe decide that he is either literally God or at least the Messiah (and, again, no orthodoxy, so each individual Rasta might have a different idea about how this works) and form an entire-ass religion around him. And then he goes there, and he’s like, “No, I’m not God,” and it doesn’t work, and then eventually he dies and … Rastafari just keeps on truckin’.
There was also a lot of oppression of Rastas early on, including a couple of events that qualify as massacres and/or pogroms, and I wasn’t aware that had happened either.
I need to know more, and I want to read a formal academic history of this belief system, is what I’m saying, and not just a memoir. I feel like I’m overusing the word fascinating in this piece but it’s mind-blowing to me that this developed the way it did.
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