Brutality rules in paradise – a memoir of Jamaican childhood

The blue-skied, hibiscus-clad ‘postcard’ beauty of Montego Bay, where the seasons shift with the rhythm of the sea breeze, veils the terrifying reality of Safiya Sinclair’s life at home. Until the age of five, Safiya lived in a small Jamaican hamlet on the white sand close to the endless beaches that attract the tourists, many of whose ancestors, ‘the white enslavers’, stole Jamaicans’ freedom and left behind their unforgettable, unforgiveable legacy.

But for a while, as music and the sweet scent of ganja fill the salt air, Safiya, born in 1984, remains convinced that her country has given her all the blessings she could ask for. In language as richly beautiful as the natural world she inhabits, Safiya describes the three-bedroom home she shares with 12 others including her parents and three younger siblings. Where fishing provides the village with most of its income, the pace of the day is languid but cautious. When ‘a weatherworn fisherman may or may not greet you with a lift of his straw hat’ the first hint of anxiety interrupts this harmonious existence. And when, aged four, Safiya nearly drowns, saved from the engulfing waves by her mother, Esther, another dangerous current emerges.

Safiya’s father, Djani, seems genetically enraged, thanks to the appalling harm suffered during his own childhood. He believes in an unyielding version of Rastafari, convinced that the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, is the black Messiah. As a reggae musician born in 1962, Djani’s guitar–playing income is ironically dependent on gigs in the tourist hotels that symbolise the epicentre of ‘Babylon’, the corrupting, empire-drenched western world that he deplores. With its loathed figureheads including President Bush, Margaret Thatcher and those who live in ‘Foreign’ including the British queen, Babylon represents for the Rastafari ‘the government that had outlawed them, the police that had pummelled and killed them’.