How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

Girlhood and womanhood are mysterious and often frightening throughout the memoir. Safiya’s burgeoning sexual maturity becomes the greatest source of conflict between her and her father: Howard is so obsessed with what will happen to his daughters when they become women that he descends into rage and violence. He is constantly afraid his daughters will have early sexual experiences like his mother, so he exerts his power over them to keep them isolated.

While Safiya struggles to fit in at St. James because of her socioeconomic background and scholarship status, her female classmates perform a kind of girlhood that is completely foreign to her. She is used to seeing Rasta women being subservient and docile. In contrast, her classmates are boisterous and opinionated; she observes their “strange manners and references, parsing out the upswing of their voices on the end of their sentences” while wishing “for that freedom” (129). No matter what she tries to assimilate—their language or their clothing—Safiya is always seen as other because of Howard’s demands and restrictions. Her classmates’ ease with their girlhood gives them power over Safiya and drives her further into isolation. Her only source of comfort is the written word.