ON SAFIYA SINCLAIR, author of HOW TO SAY BABYLON A MEMOIR By William Thorpe

There is nothing unique about a hot in the ass 19 year old teenage girl rebelling against her Dad, The family and in extension the entire society, culture and political-economy that constructed and determined the existence of the Father-object of the teenage rebellion. Our human condition is replete with it. First of all this isn't umbrage, I make no bones about Sistah Safiya Sinclair, I applaud her Professorship and scholarly realization. Nonetheless there is a contradiction in the presented critique of her rebellion against her upbringing and development, which despite its negative basis has matured into an exploited qualitative valuation, as she has monetized as all things of our human condition is to be expected and its to that contradiction, which isn't specific to Sistah Safiya to which she can lay no claim, but is experientially general, to Blackness and its to that I speak, under the exegesis, as formulated by our revolutionary French Brethren, 'that even the Sun had to justify it's existence at the court of Dialectics' and to put it bluntly as social beings no critique is unique and exceptional which synthesis and resolution as purpose of the expression reveals and exposes a continuum that can either fork antagonistically or contradictorily and we find both in Sistah Safiya's work. Sistah Safiya was born into a Jamaican Rastafarian household and she rebelled. Then she gave us its account in, HOW TO SAY BABYLON,A MEMOIR. My reaction to her work is, her expressed and articulated reasons, which she concisely gave us in her FRESH AIR interview begs this: Those contradictions that necessitated her rebellion against her Dad, exist here in these United States as full blown antagonisms, in society and the political-economy as human redemption and realization bane. So my ask of Sistah Safiya Sinclair is, simply this, will she direct her perception, ability and will at critiquing these American antagonisms just as she critiqued her Dads contradictions on Fresh Air? As I've stated, this isn't ad hominem, but we have to mature into the acceptance that, for example, the legitimate passion of "The Color Purple", critique, which Sistah Safiya's work is subject, is a utilitarian declaration that the ills of Patriarchy, the antagonisms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, isn't just relegated and limited to a scape-goated, corrupted Black masculinity, but is firstly human and secondly an aggravated dehumanizing consequence of those barbaric conditions that gives rise to Sistah Safiya's Dads' Rastafarianism as existential resistance. Solzhenitsyn gave us his "Gulag Archipelago", as if injustice and suppression were only endemic to the Soviet Union, then as he lived and existed in good ole Vermont he got reacquainted to disillusionment and the reminder that the narrative he gave us in " Gulag..."knew no borders and was also American. Or what about the pitiful Ayn Rand and her hypocrisy even as she pathetically tried to replicate the authoritarianism she, critiqued in her relations with her dumbstruck acoloytes. I cite these two Europeans to make the point that the grass is greener on the other side idealistic critique of our human behavior isn't limited to the inferiority complex of the marginalized. Because as citizens of The Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn and Rand were in a more political-economic privileged position than Sistah Safiya and her Rastafarian family were in Jamaica still they found cause to call on The United States to bear witness, just as in 1776 the Great schizophrenic in Chief, Thomas Jefferson called on a "candid world" to bear witness to his woes even as he yoked woes on enslaved Black People.

By William Thorpe