Somewhere around junior high, I started listening to Bob Marley’s music, highly influenced by my older brother and his huge album collection. I sang lyrics like “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights” and “Buffalo solider, dreadlock rasta” and “Exodus alright, movement of Jah people,” over and over without any real idea of what they meant, and in full disclosure: I sang “movement of the people” not “Jah people” (along with many other mondegreens). So now that I’ve read Safiya Sinclair’s memoir about growing up in a Rasta household and spent a lot of time on Wikipedia while reading, I finally have an understanding of Marley’s beliefs and culture in a way that I surely did not during my teens, twenties, and even until last week.

For example, I had no idea that Jah (short for the biblical Jahweh) was the name of the Rasta god that “lives within all Rastafarians” and is interpreted as a liberating figure for the oppressed people of African descent. Or that the mid 1950s Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was believed to be a divine manifestation for Rastafarians. And I certainly didn’t know that Rastafarians believed in purity culture, patriarchal gender roles, a vegan diet, and the spirituality of dreadlocks. Nor did I know that the term “Babylon” refers to Western culture, British colonialism, capitalism, Black subservience, Christianity, and many other systems of oppression, all of which are in opposition to Pan-Africanism. And this is what Bob Marley wrote about in all of his lyrics and what Safiya Sinclair’s father sang about and lived his whole Rastafari life.

Like her three younger siblings, Sinclair worshipped her father as a child–he was a rising star of Jamaican Reggae, carrying on Bob Marley’s legacy while encouraging his kids to be the smartest, most accomplished students in all subjects. But as the girls grew up, he became more and more obsessed with fighting Babylon, requiring them to wear long skirts, dreadlocks, and “holy silence,” along with nursing the needs of others, showing no vanity, and following no god but their father until he was replaced by a husband. Interestingly, Safiya’s father was kicked out of the house by his mother when he was just 18, and Safiya’s mother was abused by a family member, so both of her parents were lost souls when they met and decided to join a Rasta commune–perhaps turning to this lifestyle as an act of desperation. But then they forced it on their children.

Much of this memoir goes on to show her father’s progression into physical and emotional abuse, especially as his own life unravels into poverty after he loses a record deal and becomes just another struggling musician playing at resorts and hotels in Jamaica–playing for Babylon–selling out to a colonial audience to make a buck. And the more his prospects dwindle, the more intolerant he becomes, belittling and berating and beating his daughters as a way to “protect them”and to hold onto his own masculinity.

Safiya and her siblings spend their later youth trying to find a way out, and for Safiya, it’s through poetry. A voracious reader, she devours hundreds of books a year, studying words and ideas of the greatest poets and writers–and this becomes her ticket. Ironically, in valuing the one “Western” belief of education, their father allowed them to become something other than a subservient woman, though he somehow thought they’d be smart and ambitious and yet happy to remain in a role he envisioned for them within the Rasta male patriarchy.

It’s obvious that Sinclair is a poet. Her descriptions and words are beautiful–sometimes a bit overwrought–but this memoir is written with the detail and imagery of poetry. She tried to start this book years earlier, but with the sage advice of a college professor, “trauma remembered and revisited” can only happen in a “place of safety.” And like many trauma victims, it took her years to feel safe enough to put this experience into words. Similarly, I always tell my students that we need distance and perspective to write about the hardest aspects of our lives.

As award-winning poet and an associate professor of English, Sinclair used her power of words to create a new life for herself. Her sisters and mother followed, breaking away from an oppressive culture that hampered their growth and individuality. Yet for Safiya, Montego Bay and Jamaica will always feel like home.