Pushkin.
If I followed this path that my father had laid out for me, I would be a woman who didn't follow her own dreams and desires, didn't follow her own passions, didn't live for herself, and was relegated to this sort of bent and broken place of silence, of only domesticity.
Sophia Sinclair is a writer and poet who grew up in a Rastafari family. Her father was the head of the household, and he made Sophia and her siblings follow a strict interpretation of Rastafari. But as Sophia grew older, living under her father's rules became suffocating.
And I thought, no, that's not the future that I want for myself. And I want to decide for myself the woman that I am going to be, and so I need to cut this future completely out of me and out of my life entirely.
On today's show, Breaking Free from your family's beliefs, I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Sophia grew up in a small fishing village on the north coast of Jamaica. The village belonged to her mom's family, and Sophia's dad never quite felt like he along there. He was part of a radical sect of Rastafari, a religious and social movement. In that sect, the main tenant was to maintain purity,
to keep your mind and body clean. This meant avoiding any influences from Babylon, the world outside of Rastafari, which was seen as evil and corrupt. Sophia's dad worried that keeping his family in the village would hurt their purity. Sophia and her siblings would be exposed to their maternal aunts, for example, who did things like eat meat, drink alcohol, wear makeup, and go out dancing. And so when Sophia was five, her dad moved their family to the countryside.
We left the seaside, and suddenly the rules were coming fast at me, and you know, which involved like growing the dreadlocks. And then also when I was nine years old, my father said, you can't climb trees anymore, you will never ride a bicycle, you cannot wear jeans, you can't wear pants, you can't wear shorts. And so that's why I began to question everything, because I was like wait, I'm not quite sure where these rules are coming from. And a lot of them weren't placed on my brother.
He could still climb the trees and ride his bicycle and all of this. And so I did question, and the answer was always, don't question me, just do what I say.
You mentioned these extreme restrictions, right, I mean, there were so many limitations placed on you. What was your understanding of the expectations of a Rastafari woman. What was the future that you were forced to envision for yourself within these confines.
Well, for a long time, I didn't have a good understanding of what was expected of me. The rest of Fari movement itself doesn't have one unifying principle or core tenet. There is no kind of biblical equivalent for Rastafari. There's no Holy Book, and most Rastafari households, the idea was that the Rasta brethren was kind of God had figured in the household. Each Rasta brethren really got to interpret and create the rules for himself in his own household.
And that's what my household was like. My father just said these are the rules and you must follow them. So that kind of set the tone for what growing up was like, and so silence was something that was seen, especially for women, as something that made you virtuous. And then you know, for women, there were also certain rules that weren't necessarily given to the men. For example, there were rules about the modesty of dress for women. So for the women of Rastafari, you know, they had to
cover their arms and legs, cover their knees. Some women covered their hair. And there was a moment where we there, it was a gathering of the rass of community and I just remember observing, and I was maybe eight years old. I remember observing. All the women were inside in the kitchen. They had multiple children kind of grabbing onto their you know, arms, legs, their hems. They were making the food and they would bring the food outside to the men. And the men
were all sitting outside talking. But the rastafar I call it reasoning right, which was like a big part of their community in a way that they passed down the oral wisdom and tenets of Rastafari, which was asking questions about the man's place in the universe. And they talked about philosophy and politics and so on, and you know,
a lot of existential conversations happening. And I remember looking at the men or the bredren sitting there and having these conversations and reasoning, and ever so often they would call the young boys over like, come and listen, Come and listen to this wisdom. I remember being so jealous, like,
why can't I get the wisdom in the reasoning? And you know, and then seeing the women were so preoccupied with making the food and bringing the food to the men that they didn't have a chance to have existential, you know, conversations with each other.
You're like, I'm smart, I'm capable. What's going on?
Yeah? And I remember that being one of the first times that I thought, Wait, is this the future that my father is laying out for me?
You know?
Is this if I continue down this path, is this where I'm going to be? You know, a woman relegated to this sort of bent and broken place of silence, of only domesticity and being beholden to just her husband. Yeah.
Did you see what you described modeled in you talked about being beholden to a man? Right? Did you see that modeled between your parents and the way that they interacted with each other, Like the way that your mom was expected to serve your father.
So when I was younger, when I was a teenager, this is how it appeared to me. You know that my mother, she did all the domestic things, she cooked for everyone, and she I mean, she was just a natural nurturing person, gentle, patient, and to her she saw it as an honor to be our mom and to educate us and expand our imaginations. But in her interactions with my father, I often, when I was younger, found
her voice to be silent. It appeared to me that she kind of just deferred, maybe to keep the peace. She was, you know, a kind of person who did not like confrontation. My father I think some of the time was almost all confrontation.
Yeah, Rastafaris constituted a very small minority of the population. Right, So you were you and your siblings were facing all of these restrictions imposed by your father, but you were further confronting difference at school because your peers were not having to follow the same rules as you. And so how did that dynamic play out for young Sophia, Right, She's going to school and you know, as little kids, we want to fit in, Right, It's like really hard.
Yeah, we were so ostracized, not just by our peers by the children. Would you kind of expect that children will sort of tease you if you're different or whatever. But my teachers and the adults also treated us unkindly because they had this unkind idea of Rastafari in their minds. It's something that most people would be surprised to know about Rastafari because we I think most people outside of Jamaica really think Rasafari define Jamaica.
Right.
You would probably imagine that they're the majority of the population, but actually they're not. They're one percent or less of the population. And historically, after the Rastafari movement began in the nineteen thirties, Jamaica was still under British colonial rule and the movement began as this sort of anti colonial movement, one that sought to harden around black liberation and freedom.
The Restafari were labeled as a cult by the British government and the founder of Rasafari and the big commune of where the Rastas lived altogether was burnt to the ground. And after that the movement really scattered, and my siblings and I were among the first Rasta ChIL children to integrate public schools in Jamaica. So Yes, that was a lot to kind of take on as a young child.
We were the only Rasta children at school. We were often the only Rasta children on the street, in the supermarket wherever we went, so people would point us out or point at us.
Yeah, and you were so easily identified, right because of your hair and the clothing restrictions.
Right, yeah, yeah, so no one else had dreadlocks. We were the only ones who had dreadlocks, and which I think most people kind of think, oh, it's it's a hair style, but for the Rastafari, it's a very big part of their belief and their faith. The dreadlocks are a sacred marker kind of it's a sign of your divinity and your your reverence to Ja, which is the godhead figure of Rastafari. And so it tethered me to
my father's control. That signaled to the Rasta brethren in his circle that he had his house on the control. It created this kind of difficulty of feeling really alienated.
H there's this very heartbreaking moment you describe in the book where a schoolmate of yours tells you that she doesn't want to be friends with you because you're Rastafari.
Yeah, you know, it was one of these moments in my life where things really changed, because as soon as we got back to school with our dreadlocks, we were being teased, and I remember feeling this is one of the first times I felt ashamed to be myself, and that was not a good feeling. But I thought I had a friend. And my father would always tell us, you know, don't keep friend and company, don't have friends because outside influences are dangerous and people only want to
hurt you. But I thought she was my friend, and one day she did send someone to give me this note that said I don't want to be friends with you. I don't want to be friends with Arasta, And yeah, this was one of the most painful moments in my young life, and I tried to harm myself. I stepped on a rusty nail. I was ten years old. You know, all of this pain, I didn't know where it should go.
And I was feeling all this pain, all this alienation, isolation, and I was at home recovering from what I'd done. I told everybody it was an accident, and somehow my mother knew it wasn't an accident, and she kind of she came to my bed and she sat down and she gave me this really beautiful talk about how she also felt alienated when she was growing up and it
was poetry that always made her life feel better. And then she gave me my first collection of poems and she said, you know, poetry has always helped me, and I think it will help you too. Wow.
And she was right, you know she And this is the moment I think my life changed. I know it changed because as she left me with this book of poems and I read the poems in there, and I.
Could feel viscerally all the hurt and pain I had been feeling because of what happened at school, slowly leaving me slowly really evaporating and changing from hurt and pain into something else, something beautiful. And I knew then that that was the power of poetry. And I thought, if I can just keep this feeling, this feeling of wonder that really burnt away all of the pain, I would always be Okay.
Yeah, do you remember particular line of poetry that you remember speaking to you or yeah.
She gave me this book. It was called Poems from a Child's World, and she told me that William Blake, the poem The Tiger was one of her favorites, and then I just remember reading that and being awe struck and how the words sort of came alive as connected to feeling, and how I felt that the imagery was also a vessel for meaning and it felt like another world opening, a way of understanding the world. That it sort of touched something in me that was just waiting
to be touched, the poet's soul. And then I wrote my first poem that was an imitation of the Tiger, called the Butterfly.
But its.
Yeah, I know, ascute little poem, but you know, it was the first time I realized that there was another world there waiting for me to touch it.
Yeah, and it's another world in which you could exercise your personal agency again, right in which you were unencumbered and just by having a pen and paper, you were fully empowered to express yourself. I mean, I can't imagine how intoxicating that would feel, given all of the restrictions you had faced up until this point.
Exactly. Yes, I mean, poetry offered me the space to nurture my sense of selfhood, to really hone my voice at a time where I felt that silence was what was being required of me, and poetry, yes, became this space where I could really evolve myself and my thoughts and my imagination.
You start reading poetry, you're writing, You're having these magical experiences with it. Right you called yourself awestruck. Did you feel that it was puncturing holes maybe in your belief system or did it open your eyes to a future that it maybe felt inaccessible to you? Prior?
Poetry for me was something that I felt was crucial to my survival. It was something that I needed to do in order to survive. But also once my poems began to be published, and my first poem was published when I was sixteen, this was really the first time I felt that not only did I have something to say, but that what I had to say matted, And so that was a crucial thing that poetry gave to me. Yes, there was always this imagination of a future in which
I could be a poet. You know that this passion that I had was something that I could continue to do, that it could continue to imbue my world with all of this light and wonder. But I think the first crucial thing it did was really help me find my voice and to believe that what that voice had to say was important. So keep speaking.
We'll be back in a moment. With a slight change of plans, at age sixteen, Sophia asked her mom to mail three of her poems to the Jamaica Observer, and soon after the paper published her first poem in print. As she continued to write, Sophia began to see that the future her dad had laid out for her, the one in which he avoided the influence of Babylon, was not going to be satisfying, and so, at age nineteen, she contemplated a bold decision.
Practically my whole life, my whole you know, adolescence. I kept asking like, can I cut my dreadlocks? And the answer was always no, absolutely not. And then, you know, I just began to feel the older I got that tied to this vision of the woman, this future woman that I would become if I continued down this path that my father had me on. I really began to see the dreadlocks as the thing that connected me to my father and his beliefs and his control over my body,
over my voice, and over my future. And I thought, this doesn't feel like who I am and that is not the future that I want. And I said to my mother, you know, Mom, I just don't feel like I can go on like this. I don't feel like myself. This is not who I am, and I want to choose for myself who I want to be. And she said, okay, well tell me how I can help you. Wow. And yeah.
Then she she helped me do it. And you know, I said, Mom, aren't you like or maybe it was her friend one of us asked like, you know, isn't my dad gonna be furious? And she said that's okay, Like I'll take his anger. I just want you to choose for yourself the person you want to be.
Wow.
Yeah. And so you know, that was another moment of my life that my mother really paved the path for me to live as freely as I wanted to.
Do. You remember, Sophia, what it was like to see that first law fall to the ground.
I mean, it was incredibly moving in a way that surprised me right, feeling this kind of peculiar remorse because I had railed for so long wanting to cut my dreadlocks that I hadn't expected it to matto when the
moment came, but then it matted a great deal. I felt like, oh my gosh, I'm losing this part of myself that had been all of because you know that your hair carries like energy and spirits, you know, everything, and it just felt like, Wow, I was losing all of this, all the past, all of the moments I'd lived, and who would I be without these dreadlocks. There was this question like am I losing some of my power?
Which is what my father always told me, that our dreadlocks were our power, like your hair is your power, your crown. Finally I felt free. I felt yeah, that the tell us had been cut from me, that I was new again, that I was someone unburdened and someone who could choose what happened next.
Wow. What was your father's reaction when he first saw you?
Girl? Anger? Fury? You know, like this was absolutely a like an disaster. It was like a fracturing in our family. It was he didn't talk to me for a while, even though we were in the same house. I think he, you know, he looked at me with like disgust. I would say, So it was hard. It was very hard. Yeah,
It's a defining moment in my life. And a defining moment in my family's life doing that, because we knew, we all knew, me and my sisters that this was the one thing that would change everything, because even if we were questioning things or we were making our own little rebellions at home, once we went out in the world with our dreadlocks, it was still assigned to the community and my father's rasta redreend that his house was
still under control. But once I cut my dreadlocks, my middle sister cut her dreadlocks, then my youngest sister cut her dreadlocks, and then my mother, who had been growing her dreadlocks since she was nineteen years old when she first met my father, And so the entire family changed. And of course my relationship with my father only worsened because he saw me as the sort of ruin us seed, the black sheep that really destroyed his perfect rast of family.
On the cusp of your twentieth birthday, you decided to get your hair straightened at a hair salon, right surrounded by worldly Babylonian women that your father would have considered unclean, and that would take you right. Tell me about that first experience being in the hair salon with all these other black women.
You know.
Yeah, it was like stepping into this world that I had no idea about. I'd never been in a salon my entire life. My hair had never been cut since I was born until that day when I cut my dreadlocks. Like no scissors had ever touched my hair. So it was like stepping into this curious world. And part of me was like, oh, this is like a feminine space. This is like a space for women, And I'd never been in a space like that before, where it was
not women living for the needs of men. It was just women who were gathering for themselves, right for their own desires. It was like there were so many things happening, but that was the thing that I took away the most, that there was something to me kind of sacred about the space of the salon and the black women of black women putting her hands in your hair. And even though I was told this was like the pits of Babylon, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how
they would see me or treat me. But they just welcomed me, and they welcomed me and treated me tenderly, and you know, I thought there was something beautiful about that, and I still do.
It's been, you know, twenty years since you took that leap that you cut your locks. What is your relationship like with your family today? So do you mind starting with your father?
Yeah, we have a good relationship. I think it was a hard road, difficult road, but I think eventually, and I think partially through my writing and my poetry, that I was able to speak to him in a way that he could hear me, that he could really see me as my own person.
Yeah. Do you feel you have a different appreciation of your father and why he had the beliefs he had or why he was the way he was.
Well, I don't know if appreciation is the right word.
I think understanding.
Maybe understanding is better because I think, you know, he did a lot of things wrong, and he did a lot of things that I wish hadn't happened to me. But I wanted to understand him in a different way and in all of his fullness, with as much nuance as I could, and not all one way, not all bad or not all good, you know. So I really part of that was going back to his own youth and trying to figure out what led him to Rastafari,
how did he go on this journey? Because him going on that journey really shaped my own life and my own connection to Rastafari. And so I recorded several interviews with him, asking him about his life, which was something I'd never done. I mean, I wasn't allowed to, I think when I was younger, because it was always like, these are the rules, don't question them. So he never really humanized himself to us. And there were moments where
I was recording with him. There was this moment where he described his mother leaving him at sixteen on the street to be homeless because he chose to be Rastafari. And when my father told me the story, he wept. It was the first time I remember hearing him cry like that, and I thought, wow, he is still holding these wounds. And I really had to think about his life in a way that led me to a path
of forgiveness, which I had not expected. I would have never described myself as a forgiving person, so no one was more surprised than me to find myself on that path. But I'm very happy that I did.
There's a stirring parallelism there, right, which was both you and your father experienced a rejection of some kind from your parents as teenagers, right. I mean he in choosing to become Restafara and you at nineteen and cutting off your dreadlocks. Right, So then the input was different that the reaction was the same.
I know. I think if he'd had his way, he would have turned me out. And my mother said, there's absolutely no way that that's going to happen, like your own mother did to you. And you know, again, coming back to my mom really as this force of strength in a way that I couldn't have seen then, but I realize now. So she's the one who said there's no way that's happening. My mom, I mean, we're so so close. She's such a lover of poetry that I think no one is a bigger fan of my writing
and my work than my mom. She's always she's always there if she can at my events in the front row. If it's a poem, I'll see her mouth moving like mouthing the worst in the poem, and she'll say to me, wow, like I just I can't believe this is what I did. Like I have my own personal poet, so to her, that's me. I'm her own personal post. Oh I love that. And you know, my siblings were all very, very very close.
We grew up like very close knit because we grew up in this very strange condition of being the only rast of children. We became very close and we're still all very close. We talk every day, you know, me and my sisters we talk several times a day. So yeah, it's wonderful.
I mean, you had mentioned earlier that you feel hair carries energy. How would you describe your relationship with your hair today?
I wear my hair in all different kinds of ways, But what really Matt does is that I have the choice to wear it how I want to, and so no matter what kind of style I have on my head, just the fact that it is my choice makes it a source of power.
Sophia's latest book is a memoir called How to Say Babylon. We'll link to it in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Next week, join me when I speak to journalists Charles Duhig about the science of what makes for a great conversation.
When you and I have a real conversation, our bodies and our brains change, our heart rates starts to match each other, our breath patterns starts to match each other, our pupils start to dilate at similar rates, and more importantly, the neural activity within our brains starts to look more and more similar. This simultaneity, the similarity, is at the core of communication and is what makes communication so powerful, and our brains have evolved that when we achieve it, we feel wonderful.
That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive producer by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior producer Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Brianna Garrett, and our engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week.