Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize Jamaican author Safiyah Sinclair said she was shocked at the announcement.
Her book How to Say Babylon: A Memoir won the overall 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by One Caribbean Media.
Speaking at the award ceremony on Saturday at Esperenza Alta, St Ann's, Sinclair said she wrote the book for Caribbean women, and in hopes her father would hear her.
“Everything I write and feel and dream is for the Caribbean. I wrote How to Say Babylon for all the Caribbean women whose work and deeds so often go unseen and unsung, women who are overlooked and forgotten in the margins of history. I wrote this book for all the Caribbean who gave us the wildfire of our dialects and our folklore.
“In many ways too, I wrote this book for my father and the rest of bredren like him who gave me the fire of my linguistic rebellion, to say what the I mean and mean what the I say. I wrote this in hopes that my father may understand me a little bit better, that he might finally hear me.
She said she also wrote the book for her siblings and in tribute to the place she grew up in.
“I wrote this book for my siblings, my sisters Ife and Shari, and my brother Lij. Im so thankful for their strength, their laughter their hope, the sunlight we found somehow, somewhere, under the shadow of our circumstance.
“And I wrote this book for Montego Bay Jamaica, the red poinciana I was born under, the blue sound and music of my Caribbean sea.”
She congratulated her fellow competitors, Kevin Jared Hosein, who would have won the fiction category with his book Hungry Ghosts, and Nicole Sealey, who won the poetry prize for her book The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.
She said she was thankful for the inspiration of writers who came before her, including Edwidge Danticat, Lorraine Goodison, Sylvia Wynter, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin, Nicole Sealey and others.
“With you, with all of you, we continue to create this matriarchal language, and with you I'm leaving my small part of work.”
Sinclair had a message for her fellow Caribbean writers.
“I want to say, being born in someone else else's idea of Paradise, we're often encouraged not to dream too far, not to think too big. But I think the very essence of being Caribbean is that when we're told what's impossible, we still reach for the sun anyway.
“I wrote this book for all of you, for home. I write in hope we continue to defy colonial powers and continue to interrogate the violent history of the narratives that we were handed.”
She said she wished for an end to colonial violence worldwide.
“I wish to see an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza. I dream to see a free Palestine in my lifetime, a free Congo, a free Sudan, a free Haiti.
Sinclair spoke about how colonial violence shaped the Caribbean.
“When Columbus came to this Archipelago, he miscategorised the West Indies. He also mischaracterised the natives he found there as Caribes, cannibals, and perhaps there is some
