“Out here I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness,” the Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair writes of growing up by the water, “stretched out under the almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea’s milky lapping.” Born, in her words, “just beyond the margins of the postcard idea of Jamaica,” Sinclair has been publishing poetry about her island since she was 16. Her 2011 chapbook, Catacombs, and her 2016 poetry collection, Cannibal, deploy vivid descriptions of Jamaica’s lush terrain and native wildlife, to haunting effect. Now her new memoir animates the same land while excavating the past in prose. How to Say Babylon paints idyllic images of youthful freedom stifled too soon: When Sinclair was 5, her strict Rastafari father moved their family away from the sea—and the maternal relatives—that nourished them. The memoir chronicles Sinclair’s attempts to break free from his control—a rebellion emboldened by the seaside she first called home and by the poetry that forged her a path beyond …