Review: Allen Callahan on Temple Folk and How to Say Babylon
Aaliyah Bilal’s collection of short stories, Temple Folk, and Safiya Sinclair’s memoir, How to Say Babylon, are more than superb recent writing about Black folk—though they are certainly that. They are also nothing short of literary events: two works of well-crafted prose that tell us much about people about whom we otherwise know so little.
Both authors treat of the struggles of the descendants of African slaves in the Americas. The denizens of Safiya Sinclair’s Rastafarian community are the besieged, impoverished survivors of international tourism’s takeover of Jamaica’s Montego Bay. Aaliyah Bilal’s African American protagonists span the breadth of the Black working classes in the United States: along with accountants, MBAs, and engineering students in suburban enclaves and gentrified inner cities, they include the ex-cons, domestics, janitors, street peddlers, and panhandlers in redlined zip codes who, from its obscure beginnings, found their way to the Nation of Islam. Both books inhabit the generational crisis of faith that attended the global demise of Black Power and Black liberation in the 1970s: fathers of Black messianic movements eating the sour grapes of defeat, exhaustion, and failure; their children’s teeth set on edge.
The two books differ from each other in tone and technique. How to Say Babylon testifies to one woman’s troubled coming-of-age in the wreckage of contemporary Rastafarianism. The young Safiya Sinclair is an excellent student, well-read and well spoken, always at the top of her class while self-consciously at the bottom of the socio-economic food chain. She regards her domineering Rasta father, a failed Reggae singer, with an admixture of adoration, dread, and contempt: his misogynistic, sectarian tyranny looms large in her narrative. Though her book offers a view of Rastafarianism from the inside out, as well as the broken promises of postcolonial self-rule and the free-market free-fall of the eighties and nineties, hers is a story, finally, about her. And alas, only her: the happy ending that greets her as a rising star in New York City’s literary firmament is exceptional, idiosyncratic, and so not on offer to anyone else in her story.
If Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon is an intimately detailed self-portrait, Aaliyah Bilal’s Temple Folk is a deftly curated portrait gallery in which we may occasionally discern, as we might in a painting by Rembrandt or Botticelli, the face of the artist. Among those varied portraits: a pious Muslim woman who plans to murder her devout, polygamous husband and his new wife; a coed confronting the vagaries of Islamic online dating; a Black FBI agent spying on one of Elijah Muhammad’s mistresses; the ghost of a dead imam who knows the living better than they know themselves. The different subjects, in different ways, bear witness to the legacy of the Nation of Islam after the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975: those who fell in line with his son Warith Deen Muhammad, those who fell in line with Louis Farrakhan’s rival organization, and those who simply fell away—into disillusionment, cynicism, resignation, nostalgia. And there are those who simply walk away—leaving behind job, home, spouse, child, as well as temple. In these stories we catch rare glimpses of how these all-too-human people work and play, love and hate, keep faith and lose it.
The if-not-altogether-unhappy, not-so-happy endings of the stories in Temple Folk insist on what How to Say Babylon, in its more forthright moments, implies: that religion for Black folk in the Americas has always been a kind of dream—the dream that a glorious, mythic past and an even more glorious, mythic future might vindicate them in their inglorious present; that a divine messiah might lead them in triumph through the wilderness of American racism; and that by changing their names, their speech, their clothes and their diets, their holidays and hairstyles, they might yet have what they have never had and have always truly wanted—dignity. Temple Folk and How to Say Babylon offer us rich, poignant stories of Black folk’s deferred dream of dignity—and their willingness to believe in almost anything to get it.
Allen Callahan is the author of The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, among other books.
Book Notes
Two years ago, Loudon County, Virginia, an hour from Washington, DC, became one of the first and most visible school districts to embrace district-sponsored restrictions on K–12 school libraries and curricula, when contentious school board meetings segued parents’ frustration with covid mask mandates and school closures into arguments that books considering racial inequality and LGBTQ experience inculcate a liberal agenda and are inappropriate for children. Glenn Youngkin credited his 2021 election to Virginia governor to this parental uprising, and the prospect that political victory might follow from challenges to libraries gave fuel to an unprecedented wave of library restrictions. In this months’ elections this expectation was put to the test. Pro-restriction candidates were defeated in Loudon County’s own school board elections and a majority of school board elections nationally, and ballot measures promoting library restrictions lost, suggesting that these campaigns may be seen as a political liability coming key elections. Publishers Weekly sums up coverage.
Last week a Russian court convicted artist Alexandra Skochilenko of “spreading disinformation” and sentenced her to seven years in prison for placing messages opposing the war in Ukraine over supermarket price tags. Said she, “How weak is the prosecution’s faith in our state and society if it thinks five little slips of paper could make our statehood and public security collapse?” She told the court: “Even though I’m behind bars, I’m more free than you.” —AKj
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