Marcia Douglas is the author of novels and poems and performs the one-woman show, “Natural Herstory.” She teaches creative writing and Caribbean literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’s “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation). The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters—all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica:
For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah-&-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth’s axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata—velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do.
“Is me—Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed. Jah ways are mysterious ways, from Kingston’s ghettoes to London, from Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian palace and back to Jamaica, Marcia Douglas’s mythical reworking of three hundred years of violence is a ticket to the deep world of Rasta history. This amazing novel—in bass riddim—carries the reader on a voyage all the way to the gates of Zion.
Brave and strange: in the great cosmic scheme of this book there’s constant traffic between this world and the next.
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim… has the air of a spell. A beautiful and otherworldly book; a work of poetry steeped in history and rich with imagination. Douglas has a way of conveying the sense of wonder that powers the island’s creative spirit. Douglas writes with an almost Biblical diction…Weaving a complex and warmhearted tale — one told through multiple voices — against a backdrop of violence. She can be uproariously funny too — the patois practically jumps off the page, and things can go from light to dark in an instant. Her chapters are tracks that all work well as singles, but when played together pulsate with great power.
Marvellous Equations of the Dread is a celebration of the conflicted Jamaican experience. The women in Marcia Douglas’s books are proud women: they are the descendants of Queen Nanny, the Maroon chieftain who, according to legend, could catch the bullets of the British soldiers between her teeth.
