Marcia Douglas

The ancestors have awakened. Somebody has called them. The long-dead are stirring. Jah ways are mysterious ways.

A Novel in Bass Riddim

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread

Marcia Douglas's dreamlike mosaic weaves together ecological prayers, healing wisdom, and buried herstories from the Caribbean and the U.S. Recalling Zora Neale Hurston's time with the maroons in the village of Accompong, the book traces a young woman's flight from New Jersey to the Grand Canyon to escape U.S. immigration officers and follows multiple other lives: an Ashante woman in the hull of a middle-passage ship, a mother searching across centuries for her missing child, and a wailing youth wandering through dreamscapes, seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. The whole weave is juxtaposed against botanical, animal, and planetary migrations and the riddim and chant of the cosmos.

Carrying on Douglas's "speculative ancestral project" (Whiting Foundation), The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive further explores themes of loss, survival, and deliverance. Through an immersive storytelling, richly layered with drawings and footnotes of flora, fauna, and natural phenomena, Douglas preserves and reimagines "the movement of Jah people" and the cultural memory of the African diaspora.

The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs

Marcia Douglas, who was born in England and grew up in Jamaica, presents poems beginning with the image of the voicelessness of the country people who witness the coming of lights to Cocoa Bottom but have no one amongst them to record the event. Each poem has its own poignant individually, but there is also a powerful sense of architecture which runs through the collection.

Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom

Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells

"The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica's nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justic to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor's palace in Addis Ababa and Zion. There is even a fallen angel. At its heart are the human stories of the deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; and relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island's dead. There is also the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766. The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. Not least of the novel's marvellous equations are the dead revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation."

a novel in bass riddim

The marvellous equations of the dread

Rgaret Diehl

A poetic novel melds the past and the present of the author's native Jamaica through the voices of a series of women, both real and mythological, whose lives embody the country's mythology, colonial history, and matrilineal traditions.

Madam Fate

The ancestors have awakened. Somebody has called them. The long-dead are stirring. Jah ways are mysterious ways. “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 Selaisse’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.

Marcia Douglas

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