Marcia Douglas

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.

“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.