The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim

by Marcia Douglas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227872
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/31/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

MARCIA DOUGLAS is the author of novels and poems and performs the one-woman show, “Natural Her-Story.” 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.

Editorial Reviews

"A powerful woman-centered version of Jamaican her-story."

SX Salon

"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."

The Rumpus

"A vast panorama of a small corner of Kingston, a musical novel where the music is reggae, a historical documentary set in the present: As the illustrious and anonymous living and dead materialize to reenact, retell, and undo their life stories, it’s impossible to resist reading these voices out loud, adding your own to this orchestrated hubbub."

Eliot Weinberger

"A lyrical convocation of reggae, roots healing, the history of Half Way Tree, of duppies and fearsome body-swapping, of dangerous youthmen and deliberate revolution—here is prose steeped deep in portents, parables, and a profusion of signs. Marcia Douglas lets the sounds fall from on high, in prose that chants down Babylon and confirms the coming, sweeter than can be reckoned, of Zion."

Caribbean Beat

"A rollicking, music-rich, dream-filled, polyphonic tour through Jamaica’s past and present, both in this world and, on the “dub-side,” beyond it, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread is a masterpiece of linguistic and narrative inventiveness, a contemporary literary marvel."

John Keene

"A pulsating tale revolving around the return of Bob Marley’s spirit on a Kingston street corner dubbed Half Way Tree—it's about the transmigration of souls, Rasta dreams, and the powerful vibrations of consciousness passed down through generations. A whirlwind of a novel that sways to an irresistible beat."

Vanity Fair

"Marcia Douglas’s book is as marvellous as its title – one of the most stunning new works of Jamaican fiction I have had the pleasure of reading. The novel that is not unlike the island that it tries to capture – as musical as it is brutal, and here is writing as full of poetic heft as it is of narrative drive; even as you want to linger and relish in the language, the novel demands that you turn the page."

Kei Miller

"Massively creative, The Marvellous Equations of The Dread draws from—and continues—a long Caribbean musical tradition."

The Millions

"Miraculous."

The Believer - Matt Alston

"Brave and strange: in the great cosmic scheme of this book there's constant traffic between this world and the next."

Chanting Down Babylon - The New York Review of Books - Colin Grant

"Marvellous Equations of the Dread harkens back to the past of slavery, oppression, and violence to account for the situation in Jamaica today...Mystical."

World Literature Today

"Rhapsodic, poetic, scripturally engaged and endlessly inventive. Not only is the electric atmosphere of Jamaica evoked with sensuousness, delicacy and love; so is the ‘dub-side,’ a studio yard just the other side of death, where Bob Marley and a toothless and lisping Haile Selassie discuss the relative merits of routes to Zion."

Review 31

"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."

NPR - Juan Vidal

07/01/2017
A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and professor of Caribbean literature at the University of Colorado, novelist/poet Douglas (Madam Fate) spares nothing here, offering her creative best. Accurately described in the subtitle as written in "bass riddim," this novel fuses poems, song lyrics, remembrances, and quotes to present Jamaica's history and colorful people. Leenah, a deaf woman, writes of the women in her family and the bond between mother and daughter while also detailing her relationship with Bob Marley, though she cannot hear his music. Meanwhile, a street boy named Delroy forms an intriguing friendship with the town madman and a believably rendered fallen angel. By giving each character a distinctive voice in a range of dialects, Douglas portrays life as many Jamaican people have experienced it while simultaneously illuminating the intertwined relationships of Marley, Marcus Garvey, and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Also effective are the historic photographs and an appendix that offers more insight into the leaders that influenced the religious and social climate of the nation. VERDICT Merging verisimilitude and mysticism in the same way as Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River, this work will appeal to readers of Caribbean literature and literary fiction generally.—Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC

Library Journal

2018-04-16
The spirit of Bob Marley dominates this novel, which evokes the rich, bottom-heavy sounds of Marley's music.You can't tell the living and the dead here without a score card, and a score card would be too linear a device for this magical realist tale spun by Douglas (Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells, 2005, etc.). It's hard to know which of the myriad narrative strands one should examine first, but we'll start with the deaf woman named Leenah, who met and fell in love with Marley in 1977 when both were exiles from their Jamaican homeland living in London. Years later, the soul of the reggae superstar and icon of Rastafarianism is implanted into the body of a homeless man huddling in a clock tower in Kingston. The man is referred to throughout the book as a "Fall-down" or a "fallen angel," and when Leenah, now back home, sees him on the streets, she alone recognizes him immediately as Marley, the father of her daughter, Anjahla. The clock tower itself has a past life of sorts: Centuries before, it was the site of a tree where a black slave boy was hung and was known from that time on as the "Half Way Tree." Past and present become likewise intertwined throughout the book as such historic personages as Britain's King Edward VII, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (referred to throughout as His Imperial Majesty or by the initials "H.I.M.") make in-and-out appearances, sometimes to confer or get high with the reincarnated Marley in the clock tower. Douglas' audacious, willful blend of surreal imagery, historic facts, and vividly rendered monologues from all her characters, whether Jamaican-born or not, seems at times to get away from her. Somehow, the spiraling, unwieldy mix is held together by its recurrent invocation of musical motifs borrowed from classic Caribbean pop (references to "background singers," "dub-side chanting" and "bass-lines") and, most of all, by the poetic fire of the author's imagery. When at one point Leenah remembers the living Bob Marley as having "cheekbones which could balance an egg or a flame or a revolution," it's almost as if he's in front of the reader, preparing to let loose a musical cry for freedom.Think of this book as a haunted island with spectral voices and inscrutable mysteries.

Kirkus Reviews