I’m a rebel; let them talk.
– RNM
run it/for the people –
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcia Douglas is the author of the novels, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies internationally, including Edexcel Anthology for English Language, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, The Forward Book of Poetry, Kingston Noir, Jubilation! 50 Years of Jamaican Poetry, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Whispers from Under the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose, Essays, and The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In addition to writing, she performs a one-woman show, “Natural Herstory”, and is on faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches creative writing and Caribbean literature.
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ALSO BY MARCIA DOUGLAS
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom
ISBN: 9781900715287; pp. 80; pub. 1999; price £7.99
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom takes the reader on a journey of light, from the flicker of the firefly in rural Jamaica, through the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile in the USA to the point of arrival and reconnection imaged by the eight-pointed star.
It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and across continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers and ending in tongues of fire.
In making this book a Poetry Book Society recommendation, its selector commented: ‘Marcia Douglas has the kind of intent but relaxed concentration which ushers the reader into the life of a poem and makes the event – a wedding, a hot afternoon, an aeroplane journey – seem for a while like the centre of things. This is a rich and very welcome book.'
June Owens writes in The Caribbean Writer: ‘Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon a culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illumined and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas.’
Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells
ISBN: 9781845230166; pp. 200; pub. 2005; price £8.99
‘Writing is a cover for necromancy’, Carmen Innocencia accuses her creator, Flamingo Tongue, a young Jamaican writer. Carmen is not the only one of Flamingo’s creations to confront her author, for her characters and their tragic, heartening story come vividly alive, perhaps too alive, and just to make sure she can control them, Flamingo makes doll figures of them, but even then… There is Alva Donovan, blinded in childhood, with one seeing eye, one dreaming eye, with whom Flamingo exchanges shoes and in whom she begins to fear she will lose herself. There are the other members of the Donovan family: Dahlia, Paul aka Made in China, and their parents Mama Milly and Daddy Clive the beekeeper whose sudden, violent deaths set up the patterns of separation and eventual reconnection and healing that run through the novel. As Carmen’s accusation suggests, this is a novel set at the cross-roads between the living and the dead – and the cemetery literally becomes the refuge of the orphaned children – between the harsh realities of the violence which spills over from an election campaign and a world where dreams, spirit possession and women who become snails are just as real. This, after all, is Jamaica where in Bob Marley’s words, ‘there’s a natural mystic flowing through the air.’ This is not a story of straight lines, for with those, Flamingo discovers, you miss the crossings.
With the smells of damp earth and Jamaica’s healing herbs, the sounds of the songs that weave through the narrative, and illustrated with photographs of the dolls, and the sketches Flamingo cannot stop herself from adding to her notebooks margins, this is a novel to delight all the senses.
These and over three hundred Caribbean and Black British books available from www.peepaltreepress.com, with safe on-line ordering, or email [email protected], or call +44 (0)113 245 1703, or write to Peepal Tree Press, 17 Kings Avenue, Leeds LS6 1QS, UK
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