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

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’ “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas’ vision.

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’s 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/poem 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 after three hundred years of slaughter, monk seals know better than to reveal themselves to humans. These days, they stay low, adapting to below surface conditions and establishing habitat with the underwater spirits of drowned horses and slaves disappeared overboard. 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.