Publishers Weekly - January 8, 2018

which, she explains, is the crossroad in Kingston that separates
uptown from downtown, with a clock in the tower that always
tells the wrong time: “There’s a square where Jamaicans come
together, where politicians come to speak, and it’s a meeting
place of different people from different classes. For me, it’s
symbolic. When you write a book, part of it comes from history,
but most comes from imagination. Leah, Bob’s love, is fictional
but comes from women I’ve known, as does the character of
Bob. I’ve encountered men like Bob even if I’ve never met
him.” We both laugh, acknowledging Marley’s reputation in
matters of the heart. As Marley himself says in the book,
“Women is my vice.”
In one chapter, Douglas imagines the Ethiopian emperor Haile
Selassie, revered by Rastafarians, as “the old man in the torn shirt
eating sugar cane” meeting Marley: “And so it is the prophet and
the Judah-lion stand at the redgreengold sign.... Rastaman
without locs, lion without teeth... Now the Judah-lion’s toothless
smile is absent of worry or botheration, and Marley, standing there
face to face with the Almighty, feels the urge to sing, his voice a
seven-chambered instrument filling the yard, redgreengold fire
in the sound.”
Douglas tells me that she loves writing. “It’s hard work,” she
says, “but I enjoy the process.” For Marvellous Equations, she took
a year’s sabbatical from teaching creative writing and Caribbean
literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and spent it
in Jamaica.

“Writing the book enabled me to go home, to revel in the
language,” Douglas says. “I felt like I was in my story.” She did
traditional research, but most of it “was pure experience.” She
spent days and days at Half Way Tree “catching the vibe of the
place.”
I ask Douglas, “What is bass riddim?” and she explains that
reggae is only as good as its bass, that good reggae has a deep
bass, and that, for Marvellous Equations, she imagined a bass so
powerful that it could call up the dead, bring back the ancestors.
She wanted to write a book that came out of the reggae aesthetic.
“And when you think reggae,” she says, “you think Bob Marley.”
And when you think Bob Marley, you think Rasta: “Rasta is a
mysterious thing, is a thing of the heart,” a street corner char-
acter notes in the book. “Some people Rasta and them don’t even
know them is Rasta.”
Before writing Marvellous Equations, Douglas had published a
falls/ From the tables of joy/ Sometimes a bone is flung.”
I’m feeling lucky in this new year to be in this business that
brings me together with people like Barbara Epler, Mieke Chew,
and Eliot Weinberger to talk about a New Directions book we
are all excited about: The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A
Novel in Bass Riddim by Marcia Douglas. Epler is the president
of New Directions and Chew is co-director of publicity;
Weinberger—an essayist, editor, and translator, most notably
of Octavio Paz—is the one who discovered the book, and
Douglas, at the 2016 Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad in
April 2016.

Weinberger says he was invited to the festival “inexplicably,”
adding: “I was perhaps the only writer there with no connection
to the Caribbean—and, embarrassingly, largely ignorant of
Caribbean literature. This was a whole new world of writing for
me—one that is thriving and lively, although almost entirely
neglected by the rest of Anglophone writers, readers, and pub-
lishers—so I tried to attend most of the readings and panel
discussions.”
At the festival, Weinberger kept hearing about Douglas’s
novel, which had just come out from Peepal Tree Press in
England. (Peepal Tree is the major forum for Caribbean writers,
with more than 300 books published since 1985, and where
many of the writers Weinberger met at the festival have pub-
lished, or hoped to be published.) He went to Douglas’s reading
and onstage interview, and was “simply knocked out” by this
“panoramic novel that takes place on one corner of Kingston,
Jamaica, full of characters, living and dead—from street vendors
to historical figures like Marcus Garvey—presented in a multi-
plicity of voices, with a vibrancy of the English language that was
new to me.”
I concur. It’s a wildly creative, funny, and immersive book, in
which Marley is reincarnated as Fall-down, a homeless man who
sleeps in a clock tower in Half Way Tree in Kingston, recog-
nized only by his long-ago lover, the deaf woman Leah.

The book is personal for Douglas, who came to the U.S. to study when she was 19, but came of age in Half Way Tree, Every Little Thing Gonna Be All Right