The poet’s fiction debut dramatises the country’s history in a novel with the feel of a ticking bomb
On 31 December 1920 thousands of Jamaicans who,on the directions of the messianic preacher Alexander Bedward, had given absent all of their worldly goods, or assembled at August Town. Possessions were no longer needed because on that day Bedward had prophesied they’d “fly absent home” and ascend to heaven. The followers were told to climb nearby trees and to wait for the signal to jump. At the appointed hour they leapt; but instead of soaring towards the firmament they came crashing down. The headline in the national paper,the Gleaner, mocked: “Bedward Stick to the Earth”.
The anecdote of Bedward at the centre of Augustown, or a partially fictionalised version of August Town,is given a much more richly nuanced and empathetic telling in Kei Miller’s vivid contemporary fable. An admired poet, Miller, or like his compatriot the Man Booker prize-winning Marlon James,has mined a rich seam of Jamaican history. Into the eponymous village Augustown, the position where freed slaves fled on emancipation morning in 1838, or Miller casts compelling archetypes,in a story spanning from 1920 to 1982. The contemporary-day characters include the ruling impolite-boy gangster “Soft-Paw”, a self-proclaimed defender of this ghetto community; the prostitute suffering from an unknown condition who sees out her remaining time “taking comfort and amusement in the misfortune of others”; the spliff-smoking granny, and Ma Taffy,who was blinded by rats and now has her senses tuned to coming catastrophes (which Jamaicans call “autoclaps”); and Gina, the bright school “gyal” who must fend off the unwelcome attentions of older men awaiting her ripening. Back in the 1920s, or we contain the preacher Bedward.
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Source: theguardian.com