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256 pages, Hardcover
First published August 11, 2016
“The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you seeOnly after I looked for interviews with Miller did I realize he is considered a poet first, though in descriptions of his education he says he started with prose stories. He is lavishly talented, and writes with an enlightened sexual awareness. This novel has a strong set of female characters and in his 2010 collection of poems called A Light Song of Light, we also get that sense of even ground, and more:
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be the bigger than whose?
Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?”
—from Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Every bed was made illegal by the brushMiller saves his challenges for colonialists and from his words we recognize Miller understands rage and sorrow.
of chest against chest, and by our sweat.
--from A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together
"...how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids--mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful. The law concerning mermaids only caused mermaids to pass a law concerning man: that they would never again cross our boundaries of sand; never lift their torsos up from the surf; never again wave at sailors, salt dripping from their curls; would never again enter our dry and stifling world."Historical figures feature in this poetry collection, including Alexander Bedward again, Singerman (Marley?), Nathaniel Morgan, Coolie Duppy, etc. and there is a strong scent of homesickness. Miller has lived in Great Britain for some years now and perhaps is telling the same story over and over, in a new way each time, pruning and training the branches until they remind him of home.
--from The Law Concerning Mermaids
UnsettledThe unsettlement one feels when reading the poem is curiously the way Miller makes us feel in his novel, though he does not use such words. We retain a kind of distance. Just as well. There is danger everywhere. The only other place that ever gave me this sense of familiarity and menace was another island with a bloody colonial history, Tasmania.
So consider an unsettled island
Inside—the unflattened and unsugared
fields; inside—a tegareg
sprawl of roots and canopies,
inside—the tall sentries of blondwood
and yoke-wood and sweet-wood,
of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard
they will one day splinter cutlasses,
will one day swing low the carcasses
of slaves; inside—a crawling
brawl of vines, unseemly
flowers that blossom from their spines;
inside—the leh-guh orchids and labrishing
hibiscuses that throw raucous
syllables at crows whose heads are red as annattos; inside—malarial mosquitoes
that rise from stagnant ponds;
inside—a green humidity thick as mud;
inside—the stinging spurge, the nightshades,
the Madame Fates;
inside—spiders, gnats and bees,
wasps and lice and fleas; inside—
the dengue, the hookworm, the heat
and botheration; unchecked macka
sharp as crucifixion. This is no paradise—
not yet—not this unfriendly, untamed island—
this unsanitised, unstructured island—
this unmannered, unmeasured island;
this island: unwritten, unsettled, unmapped.
—from Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Look, this isn’t magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don’t get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.
Call it what you will – “history”, or just another “old-time story” – there really was a time in Jamaica, 1920 to be precise when a great thing was about to happen but did not happen. Though people across the length and breadth of the island believed it was going to happen, though they desperately needed it to happen, it did not. But the story as it is recorded and as it is whispered today is only one version. It is the story as told …. by journalist, by governors, by people who sat on wide verandas overlooking the city, by people who were determined that the great thing should not happen.
Look, this isn’t magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don’t get off that easy. This is a story people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.
Her voice was not typical. Hers was not the rich alto one might expect from a churchified young woman in Augustown - not that gruffly textured sound that had in it the feel of planting cane or walking long distances, and that had at its centre a kind of brokenness which was where all its power sprang from.
Look, this isn't magical realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don't get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.