Marcia Douglas

Marcia Douglas was born in the UK of Jamaican parents in 1961, but grew up in rural Jamaica. She left Jamaica in 1990 to study for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ohio State University and was awarded a Ph D in African American and Caribbean Literature in 1997.

Visit Marcia Douglas's website: www.marciadouglas.com

Her first publications appeared in Sister of Caliban: A Multilingual Anthology of Contemporary Caribbean Women Poets (1996) and in Callaloo, Sun Dog: Southeast Review, Phoebe and APTE.

Her first collection of poems, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree, 1999) won a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It explores the recuperation of Jamaican place and voice from the perspective of a young woman in urban America in resistance to culturally annihilating forces in that society. She writes of the memories which went into these poems:

‘To write these poems was to traverse my navel string back to my Jamaican grandmother who I remember working at a foot-pedalled sewing machine by the light of a kerosene lamp, the words Home Sweet Home on the glass shade; it was to return to the feel of her new cloth, and in that (re)membering, to realize that somewhere in the relationship between line and linen, text and textile, my grandmother, humming and stitching, had bequeathed to me her voice and creative spirit.

To write these poems was to remember my mother (who, going to town as a young country girl and seeing an electric light for the first time, sat and wondered: How to turn it on?) Together, my parents unleashed the trick in electricity, my mother bought a new Bernina sewing machine and by the time I was born, the lights were so bright, I screamed right out loud.

It is this scream which traverses the space between kerosene lamp and light bulb, journeying back and forth across the Atlantic and across continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers, and ending in tongues of fire. At my father’s baptism in Yallahs River, it is said that he received ‘the gift of tongues’. After fifteen long years of working in England, he had recently returned to Jamaica on a ship, The Mimosa. I was seven years old, and remember standing by the water, my father wet and glistening, his neck strings taut, his voice booming in an unknown language, Oh shali wah, shail mahi wah. I was just a little girl and did not understand the full implication of the event, but even then, I sensed such power in the moment that I began to cry and had to turn away because I knew I would not be able to explain my tears. For many years afterward, I wondered, did Daddy speak in the language of God and angels? Or did he just make one up to suit himself? Whatever the answer, what I remember is the passion in his voice, this fire, which ultimately informs these poems.

In my imagi(nation) I watch my grandmother thread her needle, and I traverse my navel string back to her side where her feet pedal the sewing machine... She sews as she hums and hums as she sews, smiling at the firefly on the window. She knows stories of women who shed their skin and become balls of fire, thread in, thread out; and of women who catch words between their teeth, thread in, thread out...

My grandmother died a few years ago, but I have one of her dresses which she made with her own two hands. It’s old and worn from many washings and mostly I keep it folded in a special place, but increasingly, in need of a muse - I put it on. It fits me perfectly.

In 2000, she published her first novel, Madam Fate with The Women’s Press. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with her daughter, Avani.

Visit Marcia Douglas's website: www.marciadouglas.com

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