Dawes A Place to Hide

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-84523-494-2
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incisive portrayal of contemporary Jamaican society that is unsparing in confronting its elements of misogyny and nihilistic violence. Indeed several stories question how this disorder can be meaningfully told without either sensationalism or despair. For Dawes, the answer is found in the creative energies that lie just the other side of chaos. In particular, in the dub vershan episodes, which intercut the stories, there are intense and moving celebrations of moments of reggae creation in the studio and in performance. Dawes has established a growing international reputation as a poet and these are stories that combine a poetic imagination with narrative drive, an acute social awareness and a deep inwardness in the treatment of character. In the penultimate story, 'Marley's Ghost', Dawes's imagination soars to towering myth. Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty five books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean's leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His next book of poetry from Peepal Tree Press will be 'A New Beginning', a cycle of poems written with John Kinsella. He has been elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty five books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean's leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dawes, Kwame

Leseproben

A PLACE TO HIDE
On rainy nights like these she would imagine her house the way he had seen it the first time from the terrace of a house on the hills above Kingston. She had gone there one evening after playing squash with him at the Liguanea Club, playing politics as the other junior managers at office would call it, or playing with fire in the words of her sisters in the church, each and every one of them, like her, a fallen angel. When she pointed to her house in Mona Heights, his response was simple: “Neat.” One of the Americanisms he had picked up at college in Miami. But what did he mean by neat? She thought now as she tugged her skirt and sat down on the toilet seat. Perhaps it was the tic-tac-toe predictability of the streets, rows of concrete houses, each one like the next, the regimented hedges, the squareness of the civil servants. She knew what he had meant by “neat” but it was hard for her to say it. Neat was everything that she was not; her desk, her blue Ford Escort, her apartment in what used to be the maid’s quarters. She was careless and untidy, or as he used to call her before their separation: “A nasty slob.” Standing before the mirror in her brassiere, her blouse and skirt heaped in a pile, she traced the dark lines that curved on her cheeks. She wiped away what was left of her make-up with cool cream and tissue. Her nose, she observed, grew darker the older she got. Thirty now. In ten years it would be a deep mahogany. It was the size. An African stamp. Maroon blood. Sometimes she was proud, sometimes she needed someone else to affirm it. He never did. When he called her “big nose” or “nosifus” they were terms of endearment, he once explained, and she had wondered how he would have felt if she had called him “red skin” or “short ass”. But then, he wouldn’t care – he was blessed with that masculine ability to blame a woman for her perceptions of his shortcomings. He wouldn’t care because she was with him, and that was evidence enough that she was only trying to hurt him. Anyway, she did not have the distance of anger, then. Not like now. Turning from the mirror she pulled off the brassiere, her breasts resting snugly on her rib cage. He had asked her if there was no way to get rid of the yellow stretch marks that lined her breasts. Before that she had never felt awkward about the marks. Now she was very conscious of them. She rarely looked at her body in a full-length mirror. She threw the damp bra on the pile in the corner and stepped into the shower. As the water beat her muscles, she allowed herself to think about the day. It had started already, the short-temperedness, the moodiness, and the day-dreaming fantasies that never failed to disturb her. Even on the bus, with her legs held tightly together to prevent the pressure of water in her, at each bump of a pot-hole she sensed a tingling warmth flowing through her body in response to the images that swirled through her mind. It annoyed her that these thoughts were of him. It was during these days that she had most wanted him around, and they had wonderful times when he did come. But he was not going to come. She tried to convince her body that discipline was necessary. She filled her mouth with warm water and then let it hang open, so the water tumbled out in a smooth flow down her chin. The bathroom grew misty in the heat. Reaching out of the shower curtain, she groped for her panties, feeling the water pound on her back. She was going to wash them with the shampoo that gave them the sweet smell he liked, but then decided to leave them there, sweat-soaked with the day’s tensions. She stepped out of the shower, careless of the huge puddles she allowed to form on the tiles. She flushed the toilet and watched the pink paper spin in the yellow water as it foamed and then turned transparent. The gurgle of water forcing its way through the tight neck of the bowl changed to a long whining sound. That was her cue to flick the lever until there was another change of gear, this time a high pitched whistling that faded slowly to silence. Then she cleaned her teeth, wiping a clear patch in the thin film of steam that blurred the mirror, catching sight of a mouth full of bubbly foam beneath what now seemed like something gross, a grotesquery of flesh. She switched off the bathroom lights and moved into the bedroom, which was dark. In bed, small goose-bumps formed on her body. She had left the window open and now looked through the louvres at the dark green mango leaves shaking on black branches. For a moment the dark clouds cleared a patch so she could see the thin pale line of the moon. The black-green leaves glistened under the amber streetlight when she opened her eyes. The drizzle had waned but had begun again. It was soft on the asphalt and concrete outside and, mixed with the cool breeze from the hills, it was sweet to the nose. She breathed deeply. The smell of rain. She was never able to decide why the rain had that smell. It was like the sweet taste of water in a thirsty mouth. She was slowly forgetting the hot day, the oily oxtail and rice that still weighed heavy in her stomach. She would not eat now for fear of heartburn that would torment her for the entire night. She was too tired, anyway, to try and make another interesting meal of corned-beef and green peas. She had no more fresh meat in her refrigerator. She wasn’t particularly inclined to buy more meat since he was the one who had to eat fresh meat. He had stopped coming by so she could now return to the ulcer and pain of her old ways of eating and drinking. A gust of wind swirled around the room, making the curtains flap. A bizarre shadow moved across the walls. She felt droplets of rain blowing onto her skin. She brushed a breast to wipe a drop off. Her hand remained there, her fingers lightly following the tiny bumps. She stretched her legs, curled her toes, her thighs tensing and then relaxing. Then she turned onto her stomach lying on her hand to keep the warmth inside. As she faded into sleep she mumbled to God that he must understand. She was drifting to sleep when the harsh clanging of a rock on the grill startled her. She rolled over, looking towards the door, listening. She was not expecting anyone and it was late. She decided it must have been for the old couple in the front house. But she had not heard them come in, which at first made her nervous. Violence was lurking everywhere. But what did she have to fear? She was not mixed up in anything. And although her conscience wasn’t clear, for she had sinned with her body, she could sleep at night, although at times she did not think that she deserved it. As her body relaxed, the clanging started again. “Fred open the door, nuh.” The old lady’s voice trembled from inside the house. “Is by the flat,” her husband’s gravelly voice replied impatiently. Sitting up, she listened again. She heard swishing of the leaves just outside the windows. She rose quickly, pulling the sheet over her body. She knew somebody was out there. She would hide in the bathroom, she had her robe in there. “Sarah…” She recognized the voice. Her shoulders tensed. “Sarah! You in there? Open the grill, nuh. Is me. Jacob.” “Suppose the police see you out there and shoot you? What you doing by my window like a thief?” “Open the grill, nuh Sarah. Is rain out here yuh know. I’m wet. I’m wet. I’m soaking wet.” “I’m waiting for you to move. I want to dress.” “Dress for what? Look, I getting wet, just open the blasted door!” Jacob Lawson, insurance agent, lapsed Seventh Day Adventist – the man she was secretly seeing for almost a year until a month ago (when he confessed what she had already known but had chosen to ignore: that he was seeing another woman, called Jane Tipman, a brown-skinned physiotherapist he had met on the North Coast, that he was sleeping with this bitch regularly while still making his twice a week visits for sex with her); the man who had arrived when she needed to fall into sin, to blackslide; the man who became her vehicle of rebellion, a tangible man, just the kind of person she had been avoiding for years, keeping herself pure; the man whom she never thought to love but allowed to see her in a way that no other person had – muttered impatiently and moved from the window. These days, every time he appeared, she found herself rehearsing the year with him, and the transformation it had represented after the five years of holy living. February a year ago marked the five years since her baptism in the overflowing Hope River, some six miles up into the Blue Mountains that loomed over her home. Salvation had come as a New Year’s resolution. Her father’s first heart attack had shattered the family during the Christmas vacation. She remembered the hours in the hospital, the talks with doctors, the comforting of her mother, the procession of family from abroad to see him as if to pay their final respects, the sick feeling she had eating Christmas dinner with him in the yellow-walled ward of Andrew’s Memorial, the amount she drank and threw up on Boxing Day when she went to a friend’s party to try and forget everything, and the realization that she really loved her father, feared him dying and wanted to find a way to prolong their time together. She prayed a lot during that time. She convinced her father to go with her to church on New Year’s Eve. Her intention was to have him saved just in...