The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive

The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive continues Marcia Douglas’s "speculative ancestral project" (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Dreamlike and fiercely paced, this poetic and eco-spiritual work zooms into tight focus on present-day life while dashing deep into the past.

Douglas weaves a rich mosaic of characters and timelines: a mother searches across centuries for her missing child; a young girl flees from New Jersey to the Grand Canyon to escape U.S. immigration officers; an undocumented migrant struggles with loss in America; an Ashante woman endures the hull of a Middle Passage ship; a wailing youth leaps through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. One key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera, recalling her time with the maroons in the village of Accompong.

Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another facet of the dream story, the whole juxtaposed against botanical, animal, and planetary migrations and the riddims and chants of the cosmos. Through immersive storytelling richly layered with drawings, footnotes, and natural phenomena, Douglas carries forward the cultural preservation so central to her vision. The Shante Dream Arkive reimagines the “movement of Jah people” and the cultural memory of the African diaspora, while exploring themes of loss, survival, deliverance—and the buried herstories of the Caribbean and the Americas.