'A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories' by Jacob Ross
Published by Mango Publishing Price: £8.99 Reviewed by
Bernardine Evaristo 'Sometimes you not s'pose to lissen to de words a pusson say, cos dat's not
where you find de meaning, you find de meaning in de voice - Uh mean, de feelins dat de words come wrap in'.
Ross's first collection of short stories Song for Simone was published to excellent reviews in 1986, it's been a long wait for his second book, and it has been worth it.
A Way to Catch the Dust is a collection of eleven short and longer narrative pieces that delve into the complex psyche of a range of remarkable and indeed unforgettable characters who are in
essence outsiders in a community where 'If you different then you good as dead'. Ross's first collection was hailed as 'one of the most powerful crystallization of
Caribbean childhood since George Lamming's 'In the Castle of my Skin.' These were stories concerned with the 'scarring sensations of childhood'. Here in this new collection we
have a writer pre-occupied with larger more demanding themes of self-discovery and redemption, of un/belonging and revenge. Reviewers such as novelists Leone Ross, Alba Ambert, and Colombian
poet Anabel Torres, comment on the remarkable range, the sheer story-telling skill and versatility of this writer who presents us with ordinary people capable of committing extraordinary acts.
Here are characters who often do the unspeakable or the improbable, or in Toni Morrison's words, the unthinkable 'Writing has to do with the imagination. It's being willing to think the
unthinkable, no matter how silly it may appear.' Indeed in relation to this collection Ross was recently quoted as saying, "I was interested in the unsaid, the atrocious, the improbable."
Set in an unnamed Caribbean island these stories are powerful explorations of the loaded space between what is thought and what is said. If there is one overarching metaphor that
binds the pieces together, it is the sea. The ocean is omnipresent. It is presented as a complex reality that is both metaphysical and concrete, it shapes the lives of these characters, it
defines their reality and like life, the sea is everything. Indeed one of the many pleasures of the book is the range of original images that this author uses to invoke it: at times it is 'the
great wide open paw of some soft-voiced, growling dog that scampered off to other worlds at night' or simply a 'wet desert' or a 'frenzy of white, rolling water, bloated
with indigestion from the bits of the world it had swallowed up'. These stories are refined, timeless and startlingly beautiful and if Walcott is the poet laureate of the Caribbean Sea
then with this collection, Ross becomes a major contender as its chief prose stylist. Rum an Coke, the opening story, is an exploration of revenge - a common enough theme in literature
but given a particular resonance here when Norma Browne a woman whose hopelessly drug-addicted son begins to beat her up. She turns on the man who 'feeds the veins' of her child with '
de niceness' and murders him not simply because he now 'owns' her only child, and has destroyed something 'essential' in this gifted youth, but also because he has, in a sense, destroyed her!
For
'a time does reach when a woman can only hope for what come after she; she children and de children that will come from them, that will pass on, if not her name then her blood and perhaps a memory of her; an acknowledgement that they were alive only because she existed once.
A Different Ocean is a story about the young girl Sienna Miller who becomes obsessed with a white doll, which is cast up on the beach by the sea. White people, we learn, are alien to her.
She is a child at the edge of her community, raised by an aunt who curses her and living in a community that constantly reminds her of her ugliness. Yet she is possessed with the gift of being an
exceptional swimmer. When two white strangers in an expensive yacht drop anchor in The Silent, the lagoon above which their village is perched, she is fascinated by their whiteness and seduced by
their offer of friendship. 'Nothing in her life had prepared her for this encounter. For these strangers who came in from the other side of the world never seemed to see them in
their little houses on the hill......If these people belonged to the same world at all, they certainly owned different parts of it.
So when the woman held out her hand Sienna could not help but stare at it and then up at her face. But in these and the other stories, little is what it appears to be. The couple encourages
her to dive deeper and deeper into the lagoon in exchange for small presents. And she does so, even as the dives become more dangerous, more life threatening for this is a child desperate to
prove her worth - to herself above all - and to validate herself in the eyes of others. The story culminates in a powerful moment of self-realisation when she learns that these people, in order
to retrieve something from the floor of the lagoon were in fact prepared to kill her. If Sienna's wound is psychological, then the fisherman Oshun's is - at least overtly- a physical one.
In the stunning story Deliverance, a man is possessed of an incurable, rancid leg sore. He comes to believe his own fantasy that only the albino dolphin that appears in his dreams, 'the
white one with the eyes like flames in her head' can heal him. He too is shunned by the village and is an unwanted burden to his niece with whom he lives. Late one night he steals the best
fishing boat on the beach and makes out to sea in search of the dolphin, venturing into a part that is so dangerous it is known as Hell. Admiration and acceptance will be his when he returns home
healed, he believes. What follows is Oshun's battle with the sea, the elements - in fact with himself - for this is a man whose past contains dreadful secrets that have been festering for years.
It is a delicate, very crafted piece from which the reader will gain a lot with attentive reading. The title story A Way To Catch The Dust, is also one of the most powerful in the
collection. Mantos, of the 'parched skin, the Old Testament face'
is the only one on the island with the unique ability to predict storms. On a hilltop overlooking the sea, he holds a saliva-wet finger and thumb to the wind to catch a strange red dust that arrives only with a particular kind of storm. A storm is imminent and he is being watched by the chilling young Simon. Simon is suspected by the villagers, though not accused outright, of recently murdering a young girl in the swamps. Mantos was the only one who saw him. In addition to his awareness that the old man has seen him carrying the body of the girl into the swamps, Simon wants to learn the Old Man's trick – the way to catch the dust and he therefore stalks him. In effect, these two are alter egos. They are linked by the emergence of a girl from a storm-whipped sea. And it soon becomes clear that this is a confrontation between these island people and their history. It is a story of complex motivations and relationships, and here Ross is more concerned with crafting a piece that would serve what is clearly an emerging vision of rejection, redemption and belonging and of the absolute resilience of the human spirit.
A Way to Catch the Dust
is also a very funny book. The 'Ku-Kus' stories in particular, written in Caribbean Creole are genuinely funny, even while they sit on serious themes. The plot construction, character shaping through dialogue and the use of malapropism work together to make "Chirren, De Laughin Tree, Ku-Kus – Woman of Letters" worthy foils to the more demanding pieces in the book.
Jacob Ross expertly draws us into the strange and haunting world of another time, another place. Going against the
grain, these stories are a marked contrast to much of the contemporary urban narratives produced by Black writers in Britain. Ross, following in the tradition of Hemingway and Morrison,
displays all the brilliance of a great storyteller in action. Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of two books Lara and Island of Abraham
, with a third The Emperor's Babe, due out with Hamish Hamilton / Penguin in the UK, June 2001, and Viking / Penguin in the USA, early 2002. |
