Augustown

by Kei Miller

Overview

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Slate • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Vividly bringing to life Jamaica in the 1980s, Augustown is a masterpiece of poetic prose that follows one family's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.

Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. A teacher has cut off Kaia's dreadlocks—a violation of his Rastafari beliefs—and this single impulsive action will have ramifications that stretch throughout the entire community. For Kaia's story brings back memories from Ma Taffy's youth, including the legend of the flying preacherman and his ties to the history of Jamaican oppression and resistance—all of which will reverberate forward to the present and change Augustown forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101974094
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	102,578
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

KEI MILLER is the author of two previous novels, several poetry collections, and Fear of Stones and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book. In 2014, he won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Born in Jamaica, he lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Read an Excerpt

First you must imagine the sky, blue and cloudless if that helps, or else the luminously black spread of night. Next—and this is the important bit—you must imagine yourself inside it. Inside the sky, floating beside me. Below us, the green and blue disc of the earth.
 
Now focus. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. We have gone inland. Down there is a dismal little valley on a dismal little island. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar—a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin—as if a kind of ruin has befallen them.
 
Seen from up here, the ramshackle valley looks like a pot of cornmeal porridge, rusting tin roofs stirred into its hot, bubbling vortex. Perhaps it is the dust bowls, the tracts of sand and the dry riverbed that give the place this cornmeally look. The streets run in unplanned and sometimes maze-like directions; paved roads often thin into dirt paths; wide streets narrow into alleys lined with zinc or scrap-board fences. If solid concrete houses rise like sentinels at the beginning of a road, the architecture will devolve into clumsy board shacks by the time you get to the cul-de-sac. If on one road the houses are separated into tidy lots, on the road just over they are crowded together and lean into each other as if for comfort. This is a community that does not quite come together.
 
We must imagine there was a time when all of this was beautiful and unscarred; a time when the hills were whole and green—verdant humps rolling up towards the Blue Mountain range above; a time when the valley was thick with guava trees, when wild parakeets flew above the forest and fat iguanas sunbathed on river-smoothed rocks. But that is all we can do. Imagine. There is no forest any more, and no more iguanas, and the mineral river that once flowed swiftly through the valley is now dammed up, its waters diverted to the city’s reservoir. Where there was once a perfect green hill, there is now a scar, and where there was once a river, there is now just a dry riverbed, little boys playing football among its vast sands. Where there once was beauty, now there is just “Augustown,” or sometimes “Greater Augustown” if you listen to the island’s city officials, who have seen fit to attach to it, like addendums, the nearby districts of Kintyre, Rockers, Bryce Hill, Dread Heights and “Gola.
 
Down there it is 11 April 1982, a day I have watched over and over again, as if from up here I could change things; could slip inside its hours and change the outcome. But I can only watch.
 
For here is the truth: each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exag­geration to say that every day contains all of history.

Table of Contents

·Author’s Note· xi

·The Flying Preacherman· 1
·This Is How It Starts· 117
·The Autoclaps· 153

·Thanks· 241

Editorial Reviews

“A deceptive spellbinder, a metafiction so disguised as old-time storytelling that you can almost hear the crackle of home fires as it starts. But then it gets you with twists and turns, it seduces and shocks you even as it wrestles with the very nature of storytelling itself. It’s the story of women haunted by women, and of the dangers of both keeping secrets and saying too much.”
—Marlon James, author of Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings

"The richness and heft that is lost in the making of official accounts of the world is one of Miller’s favorite themes... Where the poet’s touch in “Augustown” becomes detectable is in the novel’s epigrammatic concision and in the loping, conversational cadence of so many of its sentences... The barely perceptible Caribbean lilt in Miller’s prose exerts a hypnotic effect that is one of the great pleasures of Augustown...An expansive talent, of a writer stretching to catch up with his own curiosity and fertility...The center of the novel, Miller’s portrait of Augustown, holds."
—Laura Miller, The New Yorker

"Brilliant... Moving... Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem."
—The New York Times Book Review

"The structure of “Augustown’’ is pleasingly loose — a regular feature of novels written by poets, who seem to enjoy sauntering about once they’ve escaped the house of poetry... Miller’s poetry provides memorable line after line...If anything maps the way to Zion, Miller suggests, it’s this continued witness to untold history, this attention to how the glimmer of the future might be seen in the past."
—The Boston Globe

"A deeply interesting historical novel, not least because it covers matters little-known beyond Jamaica...Kei Miller’s considerable skills show vividly in his control of this back-and-forth narration...He is equally adept at characterization. Kaia is a lovely portrait of a little boy, and Ma Taffy is only the most important and lively of the people who seem to jump from his pages. Not least of the means used to power them is their Jamaican speech, sparkling with adjective and metaphor, inventive in syntax, studded with old words from England and Africa. Readers can almost see Kei Miller having fun writing this dialogue. Indeed, Augustown feels like a novel that its author enjoyed writing. It’s certainly a serious pleasure to read."
—The Washington Times

"Miller’s novel exhales the breathy immediacy of the here and now...Augustown offers a compelling variation on the theme that black lives matter... As with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, it demands [to] be heard."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Augustown is a gorgeously plotted, sharply convincing, achingly urgent novel deserving widespread attention."
 —Booklist (starred review)

"Miller captures the ways community, faith, and class create a variety of cultural microclimates."
 —Kirkus (starred review)

“A rueful portrait of the enduring struggle between those who reject an impoverished life… and the forces that hold them in check… Miller infuses his lyrical descriptions of the island’s present with the weight of its history.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Miller's new novel uses assured poetic language to create important historical intersections and strong, realistic characters... Highly recommended, and not just for lvoers of African and Caribbean folklore. This book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in fiction that's grounded in community."
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Set in the backlands of Jamaica, this is a magical and haunting novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the constraints of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Miller’s storytelling is moving, poetic, and inventive.”
—Lisa Lucas, Page Turners for 2017, Martha Stewart Magazine

“Miller’s writing has a cool immediacy [that] gives more than a nod to García Márquez… A vivid modern fable, richly nuanced and empathetic.”
—The Guardian
 

“The language is as clear as spring water, the characters are vividly drawn.”
—The Observer
 

“Miller’s storytelling is superb, its power coming from the seamless melding of the magical and the everyday that gives his novel a significant fabular quality.”
—The Sunday Times (London)

From the Publisher

…brilliant and moving…Miller paints the town with powerful language and a deep sense of history, ushering in a past so alive it feels like the present. Every era and sector of society bustles with fully fleshed characters; each carefully chosen detail leads to a painful and seemingly inevitable end, and a world both smaller and bigger than it seems…Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem.

The New York Times Book Review - V. V. Ganeshananthan

★ 03/13/2017
The Jamaican novelist and poet Miller (The Last Warner Woman) presents a rueful portrait of the enduring struggle between those who reject an impoverished life on his native island and the forces that hold them in check, what the rastafari call Babylon. The year is 1982, and a teacher cuts the dreadlocks off a child named Kaia because he looks “like some dirty little African.” Ma Taffy, Kaia’s aunt, comforts him with the story of Bedward, an Augustown preacher and forerunner of the rastafari. Sixty years earlier, Bedward’s miraculous attempt “‘to rise up into de skies like Elijah’” was halted by the “Babylon boys” pulling him down “with a long hooker stick.” Like Bedward, Kaia’s mother believes she might escape: the principal of the school has been tutoring her, and after the local college accepts her application, “a certain lightness of being” takes her over, “as if she could close her eyes right now and begin to rise.” After seeing Kaia’s bald head, though, she is instead forced into a confrontation with Babylon. In the end, there is no avoiding “the stone” Ma Taffy describes the poor people of Augustown being born with, “the one that always stop we from rising.” The flashback is telling of Miller’s talent for infusing his lyrical descriptions of the island’s present with the weight of its history. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/15/2017
In 2014, Jamaican author Miller's The Cartographer Tries To Map a Way to Zion won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry, and Miller's new novel uses assured poetic language to create important historical intersections and strong, realistic characters. The poor Jamaican town of the title features many interesting figures, including Ma Taffy, who is raising grandnephew Kaia; Clarky, the fruit-selling Rastaman; and Bedward, the sinner-turned-saint, who levitated before the eyes of his congregation. The book opens with Kaia returning home from school, his long locs completely gone after his ill-tempered teacher shaved them off, knowing their importance in Rasta culture. The style recalls magical realism, but the novel as a whole is more a blend of folklore representing Africans of the diaspora and their creative use of mythos to survive hardship. Miller also explores Jamaica's racial and economic rifts and the ensuing violence without being preachy, instead working through his characters' experiences. VERDICT Highly recommended, and not just for lovers of African and Caribbean folklore. This book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in fiction that's grounded in community.—Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC

Library Journal

★ 2017-03-07
A boy's schoolroom punishment opens a window into the roiling, mystical history of a Jamaican community.When Kaia arrives at the home of his great-aunt Ma Taffy from school with his dreadlocks shorn off, it's more than a case of a teacher taking discipline too far. It's a direct attack on the family's Rastafarian heritage, and the incident prompts Ma Taffy to think back on the history of Kingston's Augustown neighborhood and the persecutions two generations past. More specifically, she recalls the story of Alexander Bedward, a proto-Rastafari preacher who in the 1920s captivated the island with rumors that he was able to levitate. And, just as Bedward was attacked by the then-ruling British government threatened by his popularity, Miller suggests that the bigotry persisted into 1982, when the story is set. Miller's excellent third novel is built on sharp, sensitive portraits of key players in what at first seems a minor incident, from Ma Taffy and Bedward to Kaia's teacher, the school principal, and neighborhood gangsters, each of whom are fending off personal and cultural misunderstandings. To that end, they're all subject to the concept of "autoclaps," Jamaican slang for calamity; Miller returns to this point often, and storytelling suggests that Augustown (based on the real August Town) is a place where the other shoe keeps dropping. Miller insists that Bedward's floating not be interpreted as sprightly magical realism but as a symbol for how the place is misunderstood and how such misunderstandings feed into needless violence: "Consider...not whether you believe in this story or not," he writes, "but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in." Despite the novel's relative brevity, Miller captures the ways community, faith, and class create a variety of cultural microclimates.

Kirkus Reviews