“Fire Rush” by Jacqueline Crooks, an intoxicating novel about dub and Jamaican culture

It’s a novel as full as an egg. Music, rhythms, scents, ghosts, poetic discoveries and anger. An initiatory novel in three very distinct parts, which begins at the end of the 1970s, and which the author, a Londoner of Jamaican origin, describes as “the fictionalized story of (her) life“.

First, there is the sound and powerful bass of dub, whose roots lie in slave revolts. Its syncopated rhythms attract the narrator Yamaye and her two friends to the dance-hall evenings of the Crypt, a bustling underground club nestled in the basement of a church in the suburbs of London. The only place where they and their peers feel free, dancing and pulsing every weekend as if their lives depended on it in the scent of ganja. During the day, they work in the factory, at night they turn heads. “We wear our musical style on our bodies. (…) Pleats that crack like whiplashes, mixed textures, sweeping skirts that rewind time, showing off to the fullest.”

“Our best weapon is sound”

At the Crypt, Yamaye falls in love with Moose, a promising cabinetmaker who opens his arms and his heart to her. Together they plan to go to Jamaica to escape their condition and the racism of “Babylon”, in this season of riots at the time of the advent of Margaret Thatcher. But Moose’s death at the hands of the police quickly cuts this happiness short, pushing the narrator to seek justice before embarking on a desperate search for herself and her roots.

In a cemetery, she meets Monassa, half-man, half-spectre, and the novel then slides into a darker register, at the heart of a dangerous Bristol gang and its chilling HQ to which she gradually finds herself captive. The third part returns to the light when the narrator, on the run, flies to Jamaica on the trail of her mother who mysteriously disappeared when she was a child. There, with Granma Itiba, an old Jamaican magician, she will reconnect with her ancestors, the Jamaican maroons, these slaves in resistance led by Queen Nanny, and free herself from the controls.

In her very first novel, which took her 16 years to complete, Jacqueline Crooks puts music at the forefront. “Blades, guns, that’s not my thing. Our best weapon is sound“says Eustace, the record seller friend.”The man preaches revolution but the woman carries the sound“, says Oraca, the surrogate mother.

An inventive style, rhythmic like a dub

The author carves out an acoustic vocabulary, summoning metaphors and sound images on each page, making this story an intoxicating musical score. Lawyers in court”are mc’s who are preparing for soundclash” And “sharpen their playback heads before running their versions“. The cast iron stove of his Jamaican landlady “rlooks like turntables with its six cooking tracks, its two-level oven the size of record boxes, and its rows of buttons.” Even “the silent crackling of snow”This “electric whisper”looks like “in the first seconds when the needle touches the vinyl“.

Perfumes, smells and scents compete with sounds. Each description gives rise to fragrant details. Moose’s neck, during their first rub-a-dub dance at the Crypt, “exudes wafts of vanilla, coconut beans and pine needles“The wastelands of its cemetery city smell”mud, blueberries and cut grass” while “pollen saturates the air like tear gas“.

In this intense novel, both dreamlike and committed, which flirts with the supernatural, the poetic verb above all carries the rage of a woman against the domination of men who constrain and monitor, those “who maintain their grip on our bodies when we dance“, and those like his father”reign with the strength of their fists, as distorted as their own wounds.” Bringing to the surface a musical movement on which too few fiction authors have focused, Fire Rush is also a powerful novel of female emancipation, resistance and combat.

“Fire Rush” by Jacqueline Crooks (Denoël, 23 euros)

From “Fire Rush”, Page 161:

“Two men with slingshots, eyes like bullets, are standing on an overturned car which they are pounding like a steel drum. The mounted police, like bats, rush at them. The church bell rings violently, the smoke from a burning shop pours onto the street; a pile of crates burns in the middle of the road, the flames lick the air.
I see Bongo Natty and the guys from the Crypt rushing towards a group waiting for them next to the barrage of cops, arms open, fists clenched on metal bars and baseball bats. While running, our fighters chant refrains – sonic expressions of pain, exaltation and destruction – which shake the pavement. The heavens rub shoulders with the earth, they collide like tectonic plates. The rhythmic roar carries me and I rush through the streets with the crowd, shouting: “Crush Babylon!”
We follow the rhythmic tracks of the drums as they climb and descend along narrow paths. Infinite loops of sounds. I run and dance at the same time. My body sweats stars, expels the dark universe that is within me. This is where I belong, communing with my people through rhythm and harmony.”