Oracabessa is, of course, well-known as the place where Ian Fleming lived and wrote so many of his James Bond novels. "There is such a thing as the perfect storm.Ħ The prose-poem entitled "Place-name: Oracabessa -" looks at the issue of naming and colonialism. That story is, of course, used to deal with the issues of identity and displacement, with the reindeer, like the runaway slaves before them, having to adapt and to make Jamaica their home: As indicated in one of the first poems in the collections, "The Understory", Miller is concerned with Jamaica’s hidden past and tormented present, and he wants to tell his readers about the hidden Jamaica tourists never really experience: "Are there stories you have heard about Jamaica? /Well here are the stories underneath" (8).ĥ Jamaica’s slave past is dealt with neatly with the tale of the reindeer which were brought to Jamaica for a show in 1988, and because of or thanks to a hurricane which devastated the island in that year, managed to escape into the hills and to put down roots, so to speak, so that their population now stands at 6,000. In the context of Jamaica, the word is, of course, associated with the mountains, and with rural areas, but also with Jamaica’s tormented past, as in the days of slavery, runaway slaves and Maroons escaped into the "bush", or the hills.ģ The collection is divided into three sections, "Here", "Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places", and "In Nearby Bushes", which look at various aspects of Jamaican history through the prism of places, placelessness, and naming.Ĥ The phrase "in nearby bushes" suggests something hidden, something which is not to be seen, and which should not be visible.
The phrase seems to recur in many newspaper articles relating incidents leading to some violent deaths. In 2017 his novel Augustown won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.Ģ Miller’s latest collection, In Nearby Bushes, was published in 2019 by Carcanet and takes its title from a phrase used in a legal context in Jamaica to refer to criminals escaping into "nearby bushes". 1 Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet and novelist who is currently the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection for his 2014 book of poems The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.
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