"From an underground dub club in 1970s London, to Jamaica’s revolutionary Cockpit Country, this remarkable, radiant novel sees a Black woman journey through loss to find the freedom of selfhood."
Ablaze with the losses, loves and transformation of a young Black woman, Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush is exceptional.
Moving from an underground club in late-seventies London, to Bristol’s criminal underbelly, to a spellbinding, revolutionary climax in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, it presents a powerful personal journey that throbs with the beat of dub music, and to the heartbeat of its unforgettable protagonist. What’s more, Fire Rush is powerfully pertinent, with the three-fold injustices of “Police brutality. Racism. Hardship” also explored with incisive aplomb.
Yamaye lives for her weekends clubbing at The Crypt. On the streets, “People stare at us. We don’t dress pop. We spin our garments different, wear our music on our bodies”. In the club, through the music, Yamaye feels who she is. Then, when she meets Moose, a man deeply connected to his Cockpit Country hometown, a place where Maroon revolutionaries strengthened in the rainforest, she sees an alternate future. Moose is planning to return to his Granny Itiba, and his people: “Dead or alive, bonds are tight. Have to get back to our people, our land”. Yamaye plans to go with him.
But tragedy is quick to quell this hope and all-consuming love. When her relationship with Moose is brutally cut short, Yamaye is trapped by a criminal gang in Bristol, just as demos and police riots detonate around Britain. All the while, though, Yamaye remains set on going to see Moose’s granny, and she hears her Muma’s voice “singing about children killed in their dancing time”.
After enduring the worst, Yamaye remarks that “The dry layers of loss and loneliness in my body have been lit. I’m ready to walk through smoke; come out the other side’, which is exactly what she does when she finds her voice in Accompong, Jamaica, and it rises loud like the Maroon uprisings that took place here. What a story, powered by personal revolution, ancestral rebel fires, and music of the soul.
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