Title: Song for Mumu
First published: 1967
Description: Song for Mumu is a first novel by a young Jamaican writer. The form is allegoric because it draws heavily on folklore and the supernatural; the language is lyric because it has the qualities of a song, a ritual lament. One might compare Song for Mumu to a modern, tropic version of a classical tragedy, compounded of violence and destiny, memories and desires of the blood. It is set in "the Green", a Caribbean countryside whose life has been violated in the past by slavery, and the City, a civilization without love. The protagonists are Meela, a farmer's daughter, the embodiment of innocence and sensuality; and Mumu born of the union between Meela and her cruelly insane young husband Scully. Scully dies abandoned in the Asylum. Meela and Mumu, beautiful doomed women of the green world, go to the clamorous and brutal city, where they live on the brink of unrecognized disaster. Eventually Meela, her spirit fired by religion, returns home; and after many lovers Mumu follows her -- to die. Mother and daughter lie buried in the same bloody grave. Their fate and that of their people are commented on by a sibylline chorus of River Women. Song for Mumu is a story magnificent in conception, moved by the author's brilliant sense of individual and historical plight  - Jacket flap.