Two Days in Mayaro
Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. An 80-year-old woman goes to great lengths to get the sugar needed to bake a cake for a soon-to-be-arriving visitor.
Two Days in Mayaro brings together a new collection of stories that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Pamela Mordecai’s writing. Set largely in the Jamaican diaspora, Mordecai’s stories are alive with sound and often driven by dazzling yet subtle reimaginings of lore, ancestry, and history.
Mordecai’s characters cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, joy and betrayal, reckoning with both their present and past. In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh.
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“Pamela Mordecai plays across the spectrum of Caribbean languages like a maestro’s fingers on a piano. From the deep Jamaican Patwa of a woman’s first Canadian winter, to the standard English of an academic recalling an extraordinary weekend, to the Spanglish of the hemispheric diaspora, and the ghostly murmur of Haitian Creole, Mordecai renders each voice with an authenticity that only a Caribbean writer of her stature could command. These are thirteen stories set in places as far afield as Mayaro village in Trinidad and the subway stations of Toronto, and they carry with them all the heirlooms that Caribbean people carry when they leave home: the folklore, the duppy sightings, the prophecies and proverbs, the obeah, all rendered with an islander’s humour. Mordecai’s great gift is to make this combination feel not like the past haunting the present, but like the fullness of Caribbean crossroads identity: comic, tender, at times frightening, yet undeniably relevant.” — Celeste Mohammed, author of Pleasantview
“The funniest serious book I’ve read in years. Pamela Mordecai treats the no-joke experience of living between worlds in the most insightfully hilarious ways. The alchemies she weaves between outrage and laughter, faith and give up, ‘yard’ and ‘foreign’ (not to mention man and duppy) produce an alternative universe of a different kind. Two Days in Mayaro is Mordecai at her compelling best.” — Curdella Forbes, author of A Tall History of Sugar
“Who but Pamela Mordecai, with her inimitable loving irreverence, would speak of the ‘Divinity with an affinity for stones, like how he send out a likl pikni with a slingshot and a pebble to lick down a giant’? Mordecai’s stories flesh out the literary landscape of ‘this too’ is Canada. She reminds us in Two Days in Mayaro of the richness of the many englishes cast, like those pebbles around the globe, while she licks down our tired language borders.” — Shani Mootoo, author of Starry Starry Night
“Critically acclaimed poet and author Pamela Mordecai’s new collection of short stories, Two Days In Mayaro, offers ample evidence that she is indeed a truly consummate story teller. These glimpses into the fictional lives of the Jamaican diaspora in Canada explore familiar aspects of the human condition. There is an enticing vein of humour running through these tales of ageing, anxiety, deceit, guilt, infidelity, prejudice, and superstition. It’s a refreshing, riveting read.” — Linton Kwesi Johnson, author of Time Come
“Pamela Mordecai carries in her every literary gesture the grounded sensibility and language of Jamaica’s deeply complex and earthbound cultures, which travel with her through her journeys of the imagination and her actual travels. A writer interested in themes of departure, arrival, settling, and unsettling, Mordecai creates stories rich with humor, deep feeling, and Jamaican folk wisdom. Each of them give account of an oft-ignored feature of the Jamaican spirit — the improvisational and transformative force of a culture that doggedly survives despite geographical and psychic journeys, enriching and redefining the idea of home. Mordecai’s fiction, classically crafted and brilliantly devoted to the universal values of stories and people, delights and moves us, sentence after memorable sentence.” — Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town
Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian author whose first short story collection, Pink Icing, received rave reviews and whose debut novel, Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has been described as “brilliant” by Kamau Brathwaite and as “immaculately crafted” by Kwame Dawes and has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (now the Otherwise Award) for writing in the speculative fiction or fantasy genre. She has written nine collections of poetry, including a trilogy about the life of Jesus in Jamaican Patwa (de book of Joseph, de book of Mary, and de Man) and a collection of new and selected poems, A Fierce Green Place. With her late husband, Martin, she also wrote a reference work called Culture and Customs of Jamaica. A recipient of the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary and Bronze Medals for her contributions to Jamaican literature, she blogs at pamelamordecai.ca and writes the occasional critical essay. Two Days in Mayaro is her second collection of stories.
