Two Days in Mayaro

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.

“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.”