de book of Joseph

Pamela Mordecai is an author and editor with nine collections of poetry, five children’s books, a novel, and a collection of short fiction to her credit. She has also edited several volumes including two landmark Jamaican poetry anthologies, Jamaica Woman (with Mervyn Morris; 1980/1985/1987) and From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry since Independence (1987/1989). Her fiction collection, Pink Icing and Other Stories, first appeared in 2006 and has since been released, in 2019, as an audiobook read by Mordecai herself. In 2015, her debut novel, Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the prestigious Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. Her most recent book, de book of Joseph: a performance poem (2022) was shortlisted for the 2023 OCM BOCAS Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature. de book of Joseph, the third installment in Mordecai’s trilogy about the lives of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is a long prose poem about Joseph narrated in wonderfully crafted Jamaican language that brings all the resources of lively, oral storytelling to the page.

This is an edited version of a conversation between Pamela Mordecai and Ronald Cummings on the occasion of the launch of de book of Joseph in Toronto on 27 March 2023.

Ronald Cummings: In a recent conversation with Canisia Lubrin, Lorna Goodison said that “if you were learning to read in Jamaica, you probably learned to read from the Bible.”¹ It’s one of those things that I’ve never thought about, but the moment I heard it, I thought, There’s truth in that. I wondered if you might talk about your relationship to the Bible and the ways in which we can think about its function in relation to Jamaican poetry and poetics.

Pamela Mordecai: That is a hard question. I can start by saying that I laughed when you asked me about my relationship to the Bible because I’m a Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics don’t know the Bible. We all know that, right? We hear the Bible in the readings at mass, and in other services we also read the Bible. But if you are a Roman Catholic and you know the Bible, you did a little thing yourself. I like to think that I have read it from cover to cover.

The other thing about the Bible is that (some) linguists say that the King James Version of the Bible influenced the development of the Jamaican Creole, the Jamaican patois, so there’s that. Also, I think that Dionne Brand says that the first book in her house in Guayaguayare, growing up, was the Bible. Is that right? I think she said that.² So, I think that it is absolutely true that the Bible in many Caribbean homes would have been the only book, and it would have been, I like to think, a read book. In fact, in my novel, right at the start, the little girl is reading for her family from the Bible.³ I think that there is no question of the influence of the Bible on a kind of poetics and as part of writing.

RC: I’m also thinking of de book of Joseph in relation to a number of other Jamaican texts, like Mervyn Morris’s On Holy Week, which revisits the Easter story.⁴ Or Easton Lee’s play The Rope and the Cross, which takes up the story of Judas’s mother.⁵ And your own trilogy, which I think is the most ambitious of them in the sense that it is spread across three books.⁶ It seems to me that there is a way in which these Jamaican writers, including yourself, are involved in a process of writing a new New Testament. I wonder if you might talk about your work in relation to that project but also in relation to Jamaican translations of the New Testament.

PM: I will tell you a bit of history. With the Jamaican New Testament (2012), published by the Bible Society, the persons who translated it elected to write it in appropriate Creole orthography. There can be problems here. Now, B‑a‑a‑l is Jamaican for “bawl.” For a reader familiar with the Bible, B‑a‑a‑l is something quite different.⁷ Also, plenty people can’t read it. It is not entirely phonetic. I can’t tell you that I am entirely familiar with it. I do know that I’ve looked at it and it is not as easy to read.

I was in on [the New Testament project] at the start. Malcolm Gladwell’s aunt [Faith Linton] is the lady that started the whole thing. I mention that because very often we, in the Caribbean or in Jamaica, lose our history and it’s not a good thing. So there was a project to create translations, and because the translation team of the Jamaica Bible Society anticipated that there would be resistance, the translations would be broadcasted first then afterward written down. There’s a man, a translator in the sense that he facilitated the translation of the Bible all over the world. His name is Dr. Harold Fehderau. He is now dead. He was a Mennonite from Kitchener-Waterloo [in Ontario, Canada]. He was very instrumental in all of this. I just want to put that in there because I don’t hear those people’s names very much, names like Faith Linton, Anna Grant, Grace Walker-Gordon (the last two being members of the translation team), and they are important. They started the work; they need to have their credit.

I think that the first critical piece of writing that I did might have been, in fact, a review of On Holy Week.⁸ I did other writing on Mervyn’s work as well. I am very familiar with the work. Certainly, I know Easton’s The Rope and the Cross. The thing is, with respect to influence, I think that you absorb these things. I would not say that I was thinking of Mervyn’s On Holy Week when I set out to do this. That wouldn’t be true. I cannot say that Mervyn’s work isn’t in me. It is in me, right? And the same thing with The Rope and the Cross (the play and the dance). It all gathers itself together. You are not separate from anything. You are immersed in all of it. It is a work that everybody is doing.

As for my own involvement with this project, it was started by an encounter between me and the parish priest at Thomas Aquinas (at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica). I will not tell you the whole story of Father Ollie, although it’s quite funny. He came as a very stiff New England priest, and within six months he was jumping poco at the altar! But it was he who said to me at the end of a Good Friday service, “You should write something for Good Friday.” I said that I would. At the beginning of Lent the next year, I had not written anything. And then a line jumped into my head. And this is the magic of all of this. People who write will tell you it happens. The line was “Oonu see mi dyin trial!” And I started to think, That is a very Jamaican phrase. I never thought of it as having any association with Jesus’s dying. Same thing about crosses. Jamaican people talk about nuff crosses. I never thought of it as Jesus’s cross. It is always about crosses: bad luck, and hard life, and ting and ting.

So the first book in [my] trilogy—it is no longer in print—was published by the distinguished Sister Vision Press of blessed memory.⁹ It was written for performance. I meant it not for the page at all. de Man was published in 1995. You know old people keep carouches. I was going through my carouches and I found something. It was not dated, but it was called “Mary’s Diaries.” I had begun it almost immediately after [finishing de Man]. I cannot tell you why the second book in the trilogy was published [so much later,] in 2014–15. I think maybe the second book was waiting for me to have the skill to do it. The second book is quite different, much more ambitious, much longer. So I think maybe that was it.

RC: At what point did you decide that there would be a third book?

PM: I don’t know. It seems fairly natural. I was writing this thing backward, if you think about it. The crucifixion comes after Mary’s story. de book of Joseph begins when he [Joseph] is a boy. It seems natural that after finishing one that I ought to write the next one, then the next one. And I do not mean ought in the sense of obligation, but rather I mean in the sense of the things that move you as a writer and a poet. It was the right thing to do in terms of poetics.

RC: We have talked about the New Testament as source. I also wanted to ask about Rastafari as source and influence.

PCM: I write out of who I am; experience folds itself into me, so I’m not sure about “source” and “influence.” It may be Rasta was going to be important to me because Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I on my birth date—not day—in 1930! The Smith, Augier and Nettleford document, The Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica [1960], was published when I was eighteen;¹⁰ early responses (some very ugly) to Rasta are part of my lived experience, as also the process according to which Rasta has been, over time, accepted, and as recent scholarship points out, even co-opted and commodified. Rasta’s message of peace and love, veneration of women (to counterbalance the widely received narrative of Rasta subjugation of women),¹¹ meditation, roots, and grounding entered my blood over time, probably concomitant with a conscientization/radicalization derived from a source I’ve yet to pinpoint but much encouraged by my late husband. I find the revocalization and reinscription of Dread Talk crucial and liberatory;¹² English, the downpressors’ language, can steal one’s soul, so, for example, every fair thing is good and every dark thing is foul. Rather, Archangel Gabriel in de book of Mary is “white as light, black as night . . .” That Rasta reveres the Nazarene is of course a hallelujah thing! Selah!

RC: Can you talk a little bit about the research that went into this book? I’m struck so much by how you write about place, how you write about space. There is a distinct attention to geography that I detect in the book.

PM: There are two noncanonical gospels that were useful.¹³ The notes in the book are fairly comprehensive, so I won’t bother to mention them. [The two gospels are] noncanonical which means they’re not right or correct to read. And I would agree. Some rather strange things go on in at least one of them. The other thing is that I did geography for A-levels. I enjoyed geography. People are in a space; we are in a space right now. You can’t understand that life is going on unless there is a space. It seemed to me important to have as complete a sense of the space [as possible]. Not a lot is known about Jesus’s time, so that was not an easy thing to do. But some things are known. The geography doesn’t change that much. I, for instance, was fascinated by the fact that Nazareth is a town that is higher in feet above sea level than Sepphoris. Sepphoris is a grand town because one of the Herods decided that he was going to make the place a cool place. He had built many great buildings and so on. The [name] Sepphoris comes from the word tzipor, which means “bird on a hill.” I really enjoyed getting to know the geography and getting to know that there was a valley, Jezreel, getting to have a sense of Galilee and Samaria south of it, and [of] Judea south of Samaria. If you are going from Nazareth to Jerusalem, you go by one of two routes. You can go across this wonderful breadbasket, I think it still is, the valley Jezreel. You go east to the river Jordan, you follow the Jordan south, and then you make a wretched turn back west, where you then climb a steep, steep hill. And Jericho is there. That is one of the routes to Jerusalem. The other route is a dangerous route because you have to go through Samaria. Samaria is not only challenging geographically, but the Samaritans and the Jews didn’t get along. If you do not know this, then you do not know the significance of [the story of] the good Samaritan. Very often, as I understand it, the Jews going south to the great feasts, in particular the Passover, would elect to go south because it was a swifter route, with a journey time of about two days. All of this I could envision in my mind.

I looked very closely at my maps. I’ll tell you a joke. One of the things that we have to do is be aware that what obtains now on a map didn’t necessarily obtain in Jesus’s time. So here I am trying to figure out a journey south from Nazareth to Jerusalem because I had decided that Joseph and Mary were going to go south. It’s a difficult journey, but they have to go south. And I see a town called Shechem, and it seems to be on the route, and I say I am going to put Shechem there, and then something just said to me to go look up Shechem. When I looked up Shechem from the time, it was a town in ruins. They would not have stopped there. They [would have] stopped at Sychar, the place where Jesus meets the woman at the well. Then there was the whole business of Egypt and the holy family going to Egypt. That is another story. The Nile was called the Black River; the Mediterranean was the Mare Nostrum (of course, it belonged to the Romans). If you don’t know this, then how can you write [the story]? You can’t.

RC: The other thing that is really striking about de book of Joseph is voice because we are in the presence of a storyteller throughout this whole work. Can you talk a little bit about deciding on voice, register, and the practice of storytelling?

PM: One of the things that I always say when I go into the classroom, in the times when I would, is that the one thing that you have that nobody can take from you is your voice. Even if they tear your tongue out, a voice is still there. And even if you have never heard a voice, for people who are impaired or challenged in that way, there is still a voice. So, voice for me is the bottom line and the top line and everything.

I’m lucky because I spoke Jamaican patois since I was a little girl. I was reciting Louise Bennett poems all the time, up and down the house, I can still say some of them. There was a point at which my father said, “You have to stop. You will lose the capacity to speak the English language.” I am sure my father was joking. [My parents] were always proud of my ability to perform poems when I was a child. If you come from the Caribbean or, indeed, many other colonial countries, you recognize the importance of being able to speak the King’s, Queen’s, or whoever’s it is, English. Those were voices offering themselves up to Jamaicans and in similar parts of the world.

I must speak now about the Jamaican Creole continuum. This is Teacher Pam. The Jamaican Creole continuum is unique in the world, as far as I can gather. I had thought recently, as I had come across some article which seemed respectable (Cambridge or some university like that had published the thing), and it said that there was a continuum also in German (high German, low German). In fact, in various parts of the country a different German was spoken. That is a different kind of continuum from our continuum. Our continuum has various, various versions, and you don’t mix them up. Any Jamaican that is here today can tell you that. And it is there in the book as well. Sometimes Joseph is speaking something very close to English, sometimes him is talking something that is not quite so close. So I begin writing the book with a gift. I begin with all of those possible voices. They are all available to me. Really and truly, it is Jamaican language that gives me these poems. The language has first credit. It must have this credit. Without it [the poems] could not exist as voices. For example, that voice that says “Oonu see mi dyin trial!” was a woman’s voice. I knew it was a woman’s voice. It couldn’t have been a man’s, and the character then came after that voice. This very often happens with me. I hear the voices and then I see the people. I guess, in the end, voice is everything. The characters live because of how they speak.

RC: There isn’t a shyness for talking about sex and sexuality in this book. It seems a kind of subversive choice in relationship to a story that is often framed in terms of virginity and immaculate conception. Can we talk a little bit about addressing that in the context of this story?

PM: There was a launch in Jamaica. It was an online launch. I made the statement that if there were more good sex in the world, we would not be having wars with each other. There is a lot of sex, but not quite so much good sex. That seems so obvious to me. Apparently, it was some kind of revolutionary statement, probably because I am over eighty years old. I should not be having thoughts of this kind. I was thinking about that question. That question needs a very long answer. In part because the whole business, the notion and idea of virginity that we have, has to do with a time when men owned women. A woman who had been interfered with [had previously engaged in sexual activity] could have all manner of diseases, therefore she would not have been a good progenitor. You could not rely on the fact that her offspring were going to be good chattel. This logic does not come out of a sense that a hymen is a part of a woman’s body or that she makes a decision about it. She decides. Or that she must be aware of it when she starts to have her period. This was not part of it at all. Nobody was thinking about a woman person with a woman’s body functioning in a certain kind of way.

I can’t engage in any kind of authoritative discourse about societies which owned women going way back in time. But I will begin at the end and say, I think the truth is that the world as it is, it is a world made by men. It is not a good world. The reason for that is from so long ago the woman person, as a person with a voice and a body of her own, is not given enough consideration. Research on heart attacks in women, for instance, is a recent business. This requires a longer conversation, but the fact is that I think that we are sexed and sexual beings. And I don’t think that most of us, or not enough of us, are happy in our sexual and gendered selves. I am very sorry. And I think that our churches and our religions have not done a good job of making us happy to know ourselves in this way.

RC: I wanted to ask you about the form of the book. It is structured in terms of numbers, and it seems to me that this structure mirrors the structure of chapters in books in the Bible. How did you come to that structure? How did it help you in pacing the narrative?

PM: I will confess, the numbers came at the end. I was trying to find titles and some of the titles were working very well, some were not. I think it was Nurjehan Aziz [the publisher at Mawenzi House] who suggested [that we use numbers instead]. Here is the village again at work, the village writing the book. The structure was not a priori or upfront. The numbering came at the end. What was the other piece of the question?

RC: I was asking, How did it help you to pace the story?

PM: You have to remember, also, that I am a novelist. Also, that I write stories. Also, that I have a sense of the progress of a narrative, so I can’t say that that helped me. Let me go to de book of Mary. One of the things about writing the de book of Mary is that a lot of the life of Mary is, in fact, available through the gospels. At a certain point, as I was trying to get through the story, I would have the gospel here, and I would be writing the poem here. That was not possible for this book. Also, this book is a prose poem, so I am already in the prose mode. I think that this has to do with it as well. Martin [Mordecai] always said, as well as other people, that if you want to be a writer, what do you do? You read! It comes into you like osmosis in a way. I see other writers in the room nodding sagely. I describe myself often, as you know, I say I am an undeliberate writer. Maybe what it is, is just that you have a body-sense of things. I’m old now and I find that if I can’t remember something and it is related to place, if I put myself into place then I regain the memory. There’s a lot of weirdness going on in human beings. Plenty weirdness going on in writers, I am sure you know that. But I think that some of the weirdness is what contributes to part of the magic of being able to do that stuff.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Nurjehan Aziz and Mawenzi House Press for their work in curating and recording this conversation. We would also like to thank Linzey Corridon for transcribing this interview.

Ronald Cummings is an associate professor of Caribbean literature and Black diaspora studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He is the coeditor of three critical volumes, including, with Alison Donnell, Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2021); and the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). He is also an affiliated member of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg.

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[1] “Mother Muse: Lorna Goodison,” Lorna Goodison and Canisia Lubrin in conversation at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, Harbourfront Centre, 2 October 2022.

[2] See Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2002; repr., Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2023), 184.

[3] See Pamela Mordecai, Red Jacket: A Novel (Toronto: TAP Books, 2015), 15–16.

[4] Mervyn Morris, On Holy Week (Kingston: Sangsters, 1976).

[5] Easton Lee’s play The Rope and the Cross premiered in 1979. Lee originally wrote a poem of the same title that inspired a dance by Sheila Barnett for the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica in 1975.

[6] Pamela Mordecai, de Man: a performance poem (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1995); de book of Mary: a performance poem (Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2015); and de book of Joseph: a performance poem (Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2022).

[7] Baal is the name of the supreme god of Canaan and Phoenicia.

[8] Pamela Mordecai, “Review: On Holy Week by Mervyn Morris,” Caribbean Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1976), 113–15.

[9] Sister Vision Press was started by Makeda Silvera and Stephanie Martin in Toronto in 1984. The first book by the press was published in 1985, and throughout the 1990s, the press made a critical intervention in the publishing landscape, making available important works by women of color. For a brief history of the press see Makeda Silvera’s essay “The Story of Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press—We Had to Fight, Cuss and Kick Every Inch of the Way,” in Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple, eds., Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical Memory and Futures in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

[10] M. G. Smith, Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford, The Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University College of the West Indies, 1960).

[11] See Shamira Wylie Alhassan, “Rastafari Women’s Early Twentieth-Century World-Making,” Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, 1 April 2022, https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/04/01/rastafari-womens-early-twentieth-century-world-making/.

[12] For a critical exploration of the dynamics and politics of Rastafarian speech, see Velma Pollard’s Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).

[13] The note for “Culture, Lore, and Bible Story” in de book of Joseph identifies the noncanonical gospels as “the second-century Protoevangelium of James or ‘The First Gospel of James’ and the third-century Evangelium de Nativitate Mariae or ‘Gospel of the Nativity of Mary’” (146).