Red Jacket<\/i>
\nby Pamela Mordecai,
\nToronto: TAP Books, 2015
\n462 pp. $24.99<\/p>\n
Red Jacket<\/i> is Pamela Mordecai\u2019s second book-length foray into adult prose fiction. Both books were written after a long career of writing children\u2019s books and poetry. Some of the effective qualities of such writing\u2014cinematic clarity and musicality, for example\u2014are evident in Red Jacket<\/i>. (\u201cGramps face turn into stone, and the gleam in his eye vanishes, like you dash water on fire.\u201d (p. 199) \u201cNo mind the pills she\u2019d taken, her head feels like an anvil in a busy smithy.\u201d (225). Poets adding prose fiction to their craft is not unusual. It offers greater space to portray their themes and makes their work available to a broader audience. It\u2019s no longer a secret that even the well-educated in Western countries have trouble understanding complex poetry. There is nevertheless poetry in Red Jacket:<\/i> the poetry of the folk in the novel\u2019s Caribbean and African settings. It is omnipresent and seamlessly woven into the narrative.<\/p>\n
A major portion of the novel covers the life of its protagonist Grace, who was born to a twelve-year-old mother and raised until late adolescence by family friends. Intellectually gifted and strong-willed to the point that it earns her the nickname Miss Determination, Grace obtains several bursaries that take her from her birthplace, St Christopher (an invented Caribbean island that resembles Jamaica and is located \u201csouth of the western tip of Cuba\u201d (Mordecai, \u201cNote.\u201d)) to university in Toronto, Ann Arbor (Michigan) and back to St Christopher, where she completes a doctorate, following which she is employed by the World Health Organisation. Her employment takes her to Mabuli, (an invented \u201csmall country between Mali and Burkina Faso, taking up a bit of each and bordering C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire in the South\u201d (Mordecai, \u201cNote.\u201d), the second of the novel\u2019s major settings, where she is involved with a project to prevent the spread of HIV and provide support to those who are already infected. But there\u2019s chaos in her personal life when she arrives and that chaos will remain unresolved to the very end of the novel.<\/p>\n
The Mabuli setting brings Jimmy into the narrative. He is a Jesuit priest, and much of his drama turns around personal tragedy and the renunciation of sex that his vocation requires. This battle with himself accounts for much of the angst that drives a significant portion of the novel and contributes to developing one of its subthemes: progeny resulting from consensual and non-consensual sex, in or out of wedlock.<\/p>\n
Red Jacket<\/i> touches on the theme of sexual fidelity. The prose seems to falter in this area: the dialogue is stilted and formulaic. It could have been excised with no loss to the main story.<\/p>\n
A major theme of Red Jacket<\/i> is the individual relationship with the Judaeo-Christian God, a theme that Mordecai began to pursue assiduously in her verse drama De Man, a folk portrayal of Christ written in Jamaican English. In Red Jacket<\/i>, however, the characters confront God\u2014 \u201cwrestle with him,\u201d Gramps says. Jimmy opposes Catholic orthodoxy; it puts him in conflict with his superiors. Gramps\u2014the most endearing of the secondary characters\u2014has no compunction about radically adjusting Judaeo-Christian ethics to resolve a specific moral problem. Grace gradually moves from a more orthodox vision of God and Gramps and Jimmy\u2019s more creative vision almost to the point of renunciation. This theme is handled with humour, delicacy and complexity and is one of the strengths of the novel. A very young Grace observes that:<\/p>\n <\/br><\/p>\n Red Jacket<\/i> defies many conventional expectations. It dispels the notion that one is fated to remain burdened by devastating childhood trauma. Phyllis, Grace\u2019s mother, who is more socially conforming than Grace, surmounts the trauma she endured at twelve. One could draw a parallel between her and Black slave women who endured every conceivable atrocity and managed to survive. Grace too rejects being burdened by circumstances beyond her control. But for her early flirtation with basic Christianity, she could easily have been an existential character resigned to and unbothered by the dictates of fate. The presence too of a generous, caring Chinese shopkeeper runs counter to the stereotypical Caribbean narratives of such characters. <\/br><\/p>\n <\/br><\/p>\n Another quality is Mordecai\u2019s wit, in this case encapsulated in metaphor:<\/p>\n <\/br><\/p>\n One can quibble with a couple of the novel\u2019s features. Jimmy\u2019s story\u2014its detailed setting and worldview, the many characters he brings, along with his vocational and physiological problems\u2014seems to compete with Grace\u2019s narrative. It makes this reviewer wonder whether initially there were two independent narratives that Mordecai fused. The other quibble is the novel\u2019s truncated and sometimes surreal feel because of its multiple third-person narrators who sometimes leap the story into a future unlinked to anything the reader knows. This would not have been a problem if the story were told using flashbacks. These aside, Red Jacket<\/i> is successful in that it holds the reader\u2019s attention from start to finish and invites us to reflect on many issues that assail us. It is a significant fictional accomplishment. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n One People\u00a0: Two Worlds Apart<\/i> The poems in Horace Goddard\u2019s One People : Two Worlds Apart<\/i> are the result of an Afro- Barbadian-Canadian poetic sensibility engaging with the landscapes and social realities of Uganda and Jamaica. This collection is Goddard\u2019s fifth book of poems. He is also the author of two novels, two children\u2019s books and several essays of literary criticism.<\/p>\n One People: Two Worlds Apart is organized into two distinct books. The first, which deals exclusively with Uganda, is titled Song of Uganda<\/i> and is comprised of forty poems. The second, which contains twenty-eight poems about Jamaica, is called Jamaican Voices from the Forest<\/i>. Based on the content of the poems, I am unsure about the oneness of these peoples. The closest that the poet comes to showing it is in \u201cLinstead Market,\u201d where the hucksters of trinkets in Jamaica and Uganda employ the same spiel to sell their wares. It could be argued too that at least two similar techniques are present in both books:((1) a contrasting of beautiful, sublime landscape and sordid human practices, and (2) the narration of several of the poems via personas. Perhaps the unity is implicit, is in the fact that the ancestors of more than eighty percent of Jamaica\u2019s present population originated in Africa, though it is highly unlikely that many of them came from East Africa.<\/p>\n That Uganda and Jamaica represent two worlds apart is cogently depicted in the poems. Of course, every artist knows that when reality is put through the alembic of the imagination an altered product emerges, so in that sense there\u2019s a third dimension to this apartness: the poet\u2019s. In \u201cA Writing Attack,\u201d Goddard is forthright about how his imagination works:<\/p>\n \tbursting forth from a brain on this page in a The depiction continues in the poem \u201cBlack K (Night)\u201d:<\/p>\n \t\tStanzas dance in tune\/ with the silence, with The narrators of the Ugandan poems employ an overall tone that is objective but empathetic. The exception is the poem \u201cMamie (Report to a Dead Mother),\u201d in which the speaker expresses in triplets his opinions about Uganda. However, even here, it is opinions tied to facts.<\/p>\n The poet wants the reader to understand that these poems (at least in their first drafts) were conceived against a backdrop of the 2012 New-Year Celebrations. The celebrations often intrude like white noise into the scenarios being depicted, and the New Year festival is itself the subject matter of a couple of the poems.<\/p>\n For this reviewer there are three core poems in the Ugandan section: \u201cKiyera (Nile) River,\u201d \u201cUganda\u2019s Rain Dance,\u201d and \u201cKiboga Child\u201d. The first exemplifies the poet\u2019s use of landscape , in this case the Nile, as poignant metaphors that embody the country\u2019s history, traditions and politics. The second brings together the many unpleasant social realities afflicting the Ugandan nation. The third epitomizes the poet\u2019s reaction to the plight of Ugandan women. Roughly one-third of the poems address Ugandan politics; almost as many depict the clash of cultures between traditionalists and modernists. For me, the most engaging of the poems are those that portray the existence of \u201c women [who] stoop before men \/ with knees rubbed down\/ carrying food to feed them . . .\/crawling, bowing, cowering in obedience “(p. 31); women, whose Baganda husbands say:<\/p>\n \tA man cannot do those chores \t. . . Sometimes she refuses to cook my \tHere we flog disobedient wives \tA wife is a man\u2019s possession. He pays I asked Mr. Goddard whether he was aware that his depiction of gender inequality might stir up controversy. He said he welcomes any debate they might provoke.<\/p>\n The Ugandan poems are reader-friendly, written for the most part in couplets and triplets, in simple diction and straightforward syntax. They are engaging and highly informative.<\/p>\n The poems comprising Jamaican Voices from the Forest<\/i> diverge from the Ugandan poems in language and in tone. Here Goddard liberally uses Nation language (the Jamaican vernacular) in several of the poems, in some cases totally, in others occasionally. This has the effect of rooting the poems firmly in their environment. In some cases it\u2019s clear that the poems were written with performance in mind. The Jamaican poems show engaged narrators whose tones range between stifled anger and resignation: fitting tones, inasmuch as many of the poems depict the dire social conditions in which Jamaicans are trapped. Prison as reality and metaphor is omnipresent in the poems.<\/p>\n From a technical standpoint the Ugandan poems are the better poems in the collection. They are more sharply etched and more engaging. This is a collection worth reading and re-reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction and Poetry Reviews Red Jacket by Pamela Mordecai, Toronto: TAP Books, 2015 462 pp. $24.99 Red Jacket is Pamela Mordecai\u2019s second book-length foray into adult prose fiction. Both books were written after a long career of writing children\u2019s books and poetry. Some of the effective qualities of such writing\u2014cinematic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2746,"parent":93,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1444","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2673,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1444\/revisions\/2673"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOne of the novel\u2019s captivating qualities is the ease with which Mordecai interweaves Jamaican and standard English\u2014and this in spite of Mordecai\u2019s claim that that the vernacular isn\u2019t altogether Jamaican. Here are samples:<\/p>\n
\n by Horace I (Mukwano) Goddard,
\nBloomington, Indiana: Balboa Press, 2014
\n110 pp. US $11.99, Can $13 <\/p>\n
\nAnd I write these steel lines . . .<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthat ceases to shut down
\nsprinting, routing words<\/span><\/p>\n
\nmud flow of word rage until
\nthe brain explodes in rain ( p. 8).
\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tCrash and crush into lines\/ cascading into stanzas<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\tthe blackness, with a drawn-out prayer for light (p. 26).<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n
\n\tThe Compound and look after the children.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\tThe villagers will shun him. . .<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\tFood and I want to beat her. . .<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\tand children since they belong to us. . .<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\tFor her with cattle and goats. . . (p. 62-63)<\/span><\/div>\n