Five Questions about de book of Mary with Pamela Mordecai

1. What made you decide to tackle a project as big as de book of Mary?

The story of de book of Mary begins in 1993, with my writing de Man: a performance poem, which is a report of the crucifixion of Jesus by two by-standers that’s written entirely in Jamaican Creole. Sister Vision Press published it in Canada in 1995, and though it received excellent reviews, they were few. So it’s not been very well known, though that’s recently been changing. It occurred to me pretty quickly after writing de Man that I ought to write something in Jamaican Creole or patwa about Mary’s life.

Over the past few years, especially after I’d finished work on Subversive Sonnets, the book began to acquire a shape, at least in formal terms. It’s written, like Walcott’s Omeros, in tercets of anapaests – you know, three line stanzas with a running rhythm, da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-da-dah... I hadn’t remembered that at the time; my publisher subsequently pointed it out. Once the form seemed to be a good choice, I was ready to write. I never thought about how hard it would be, to be honest. It just seemed that I needed to do it.


2. That sounds engaging. Was it difficult to write?

Getting the first poems down was not too difficult, but once I was into the story, it became clear that more and more poems were needed to tell the tale adequately. I was also writing against a deadline – something I’ve never done before for a creative project. So it became quite a test.


3. So what was your biggest challenge in writing de book of Mary?

How to put the creole down on the page! I had choices. I could have used a standard orthography, like the Cassidy-LePage writing system, or the International Phonetic Alphabet. The problem with both of those systems is that they aren’t easy to read until you are familiar with them. I’m hoping for a big audience of creole speaking Caribbean people, but I hope for a big audience of English speakers too. So I decided to suggest what the creole sounds like rather than represent it faithfully. To that end, I’ve changed th’s to d’s (dem, dat, dey for them, that they) and some th’s to t’s in a few important contexts (thief to tief, thing to ting, so, for example, God is “De-One-Who-Run-tings!) In this way, I hope to convey the flavour of Jamaican patwa.


4. You’ve said this book is the first in a trilogy. What are the three books, and why a trilogy?

The three books are de Man, which comes last, and which was published in 1995, de book of Mary, which comes first, and will appear in October 2015, and de book of Joseph, in the middle and being written. A crazy way to do it, I know, but that’s just how it has happened. I thought of a trilogy, because the same Jesus story involves these three crucial persons, and they each must see it differently. Now, it’s true de book of Mary and de book of Joseph are from Mary and Joseph’s points of view, whereas the last book, de Man is from the point of view of two common folks who watch the crucifixion take place and report what they see. So perhaps that means I need to write a fourth book, from Jesus’s point of view, though that would be daring indeed. I’ll see how the Spirit moves me!


5. Do you think of these books as religious books? I assume you are a Christian?

The words religious and Christian have acquired inverted meanings. We know that throughout history, up to the present day, so-called religion has kept plunging people into the not-very-religious business of war. (Consider the Crusades!) And one need only look at some of the ostensible “Christian” websites online to get my point about Christianity. Jesus was a Jew, and so were Mary and Joseph, so these stories are about a Jewish man who claimed to be the Messiah and his Jewish mother and foster father. Jewish stories.

Secondly, Islam also celebrates Jesus as a prophet, and honours Mary, though it doesn’t mention Joseph. So it’s a Jewish story with an Islamic aspect. And then, though Christians say they follow Jesus that is an assertion perhaps as honoured in the breach as in the observance. So we have un-Christian Christians laying claim to a Jewish man honoured by Muslims! Many Christians give Mary and Joseph short shrift, except when it comes to putting up the crib at Christmas. The Jesus story is simply remarkable, archetypal, and, for me, hearing it in the creole opened up a host of possibilities and insights, about Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the lynching of Jesus, and the time in which all this happened. I wanted to share all of that. I do follow Jesus, but I don’t think that’s necessary to appreciate the Jesus narrative.

9/11

The 11th of September, dubbed nine-eleven by many, was a horrendous day that I think I will remember for the rest of my days. Here are the reasons why. (1) Many innocent people lost their lives, quite unnecessarily and in quite a cruel manner; and it was filmed, I saw folks jumping out of skyscraper windows. Horrendous things happen everywhere, but this was "unignorable" for the way it was on every TV screen. And what's more, the way it was talked about by pundits enlarged it and made it bigger than other tragedies; (2) Most of those who flew the planes or helped hijack them had a future, family, prospects, and they chucked it out the window. I don't understand. Soldiers who go to war could be said to be in the same situation. But we're used to that; (3) The tragedy was spectacular, and I keep seeing the second plane slamming into a tower; (4) The amount of hate that goes into planning and executing something like this is beyond my comprehension; Mind you, I still don't understand the hatred that went into creating and executing Apartheid, except, that kind of hatred, or the kind of dehumanising and decimating the native American peoples, is fomented for a reason: theft, or cheap labour. I want your land, or your resources, or your muscle, so I'm gonna label you non-human or inferior human. (5) I've already seen a few films and documentaries on the subject, and I'm sure there's more to come. More attacks. And if it doesn't come, be sure that someone somewhere is planning it.

How can we forget, and why should we? How can we forget tragedy? Loss of life? Cruelty? La bêtise humaine? How can we forget 11 September 2001? How can we forget the Shoah? How can we forget slavery? How can we forget the dying populations of Iraq? How can we forget Rwanda? How can we forget New Orleans and Katrina? How can we forget Darfur? And more important, why should we? How can we forget Apartheid?

My point?

This is a long way of saying, I'm glad we aren't forgetting this, but also that we must never forget those, either. No tragedy should be forgotten, and the perpetrator(s) need to be punished. I needed to go this long way to assure my reader that I do refer to all human tragedies, respectfully.

Some time ago I read a poem that may perhaps illustrate my feeling more clearly. Poems always do, don't they? Here it is:

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.

© Emmanuel Ortiz (published on 11 September 2002)
* Listen to the poem (1)

Birds of Ill

They’ll follow any being carried away by
the winds of tumult, these ominous things
that hang in flight till a creature dies
at length.

And is it in the life of us
to turn against these pinions of demise?
Renegades born under a dying day
they’ll follow any being
across the landscape of survival.

But we are all children under this house,
different organs to the same spirit;
pressed against the wall and menaced
by the shadow of wingspans, is it in the life of us
to withstand?

Gnarled under hunger, demented eyes holes,
they have put that lading upon our souls.

Recycling

Ours is a land of open graves
where knolls of soil from one
are used to fill another in a case
of domino deaths on the roof
of the world. Death, bold death,
has found sanctity among us.
We are the ones who dig out
tombs whose soil covers
our graves. There’s a kind
of comfort there, in how sweat
from your own brow cleanses
the blanket of your eternal life.
(There’s no relief in knowing
we have turned into a nation
of grave-diggers, eaters of for-
borne tears). Comfort is chiefly
in knowing where life is from,
and then putting it back there.

Upon reading ‘facts about the moon’

When I started writing this, as a confession,
a solstice was circling the world, Stonehenge
was rife with worshipers, my wife was drinking
mojitos and rutting. I sat on the edge of our bed
and heard whales calling from the coast below.
Sometimes when the mood sets in I’ll fling dishes
to the sky (manhole covers are too heavy for this),
or resort to a frisbee in the park at night, see it wane,
then yield to a death its circle finds in words
and is captured by them. Big-arse plate for near moon,
tea saucer for far, bulb-in-the-sky little moon—
now when I look at it straightlaced I only see zits
on the face of the man there, among fields of craters
in the stillness of time where Michael Jackson
would have loved to walk, alone in Laux's poem.
My heart sits in the heaviest atmosphere of itself.
Silence is the only thing about this that is true,
a perigee-syzygy rendezvous with sun and earth,
hinting that in the end death is unlikely to be fair.
----

Facts about the moon: http://goo.gl/emqfzl

Paradise child

There isn’t a North or South here, honey child,
we are one moment of stone carved and re-carved,
borne from the earth, held inside this mountain
that sits upon its heart. Besides, all of our towns
are like angles of one facet, little tapers through
the blood of night with a lustre awaiting edges
of shovels. Just like faces angels show to earth.
But we’ve fashioned bayonets out of those shovels,
and bayonets know only one way to dig things out.
Anything which gazes East-West is the same rock,
to tell us about the presence of silence. Oh there is
an after-thought after desiring peace and getting it,
much like with fucking, there’s a single one, and it’s
the prospect of nobler sex in future. Even against
gravity the head stands up, even against the promise
of a broken lifespan; and it stands out like an arm
holding a 10 pound burden, and it says: better luck
next time, buddy, at daunting me; and then says:
but come, I want to tell you about our country,
our own little kingdom. It started with the magnet
our fathers used to pull it out of rotting days—
it was a mess. In secret they packed it here
in us, under our name, like bodies in a cemetery.
You have to understand that this country is a tomb
of the known fighter. But come, take this piece of me
to understand what is presence in silence, take it
now, it’s no bomb, it is the tip of some old iceberg
covered by years, those frivolous diamond years
whose voices are audible elsewhere, but never here
where the earth-rock breathes like a baby inside
the liquid of a mountain womb. If you place your ear
against it you’ll see what I mean, you’ll hear life
burbling a sound of friendship and of freedom
which will never be born, which will never be born.
The shovel-holders know the torrent of the river
more than the mountain, and they make it swish
its tail down the trail like an eel. And they smile,
take their tools to praise the name Koeeoko. We
have no prophets, our last one is dead, long live
the memory of the stone in his blood, of his refusal
to bend to the will of their knife. If happiness
will never be reborn, perhaps now that the man
Maaparankoe is gone the child of an unborn child
will spatter his way out, though if that means joy,
then another vein must be cut. No one knows if
we’ll find comfort there; I do not think we will.

Stairway to Heaven

The queen grows fat beneath my house
while drones infest the walls

reconnaissance to feed her glut,
wood ripped from studs and joists.

I'll pay to drill the slab and ruin
her pestilential nest. How to find

the song in this day's summons?
I've been accused of darkness

by my inner light. My brother sits
in the chemo chair another long day

of toxic infusion, the house of his body--
bones, brain and balls gone skeltering.

I sit in my parked car listening
to Robert Plant recall how the English

envied the Americans for getting
the blues, getting all of it, into song.

I remember the dream where
brother and sister, adult and equal,

lean and white as lilies, as bare,
dove into a mountain lake, black water,

high elevation, fir trees growing
in flood water that had joined

two lakes into one. Do you ever dream
of animals, I ask him, hospice bed

looking out on a plywood squirrel
perched on cement block wall.

Frequently. A lilt of surprising joy. What kind?
Mostly the jungle animals. Then: I'm going

to do my exercises now. What exercises?
I like pacing, he said, immobilized

upon his death nest of nine pillows.
Then he closed his eyes to become the inward one

whose only work was to wear a pathway
back and forth within his enclosure.

~Alison Hawthorne Deming
[http://tinyurl.com/mcmnxch]
Posted with the author's permission
--------------------

Alison Hawthorne Deming