E.R. Zarevich Reviews Pamela Mordecai's de book of Joseph

Mordecai, Pamela. de book of Joseph. Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd., $20.95, 160 pp. ISBN 978-1-774-15072-6.

It is the third installment of a Holy Trinity. Published in June 2022 by Mawenzi House, Jamaican-Canadian author Pamela Mordecai’s performance poem de book of Joseph invites her readers for the third time to experience the divine dynamic between Jesus of Nazareth, his mother the Virgin Mary, and his earthly stepfather, Saint Joseph. In this third act of the trilogy – following behind de Man (published in 1995) and de book of Mary (published in 2015) – the star is Joseph, Mary’s steadfast husband, an angle often neglected in biblical analysis and long overdue more creative representation. Mordecai’s objective in writing from this point of view is a solid character study of the patron saint of workers. Who exactly was this man, not blessed with any special otherworldly abilities, but instead assigned the extraordinary responsibility of raising the infant prophesized to become the saviour of humankind? And moreover, why did he accept such a daunting task? He was, after all, just a normal man. 

Like a religious reformer, Mordecai sets about reworking the Bible in her own language. She respects the original content while metamorphizing it for readers to experience in a new, fresh, and experimental way. What Martin Luther accomplished in his native vernacular German in the sixteenth century, Mordecai accomplishes in Jamaican Creole in the twenty-first century. auspiciously humanizing her subjects while inviting readers to participate in her own culture and dialect. Readers who are unaccustomed to Mordecai’s language style will still feel a connection, and a high degree of relatability, to Joseph. If the reader is being introduced for the first time to Jamaican through this text, it’s like eavesdropping on a meaningful conversation while travelling away from home. Even in an unfamiliar environment, the reader is still immersed in the chronicle another human being is divulging. Once the words, sounds, and patterns of the new language are gripped and understood, the reader becomes emotionally invested in Joseph’s life story. 

As a narrator, Mordecai’s Joseph is blunt, good-natured, proud, and assertive, though not intimidating; he’s extremely likeable, and readers will appreciate his straightforward manner of handling events. He is a hardworking man with simple needs. He loves his first wife – named Deborah in this adaptation of events – and after her death by childbirth misses her profoundly, like he misses his first profession, shepherding, which his family has had him forsake for the more lucrative trade of carpentry. Mordecai establishes her hero with a spiritual bond to his work and certain sensibility towards building cradles. He seems almost aware already that his destiny will revolve around children, and the passing down of his skills to the next generation as they were passed down to him: 

“de sweetest is coaxing a cradle from stone. is a job don’t too often come for dis not a big town and one cradle can serve a whole fambili pikni after pikni…

so me watch and try learn what Uncle Reuben learn me and me tell myself who beg can’t choose

and each day me wait on de wood…” (Mordecai, pg. 10). 

In the Jamaican language, fambili is family, and Joseph is uncomplainingly loyal to his, as well as to the customs of his Jewish village community. He is also capable of being hilariously direct, when he finds himself uncomfortably swept into a bizarre saga through his unexpected betrothal to the divinely singled-out Mary of Sepphoris. “Mary is joke you running wid me?” (pg. 71) is his admittedly reasonable response to the news that his second wife is pregnant with the son of God. But Mordecai is consistent with her protagonist’s upstanding nature, and one of his first acts after the birth of his stepson is refurnishing the stable where Mary and the newborn Jesus – also called Yeshua in the text – are recuperating. This offers a new layer of meaning to the Nativity scene, one that is refreshing in its secularity. Through her Joseph, Mordecai transforms the setting from a venerable holy site to a recognizable family dwelling, one which is built and managed by a loving, devoted, and protective patriarch. This is just one of the many impressive ways Mordecai makes her characters seem real in de book of Joseph. 

For those who are unacquainted with Christian biblical stories and lore, or who are familiar and notice inconsistencies with the source material, Mordecai includes a section at the back of the book – titled “Notes” – that explains her artistic and linguistic choices. Readers can decide for themselves whether to read this section first or dive straight into de book of Joseph, placing trust in Mordecai’s storytelling abilities alone to convey this remarkable narrative poem.

Emily R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Shrapnel Magazine, Dreamers Creative Writing, The Monitor, and The Queen's Quarterly, among other journals. She is an enthusiast for poetry especially.