Two Days in Mayaro

Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. An 80-year-old woman goes to great lengths to get the sugar needed to bake a cake for a soon-to-be-arriving visitor. Two Days in Mayaro brings together a new collection of stories that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Pamela Mordecai’s writing. Set largely in the Jamaican diaspora, Mordecai’s stories are alive with sound and often driven by dazzling yet subtle reimaginings of lore, ancestry, and history. Mordecai’s characters cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, joy and betrayal, reckoning with both their present and past. In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh.