Two Days in Mayaro

A new collection of stories of the Jamaican diaspora by acclaimed poet and storyteller Pamela Mordecai. Mordecai combines old time stories with the contemporary and showcases the struggles, triumphs, and humour of diaspora life, creating a world powered by unforgettable characters in language that sings.

The characters in Two Days in Mayaro cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, home and belonging, reckoning with both their present and past. 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. A man in a nursing home looks back on two days on a beach with his then-wife and children and the lost chance of happiness.

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. This is a world alive with sound, infused by lore, ancestry, and history.