Cover of 'Pink Icing'.- contributed

'Pink Icing and other stories' by Pamela Mordecai.

Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2006. 241 pages.

Reviewed by: Mary Hanna

Accomplished Jamaican poet and scholar, Pamela Mordecai, has written her first collection of short stories, delicately called Pink Icing.

Mordecai's ear for the flow of island language is flawless, and better even than her elegant narratives are her nuanced telling of the tales in cadences that reflect the inner-voice of the protagonist of each story. She speaks the child's voice with especial grace and charm, bringing the verbal dimension to the fore and intimating that the small girl on the front cover of the collection is indeed Mordecai as a child, full of whimsy and charm.

These stories are coming from a deep understanding of island talk and island ways. They are from somewhere close to the poet's heart and make for an intense and complex reading experience.

Mordecai tells stories of ordinary lives with magical skill. She draws detailed portraits of life in Jamaica that seem to come from memory. In the title story 'Pink Icing', Mordecai draws an intricate map of the walk from what must surely be Alpha Academy to a home in Vineyard Town, with a pause before the end of the journey at the Thrifty Store where the dusty schoolgirl uses her bus fare - penny-ha'penny -- to purchase a slice of cake with pink icing:

I take out my penny-hapenny, and pass it across to the Chinese lady behind the counter. I take the slice of cake from her with great care, step outside the store, and begin by carefully peeling off the bit of wax paper at the bottom so none of the cake goes with it. Then Inibble quickly through the yellow part. Now in my hand is a bare, naked square of pink icing.

I take the first bite.

(Pink Icing)

Mordecai has drawn a fine portrait of the schoolgirl seeking satisfaction and homecoming in the delicate tracery of pink icing. It is like a metaphor for all her stories: the gentle persistence of the reader ultimately is rewarded by a revelation that is sweet and perfectly formed out of the short narrative that has been offered.

As a poet, Mordecai knows how to write in a clearly aural/oral manner —- it is as if you can hear the story being read aloud as you read the text, such is the successful transition of Creole to page. Mordecai is accurate and ebullient, vibrant and precise. She is a brilliant storyteller with a gift for orality.

In 'Chalk it up', another little girl tells the heartrending story of her mother's descent into madness. She describes the house with care and love near the beginning of the tale:

In my Granny house, is a real window, a window with glass. It sits sideways and twist to open and you stick a little iron pin in a hole to make it stay. In our house, is just a space over the door with pieces of wood shaped like the sun —- not the whole sun, just half, right at the bottom with rays sticking out and space between so the air can visit from room to room.

The interplay of relationships in the home is like the quiet visiting of air from room to room, and the girlchild Colleen is rewarded with a moment of clarity from her Mama before the mother leaves to receive treatment. The solidity of the home will prevail; like Jane and Louisa, the Mama will return to her beautiful garden.

Of the 12 stories in the text, at least six are written with such grace from the child's point of view. Evocative minutiae bring to the mind's eye Jamaica of the 1940s, yet Mordecai also writes of the violence of today's Jamaica with astuteness and compassion. In 'Blood' —- a story previously published in the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes —- Mordecai tells the story of one ghetto family caught in a web of violence:

It was only Mama, Duarte and Ainsley left. In '98, police gunfire kill Raymond and Fenton. They not political nor criminal nor nothing like that. Just out in the road at the wrong time. Everybody know the two youth, know that they trouble nobody, grieve no human being. When Campbell Village people find out, they block the road with old car tires, and set the tyres on fire.

('Blood')

Mordecai's vision of the death of Jamaica youths because of street violence is brilliantly caught in the closing image of young children playing at being shot in the chest with toy guns, just as Ainsley's brother Duarte is being taken away to die of a chest wound as a result of gang warfare.

In 'Limber Like Me', the first story that Mordecai wrote in this collection, and my favourite, the author interweaves her experiences at university with the slow and terrible death by throat cancer of her father. The dignity of the suffering man is found in his erect head as cancer grows like cauliflowers around his neck. The poet determines that when his head rests on the pillow he will die, and that moment comes like a jolt near the end of the recounting:

So the last petals of cauliflower find their way into the decoration around my father's neck.

"Pops," I say to him, "you must be really tired."

He smile a weak smile. Then, his eyes make four with mine and his head drop back onto the pillow.

Mordecai's tale of the death of the beloved parent is moving and realistic and will hit a chord with many of her readers.

On a lighter note, Mordecai's humour is woven throughout the tale of white paternity and irresponsibility, 'Corinthians Thirteen Thirteen'. Here Miss Nella, head of the community, discovers the identity of the strange visiting white man hidden under his dirty exterior. She presides at the acknowledging of his fathering of a girl-child with Sister Gertie, loud of mouth and wide of girth. Angie, Miss Nella's young ward, discovers the meaning ofSister Gertie's daughter's 'soft hair and light complexion'. She discovers that "It is not so simple, not so simple at all."

Other tales also deal in revelation: in 'Alvin's Ilk', a self-centred teenaged boy comes to understand his elderly Chinese neighbour, while in 'Hartstone High', a group of girls learn some hard truths at school. In 'Shining Waters', a young priest's plans for his new parish go horribly awry, and in 'Once on the shores of the stream, Senegambia' - a story that first appeared in a different version in a collection of fabulist fiction Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root - mesmerising and intense experiments with consciousness are visited on some black women who answer an ad for medical research. These stories are carefully wrought and once again are written with the lyrical cadence that proclaims the author of Caribbean origin, even though 'Senegambia' is set in Canada where Mordecai has been living for many years.

Pamela Mordecai was born in Jamaica and wrote her first poem at the age of nine. She is brilliantly prolific, having published over thirty books including textbooks, anthologies of Caribbean writing, children's books, and four collections of poetry. She has co-authored a reference work on Jamaica with her husband Martin. With her sister Betty Wilson, she co-edited the foundational text of Caribbean women's writing, Her True-True Name.