Synopsis
A beautiful modern-day illuminated manuscript created by a young Jamaican artist who weaves together in words and paintings the story of her mother's life and death.
Anna Ruth Henriques began the extraordinary pages that would become The Book of Mechtilde at the kitchen table in her grandparents' house outside Kingston, Jamaica, where she grew up. She was twenty-two years old, and for the next seven years she worked on it as an act of love, to both celebrate and mourn her mother, Sheila Mechtilde Henriques, who had died of breast cancer when Anna was eleven years old.
Inspired by texts from the Book of Job, Anna tells her mother's story - her youth, her love for her husband and their happy marriage, the birth of her daughters, her slow illness, death, and final peace - all in the form of a fable, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. Each scene is illustrated with a painting encircled with calligraphy and set in a gold border of flowers, fruit, or symbolic creatures. Both the story and the paintings are enriched by Anna's remarkable family heritage - Jewish and Christian, European, African, Chinese, Indian, and Creole - and by her amazing drive to use her enormous artistic gifts to transform loss into a passionate celebration of life.
Review
"In the land of Jah, there lived a good woman named Mechtilde." So begins Anna Ruth Henriques's extraordinary tribute to her mother, Sheila Mechtilde Henriques, who was crowned Miss Jamaica in 1959 and became a beloved symbol of hope and optimism to her fellow Jamaicans in the years leading to the former colony's independence. Mechtilde's untimely death after a long struggle with cancer was cause for sorrow throughout Jamaica. This tribute is an illuminated manuscript inspired by the book of Job, and includes heartbreakingly beautiful poetry and prose alongside intricately detailed paintings. The Book of Mechtilde feels ancient, not only in its format (illuminated manuscripts are associated with medieval texts), but also in the intensity of these poetic lamentations, which are often tied to nature. Here, Henriques compares her loss to unseasonable weather: "No! Not yet / no rain / not the right time of year / not ready / prepared / to feel / what you are ready / to show me."
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