Anthony Joyette, For Judas Iscariot in Heave and other poem.

Anthony Joyette, For Judas Iscariot in Heave and other poem, AFO Enterprises, 2005: Book Review

Joyette's collection For Judas Iscariot in Heaven extends a spiritual offering of redemption for humankind that is envisioned within the social and private spaces of the poet's naturalized home, Canada. The Diaspora view of home embraced by most hyphenated-Caribbean writers of Joyette's generation dictates that "home is the world" (7) a view that guides the sensibility of most of the poems in this collection. While the Canadian space is the receptacle in which the poet's misgivings are poured out, Canada is home, like any other home, a landscape filled with the daily rituals of the struggle to comprehend life. The poet could be "home in the world everywhere" (8), seeing "the world through / the movement of life," and life made up of people who are no less than "blossoms of a trillion colors" (9).

An artist also by profession, Joyette sees with the eye of the artist, his poems carving out a future that transcends the pain and guilt of living in the present. At the heart of his poetic discourse in this collection of poems is his rejection of traditional Christian philosophies that insist on the dualities of right and wrong, good and evil, for which the title poem, For Judas Iscariot in Heaven becomes a signature piece. Assuming the artist's right to use whatever material he has handy to create, Joyette reshapes Judeo-Christian theology assuring readers that Christ's sacrifice of love redeems even Judas Iscariot, the Christian archetype of all that is evil in humans, as "the seeds of love / blossom another sacrifice / for life" (14). In this context, the evils of society are viewed as destiny, the perpetrator as both "victim and villain" (ix), the collection drawing together the materials of modern black Canadian history, detailing the sacrifice of black lives:

   Since Crispus Attucks' sacrifice,
   the bullet circumvents our lives
   replacing chains
   and wire fences

   I am free to roam into its path;
   to be pushed into its path;
   taken into its path or
   to be born into its path. (18)

The poems in For Judas Iscariot in Heaven cannot be read within one particular theoretical discourse, coming as they do from the perspective of an artist whose many seeing eyes envision for us a world in which multiculturalism attempts to create a social space for seeing the other. In "Eulogy (A Canadian chant)" (57) the poet suggests the possibility of celebration in a world where people begin to "transcend, from chaos and anxiety, to a / collective reality," the maple, a traditional symbol of Canadian nationalism, being fused with the pine as a suggestion of national evolution, a process of continuous renewal that includes black reality. If the tone of individual poems in this collection is gloomy, the dominant tone is hopeful and inspiring. From beginning to end, the collection suggests the importance of accepting the good with the bad, the Judas kiss of betrayal becoming a symbol of human life, a mix of the seeds of love and hate without judgment:

   Home is the world
   where images of hate
   and love spawn
   death and life ... (7-8)

In For Judas Iscariot in Heaven, Joyette creates a national mosaic of images of black grief and anguish washed by tears of redemption, "themes of love / flow[ing] through the veins of time," fanning the "flame of hope / in noble joy" (19) that sustains the poetic journey.