sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

without any cause or utility to produce such an effect, or to excite any unbecoming movement of
passion…On the contrary the effect of his overshadowing is to quench the fire of original sin.” 22
And so, in defiance, my Mary revels in sex and her sexuality, presented here in her teenaged
voice:
Jeremiah lay back on his cloak…then I reached for him again….I climbed on top of him
and rocked and rocked until I gushed all over and around him. I love to learn about my
body through his body. I don’t believe that such knowledge is wicked. 23
In fact, throughout her formative teenaged years, Mary determines to break most of the social
and sexual taboos of her time:
All you have to do is read Song of Songs to know that God wants us to celebrate each
other. I don’t feel dirty when I’m with Jeremiah. I feel beautiful. And I’m not ashamed of
anything we do….If I ever have a daughter, I’ll bring her up differently. I think a lot about
these things. Thoughts like mine can get you killed. 24
She knows too well how disobedient women become pariahs, or worse, are killed in the village
square:
So how come I’ve never heard of a man stoned for adultery, no matter what the Torah
says? Doesn’t happen in my village. Only women and girls. Unmarried girls like me who
lose their virginity. Women like Jez, paid for their services. I wonder how many of us
there are. Bad girls and women, that is. Probably quite a few. Hiding. Hiding from men
and their stupid laws. 25
Yet Mary audaciously writes these dangerous thoughts in her diary (a series of scrolls presented
by her mother, Anna, for her fourteenth birthday), sneaks out to parties at the village brothel to
meet her lover Jeremiah, defies the laws of men and Yahweh, and is critical of the disparity between
a woman’s and a man’s world: “my father Joachim the merchant, gets to do all the important stuff.
Bartering with the growers, travelling, drinking with the dealers. My mother, Anna, works all day in
the square. Roosts over the house in the evening.” 26 Mary’s rebellious tone and much of her
behaviour are that of a 21 st ‐century teenager. She balks at her arranged marriage‐to‐be with Joseph.
When she discovers her pregnancy and learns that Jeremiah is a weapons and narcotics dealer,
already married and newly arrested, she writes:
Please. I’m fourteen. What do I know?
Here’s what I know. I am fourteen‐going‐on‐fifteen with a bun in the oven and a
nebbish for a fiancé and my parents would sooner have me killed than return their fucking
barnyard friends. And the man I love is locked up and maybe he’s going to die, and he
doesn’t deal in perfumes or spices or herbs like any self‐respecting merchant, he sells
opium and hashish and not only that Jez tells me he uses it and not only that but he
knocks me up and not only that but he’s married to another woman whose name for
fuck’s sake just happens to be Mary.
Ha ha ha. Very, very funny, God. Just what do you have in store for me, Mary, your
handmaid? 27
That Mary writes at all is highly unlikely for a Nazarene girl of her time, but is portrayed in
Renaissance artists’ depictions of Anna teaching her daughter to read, and likewise, Mary teaching
her son: “I…feel the power of …words is restricted to men…Like the arts of reading and writing and
study. I will have these gifts that men hoard. And I will teach my son.” 28 Though literacy is
forbidden, 29 Mary’s mother Anna comes from “a wealthy enlightened family” and insists that all her
children learn to read and write Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. 30 Writing gives Mary agency, the
opportunity denied her in the Gospels to tell her own story. In my novel, the desperate and pregnant
Mary fashions a fiction—replete with the angel Gabriel—delivers it via letter to Joseph, and