Book of the Week

Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

Recommended by Dr Cocks

  
The title of Ingrid Persaud’s novel is a direct echo of Derek Walcott’s 1971 poem of the same title:

    The time will come
    when, with elation
    you will greet yourself arriving
    at your own door, in your own mirror
    and each will smile at the other's welcome,

    and say, sit here. Eat.
    You will love again the stranger who was your self.
    Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

Walcott’s poem celebrates a time when fractured selves will be reconciled and accommodated – a time in the future when we might learn self-acceptance, understanding, a sense of being at home with one’s self after a period of exile, a biblical homecoming when the self shall return to the self, catching them unaware, and be welcomed as a guest with feasting. In the context of the multiple selves we navigate in the world of the African diaspora and in the post-liberationist milieu of the Caribbean, this poem might also speak to the sense of self-reckoning, self-recognition, and self-love that nations might find too.

Persaud’s tender and ultimately joyous novel of 2020 does some of the cultural work of capturing a national sensibility, even while it acknowledges that any such sensibilities to be in flux. It unfolds, for the most part, or at least for the best parts, in present day Port of Spain ( Trinidad). It’s the story of Betty Ramdin, a close-to-middle aged teacher who has suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her alcoholic husband. A few years on from her husband’s sudden death, she takes in a lodger, Mr Chetan, a homely man in search of a family , and together with her son Solo, they form a complicated and happily dysfunctional family whose love for each other might just be enough to sustain them as they come to terms with who they are, with the legacy of the violent past, and with the selves they must learn to love.

Although the novel’s split narration reflects the split of the family ( one section unfolds in New York, where Solo has attempted to flee his past and his home), the richest sections of the novel are those when the family is together: gardening, cooking, gossiping, loving. It is here that the ordinary is shot through with tender and poignant significance, where the language is at its most playful and flirtatious and when the vernacular at its most exuberant.

 
Persaud’s novel speaks to many of the sentiments of homecoming and reconciliation of the self to its fractured pasts that preoccupied Walcott . The novel explores the processes by which we learn to know, accept, and love ourselves and there is in her novel that sense of multiple worlds to be traversed in the imaginations of the readers as in the imaginary lives of the characters: India, Britain, Africa, and America as well as Trinidad are part of the geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural landscapes it maps out. But there’s also a sense of the need for many characters to confront and be reconciled with the patterns of exile and homecoming which ebb and flow across their lives, through the novel, like the sea. At one point, Solo remarks of his mother’s new boyfriend, freshly returned from England, in a moment of proleptic irony that hints at his own trajectory, 'he was always talking up England and look how his Windrush ass reached back right here.'

The sense of home is significant, even for those who have not left but find themselves excluded from normative family life. Mr Chetan’s search for home and family yields a lot simple wisdom—'New broom might sweep clean but it’s the old broom that know all the little corners.' This is as much about the broom as the familiar corners it's learned to love. At another point he remarks, 'Miss Betty, relaxing is not a crime. Live a little. Best to do things while you still have your own teeth in your mouth.' The novel also explores powerfully the ruptures and fractures in this society: homophobic violence and hatred, the struggle for female agency and for the right to female desire or queer love in a world shaped by male heterosexual desire and violence.

It seems churlish to fund fault with a novel that brought such joy and such proud affirmation of Trinidadian / postcolonial adeptness at absorbing conflict or adversity into a form of survival and resilience. But while I enjoyed the frank and brave depiction of same-sex love in the novel in communities that continue to struggle with homophobia in very palpable ways, the conclusion of that storyline might have been more sensitively handled in a novel that is so much about hope and for communities who need hope. But with this exception, the novel is overwhelmingly a story of joy and survival that draws its staying power from pleasure. Pleasure ripples through the text: language and dialect, the keeping and sharing of secrets and recipes, the growing and sourcing of ingredients and the voluptuous rituals of cooking and eating, making, communing, loving.

Derek Walcott

Whereas Walcott’s 1962 speaker in ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ finds himself poisoned with the blood of both his British and African ancestry and cursing his predicament of being caught ‘Between this Africa and the English tongue I love’, in Persaud, the split and multiple influences of language, culture, religion, and race reverberate as a richness that informs and shapes, and is accommodated into a distinct , if fragile and heterogenous Trinidadian society. And despite some of the grim and disturbing content, the overall note the novel sounds is one of joyful resilience, resistance, and survival - for some characters at least.

Ingrid Persaud, winning the BBC National Short Story Award

Persaud’s debut short story ‘The Sweet Sop’ ( winner of 2017 Common Wealth Short Story Prize) heralded the arrival a new talent. And while we eagerly anticipate the arrival of the next novel from a writer who rewards the reader with extraordinary pleasure, it’s important to remember that the swagger and confidence in the prose, the pleasures of the vernacular, and the meticulous ear for dialogue owes much to the rich seam of contemporary Caribbean writing. Marlon James, Lauren Francis Sharma , Caroline McKenzie, Tiphanie Yanique, Margaret Cezair-Thompson and Kei Miller are some of the writers whose work I have really enjoyed in the last decade or so. Sharma and Mckenzie are also Trinidadian.

 
Perhaps it’s misleading to suggest that this is a new phenomenon. In an important sense, the pre- and post-independence movements in the Caribbean saw the emergence in both poetry and fiction of a constellation of glittering talents such as Samuel Selvon (the Trinidadian novelist whose haunting descriptions of Windrush life in London remains one of the most enduring influence on literature of the diaspora and the British-Caribbean experience), E.R. Braithwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrew Salkey, Sylvia Wynter, Jan Carew, C.L.R. James, V.S. Reid, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul.

Naipaul (also Trinidadian) and Walcott (St Lucian) have received global recognition for their work. Both are Nobel laureates. Both survived some of the personal and political controversies and their success and the possibilities they helped create for a specifically Caribbean literature that was both local and global in its significance has no doubt spurred the efforts of the new generation of talented writers. Indeed, there is a lot of Naipaul’s most famous character, Mr Biswas, in Mr Chetan and Selvon’s harrowing accounts of loneliness haunt Solo’s American sojourn.

 
In a sense, no one would have been surprised if several of the writers in my selective list had been similarly honoured. Both in terms of quantity, but also achievement, the profound contributions to literatures in English and the profound ways these writers shape and continue to shape the global imaginary and our shared sense of the possibilities for language in English belie the relative small size and small populations of these island-nations.

I could venture in a blog of this kind a number of speculative and deeply problematic theories to account for this richness: newly independent nations almost always require new literatures for the project of nation-building; that when you live on an island, each novel or poem or short story is also an invitation to dialogue, to engagement and connection, a way of plotting one’s self and one’s world onto the world map; that stories of exile and migration and the associated traumas of loss, separation, homelessness- but also the wonder and joy of opportunity and self-reinvention in that loss, can only really be held and examined and understood and claimed in the spaces created by fiction and poetry; that the linguistic and cultural richness that results from centuries of movement - the entangled stories of the African and South Asian diasporas produce also a peculiar kind of richness – that poetry and fiction is the space where new cultural and linguistic formations jostle for place in the national and regional consciousness and imaginary. But these would be spurious and fail to account for the specificity of each writer.

Certainly, Persaud’s novel seems to absorb in concentrated forms these shifting currents and to refract and reflect them in away that captures in a casual phrase or a word a richness of experience, sentiment, the hopefulness that comes from acknowledging the tug of life and the strength of love - and reflects it back to the world in ways that feel to me, as a migrant, a member of the diaspora, a queer person who finds home in at least two worlds, significant and sustaining.