The Uncompromising Eye
December 2002
This year is thirty years since the publication of a novel that the Director of Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto calls “the most significant novel to come out of Trinidad”.
It’s writer was a young man from McBean, Couva. At 22 he had emigrated
to
Outside his family, few in Trinidad know
anything about him. His work was reviewed only in the small arts magazine Kairi
which I published with the late Victor Questel. He
has been ignored in the Caribbean. “He only published two novels” has been the
offered excuse. Yet there are quite a few examples of Caribbean writers who
have only published one or two novels who are placed in the Caribbean canon and
are even on school booklists.
But in Canada, the story is slightly
different. Harold Sonny Ladoo remains alive in the memories of some of
Last year one of Canada’s most distinguished
contemporary artists, Jamelie Hassan, undertook a residency at the Caribbean
Contemporary Arts here in Laventille. She dedicated her residency to the memory
of Harold Ladoo and made a personal pilgrimage to McBean
visiting Harold’s sister and the site of the discovery of his body.
What was it about Harold Ladoo that
impressed so many people so deeply that 30 years afterwards someone who never
knew him personally but was affected only by his writing and his story should
make such a pilgrimage?
In an effort to answer this question and
also to try to do justice to Ladoo's memory, I travelled to Canada last month
to start work on a video documentary about his life. I met with the people with
whom he worked at the House of Anancy Publishing house in the 70’s, then a
dynamic and catalytic forum for a new generation of Canadian writers. Margaret
Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Michael Ondatje as well as
Dennis Lee himself all had their first books published by Anansi
at that time.
Novelist Mawan
Hassan, visual artists Ron Benner and Jamelie Hassan all speak of the effect No
Pain’s publication had on the community of restaurant workers and dishwashers
at the time (Harold washed dishes for a living). As young people, children of
immigrants, students and aspiring artists No Pain was a symbol of what
could be achieved by a dishwasher and an immigrant to boot. According to
Dennis Lee’s poem refers to it as “that
spare and luminous nightmare”. It is a book unlike anything produced in our
literature to date. The late Victor Questel called
it’s main protagonist, Pa,
“the most violent character in Caribbean fiction” but it isn’t
purely the violence that hits you when you read it, it is the incredible
economy, the deft control of dialogue and characterisation, the vivid visualisation
and the maelstrom of emotions, idiosyncratic perspectives, and the hostile
environment orchestrated with the surest of instincts.
Ladoo’s writing is unmerciful in its
characterisations. Even Yesterdays, his second novel, dismissed by some
as an inferior work, astounds in its
daring and its insistence in driving straight through the hypocrisy and
sensitivity to image that Caribbean people and especially ‘fortress
communities’ like the East Indian community possess.
Ladoo was not concerned with toeing the line
of a desirable image of one’s community to be presented to the world. He wrote
it as he saw it, as his community made him live it. For example, in one of his
unpublished short stories, Chamar Tola
1941, he describes a father leaving home as evening falls to look for his young
daughters who have not returned. The father comes upon them being raped in the
headlights of a jeep by US soldiers from a nearby base. The harsh truth of the
story grabs the reader immediately.. Surely, one asks
oneself, incidents like this must have occurred.
Friends tell me of hearing stories like this
quietly passed down inside families but they have not appeared on a public
forum. In the urban centres kaiso incorporated stories of prostitution, child
abandonment and the cuckolding of local men by the US military but not of rape
or violence. From the rural, Indian, community: silence. Ladoo’s encompassing
rage at the hypocrisy around him, at the refusal to face our true selves and
our true history drove him towards his vision.
It is possibly this characteristic that ensured that he would not be
publicly recognised by his own community and it certainly would not be far
fetched to suggest that it contributed to his untimely end.
I offer the suggestion that, apart from the
fury of his genius, the uncompromising eye of Harold Sonny Ladoo was his true
gift to his community and to the Caribbean. In the season of Divali it is well
to remember that the light of truth can be unpleasant and even painful. The
flames that test our truths as they tested Sita must
be faced or we will never enter Ayohdya.
In the six years he was in Toronto, Harold
worked in a restaurant, attained a university degree and wrote at least 10 novels,
only two of which were published and the fate of the other manuscripts remains
a mystery. All those who knew Harold attest to his sense of running out of
time, his hurry to accomplish his task, the non stop writing sessions locked in his room writing a
draft at one sitting, sometimes typing under the bed to kill the noise of the
typewriter, and triumphantly phoning friends at 2.00 in the morning when he
completed yet another novel.
James Polk, the editor of Yesterdays
speaks of Harold showing him a sheet of paper on which he had sketched an
outline of a 200 novel saga! He wanted
to do for the Caribbean what Faulkner did for the American South. It was with a
Canada Council grant awarded after the publication of
No Pain, that
But you
heard your own death singing, that much I know.
And went to meet it mesmerized - to
get
the
man that got your mother, yes; but also plain
wooing it, telling
never be back
alive. The jet’s trajectory
a long
sweet arc of dying, all the way down.
For the choice of dying was death
by writing - that
airless escape
from a world that would not work unless you
wrote it,
and no longer
worked when you did -
or death in the only place where you wanted to
live,
except it christened its children
with
boots, machetes, bloodwash of birth and vengeance.
The
choice was death, or death.
from The Death of
By