I first read Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body in anticipation of teaching it, alongside Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, for Indo-Caribbean in Canada, a course I taught for about a decade at York University in Toronto.1 But the sheer abjectness of Ladoo’s text (has any book been as appropriately titled as this one?) disqualified it as suitable reading material for my depression-prone fourth-year undergraduates. Even as I marveled at Ladoo’s moving documentation of the hardships of postindentureship life for Indians in Trinidad and felt resonance in the specific lilt and language of the dialogue between his characters, I found the dystopianism of the village life depicted in his works disconnected from my George Village, a place that was directly successive to the one that Ladoo sketched in No Pain. Where his 1905 Karan Settlement was plagued with suffering, George Village produced a mostly joyful childhood and likely more joyous moments than any of the other environments in which I would then live; I would go so far as to say that growing up in George Village made it possible to stay alive in Oshawa and Toronto. I also wondered how much Ladoo, fixated on the goals of success and fame, was delivering to his 1970s Canadian audiences, and to the Caribbean community’s urban-based literary elites, the stories they expected to hear.
The works that comprise this special section of sx salon consider and interrogate the legacy of Harold Sonny Ladoo fifty years after his untimely passing. As now revealed in Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Christopher Laird’s recent biography of the writer, and Richard Fung’s new documentary film, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Ladoo was not just a chameleon and mysterious but also deliberate in his duplicitous effort to achieve success as a writer, whether that meant pretending he was adopted to forge an intimate relationship with the darling Peter Such or exaggerating the social conditions in which he lived in Trinidad.2 However, as the novelist Elias Rodriques points out in his review here of Fung’s film, Ladoo’s penchant for deception in his personal relationships did not diminish the truthfulness of his prose. Rodriques concludes that Ladoo’s works “make the past more unknowable than it may seem.”3 Gender is perhaps the area that best exemplifies this tension. As both Laird’s and Fung’s research make clear, Ladoo was a violent abuser of his wife. At the same time, No Pain has been celebrated by Espinet and others for its acknowledgement of violence suffered by Indo-Caribbean women. In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Espinet remarks, “What he was doing is simply looking at the difficult, difficult life that women had, and by paying attention to it, however, it is a critique.”
In her essay for this issue, Espinet underlines, too, the importance of Ladoo’s rendering of Indo-Caribbean masculinity through No Pain’s Pa. Espinet argues that “in Caribbean literature to date, there is no figure as alienated and alienating as Pa in No Pain.” He is ruthlessly violent toward his family and appears to completely lack a capacity for empathy. “Ladoo’s unique achievement in No Pain,” Espinet writes, “is that of raising still-unanswerable questions about Indo-Caribbean masculinity,” including questions about “a level of trauma, deep and irreconcilable, buried within the psyche of the Indo-Caribbean male.”4 Because Ladoo gives us no signposts about the sources of this all-round and irredeemable terribleness in his texts, however, I wonder about Pa’s brutality: Are these men just made so, then?
This absence of explanations is not always or necessarily imperiling. Had I discovered Ladoo’s Yesterdays (1984) at the time, I would have surely added it to the syllabus for Indo-Caribbean in Canada.5 The novel’s most remarkable quality, I think, is its handling of sexual desire, which is voracious, fluid, and queer in its natural state. The messiness of its representation is worlds away from the endless categorization of sexual preferences and acts that now dominate cultural landscapes internationally, but in many respects Ladoo’s matter-of-factness about desire’s looseness and practical pursuit of fulfillment and joy is precisely what sexual liberation activists still seek now. Yesterdays is universally regarded as a work much inferior to No Pain, but it is for me the more compelling text (a book does not have to be well written to be important, and many well-written books do not register social significance). In their assessments here of the text, Atreyee Phukan, Linzey Corridon, and Gabrielle Hosein similarly value its future-looking, world-making enterprises, whether for diasporic subjects, queer men, or Indo-Caribbean women.6
Despite the tendency to view Ladoo’s contributions as only about the distillation of the lives of Indo-Caribbean peoples, the Filipino Canadian lani maestro’s engagement of his work is evidence of its more universal significance. When maestro first encountered No Pain in the 1980s, she could locate her own sense of feeling “strange”: “as i began to read,” she recalls here, “i was taken by the language. its uttering felt strange and seductive all at once. it felt somewhat subversive, as if it went astray from the conventions of the english language to recover another way of telling.” What remains with her decades later echoes my own feelings about living with both of Ladoo’s works: “the resonance was so bodily. . . . a feeling of rootedness to earth, some primal connection to chaos with bountiful beauty. an untamed sensibility that was also purely sensual.”7 The contributors to this section consider various contours of Ladoo’s imagination, but on this point we all agree: he puts a mirror up to parts of us we might not feel comfortable with seeing.
Andil Gosine is a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University and the author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). He is currently the Beinecke Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, and his Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine exhibition will open at the Art Museum of the Americas on 27 March 2025.
[1] See Harold Sonny Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972); Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada, 2003); and Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996).
[2] Christopher Laird, Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2023); Richard Fung, dir., The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, 2024, 144 min.
[3] See Elias Rodriques, “A More Unknowable Past,” this issue of sx salon.
[4] Ramabai Espinet, “Just Like a Snake: A Portrait of Pa,” this issue of sx salon.
[5] Harold Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974).
[6] In this issue of sx salon, see Atreyee Phukan, “‘Tola in ‘Toronto’: Diasporic (Be)Longing in Harold Sonny Ladoo”; Linzey Corridon, “Talking the Talk and Walking It Too: Queer World-Building in Harold Ladoo’s Yesterdays”; and Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “‘Come and Let We Talk Gal’: Indo-Caribbean Women, Friendship, and Sex Talk in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s Yesterdays.”
[7] Andil Gosine, in dialogue with lani maestro, “lani maestro’s No Pain Like This Body,” this issue of sx salon.