Just Like a Snake

No Pain Like This Body is Harold Sonny Ladoo’s first novel, published in 1972. I read it shortly after it came out, and when I was finished, I burst into tears. Years later, in the 1990s, Christopher Laird, Errol Sitahal, and Tony Hall went on a retreat and created a screenplay of the work. They sent me a copy. Their visual rendering was like seeing it for the first time—and I had a similar reaction; I found myself weeping and weeping. The unrelieved misery of the family might have been part of the reason, but I knew it was mainly because of the impact of “Pa,” the father who stalks and attacks his own family. Ladoo’s writing is like nothing of the reckoning through literature that began during the post-indenture period, and his portrait of the Indian patriarch like no other version of Indo-Caribbean masculinity in Caribbean literature.

Compared to Biswas in V. S. Naipaul’s 1961 A House for Mr. Biswas and Tiger in Sam Selvon’s 1952 A Brighter Sun, Pa in No Pain Like This Body is a snake, as the first sentences of the novel describe him: “Pa came home. He didn’t talk to Ma. He came home just like a snake. Quiet.”¹

All three writers confront the phenomenon of the unaccommodation of the Indian presence in the wider Trinidad post-indenture context. Selvon’s Tiger approaches the matter head-on, fighting his way through the murkiness of a Creole Trinidad with already-established codes that he attempts to master or circumvent, his struggles at home with his wife, Urmilla, almost mirroring the encounters on the outside. Selvon creates a character who is sometimes moody but also multi-faceted in his personality. Ambition, disappointment, friendship, vexedness—Tiger is striking in his everyman persona. We do not always approve of his actions, but in the end, he awakens the reader’s empathy. We want to cheer him on, share in his success, wish him and Urmilla every happiness. His violence, however, is glossed over by Selvon. One key scene in this novel is when Tiger attacks Urmilla in a drunken rage and kicks her repeatedly. Later, the boy-child they had been hoping for is stillborn. Selvon does not link the two events, and Tiger’s brutality fades into the background as we are led to empathize with other, more vibrant aspects of his personality. His drive to become a part of the life around him is undiminished by his “coolie” status; Tiger hurls himself into a Trinidad not of his making but amenable to his impact upon it. Difficult but persistent, he is full of questions about the why and the how.

Naipaul offers another look through Mr. Biswas, at the longing for home, for a place, for the concept of “a house for Mr. Biswas.” Trinidad offers little; Mr. Biswas navigates a world in which he must survive and eventually prosper with a combination of trepidation and bold-facedness that endears him to the reader. Again, there is an empathetic connection. Shama, Biswas’s wife, is like Urmilla—underexplored as a character—but there is an appreciable sense of connection between her and her husband, often marked by humor. There are conflicts, however, as well as patriarchal assumptions that Biswas takes for granted. In this novel, though, Naipaul is fixed on the absence of possibility in Biswas’s world. Colonial Trinidad offers him nothing but false trails. Yet Biswas persists—and in the end, he triumphs, never mind the flawed construction of the house, its various misaligned parts, its incompleteness. And most significantly, Mr. Biswas excites the reader’s empathy. We join in his struggle.

Here we have two faces of Indo-Caribbean masculinity reckoning with the hostility of post-indenture Trinidad, simultaneously engaged in a battle for survival and the preservation of their own fragile selfhood, while presenting as the “patriarch,” the undisputed master within the family circle and the strongman protecting his family from the world outside the home. Their lapses into violence, as in the case of Tiger, and into the sarcasm, scorn, and verbal abuse to which Biswas resorts are just that—lapses that do not cause a breaking apart of the circle that shelters them. Both characters are engaging, in contrast to Pa, who came home just like a snake.

I would argue that in Caribbean literature to date, there is no figure as alienated and alienating as Pa in No Pain. He appears in the first paragraph, the term “Pa” embodying a spectre who inspires fear, God-like in his capacity for controlling the beings in his immediate world (his wife and four children), uncontrolled in the degree of physical violence that he inflicts upon them. There is an absence of empathy in Pa’s world—he offers none and the world offers none to him. The coiled snake who is Pa, the patriarch, is not even given a name until the scene of his son Rama’s wake, halfway through the text, when we learn that his name is Babwah.

At the wake, Pa engages in a series of manipulative moves by which he intends to throw Ma’s character into disrepute, branding her a drunkard and achieving this by getting the village women to keep pouring rum down her throat. At the same time, he narrates his own exemplary discharge of his duties as a father and more, while the drunken Ma lies nearby, in a semiconscious state (83). The village women acquiesce, ceding the moment to the power of the patriarch, the text achieving here the reader’s horror at the magnitude of Pa’s cunning. There is no corroboration of Pa’s fatherly virtues and no need for such.

The smooth surface of Indian village life is left undisturbed; the only challenge undertaken is by Benwah, the village stickfighter, who confronts Pa when he threatens to beat Ma for her drunkenness and further insists that Ma must be allowed to do the arti before the dead child is taken away. Benwah in turn is challenged by Jadoo, another villager, who intervenes as Benwah is shouting to Pa, “Leff de woman alone! . . . Now Babwah, if you beat dat woman I go put so much lix in you ass! If you want to fight, den fight me!” Jadoo folds his arms and asserts the full weight of the community’s reliance on a patriarchal order: “Benwah dis is de man house. If you want to fight him, you can’t hit him in front of me” (101).

In this passage, Ladoo lays bare the depth of Pa’s complete alienation from his world. Every action alienates him further from the reader—he is a snake in its most acutely stereotypical cultural usage. Pa has no redeeming qualities. Yet we never question whether he is real, exaggerated, or simply too extreme to be credible. Ladoo’s unsentimental prose achieves this portrait with effortless symmetry.

Ladoo’s unique achievement in No Pain is that of presenting still-unanswerable questions about Indo-Caribbean masculinity. He raises questions here about a level of trauma, deep and irreconcilable, buried within the psyche of the Indo-Caribbean male. Unspoken questions haunt the text: Why is Pa so full of hatred? Why does he visit his hatred upon his family? Why is his capacity for empathy nonexistent? What is the relationship of a community like this to the wider context of Trinidad? Tola is a world unto itself—what does this signify in the post-indenture social structure of Carib Island? What does it signify symbolically?

Early in the novel, when Pa is threatening the eldest child, Balraj, Ma threatens to “walk the three miles to Tolaville . . . just to get a policeman to lock up Pa” (20). She does not carry out the threat, but at some level Ma has more trust in the societal institutions around them than Pa does. A similar scene occurs around the idea of taking the two children to the hospital. Pa refuses. But Nanna, Ma’s father, one generation removed, has no hesitation in taking them.

As early as 1972, Ladoo’s work was beginning to interrogate the psychic terrain of Indo-Caribbean masculinity in a new and groundbreaking manner. Shocking, ugly, violent, hating and full of self-hatred, and presented without apology. Without ameliorating circumstances. Complex, intensely so, and without relief. What must it be like to be locked into a persona like Pa’s, alienating to those closest to him, alienated from every other person in his world? Ladoo forces us to confront this being. He also asserts something else—Pa is all too common in the post indenture landscape of Trinidad.

Dr. Ramabai Espinet is Trinidadian by birth and now lives in Canada. She is a writer, a critic, and an academic. She is retired from her position as a professor of English at Seneca College but continues to lecture in Caribbean Studies at New College, University of Toronto. Espinet’s creative works include the novel The Swinging Bridge (HarperFlamingoCanada, 2003); the poetry collection Nuclear Seasons (Sister Vision, 1991); and Indian Robber Talk (1995), performance poetry. She is also the editor of Creation Fire (Sister Vision, Black Women, and Women of Colour, 1990), an anthology of 121 Caribbean women’s poetry in several languages. In 2008 she was awarded the Nicolas Guillen International Prize for Philosophical Literature. A documentary on her work, Coming Home, directed by Frances-Anne Solomon, was released in 2005 by Leda Serene Films, Caribbean Tales.

[1] Harold Sonny Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body (1972; repr., London: Heinemann, 1987), 13; hereafter cited in the text.