A More Unknowable Past

In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Richard Fung’s documentary on the titular Trinidadian novelist, two interviewees cry. One is Peter Such, the Canadian novelist who mentored Ladoo and helped him gain entrance to Erindale College (now the University of Toronto Mississauga). “These books were a kind of rage,” Such recalls of Ladoo’s fiction in a 2003 interview. “I think he was growing beyond that rage into a kind of wisdom when his life was—” Such gestures with his hands, claps them together, and looks down. He bows his nose to clasped knuckles. He does not finish the sentence. The person behind the camera offers consoling words and the shot cuts away. Such’s sorrow at Ladoo’s forestalled future contrasts with the tears of Rachel, Ladoo’s wife. Midway through the film, she recounts an incident in which her daughter (seemingly from a previous relationship) left the house naked to stop Rachel in the street and beg her to not go to work. Though the girl did not disclose what she feared, it seems that she did not want to be alone with Ladoo. The memory halts Rachel’s speech and beckons the person behind the camera to step into the shot to comfort her. The difference in her dejection about Ladoo’s unnamed violence and Such’s about Ladoo’s unrealized potential in many ways constitute the enigma that gives the film its title. Who was Harold Sonny Ladoo?

Ladoo’s untimely demise, among other things, makes this question difficult to answer. A descendant of Indian indentured laborers, Harold Sonny Ladoo was born in Trinidad in 1945 and as a young man migrated with his wife to Canada. There he wrote and published his 1972 debut novel, No Pain Like This Body, a groundbreaking depiction of Indian indentured laborers set close to indentureship’s official end in 1920. One year later, in 1973, he returned to Trinidad. Shortly thereafter, his body was found along a road outside his home village. His killer remains unknown. “Like the small protagonist of his novel,” Dionne Brand writes in her introduction to the 2003 edition of No Pain, “he perished from place and arbitrary violence. That hardscrabble village he had come from embraced him again, and that last time he was unable to escape.”¹ In 1974, his novel Yesterdays was published. It continued his project of depicting the unique cultures of Indians in the Caribbean in a fragmentary prose style but added an extended depiction of queer men. Ladoo’s attention to the descendants of indenture and to queer life make him a perfect subject for Fung, whose films attend to the afterlife of Caribbean indentureship and to queer life in Asian diasporas.² But Ladoo’s early death renders him elusive, raising questions about how Yesterdays (which was unfinished at the time of his passing), his fiction more generally, and his life might have developed.³ The scantness of his archives and conflicting memories of him only present further obstacles to assessments of his biography and his work.

Now, more than fifty years after Ladoo’s passing, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo does not solve so much as amplify the mysteries surrounding him. The film is composed of interviews on his life and fiction, footage of the Trinidadian landscape, and animations by Adam Williams, representing Ladoo’s fiction, as well as interviews from a scrapped documentary on Ladoo by producer Christopher Laird, famed for his work with Trinidadian film company Banyan. This footage presents two countervailing narratives. On the one hand, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo presents stylized narrations of Ladoo’s fiction, praise from authors like Kevin Jared Hosein, and recollections of Ladoo’s extraordinary tales of overcoming rural Trinidadian poverty to becoming such a prolific writer that he wrote a novel a night. On the other hand, the film collects interviews with kin and peers that present Ladoo as hailing from a relatively well-to-do family, accounts of an egotism that led him to compare himself favorably to V. S. Naipaul before ever publishing a book, and speculations that his fiction’s seeming critique of sexism simply chronicled his own assaults. Rather than resolve the contradictions of Ladoo and of his work, the film heightens them, suggesting that some of the majesty of his novels lies in the author’s inexplicable biography.

The uncertainty around Ladoo’s life is in part because of Ladoo himself. He once told Such that he was raised in an orphanage in Trinidad. In a letter quoted in the film, he suggests that his early life was rife with difficulties: “I had no formal schooling, I had no money or encouragement, but I had the capacity to endure. I began to work when I was eight years old, and I knew that one day I was going to leave the rice fields and go out into a greater world.” Yet the film includes an interview with one of Ladoo’s primary school teachers, undercutting the claim that he never received an education. That teacher emphasizes both that Ladoo resembled his parents and that there was no rumor that they had adopted him. And Laird notes that Harold’s father, Sonny, was a well-to-do agricultural businessman who had inherited about ten acres from his father (received upon completion of his indenture). The film then displays a road and a residential community named after Sonny. “The idea that Harold came from poverty,” Laird says to Fung midway through the film, “is a bit far-fetched.” Though the evidence suggests Ladoo’s youthful poverty was fabricated, the film’s presentation of both narratives foregrounds that he made a fiction of his life. The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo also reminds that his fantastical self-representation persists as much as, if not more so than, the memories of him.

Gender is central to the bifurcating narratives of Ladoo. According to Such, Ladoo claimed that Indian custom required him to marry his second cousin, Rachel, when her first husband was murdered. According to other interviews, the two moved to Canada, where Rachel had their first child and Ladoo struggled to find work. Around the time that he met Such, who encouraged him to write less “Tennysonian poetry” and more “authentic” texts, Ladoo took on a great deal of care work, drafting and editing his debut while watching his son. In this account, it seems that taking on the traditionally feminine role of primary caretaker brought to his attention the violence done to women in the home that No Pain Like This Body chronicles. “What he was doing is simply looking at the difficult, difficult life that women had,” the Trinidadian poet Ramabai Espinet says of his work in the film. “And by paying attention to it, however, it is a critique.” Rachel offers an alternative perspective. According to her, Ladoo shared that he had feelings for her, and she did not reciprocate. Undeterred, he continued to pursue her, threatening to shoot her if she did not agree to wed him and to harm family members who opposed their marriage. After he posted a marriage announcement, she gave in. Near the film’s middle, Fung says of Ladoo’s fiction, “He is describing basically exactly what Rachel described that Harold did to her, the abuse that she suffered under him.” Though Fung’s film presents this account as likely the case, the juxtaposition of the two Ladoos problematizes his orientation to the representation of women for which he is celebrated.

The film’s treatment of gender also raises questions about the representation of queerness in Ladoo’s posthumously published novel, Yesterdays. In that tale of Indian life in a fictional Caribbean island and in Canada, the protagonist cheats on his wife, Basdai, with a man, Sook. In a pivotal scene, Basdai denigrates Sook for sleeping with men, and Sook responds, “Man sweeter than woman.” In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, the art critic Andil Gosine reads this scene aloud, describing the representation of Sook as ahead of its time, and then says, “There’s a way in which he writes about queer life that speaks to the ways in which it’s not exactly sanctioned. There are rules against it; there’s a tone of understanding, ‘This is not always okay.’ But at the same time, it is always okay because so many people are having sex and it’s not a big deal.” This paradoxical description of Yesterdays, in which queerness is both “not always okay” and “always okay,” suggests that contradiction does more than structure Ladoo’s life or his life’s relationship to his fiction; his fiction itself appears dialectical in nature. So too does The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the film’s representation of Ladoo’s central concern: the long ramifications of indentureship. For David Chariandy, what emerges from Ladoo’s fictional representation of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean is a tension “between the existential violence” of his characters’ lives and the possibility “that the cultural tools of the past will help them survive.” This is as true of Ladoo’s life and fiction as it is of Fung’s film. In many ways, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo began with Laird, who first received Ladoo’s novel as publisher of the literary magazine Kairi in 1974. In the decades after that first encounter, during which time Laird produced more than three hundred films, he twice tried to adapt Ladoo’s fiction. He also began a documentary on the writer. Though the triumph of Ladoo’s fiction and the tragedy of his early passing captivated Laird, he did not complete those projects. (In 2023, however, Laird completed a biography of Ladoo—Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo—that was longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature.) But Laird’s interviews for his planned documentary did provide an ample archive for Fung. By excavating Laird’s false starts to chronicle the tragedy and the triumph of Ladoo’s life and work, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo recovers one of Chariandy’s “cultural tools of the past” and adapts it to contemporary exigencies. In bringing to light the mystery of Ladoo’s life and fiction as well as Laird’s failed filmic attempts, Fung reminds us that the losses of the past are as worthy of attention as its triumphs. His film’s insistent juxtaposition of both reminds us that each not only constitutes the other but also makes the past more unknowable than it may seem.

Elias Rodriques is an assistant professor of African American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the novel All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running (W. W. Norton, 2021). His public writing has appeared in Best American Essays and the Guardian, among other publications.

[1] Dionne Brand, introduction to Harold Sonny Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body, 2nd ed. (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003), xvi–xvii. Anansi also published the 1972 first edition of No Pain and the 1974 first edition of Yesterdays.
[2] For more on Fung’s films, see http://www.richardfung.ca/.
[3] For more on the state of the manuscript, see “A Note from the Publisher,” in Harold Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Toronto: Coach House, 2024), 8.