Talking the Talk and Walking It Too

We often take for granted how speech and language animate and dictate our relations to one another. This is certainly the case in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s Yesterdays, posthumously published in 1974. Readers are transported to a space and time in which Indo-Caribbean people are (re)making life in a postindenture, rural island society. What is also made material in Ladoo’s novel is the importance of a culture of same-sex intimacy between Indo-Caribbean men during this period of revising individual and collective orientations to the world around them. Ladoo’s male characters speak queer worlds into existence, often at moments when one would least expect them to be made so. By vocalizing the same-sex desires and practices inhabited by themselves or by their family and community members, Ladoo’s characters invite readers into a different but vital rurality, an explicitly sexually nonconforming one, that plays out alongside discourses and practices of heteronormativity across the lives of so many village men.

Ladoo’s Yesterdays is set in the fictional Karan Settlement, in 1955. Early in the novel we are introduced to Choonilal; his son Poonwa; his wife, Basdai; and Tailor, the man they take into their household. Readers spend time learning about the family and their daily troubles. They discover Tailor’s habit of “practicing sodomy with the village queer,” and they also come to know of Tailor and Choonilal’s ongoing disagreement over the state of the family’s latrine pit.¹ Apparently, some of Tailor’s whore friends have defecated all over the latrine floor; Choonilal and Tailor are caught up in a heated verbal exchange that moves from reasonable disagreement about whether Tailor should clean the latrine pit to a debate about Choonilal’s manhood and his very own queer erotic inclinations. Tailor accosts Choonilal and says, “You old bitch you! You dont see dat you wife gone Tolaville to take man. . . . You stupid ass you. Just now horn going to grow on you bald head.” Choonilal responds to Tailor, “Tailor old as I is I does still ride me wife you know.” Tailor snaps back, “You can’t fool me Choonilal! You could never fool me. Your totey cant stand up. If you totey stand up, I drop dead right in dis yard of yours.” Choonilal is flabbergasted and rebuts Tailor’s claim, “You tink me totey can’t stand up eh? Well lemme tell you something. Just call out to Sook in dat shop! Ask him if me Choonilal’s totey never stand up” (10). Choonilal points at his neighbor, Sook the shopkeeper.

And in this moment of Choonilal’s pointing at Sook, the veneer of heteronormative respectability is casually lifted off the people of Karan Settlement. Sook is the “village queer” we learn about early on from descriptions of Tailor’s own same-sex pursuits (4). Sook, who is married to Rookmin, is supposedly caught up in relations with several men in the community. The arbitrary situation by which we come to learn of Karan Settlement’s sexually nonconforming history is more jarring than the actual reality that same-sex intimacy exists and persists amongst the men of the village. We as reader play witness to how speech and language not only undermines but also reinforces other rural quotidians constantly occupied by the men of Karan Settlement. One early and striking example of this world-making phenomenon involves Choonilal’s declaration that his totey (penis) is properly functioning and that Sook can testify as to the function of his sexual organ because of their previous sexual encounters with one another. Choonilal’s resorting to verbal confirmation and declaration of his activities with Sook to defend not only his manhood but also his supposed heterosexual abilities and his relations with his wife muddies how we come to understand the role of queerness in rural Indo-Caribbean life. Time and time again readers encounter scenes of the men in Karan Settlement deploying language courting same-sex intimacy and desire as a way to assert their manhood, and by extension their heterosexual and hypermasculine prowess.

In his study of the public sphere and homosexuality, Eric Clarke suggests that “sexuality and sexual dissent in particular make salient the dissimulation of narrow, evaluative standards of behavior (‘sexual morality’) as both socially desirable and universally applicable.”. The linguistic patterns characteristic of men like Choonilal, Tailor, and Sook reveal a multiplex social order upon which Indo-Caribbean rural life is predicated in Trinidad and Tobago. Their queer acts, made real through conversations and quarreling, override “the coercive imposition of [heteronormative] behavioral codes” that commonly dictate the quotidians of postindenture rural Caribbean society.²

Dominant categories of sexuality are simply not wide enough to encompass the realities that we observe playing out in the pages of Ladoo’s novel. Ragbir, a middle-aged bachelor and another neighbor, later confronts Tailor about his same-sex activities with Sook. Ragbir confidently says to Tailor, “You cant fool me Tail. You bull Sook. We men dont have to hide notten. If you bull Sook, you bull him. Dat is all.” Tailor concedes, “Oright, I bull him this mornin” (71). Ragbir’s declaration affirms the act of bulling (homosexual intercourse) as nothing more than sexual activity, another dimension to the rural quotidian as it unfolds across the space of a village and the villagers’ (re)defining of rural life beyond the shadow of the sugar mill. More important, Ragbir’s declaration suggests that the men of Karan Settlement ought to feel comfortable enough to share with one another their unfiltered same-sex desires and pursuits. We witness men establishing the spaces for verbal exchange that permit them to continue pursuing heterosexual relations—and by extension the maintenance of seemingly traditional, rural heteropatriarchal formations—while also continuing to indulge each other and their same-sex fancies.

While Ragbir continues his interrogation of Tailor by calling him a “nasty man” (71) for his practices with Sook, the conversation soon turns to the topic of Poonwa, Choonilal’s son, and his aspiration to open a Hindu missionary in Canada. Ragbir is not in favor of Poonwa’s plans and tells Tailor,

As I see it, Poon want about five six man in he ass. If somebody hold Poon and bull him, he go forget all dat Mission talk. Poon want a good man, and like Choon blind. If Choon wasnt me friend I wouda hold Poon and leggo some totey on him yeh. (73)

Tailor responds, “But I tink you tell me dat you dont like man. Wot happen so suddenly?” (73). The frankness and openness with which Ragbir admits to wanting to sodomize Poonwa, the child of one of his closest friends, is only possible because the men of Karan Settlement actively cultivate a sexually fluid environment that invites a kind of frankness and crassness when expressing same-sex emotional and erotic desires. This fluid environment may, sometimes, lead to the perpetuation of violent acts. What Ragbir is suggesting amounts to sexually assaulting Poonwa, since his proposition ignores the likely outcome that Poonwa would not consent to sexual relations between the two men. In the space of a queerly fluid, rural Indo-Caribbean experience as Ladoo portrays it, men conceive of and speak about their public relationship to sex and sexuality without immediate or noticeably public consequence.

Such a claim that the villagers might be able to imagine their publicly sexual selves differently is not so farfetched when we take a closer look at how the leaders of these communities navigate questions of sex and sexuality. Questions of religion and faith constantly arise in Ladoo’s text. When we first meet Choonilal sitting in his yard, we learn that “there was a Jandee pole in the yard; every good Hindu in Karan Settlement had a pole like it” (1). Men like Choonilal, Ragbir, Tailor, Sook, and Poonwa all live life, even if oftentimes superficially, by the teachings in holy texts such as the Bhagavad Gita. These men and their families also adhere to the teachings by the heralds of these holy texts, the village holy men, like Pandit Puru. Time and time again, readers witness Pandit Puru wielding his divine authority by choosing to recite passages from the Gita or through the offering of his own words of wisdom. The holy man speaks and everyone around him internalizes his message. Pandit Puru’s position is no different on the issue of queerness and same-sex intimacies. After Poonwa is able to secure the money for his Hindu mission to Canada, the holy man offers the young adult some words of wisdom:

Son, I is a man of God. Lemme give you an advice. Wen you go over, work hard on de Mission. Oright. But we is big people. Try and change you oil. Dat is important. Take dis as you feelosofee in life: If a woman lie down for you, ride she! If a man bend over for you, bull him! Never spear de rod! (103)

Pandit Puru professes his philosophy of sex to Poonwa in front of Ragbir, Choonilal, Basdai, Sook, and all of the others who have gathered for the news that Poonwa is finally going to be able to realize his mission. He makes clear that Poonwa should indulge his sexual fancies no matter if his sexual partner is a man or a woman; what is important is that he always makes time for “an oil change.” The fact that Pandit Puru, the village figure of wisdom, would offer this colorful edict concerning sex and sexuality says to those listening that a sexually fluid quotidian is one that is not outright contradictory to the teachings, religion, and the traditional formations that locals idealize. This “feelosofee” that emerges in the space of rural Indo-Caribbean Trinidad and Tobago is not limited to the rural, since Poonwa might indulge his sexually fluid desires while overseas.

Pandit Puru’s philosophical declaration is a moment by which we not only see glimpses of queer Caribbean futures but also are offered glimpses of what may have already been possible in a queer time and space before Poonwa and Karan Settlement in the 1950s. Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo writes of the project of Indo-Caribbean queer recovery: “As the heterosexual is constituted only through its difference from the homosexual, we must recover the trace of the homosexual left within the heterosexual”³ Pandit Puru’s philosophy is one that is ultimately loosely linked to his religious and spiritual practices, many of these religious practices deemed traditionally antiqueer. But even within spaces and within people who seemingly live antiqueer lives, we come to find verbal and other traces of queer and sexually fluid rurality that many village men recognize and pursue as part of their ontologies. In recognizing the presence of erotic same-sex tendencies within the desires of men like Choonilal and Tailor, we arrive at something more than simply the homosexual. These men tell us so. What we must contend with in Ladoo’s fiction is a rural Caribbean reality in which men are content to pursue sexual relations with both men and women. These men are comfortable in voicing their intentions to pursue such dynamic relations. They may struggle to make sense of their choices at times, but these are choices that they are fully committed to in the pursuit of absolute personal pleasure. Readers must contend with rural quotidians in which the label of homosexual does not quite fit as snuggly as many antiqueer critics would like for it to. This much is true as we witness the men of Karan Settlement repeatedly shirking their designations as homosexuals by using language to shift how we understand the frameworks for relation in their community. And if the framework of the homosexual is an inadequate one to describe the practices in Karan Settlement, then it serves us well to consider that something more fluid, more expansive, emerges out of rural Indo-Caribbean life, in terms of the villagers and their relationship to sex and sexuality. We begin to understand that many Caribbean men, like the residents of Karan Settlement, have been literally telling us, whether they commit to the work of telling deliberately or unconsciously, that other codified sexual identities exist and persist beyond more popular, static imaginings of Caribbean worlds.

Linzey Corridon is a writer, a Vanier Canada Scholar, and a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. A Vincentian who now resides in Canada, his critical and creative research primarily examine ideas concerning gender and sexual nonconformity in the Caribbean and diaspora. West of West Indian (Mawenzi, 2024) is his debut book-length project.

[1] Harold Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974), 4; hereafter cited in the text.
[2] Eric Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 70.
[3] Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo, “Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity,” Small Axe, no. 7 (March 2000): 91.