“Tola” in “Toronto”

I will always remember my first encounter with Harold Sonny Ladoo. I was a PhD student at the time, spending countless hours by the Caribbean literature section in the stacks of New York University’s Bobst library. Not having had much exposure to Caribbean authors in classes, with the exception of one novel each by George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul, I was ploughing through the alphabet trying to organize my search of a Caribbean literary canon, such as I was able to imagine it at the time. Ladoo’s 1972 No Pain Like This Body was so slim I would have missed it completely had it not been hugging the cover of The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace (among the L’s), and I wasn’t to even know about the existence of Ladoo’s Yesterdays until almost a decade later when I came across its title in a literary essay. My initial reaction to reading No Pain, and subsequently Ladoo’s other works, all written in the early 1970s, was astonishment at the novelty of what assaulted me from the page—“remarkable,” as Christopher Laird astutely suggests in Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo, “for what they didn’t do.”¹ In the main, it is the voice in the work that “didn’t” hold itself back in portraying the continuing coloniality of independence-era Trinidad or the hardships of immigrant life in the poorer neighborhoods of Toronto. With the recent publication of Ladoo’s unfinished works in Laird’s biography, Ladoo’s singularly raw and raucous narrative voice—a heady blend of Standard English, Trinidadian Creole, and Bhojpuri Creole—is now appreciable against a thoroughly new literary terrain. Previously, Ladoo has been studied as the author of two novellas based exclusively on the idiosyncratic culture of peasant communities in the fictional Carib Island. The newly discovered unpublished writings (even if incomplete) do much to provide a fuller sense of Ladoo’s vision and arc, in particular his reimagining of the urban metropolis in the same language of rural (be)longing found in No Pain and Yesterdays. The following analysis dwells on Ladoo’s distinctive literary “voicing” and its role in his development of a transcultural globality that captures the troubling (and maddening) historical coincidence that ties (post)indenture Indians to Canada, the latter being both the source of the cultural colonization of rural indenture Indians in Trinidad and one of the largest recipients of Indo-Caribbeans starting in the 1970s.

A common refrain found in criticism of Harold Sonny Ladoo is the unconventional character of his two most widely known works, the 1972 No Pain Like This Body and the posthumously published (and most likely unfinished) 1974 Yesterdays, with their eccentricities noted as a key measure of the author’s incomparable genius.² Repeatedly mentioned as well is the fact that Ladoo was working on a mammoth project encompassing two hundred novels, but this ambition was cut short by his sudden death in 1973 while visiting Trinidad on a personal matter.³ Laird’s piercing biography gives us some glimpse of a budding author intent on “out-writ[ing] Naipaul” (12).⁴ Surpassing even the originality of the literary terrain opened up by Naipaul, Ladoo, Laird writes, “was following his own path; not only has he staked out new content, he portrayed it with a new kind of storytelling” (9). While No Pain makes no reference to the world outside the rice and cane fields of the fictional Karan Settlement in Tola, Yesterdays includes characters either in awe of Canada or desperate to get there by any means possible. In the fragments of stories recuperated by Laird, the peasantry of Tola has migrated. We find characters in Toronto who regret having left and those in Tola who yearn to escape—feelings of entrapment and confinement pervade in both locations.

No Pain is set in the fictional Carib Island in 1905 and spans a few days in the life of one family. The novel’s title comes from the last two lines from one of India’s oldest spiritual texts, The Dhammapada, and the novel itself adopts a childlike omniscient voice that centers on four siblings and their father, mother, and grandparents. From beginning to end, thick rain falls incessantly on the darkened paddy fields, transforming the landscape into a vast watery expanse that makes it harder for the children to escape their father’s drunken rages and harder to search for their mother when, inconsolable after the death of her son Rama, she disappears into the forests. Similar to No Pain, the actions in Yesterdays also take place amid the cane fields and sugar estates of the fictional island but more explicitly depict Ladoo’s critique of the Canadian Presbyterian CMIs.⁵ In this novel, characters are preoccupied as much by the enduring consequences of Christian colonization as they are with observing and policing the daily bowel movements of their neighbors. Some reviews see this scatological vision in Yesterdays as inseparable from its resounding critique of cultural colonialism, capitalist materiality, and the failure of the colonizing project;⁶ Laird, however, views it as satire that literalizes and parodies what in Trinidad is referred to as “shit talk”—storytelling mostly involving men “riff[ing] the bizarre, the obscene, the sufferers of self-inflicted misfortune, the scatological[,] . . . all to score maximum humour among ‘limers’” (113). Ladoo’s treatment of the latrine and excrement is moreover explicitly defined by a Hindu cultural orthodoxy in which toilets are a source of defilement, and thus outside the home, and the only character who uses the indoor toilet derives pleasure from both eating and defecating there, a habit he acquires from having used this space to escape thrashings by his mistress at the Christian Mission school.

Set in 1955, the opening scene in Yesterdays depicts two men clearly upset and displeased with each other. Choonilal is contemplating how much water can be offered to the sun to appease the “Aryan gods” living around the “Jandee pole” so that he is “release[d] . . . from the unending cycle of life and death or doom” and not reincarnated as “a blasted worm in the latrine.”⁷ Meanwhile, Tailor, Choonilal’s tenant, is studiously avoiding any conversation about living rent free for two years or cleaning the malodorous toilet where, according to Choonilal, Tailor “does shit the most.” The main plot hinges on a father’s (Choonilal) reluctance to mortgage his house to pay for his son’s (Poonwa) Hindu mission to colonize Canada. To take revenge for the violence inflicted on him during his time in the Christian school, Poonwa is set on “beating” Hindi and the Bhavagad Gita into the Canadians. The neighbors, too, mostly believe that he can just “open a school”—“How dem white people who come on dat Canadian Mission to Carib Island beat dem Indian and make dem learn English? How . . . dey make de Indians Christians? Well de same Poonwa going to beat dey ass and make dem learn Hindi.” Choonilal alone seems to realize that this idealistic vision of a “reverse colonialism” is impossible, saying that Poonwa’s mission would succeed “wen cock get teets” in a world where “white people . . . want dis whole world for deyself.”⁸ The rest of the action centers on the busyness of latrine activity among characters whose days and nights are preoccupied by assessing who can use whose toilet and at what cost: Choonilal refuses to use his own latrine because of its defilement by his neighbor Tailor and has to risk crossing a busy road to use Ragbir’s toilet; Basdai (Choonilal’s wife) has taken to relieving herself in the open cane fields to avoid Ragbir’s sexual advances; using the latrine of Sook (the queer village shopkeeper) is generally avoided, since it comes with the “risk” of having a homosexual relationship with him. Even as the characters’ constant dialogue is fixated on the odor, volume, and size of each other’s feces and that of dogs, horses, cows, and goats, and on the currency of one another’s latrine to win sexual and other favors, they all feed Poonwa’s obsession, despite the clear mental trauma at the root of his plans for a Hindu mission to Canada.

In the drafts included in Laird’s work, fictional Tola and Toronto are explicitly and consistently coupled as if to amplify the fact that the same oppressive forces at work at home find new iteration abroad, the repercussions of colonialism and casteism in rural Trinidad akin to the endless suffering of peasant immigrants in Toronto.⁹ In the excerpt from “1st Canadian Novel,” for instance, Sawak, a recent immigrant, immediately misses the “rice and roti” of the morning repast back home when he is given eggs and bread for breakfast. On asking Sally Khan, his host, for at least a little ketchup to give it all some kind of taste, he is reprimanded for his audacity to ask for more—there is hardly anything to eat in the house, since Sally’s wife recently lost her job at the factory and is hiding from the immigration office. With their eating done, Sally returns from the kitchen with “two pieces of board.” The story ends to the sound of thumping and banging as Sawak and Sally try to kill the cockroaches nesting under the very rug on which they had been sitting to eat. The noise alerts the Italian landlord, who starts yelling about twenty-five dollars owed for “one more people” and then demands another “one hundred five dollar” for their complaining about the cockroaches (43–44). Later on, the street noise—the “yakking” and “gruntings” of people in Italian, Greek, Portuguese, and “a faint English[,] . . . as the sound from a dying man”—frightens and bewilders Sawak. Aurally, the sound of chattering was just like back home in Tola, but here had a “strange and wild” quality to it because he understood nothing, so that it “felt as if the city was conspiring against him” (45).

The story “Lying Monroe” is a fast-paced piece written from the point of view of a narrator who begins his tale with the instruction that sympathies should not be wasted on fellows like Monroe, a “nice looking boy” from a well-off family whose “life finishing just like that in this city” (52). The story focuses exclusively on Monroe’s reckless and squandering ways, moving from one example to the next as if to heighten by comparison the narrator’s attempts at success through hard work and without “good cash” coming in from home. In one scene at a bar, the narrator immediately recognizes that Monroe’s girlfriend, Laura, is “the girl who make Hanso from Carib Island nearly make a jail in Toronto,” despite Monroe’s objections and Laura’s insistence that she is a PhD student writing a book (53). As the narrator discovers, this lie is but one thread in a web of deception Monroe has created to hide where and if he even works, or how and with whom he lives. Monroe eventually contracts syphilis. He begins receiving treatment by an Indian doctor from back home to manage the symptoms, but “even the doctor say that only a Obeah woman could stop Monroe from lying,” the latter clearly an incurable pathology brought on by having to survive in a city that is otherwise “eating out” its immigrants (55). Again, in “Jametin Laura!” the narrator’s past life in Tola is frequently drawn in to contrast the new life in Toronto he finds himself in. Though he says he “leff de island good good [to] come to Toronto to better [himself],” the only work he finds is as a hotel clerk, which “back in de island . . . is a commess kinda work” (57). On his very first night at the job, he lands in trouble he had never had to experience back home—“Pappayuh, in Tola I never put me ass inside a police car [and] only a month in Toronto and I had to spend de rest of dat night in jail” (59). Alternatively, stories like that of Sohan Singh, “a labourer on Coolie Trace Sugar Estate,” depict the allure of migration as the beginning of one’s social and psychological deracination. Sohan has become so obsessed with imagining his new life in Canada that he spends his days in Tola making a spectacle of his aspirations to the point of alienating himself from his community and surroundings: “People in the village knew I was about to migrate to the whiteman’s land. . . . The rumshop peasants went mad with envy when I ordered whiskey instead of rum, and ate sandwiches instead of curried chicken and roti. Instead of listening to calypsos or East Indian music, I bought myself a stereo and spent hours listening to classical music. Dialect was below me, only proper English was used. Confident that I would be a Canadian soon, I stopped talking to most people in the village” (34–35).¹⁰

In Ladoo, both urban Toronto and the postindependence Caribbean represent sites of ongoing cultural colonization defined as much by stasis and ruin as they are by ambition and promise, especially among the rural Indian peasants who, once trapped in the hinterland and enthralled by the promise of migration, become the newly immigrated awaiting a sense of purpose, even with their souls “bleeding” and their vision “blinded by wine” (49).¹¹ By this approach, Ladoo’s postindenture literary imaginary is determinedly diasporic (then, at the time of writing, and even now, at the time of reception) yet situates caste as an additional vector in postcolonial, postindenture exile and diasporic consciousness, particularly in the so-called New World Americas. Whereas caste, along with race, gender, and sexuality, is commonly applied to studies of colonial and postcolonial Caribbean (and South Asian) identities, there is less attention given to its significance and presence in postcolonial, postindenture diasporic spaces, and even less so to literature in these fields. Against this absence, one finds in Ladoo’s fictions an invitation to reassess how issues of caste, as well as race and class, are challenged and transformed, but certainly never absent, in the crossing of cultural boundaries and between multiple homelands.

In this reflection I have attempted to provide more than a strictly literary analysis of Ladoo’s themes, characters, and stylistics, to instead offer that the writer’s voluminous and fragmented fictional drafts are equal to the timbre and contour of a diaspora that draws specifically from legacies of (post)indenture seldom explored in the realm of literature. The belated entry of the newly discovered short fictions set in Toronto—written in the 1970s only to surface in 2023, after decades of searching and research by Laird—are particularly expedient to this current moment in literary studies because they provide added momentum to recent work on reconfiguring the significance of narratives of indenture and postindenture to global literature and to conceptions of a postplantation Americas that would include colonial indenture as one legacy of postslavery.¹² Taken in its entirety, Ladoo’s oeuvre serves as an apt analogy of the brokenness and vulnerability of characters marked equally by colonial indenture’s pasts and the neocolonizing apparatus of immigration. And it is precisely through this focus on heartache, failure, and immobility in the postcolonial contexts of both Tola and Toronto that Ladoo brings to our foreground the lives and living of migrant rural peasants integral to the shaping of contemporary diasporas.

Atreyee Phukan is a professor of English at the University of San Diego, California, where she teaches courses on the anglophone global South and literary and cultural theory. She is a co-editor of Home and the World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars, 2007) and South Asia and Its Others: Reading the Exotic (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Her recent book, Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2022), was awarded the MLA’s inaugural Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies.

[1] Christopher Laird, Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2023), 8 (italics in original); hereafter cited in the text.
[2] Laird writes that Ladoo’s “two short works [are] the most significant contribution to Trinidadian literature since the fifties” and that Ladoo took “risks” with his use of “Trinidad creole rhythm” that not even Samuel Selvon had attempted. Christopher Laird, “The Novel of Tomorrow, Today: A Review of Yesterdays, a Novel by Harold Sonny Ladoo,” KAIRI 1-75 (1975): 6; a reprint can be found at https://preelit.com/2018/11/13/the-novel-of-tomorrow-today.
[3] See Christopher Laird, “Equal to Mystery: The Life and Work of Harold Sonny Ladoo,” Repeating Islands, 26 October 2020, https://repeatingislands.com/2020/10/26/equal-to-mystery-the-life-and-work-of-harold-sonny-ladoo/.
[4] Laird worked on a screenplay of No Pain in 2017 and on a television documentary on Ladoo’s life, but both projects remain unfinished because of lack of funding. Equal to Mystery was longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
[5] Canadian Mission to the Indians. Canada has seldom been viewed as imperial, though the CMIs specifically targeted indenture populations in the Caribbean. Brinsley Samaroo argues that Hindus and Muslims in Trinidad felt new pressure to control their cultural identities and practices in order to resist the colonizing agendas of the government-sanctioned CMIs. See Brinsley Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian Mission as an Agent of Integration in Trinidad during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 14, no. 4 (1975): 41–55. See also Kazim Bacchus, Education as and for Legitimacy: Developments in West Indian Education between 1846–1895 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994).
[6] Sebastian Galbo argues that Yesterdays “indexes the defecatory habits of his West Indian characters,” while also revealing “the predicament of the writer in a new nation . . . envisioning Indo-Caribbean selfhood outside the confines of caste structure into a world defined by opportunity and individualism. . . . Intestinal pains and flatulence mirror and interrogate certain caste anxieties in pre-independence Trinidad.” Sebastian Galbo, “‘A Great Need to Defecate’: Excremental Angst in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s Yesterdays,” Journal of West Indian Literature 28, no. 2 (2020): 100.
[7] Harold Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974), 1–3.
[8] Ladoo, Yesterdays, 66–67.
[9] This is not to suggest that “caste” is a new topic in these shorter works. In his review of Yesterdays, for instance, Roydon Salick shows that for his period, Ladoo “creat[ed] a unique fictional world . . . different from anything that has appeared in the Indo-Caribbean fiction” of V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Ismith Khan, or Samuel Selvon because his works were singularly attentive to caste and to communities “who historically occupied the lowest rung on the caste ladder.” Roydon Salick, “The Bittersweet Comedy of Sonny Ladoo: A Reading of Yesterdays,” Ariel 22, no. 3 (1991): 75.
[10] From what would have been “New Novel.”
[11] From a piece titled “Agony.”
[12] See Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe, no. 42 (November 2013): 1–15. McKittrick’s configuration of “black futures” focuses on the ways in which a “decolonial poetics” that “dwells on postslave violences” can renew our understanding of regenerative possibilities for postslavery communities (12), but her framework allows for the inclusion of alternate histories formed in the postslavery, postplantation Americas, such as, I argue, that of indenture. McKittrick’s suggestion that “plantation pasts and futures [are] the work of survival,” forging a “geography . . . [and] spatial politics of living just enough, just enough for the city,” provides a useful model in my reading of Ladoo’s own “decolonial poetics” in reimagining the urban space through the lens of indenture (15).