Love After Love
Ingrid Persaud • Faber & Faber Publishing • 321 pages
After 6 weeks of reacquainting myself with family, friends, and the sun, I am back in London. Looking forward to bringing you more content throughout the rest of the year!
Themes: Unconventional families, Trinidadian culture, Domestic Abuse, Diaspora, Caribbean LGBTQ
Read this if: You are unable to point out Trinidad on a map
Don’t read this if: You are looking for a sunny beach read
Links to purchase: Faber & Faber, Amazon
The cover of Love After Love would make you think it’s a beach read romance. The type of story where a widow goes on vacation to the Bahamas and falls in love with an old flame who just happens to be vacationing at the same resort. You would however be mistaken. In contrast to the setting, Trindad’s tropical beaches, the story is a gritty family drama centered around the unorthodox Ramdin-Chetan household. The three members of whom (Ms.Betty, Mr. Chetan, and Solo) are all on their own journeys to learn how to love not only the people around them, but also themselves.
The novel kicks off after the death of Ms. Betty’s husband. Struggling to pay rent, she invites, Mr. Chetan, a colleague from work to move in with her and her son, Solo. The narrative flits between the perspective of each of the three central characters, chapter by chapter. This provides us the opportunity to experience life through their own words. Take for example this passage from the perspective of Mr. Chetan:
I understand a kitchen. I’m not saying Miss Betty can’t cook. But give Jim his gym-boots. She hand nowhere near sweet like mine. Two of us coming home from work, same tired, so I took over the cooking three times for the week. As it’s Sunday I decided to do my nice steamed kingfish, callaloo with salt meat, rice and, just for Solo, a macaroni pie.
While the pie was in the oven I went on the porch. Solo was there swinging in the hammock, head in the iPad as usual.
Why’s lunch not ready?
Excuse me?
It’s past twelve o’clock
I am not your slave young man…
The boy jumped out the hammock and stood too close. Our eyes were nearly level.
You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.
I bit my lip and turned away. But he wasn’t finished.
What kind of man is always in the kitchen cooking or sitting around reading? What happen? You’re a buller man?
This passage is illustrative of the thing I found most striking, which is the vernacular language used in the book’s narration. In interviews, Ms Persaud has said that, “For millions of Caribbean people, I am writing in the very real English of a very real place.” This book follows in the footsteps of Zora Neale Hurston, and Mark Twain, and the countless other authors who have fought to put regional vernacular English on equal footing with standard English. If nothing else, the books they write are an important record of how different subcultures transformed the English language into something new.
Now, it is very safe to say that before picking up Love After Love I knew a sum total of zero about Trinidad (other than the fact it is a Caribbean country). Reading Love After Love provided me with exactly one data point; one person’s recounting of what life on the island is like. I’m stressing the singularity, because when you read a book set in another country (especially one you’ve never been to), there is a natural tendency to implicitly trust the novel as being representative of life in the country. In this case, I walked away from Love After Love with the impression that Trinidadians talk with a strong Patois.
Now it seems obvious to say that not everyone would speak like the characters in Ms. Persaud’s book, but that didn’t truly register until I was doing research for this review when I came across a Trinidadian commenting on the book on Goodreads,
“There seems to be a troubling trend in Caribbean literature being applauded only for employing certain stereotypes [patois], when there is diversity in the Caribbean, based on speech and how people express themselves. Reading Persaud's account of Trinidadian society left me thinking that there is only one way to be, one way to speak and one way to live on that island... This is the equivalent of someone writing about Londoners speaking only in a cockney accent. OR writing a book about Jamaicans who constantly say, "Yeah Mon" and blast reggae music in their car.”
The point of including that Goodreads comment is in not to gatekeep what counts as a Trinidadian novel. Ingrid Persaud’s writing is drawn from her own life experience and creativity; it is not her responsibility to perfectly represent every faction of Trinidadian society. The point of including that comment is to serve as a reminder; it is the reader’s responsibility to not extrapolate too much from a single data point, something I hadn’t realised I’d already done until it was pointed out to me by another reader.
So in the end, Love After Love is Ms. Persaud’s own impression of life on the island of Trinidad. And, to be clear, it is an absolutely entertaining representation. I found myself invested in two of the three main characters (not a huge fan of Solo), and found the turns of phrase used in the narration to be immensely clever (regardless of whether they are common on the island or not). Hopefully, someday I’ll have the opportunity to visit the island, and can therefore form my own impressions. Until then, I’ll just have to lean on Love After Love’s colorful and vibrant depiction.