Yesterdays

"All the young scholars in Karan Settlement were doomed. The sugarcane estates were monsters; they were in the habit of yawning and swallowing the young men; those who were lucky enough to get away from the estates were trapped into a career of rum drinking and fighting."

Harold Sonny Ladoo's humorous novella, Yesterdays, tells the story of a frustrated young man, Poonwa, and his desire to establish a Hindu Mission to Canada to get back at the Canadian Mission School (and colonialism generally speaking) for his years of physical abuse and torment. The son of unlettered Indian cane cutters, who, after 30 years, have a house in Karan Settlement, Poonwa, his family, and the village community are, as Ladoo's focus on excreta and depravity illustrates, full of shit. The Hindu priest, Pandit Puru, takes advantage of the community's religious faith for profit, everyone is cheating on everyone else, and, despite a general anti-gay atmosphere, a very fluid sexuality in which many men "bull" the village queer, Sook. 

The reader really does sympathize with Poonwa and his grandiose schemes for vengeance against the white colonizers for their abuse of the Indians and Negroes of this fictionalized Trinidad, yet it becomes very clear that he cannot read Hindi, has no realistic plan for actually building a Hindu school in Canada, and is driven by hatred, fueled by nightmares of his abusive Canadian schoolteacher and her white Jesus. On the other hand, the future of rum drinking and nothingness is a prevalent fear, one driving his mother, Basdai, to push her husband, Choonilal, to mortgage the house to fund Poonwa's lofty Mission. 

For those eager to read an amusing account of a village community in 1955, Ladoo's Yesterdays is quite worthwhile, yet a little underwhelming for those who expected to read about Poonwa's Canada failures. At the end of the day, it's probably unnecessary to include that, and we should enjoy the topsy-turvy world of 1950s Carib Island and its complex class, colonial, and religious tensions. For those reasons, Ladoo's novella is an extremely amusing read with a humanizing portrait of a society where everyone is lying, cheating, screwing, and exploiting each other. The Hindu priest, Choonilal, the daily intercessions of the Hindu gods through dreams, and last, but certainly not least, a disturbing emphasis on defecation or transgressive sexual acts will keep you laughing throughout.