No Pain Like This Body

Harold Sonny Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body quite different from Yesterdays. Although both novels share a raw, earthy, and unsentimental portrait of the lives of Indian peasants on a fictionalized Trinidad, local dialect for the dialogue of the uneducated, poor characters, and a bleak future, No Pain Like This Body features children as central to the plot, especially in their worldview, one in which jumbies, jables, lougawou, God, and death can be flexible to meet their shifting fears, hopes, and comprehension. Furthermore, the plot is not as straightforward, and the early chapters are dedicated to describing the experience of Rama, Panday, Sunaree, Balraj and their Ma after the abusive father beats his children and chases them into the rain on a tempestuous night on Carib Island. So, Ladoo's book is a slice of life in these downtrodden characters with some dark humor at the wake for Rama, yet one in which there's no escape from the black, heartless sky. Incredibly dark read but worthwhile for a different approach by an Indo-Trinidadian writer on their community.

The wake chapter actually brought to mind Roumain's magnum opus, believe it or not. Yet, I have never encountered any peasant family or community in other Caribbean literatures in which despair is so perfectly captured by the locale, family, village, and writing. Sure, urban settings in some other Caribbean writings have come close, but nothing quite like this. The other writer who came to mind is Arundhati Roy, particularly Rahel and Estha in The God of Small Things. One wonders if Roy ever read Ladoo. Perhaps she took an interest in the Indian diaspora of the Caribbean while writing her excellent novel?