Ever Since We Small
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family.
Celeste Mohammed's second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small, is a family saga which covers a sweeping landscape from the days of the British Raj in India, to multicultural modern Trinidad. Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavours of Trinidad kriol, the book follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, after her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured labourer in the Caribbean.
Jayanti's grandson, Lall Gopaul, seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life. His son, Shiva, is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache follows for their three children - Anand, Nadya and Abby - who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example.
Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls' inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mohammed (Pleasantview) offers a wrenching novel-in-stories of a Trinidadian family spanning from the matriarch's passage to the West Indies at the end of the 19th century to her present-day descendants' efforts to cope with inherited trauma. It opens with "The Legend of Jayanti," whose title character, a young Hindu woman in 1899 India, rejects the ritual practice of sati and refuses to be burned alive alongside the corpse of her recently deceased husband. Shunned by her community, she's signed into indentured servitude in the West Indies and travels there with a fellow indentured servant named Gopal, whom she marries on the ship to Trinidad. "Outsiders" follows Jayanti and Gopal's great-grandson, Shiva, who's cursed when he accidentally drowns an imp-like creature called a buck. The curse manifests in "Godfrey's Revenge," which finds Shiva destitute in 1989 after he takes 13-year-old Salma Mohammed for his bride and loses an eye in a construction accident. In "Sundar Larki," Shiva, unemployed and drunk, slashes Salma to death with a machete before taking his own life. "The Visitation" follows one of the couple's three children, 20-something Abby, who tries to lighten her dark skin in anticipation of meeting her online boyfriend, a white American. Throughout, Mohammed beautifully captures the rhythm and music of Trinidadian patois ("If yuh not white, yuh black," says Shiva's father). Readers will be deeply affected.
