"Creative literature so often reaches a deeper
truth than the historian."
In-depth Reviews
"Honest, fearless and also generous,
this is the book for the millennium,
one to shake comfortable assumptions..."
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"Creative literature so often reaches a deeper
truth than the historian."
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"Honest, fearless and also generous,
this is the book for the millennium,
one to shake comfortable assumptions..."
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*Click here to access a selection of the author's talks & interviews. |
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Raise the Lanterns High A writer of simplicity and poise “With her fourth novel, 'Raise the Lanterns High', Dr Lakshmi Persaud narrates once more, in her exquisite style, the trial and tribulations of the long suffering, but ultimately triumphant, Indian woman. Here the heroine is Vasti whom one encounters first as a school girl in Trinidad and then twelve years later as grown woman about to be married to a man with a dark past and finally almost as a ghostlike character watching the anguish as well as machinations of the queens following the death of their royal husband in 18th century India. As usual she treats her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion, to bring out their heartfelt response to various events. Being a writer of simplicity and poise, she captures the intricacies of human nature. A sympathetic storyteller, she has an eye for detail, an economy of prose and a precision of portrayal, a style which invites comparison with her countryman Sir Vidya Naipaul, yet has a charm all its own. Those who have gotten accustomed to the silken smoothness of her narrative marked by almost effortless craftsmanship, will not be disappointed by her latest effort. One minor criticism of her carefully crafted novel might be that by describing, in such detail, the custom of an earlier time of Suttee (the practice of widow burning) it may just feed into the public, more stereotypes in depicting the culture of her forebears. But in the novel this event (and events leading to it) is used more as a metaphor for Vasti's own life and feelings than as a social comment for the reprehensible practice. Philip Gwyn Jones, publishing director of Flamingo, referring to Indian women novelists recently stated "These writers bring a freshness to the language that makes for some of the world's most refreshing literature. They infuse English with new rhythms and cadences, and generate new forms." An apt description for the author of 'Raise the Lanterns High'. She easily wins my vote for the Booker prize!” Dr. Chandra S. Pande, USA. Endurance, courage and fortitude in these troubled times “Raise the Lanterns High is a profound and fascinating tale through which Lakshmi Persaud has further developed the discourse on Indian womanhood with which she has been engaged in her earlier novels Butterfly in the Wind and Sastra. Her new novel is a complex narrative which moves on several planes and presents a critique on the ancient traditions and rituals which construct the boundaries within which an Indian woman has to operate. She accepts its eternal relevance and worth. The uniqueness of Lakshmi Persaud’s approach lies in the manner in which, while working within a feminist discourse, she also upsets the Western constructs… Besides, the discourse on suttee is multidimensional since Baalaajee, Pundit Krishna, the Queens and Kala provide various degrees of dissent. However, this discourse is never a personal viewpoint – it is based on reinterpretation of the ancient texts. The novel is open-ended with a suggestion of the positive, despite the fact that the protagonist Vasti chooses to refrain from breaking the given frame. She thinks: "Will you crack the glass, rent the whole and bring immeasurable pain to those you hold dear? … Change is best absorbed when it evolves." Lakshmi Pesaud’s prose is extremely poetic. The normal every day objects and actions become imbued with universal and spiritual connotations. The description of marriage rituals, the ritual bathing of Queen Meena, of food and festivities are extremely evocative and sensuous. Besides, her narrative is positioned within a consciousness that is typically Indian in the manner in which it celebrates the divine essence present in all aspects of life. Her novel will always appeal to the Indian sensibility because of her quiet confirmation of the values of endurance, courage, fortitude, faithfulness and devotion in these troubled times.” Dr Stuti Prasad, A Journal of English Studies, Spring 2001, Vol 4 No.1. Special on Women's Literature 11. Literary Research Centre S.P. Verma Road, Patna 800001, Bihar, India. Click here for Dr Bhoendratt Tewarie's address at the Trinidad launch of 'Raise the Lanterns High' Click here for Professor Frank Birbalsingh's review of Raise the Lanterns High, Trinidad and Tobago Review, Vol 26 No11. November 1st 2004.
Click here to go to the 'Raise the Lanterns High' page
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For the Love of my Name The Silent Consent of Intellectuals to the Death of Democracy “Honest, fearless and also generous, this is the book for the millennium, one to shake comfortable assumptions of rectitude into recognition of the abyss into which some of us may fall while others fail to care. I couldn’t put it down. It is also, in a sense a book which marks the maturing of Caribbean Literature. She has not been afraid to challenge the politics of development. And she has let nothing pass. How many of us have really pursued to their logical conclusions our secret worries about the Jones Town Massacre in Guyana? The text holds lessons which are universal. It is a critique which should ring a warning bell in university campuses wherever ethnic prejudices are allowed to go unchallenged. The reader is constantly catching breath, brought up short not only by the strength and conviction of the views expressed but by the courage which it takes to voice them.” Pamela Beshoff, Writer and Journalist, The Weekly Gleaner, UK, Dec 15-21, 1999. The Nature of History “ 'For the Love of my Name' is a moving, disturbing, profound novel. It is an important novel to be coming out at this moment in history, as we turn into a new millennium and inevitably must think about the qualities and values that might – will – should—characterise human societies in the future... Indeed in so far as I have read another novel that deals with some of these issues in a comparable way, then the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is the book that comes closest. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize: I would hope that the judges for the year 2000 Booker pay due attention to Lakshmi’s book, it is of that quality and originality. The Love of My Name is a complex, multi-voiced and many layered novel, its essential subject is tyranny and political corruption, but understood in mythic, moral and historical contexts as well as in terms of concrete social and economic consequences. Lakshmi Persaud explores the psychological, spiritual and personal dimensions of such tyranny, both for the victims and in terms of the distorted perceptions of the tyrant himself and those around him. The novels’ most striking symbolism is in its use of the mask – both literal and metaphorical, as both disguise and liberation. Behind the mask much is permissible which would otherwise be unthinkable: ethnic identity crudely and cynically invoked, can be such mask. The stories shift in time and focus so that we have to abandon ideas of a linear development, a master narrative or simplistic notions of plot development for a more challenging engagement with voices and experiences. In this device Lakshmi Persaud is asking questions about the nature of history, the power of versions of events told from particular privileged positions. Life – and this fiction – is more complex.” Dr Stewart Brown, Poet and co-editor of 'The Oxford book of Caribbean short stories'. Senior Lecturer in African and Caribbean Literature. University of Birmingham, U.K. A Novel of Ideas "The author has come close to writing a great Guyanese and West Indian novel... It is a rare kind, a novel of ideas. There are only a few of these. It is difficult to write such a novel because it must be first and foremost an exciting story. One recalls Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain the ultimate novel of ideas. It is a characteristic of 'For the love of my Name' that it steadily puts one in mind of certain great works of the imagination. Let me hasten to say lest I give the impression that this novel is a boring tract. It is in fact a deeply moving and exciting story. Take for example the killing of Kamelia, the sugar worker, in history we know her as Kowsilia. I found it so moving that I had to put aside the book for two weeks or more before I could resume the reading with a quiet mind. But more important than individual incident is the humanity which shines through whether it is the difficult resolve of Marguerite Devonish, sister of ‘the President for life’ or the lyrical love story of Aasha and Vasu or the kindness of the poor and obscure who pay no attention to political and other divisions except to circumvent them. Creative Literature so often reaches a deeper truth than the historian. For those of us who lived through those times the novel will give meaning to experiences which we just could not deal with at the time and which we have sought to put aside but with which we must now come to terms. When younger people ask about those days this is the novel from your own personal library, however small, that you will wish to put in their hands." Georgetown Guyana Review, Wednesday, May 3rd, 2000, by Lloyd Searwar, Head, Foreign Service Institute, Guyana.
Click here to go to the 'For the Love of my Name' page
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Sastra The Beauty and Terror of Life “‘Sastra is a beautiful, moving and inspiring novel created by a gifted, sensitive and intelligent writer. It follows the life of a woman struggling to find her own wings, to fly from birth through schooling, university education abroad, marriage, motherhood, widowhood and self sufficiency as a single parent. It is a novel about love; intense love which crashes the boundaries of conventional reason. It is a novel of pain and loss and anguish which threatens to crush the human spirit. It is a novel of human courage and sacrifice. It is a novel of change and of coming to grips with the relentless inevitability of change. It is a novel of the beauty and the terror of life itself. It is a novel which celebrates the triumph of the individual human will. The novel juxtaposes complex contending opposites such as fate and free will; tradition and modernity; love and duty; prophesy and possibility; community and individual; security and risk; reason and passion; now and tomorrow; the past and the future." The Sunday Guardian, 19th Dec. 1993, by Dr Bhoe Tewarie, formerly Head of the English Dept. St Augustine, University of the West Indies. A love story of rare beauty “This is a love story of an unusual, even rare beauty. She would be compared to V.S.Naipaul, all brilliant new writers from Trinidad have come to expect that, yet there is no comparison. She has a style that is intensely her own, poetic on one plane and yet intensely practical on the other... Here a sensuous ambience is created without resource to implicit scenes... at the time in which the action takes place, life was very much more circumspect, it would be interesting to read Persaud’s interpretation of a 90’s love story — I am sure that it would be just as delicately written, absorbing and convincing as Sastra." Sunday Gleaner Nov.14 1993, by Jeanne Wilson.
Click here to go to the 'Sastra' page
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Butterfly in the Wind The Postcolonial vision "Lakshmi Persaud’s approach and attitude, is not one of uncertain, ambiguous acquiescing with the Empire. Unlike Naipaul she is openly, even rebelliously concerned with attacking and pulverizing the colonial constructs as she redefines and expresses the self of the Indians living in Trinidad. Her narrative embodies an attempt to her world in a profoundly different way. Her text has acquired greater depth as she expresses the validity and worth of the apparently humble lives of the Indian women in Trinidad who laboured, suffered and preserved to make achievements possible for the women of future generations... Kamla of Butterfly in the Wind is more forthright in resisting and rejecting attempts at mental colonization through education given in colonial schools. “It was a time when reasons for things were not given. And so throughout our school life we were given ideas, concepts, values, formulae. We received them and were later told that we had received an education. Because of this we could neither assess nor give meaning to things: even to our own history or that of the misnomer, the ‘New World,’ the Americas..." The Indian identity articulated by these two Trinidadian writers has a truth and logic which defies all previous definitions by the colonial authority. It is deeply rooted in the ancient culture of India, but it is also shaped by the trauma of transportation, indenture, struggle and humiliation in a foreign land. The value system inherited from their ancestral land and the narratives of success created later on in a foreign land make this self unique. If V.S. Naipaul is covert in affirming this identity, Lakshmi Persaud is open and confident." 'The Postcolonial vision: A concern with identity in V.S.Naipaul and Lakshmi Persaud' by Dr Stuti Prasad. published in 'A Journal of English Studies' A Commonwealth Literature Special, Winter 2002, Vol No.2. Literary Research Centre, S.P. Verma Road, Patna-1, 800001 Bihar, India. Interlacing of Perspective "Lakshmi Persaud is a noteworthy figure in the developing body of Caribbean literature. As the first female Indo-Caribbean novelist, Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind (1990) offers an unprecedented portrait of 1940s Trinidad as it is filtered through the consciousness of Kamla Maharaj, a Trinidadian girl of Indian ancestry. Strung together as a series of loosely interwoven sketches, the narrative describes the protagonist’s coming-of-age among a close-knit, Hindu community living in the rural island interior. In her loving catalogue of the cultural and linguistic traditions (be it in terms of food, names, rituals, flora and fauna, etc.) transplanted in the Caribbean by indentured labourers and their descendants, Persaud also makes evident the process of indigenization of South Asian culture in her island home." "In form and scope, Persaud’s episodic narrative is immediately reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s earlier fictional autobiography entitled Annie John (1987). Much like Kamla’s struggle for self-determination in a colonial Caribbean island, Annie John’s coming-of-age story also functions - though far more subtly - as an allegory of her island community’s gradual move toward independence. Both Persaud and Kincaid’s texts are presented as a series of anecdotal sketches that cohere in the governing voice of a strong-willed female narrator, thereby defying strict generic codification as fictional autobiographies that also function as bildungsromans. As bildungsromans, Kamla and Annie’s stories employ a dual if not kaleidoscopic focalization in continually positioning their protagonist’s developing sense of self within a dialogic framework which includes other female voices in the community. This interlacing of perspective in light of other women’s experiences subverts the traditional construction of the bildungsroman as a male-centred, linear progression toward established or dominant national ideals." ". . . As Persaud’s oeuvre reveals, Indo-Caribbean writers do not part company with their Afro-Caribbean counterparts so much as they bring to the fore a diasporic poetics of selfhood that re-conceptualizes Caribbean subjectivity within a complex network of individual, communal, national, trans-national and ancestral ties." 'The Diasporic Poetics of Selfhood: Lakshmi Persaud ’s Butterfly in the Wind and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John' by Dr. Mariam Pirbhai, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Excerpt from a conference paper delivered in Pamplona, Spain, for MESEA (Multi-Ethnic Studies Association of the Americas), May 2006.
Click here to go to the 'Butterfly in the Wind' page
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