The journey home resurfaces in the creative imagination countless times. There's a reason we've been obsessed with return tickets since Odysseus hauled himself back to Ithaca after a ten-year trip. We needn't look outside the orbit of Caribbean literature to see how this yearning for a hearth needles the human breast: Mohun Biswas, yoked beneath the stifling regime of the Tulsis, makes the quest for his own home an ultimate goal in A House for Mr Biswas.
Writing in pursuit of the same thematic core, Ingrid Persaud's debut novel If I Never Went Home confronts issues of alienation, domestic rupture and secrecy. Persaud, the daughter-in-law of celebrated Trinidadian novelist Lakshmi Persaud, launched the novel at Paper Based Bookshop in the Hotel Normandie, on December 7.
If I Never Went Home competently navigates the tricky task of dual narratives. The storyline is roughly split between the perspectives of Beatrice Clark, an adult Trini expat based in Boston, and Tina Ramlogan, a child living in Trinidad. At the novel's onset, Bea and Tina's separate stories couldn't seem less interwoven. The one thing they share is a sense of being an outsider: particularly Tina, since she must endure the whispered gossip that comes with not knowing her father's identity.
Bea is in no doubt as to her parentage but feels equally misunderstood by her emotionally distant mother, Mira, and her late saga-boy father, Alan. As the dual storylines progress, Bea and Tina's fates become increasingly meshed in a series of sometimes surprising, sometimes foreseeable ways. Will the rebellious schoolgirl and the withdrawn psychologist be able to surmount the physical and non-tactile distance that divides them? Or will the ghosts of a past, including the most prominent, lingering spectre of Tina's unidentified father, hijack their best efforts?
Persaud is possibly at her best when she's detailing the hidden, frequently traumatic world of a protagonist beset by issues of mental health. The chapters of the novel that explore Bea's extended stay at St Anthony's Hospital, consistently probe the depths of an inpatient's miserable dissonance. From the meds of increasing strength she's routinely fed, to the absence of locks on her doors, Bea's world is upended by her precarious mental state.
Persaud not only shows the physical changes wrought by an upset in mental equilibrium, she smartly includes adverse social responses to the stigma surrounding the disease. The judgmental Indian physician who first processes Bea as a critical case informs her, "Who would want a daughter with mental illness? If you keep behaving like this, you will be a grave disappointment to your parents...I hope you understand the wickedness of what you have done. Pray to Lord Vishnu and Mother Lakshmi."
As Tina blossoms into a fairly antagonistic version of womanhood, Persaud works hard to show the stigma that besets her young life, too. Tina's narrative frequently resembles a series of uncensored diary entries. In one of them, she sourly remarks, "The real joke, of course, is that they carry on like I busy screwing any and every man I meet in the hardware...if you like to look good and you have a figure, Nanny and Aunty Indra have it on church authority that you must be a whore."
Persaud repeatedly stresses the oppressive effects of a hyper-devout upbringing on Tina's freedoms, painting a colourful yet largely forbidding image of Trinidad. In Persaud's vision, given a voice through Tina's feisty rants and Bea's reluctant remembrances, Trinidad holds the promise of a potential that never seems to be fully realised while one is on that island's soil. The island symbolises in the writer's view that dually longed-for and dreaded threshold, that space we fight against desiring–and in so doing, wind up desiring even more.
The novel is excessively long and suffers from episodes of authorial indulgence that can govern a first book's eagerness to please. Despite this, If I Never Went Home is uncompromising about what it wants: to show that the journey back is almost always difficult. Persaud's debut will reward readers who enjoy a sensitive engagement on the perils and pleasures of finding one's own safe berth.