Hosein, Maharaj talk writing Trinidad

“If you open the newspaper, Trinidad writes itself,” said prizewinning author Kevin Jared Hosein during the Take Two panel featuring him and fellow novelist Rabindranath Maharaj at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest on April 28.

The two discussed their fictional explorations of Trinidad’s past and present in their novels. The panel was moderated by author Camille Hernández-Ramdwar.

The authors were asked if they thought there was something in the Trinidadian psyche that led to literature and storytelling.

Hosein, whose novel Hungry Ghosts won the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction, gave a description of an incident when music interrupted the previous evening’s awards ceremony as something he could write a short story about.

“I always say that: just open the newspaper and Trinidad does write itself. We could write many alternative histories of that altercation, and some could be distinctly Trinidadian or Caribbean. Trinidad hates literature but they love storytelling. When you can merge storytelling with literature, you can fool them in a way for them to love literature.

“It’s strange, we have so many writers that come out of here, but it’s never seen as a possibility, at least from when I grew up. I would say a lot of our cadences, how we think, the bacchanalism on this soil, it lends itself to storytelling, in my view.”

Maharaj, who has written six novels and three short-story collections, agreed with Hosein that Trinidadians are natural storytellers.

“I remember many years when I told people I wanted to be a writer, there was a kind of slight disbelief and gentle ridicule. One thing people said was that you could go to any rumshop, any corner, and anyone could tell a good story.

"That’s true and I think it’s because of Trinidadians' ability to tell a story. This oral tradition didn’t draw from one culture, it came from a multiplicity of cultures – not only the tone and the words, but the manner of telling the story – and to me that is so important.”

Maharaj said he didn’t realise what Trinidad had to offer him as a writer until he had left (he lives in Canada) and saw it from a distance.

“I began to see there were characters everywhere. People didn’t hold things close to their chest. As a stranger, you meet them on the bus and they will tell you their whole life story.

"Every single culture and ethnic group left something for writers to draw from.”

Both writers spoke about including folklore and religious and spiritual beliefs in their work.

Hosein said he thought the biggest supernatural power in Trinidad is money.

“It’s wealth, it’s generational wealth, it’s what people will do for money. To me, that supersedes any religion and any belief. People will throw away any belief, anything they grew up with, for money, for the promise of money, for the want of it.”

He said his book contained a version of Hinduism battling with the Presbyterian church. He said the inspiration came from his family history.

Maharaj said the spirituality people hold and the religion they follow pervades every aspect of their lives.

“I have always been very sceptical of the sway or the hold of religion. I use it in my books as a backdrop to show either its corrupting influence or the very distant promise of some kind of redemption. It’s sad to say, but if you look at the world and see what’s happening in the name or religion, combined with things like ethnicity, etc, it’s not unnatural to have a certain amount of scepticism.”

Hernández-Ramdwar asked what response the writers had received to the casual violence and neglect in Trinidad and Tobago society they had written about.

Hosein said when on international tours, he was often approached by people who were upset that he had killed animals and had women suffer domestic violence in his books.

“It’s not exaggeration. There’s a gap between what people imagine the Caribbean to be and when they read stories that are grounded in the Caribbean. I don’t know if it’s a shell shock, I don’t know if it’s someone’s world falling apart or their postcard getting torn up.

"It’s something I have to keep in mind, but I don’t have to abide by it. I try to make my fiction as reality-based as possible based on interviews, research, archival information. There’s stuff I’ve chosen to leave out and hold back, because there’s only so much a reader could stomach and a writer could stomach writing.”

Maharaj said violence is built into the way TT operates, for historical and cultural reasons, mainly a degree of insecurity caused by slavery and indentureship.

“Trinidad is a patriarchal society. People of my mother’s generation, and hopefully not of this one, forfeited their ambitions, for the sake of the children, and they operated at the behest of their husbands. Having a boy was an advantage to parents – even though the girls would do better in school.”

He said writers needed to blow open history and examine all the splinters in their writing.

“Our propensity for violence is not because we’re bad. You can trace it back 100, 200 years. When you oppress a people, they look for other people to oppress.”

Hosein said when he was interviewing his grandfather for his book, he was told when the schools were run by Presbyterian missionaries, the students were treated better. He said the schools got worse when the Trinidadians took over.

Asked about the brutality he writes about in Hungry Ghosts, Hosein compared people to unstable chemicals who had to release things until they became stable.

“Whatever goes in has to come out. There’s a way in which the brutality people are exposed to daily has to come out.

"Luckily, most Trinidadians do it through humour and memes. There are people who I think are incapable, or don’t like humour and memes, and it comes out in an entirely different way.

"Unfortunately we are never stable, because there’s always instability around us, so the way we deal with brutality, if it’s not humour, it’s going to be something much more nefarious.”

A recording of the discussion can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTkUa4T0DY.