News that Lisa Allen-Agostini’s debut novel, The Bread the Devil Knead, has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction might be a cause for celebration in her native Trinidad, but it will come as no great surprise there. This small Caribbean island, the larger of the two-island state it forms with Tobago – with a combined population of just 1.4 million – has long punched far above its weight, producing the groundbreaking historian CLR James, as well as two Nobel laureates.
VS Naipaul, representing prose, was a grudging son of the island, who pointed out in his 2001 Nobel lecture that only through leaving could he learn about his own history; Derek Walcott, in the poetry corner, was an enraptured adopted son who, in his own 1992 lecture, proclaimed the island’s capital, Port of Spain, a polyglot “writer’s heaven”. Poetry and prose have continued to thrive at home and among an increasingly formidable diaspora, with Naipaul’s own extended family alone going on to produce the Quebec-based chevalier des lettres Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo, winner of the UK’s richest poetry prize, the Forward.
The latest wave of successes, however, may necessitate an overhaul of literary orthodoxy, for the simple reason that so many are by women. Allen-Agostini joins last year’s Costa prize-winner, Monique Roffey, and Amanda Smyth, whose novel Fortune is in the running for the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. They are merely advance warning of a literary avalanche that will be coming down the slopes in the next couple of years, ranging from fiction to poetry, books for children to creative nonfiction.
The precursors of Trinidad’s younger female novelists are still going strong today: writers and thinkers such as Merle Hodge, Dionne Brand and Shani Mootoo, who are celebrated across the Caribbean, but whose canonical importance to world literature has yet to be more widely recognised. In Hodge, this lineage has its own origin story. In 1970, she became the first black Caribbean woman to land an international publishing deal. Her novel Crick Crack Monkey used patois to tell the story of a young girl uprooted from rural to urban life, beginning a tradition of historical reclamation by and for women that plays out today in the work of writers such as Roffey and Allen-Agostini.
The reasons for this startling success are various. Patronage has played its part. The traces of a lively periodical, the New Voices, can be seen in writers such as Jennifer Rahim – a polymath with a new novel due out next year – whom it nurtured through two decades until its closure in 1993. The OCM Bocas literary prize has, since 2011, been first to spot a raft of local talent, including Roffey and this year’s winner, Celeste Mohammed. It is part of a small but influential festival, which has become a fixture for academics across the scattered campuses of the University of the West Indies and beyond.
Then there is simple geography, which has made Trinidad such a melting pot of cultures and languages. The new literature does not ignore the violence and injustice that are the legacy of the region’s brutal colonial history, while luxuriating in the beauty and variety that have kept its writers loyal even as they spread around the globe. As Rahim wrote of her relationship with her homeland: “We leave to find / what is left behind / and that holds us, / more than we know.”
• This article was amended on 4 May 2022 to give the full name of Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo, by which they now wish to be known.
