Finding a Place

Kris Rampersad

This book presents the first comprehensive look at the genesis and development of literature and a literary consciousness among IndoTrinidadians. It examines how a people who came with little knowledge of English could within just a hundred years produce a writer like V.S. Naipaul, acclaimed as lord of the English language. Naipaul himself in all his writings consistently returns in one way or another to the country of his birth, Trinidad and Tobago but despite his constant re-examination of his Trinidadian background, the world of the IndoTrinidadian and the factors which would have produced a Naipaul have remained nebulous.

Kris Rampersad's work maps how IndoTrinidadian came to literary consciousness, what they brought to it in those evolutionary years, to its flowering in the 1950s with the emergence of Naipaul's father Seepersad, and later his brother Shiva and himself, Samuel Selvon, Ismith Khan, Sonny Ladoo and others.

320 pp

Publication Date: 2002

ISBN 978-976-637-078-7 / 976-637-078-8
Paperback US $25.00