Harold Sonny Ladoo

Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945 – 17 August 1973) was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.

Biography

Ladoo was born and grew up in an environment much like the world of his novels. He was born in Trinidad into extreme poverty and immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968 to study English at the University of Toronto.

It was during this time that he wrote his first and most notable novel, No Pain Like This Body, published in 1972. Described by David Chariandy and "an unusually strong first novel", it is the vivid story of a young boy growing up in a small Caribbean rice-growing community. The book focuses on the day-to-day struggles of a single family through illness, storm, and violence during the August rainy season. The writing is raw and often naïve yet manages to create a visceral experience.

His second book, Yesterdays (posthumously published, 1974), was a much more upbeat book about a young man attempting to launch a Hindu Mission to Canada.

Ladoo's third book was intended to be the last part of a trilogy; however, in 1973, while on a visit home to his Calcutta Settlement, he was mysteriously killed and his body was found on the side of a road in Trinidad.

Bibliography

• Yesterdays, 1974
• No Pain Like This Body (1972), House of Anansi, 2013

Legacy

Michael Bucknor and Conrad James described Ladoo's work as being, along with the works of Andrew Salkey, "especially useful" for tracking developments in Caribbean social attitudes towards masculinity and issues of male sexuality during the mid- to late-20th century, a domain which has been neglected by Western scholars until recently. An essay on Indo-Caribbean authors contrasted Ladoo's work with that of Sasenarine Persaud, neither of whom ever had direct experiences with India; Persaud integrated spiritual and aesthetic elements of Indian high culture into his writing, while Ladoo's writing of his colonial environment featured "naturalistic detail, black humour, and the grotesque". Scholar Victor Ramraj described Ladoo as being unique from fellow Indo-Caribbean writers Neil Bissoondath, Rabindranath Maharaj, Ismith Khan, V.S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon:

To come to Sonny Ladoo from Persaud and his fellow Indo-Trinidadian novelists... is to be made aware quickly of how distinct he is from these writers – that he is unique in his depiction of a specific rural pocket of Trinidad’s East Indian population in the early part of the twentieth century... Ladoo constructs a harsh, natural, and human environment of wrenching poverty, peopled by individuals given to violent and abusive domestic and communal relationships. They are perhaps the most appallingly brutal, vulgar, and obscene characters in all of West Indian literature.

The University of Toronto Mississauga campus (formerly Erindale College) offers to students The Harold Sonny Ladoo Book Prize for Creative Writing every year.

Further reading

• Dennis Lee, On the Death of Harold Ladoo, San Francisco: Kanchenjunga Press, 1976.
• Clement H. Wyke, "Harold Ladoo's Alternate Worlds: Canada and Carib Island", Canadian Literature 95 (Winter 1982), pp. 39–49.