Zahra Gor­don

Lit­tle, if any, of lo­cal land­scape and cul­ture is omit­ted from Kris Ram­per­sad's LiTTscapes: Land­scapes of Fic­tion from Trinidad and To­ba­go. Build­ing on a bib­li­og­ra­phy of more than 60 au­thors and 100 lit­er­ary works, with near­ly 300 pho­tographs, Ram­per­sad draws read­ers to the re­al-life land­scapes, land­marks and cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tions that forged the lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion of lo­cal au­thors. As Ram­per­sad de­scribes it in the post­script, "LiTTscapes is a kind of GPS of the writer's imag­i­na­tion; a map of the jour­ney from place to page as much as it is about specifics in terms of lo­ca­tion and ex­pe­ri­ences."

Ram­per­sad bridges the gap be­tween fic­tion and re­al­i­ty, painstak­ing­ly map­ping the spaces in which char­ac­ters in clas­sic nov­els such as V S Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace's The Drag­on Can't Dance were imag­ined, and the spaces where those char­ac­ters were writ­ten in­to ex­is­tence.

How­ev­er, un­like an ac­tu­al at­las, LiTTscapes does not mere­ly lo­cate places of im­por­tance, but con­tex­tu­alis­es them for read­ers. Ram­per­sad in­cludes more than 30 pages of guide­lines for LiT­Tours: de­tailed di­rec­tions for walk­ing and dri­ving tours based on lit­er­ary works. The book and the tours were launched on Au­gust 4 with a re­cep­tion at White­hall, re­ferred to in the chap­ter LiT­Ter­ary Hous­es as the fore­most of the Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en build­ings lin­ing the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah. Prob­a­bly the most en­dear­ing as­pect of LiTTscapes is the thor­ough­ness of the text, which does not fo­cus on­ly on stal­warts like No­bel lau­re­ates Naipaul and Derek Wal­cott, but on the some­times less well-known au­thor. Ram­per­sad's sec­tion on Car­ni­val, in the chap­ter FesTTscapes, cer­tain­ly in­cludes ex­cerpts from and analy­sis of Lovelace's Drag­on, but for the de­scrip­tion of the jab-jab she turns to Isa­iah James Bood­hoo's Be­tween Two Sea­sons. Ref­er­ences to the fan­cy sailor are sourced from the short sto­ries of Willi Chen and Seep­er­sad Naipaul. But it is Lovelace in the fi­nal analy­sis who is cred­it­ed with "the most pas­sion­ate and in­tense ef­fort at defin­ing Car­ni­val."

The Drag­on, one of the more ab­stract tour guides in­clud­ed in LiTTscapes, re­quires you to "feel Aldrick's tall­ness and pride as he con­tem­plates 'the guts of the peo­ple'" and to "drag your­self to the cor­ner of Cal­vary Hill and Ob­ser­va­to­ry Street" at the end of Car­ni­val. More con­crete guides di­rect read­ers to go to Wood­ford Square and lean against the wall like Lav­ern from Lawrence Scott's Witch­b­room, fol­lowed by a walk to Our La­dy of Sor­rows in the Laven­tille Hills. Ram­per­sad apt­ly char­ac­teris­es Laven­tille and the chal­lenge it pos­es to au­thors. "The hill is a metaphor. It is the ul­ti­mate ex­am­ple of life, the busi­ness of liv­ing, peo­ple be­ing that chal­lenges many a Trinida­di­an writer to cap­ture its essence... Earl Lovelace opens While Gods are Falling with a con­trast­ing (view) of the pover­ty and wealth of the city, as do vir­tu­al­ly all the writ­ers when (con­tem­plat­ing) the city from the hill or the hill from the city." Most like­ly this un­der­stand­ing of char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, in ad­di­tion to thor­ough­ness, is what led Ram­per­sad to in­clude the vil­lage shop and rumshop in the chap­ter on cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tions.

Yet, for a text at­tempt­ing to make con­crete some of the most no­table spaces of T&T's vast lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion, the ac­com­pa­ny­ing pho­tos did not seem to sub­merge the read­er in­to the spaces, and a high­er res­o­lu­tion might have helped some pho­tos. Still, LiTTscapes suc­cess­ful­ly char­ters a path to­wards deep­er un­der­stand­ing of not on­ly the lit­er­ary works that de­fine us, but al­so the au­thors and their mul­ti­fac­eted in­spi­ra­tion. In the fi­nal chap­ter, Glob­al Move­menTTs, Ram­per­sad al­ludes to the fact that maps are not on­ly for pin­point­ing your lo­cale, but dis­cov­er­ing how that lo­cale re­lates to the rest of the coun­try and the world. Ex­cerpts from writ­ers writ­ing away from home, such as Shani Mootoo and Ram­abai Es­pinet, demon­strate that their con­tri­bu­tion is just as vi­tal to the lo­cal imag­i­na­tion as those who re­main on the is­land. "The Trin­bag­o­ni­ans out of the wider di­as­po­ra of Lon­don, Toron­to, the USA, In­dia and Africa, com­plete and at the same time con­tin­ue the cir­cle and cy­cle of mi­gra­tions that char­ac­teris­es the progress of world civil­i­sa­tions". LiTTscapes is avail­able at Met­ro­pol­i­tan Book Sup­pli­ers.