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Friday, February 28, 2025

GML’s Ryan Bachoo launches first novel

by

GEISHA KOWLESSAR-ALONZO
39 days ago
20250120

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

In his first book, which he ded­i­cat­ed to his par­ents, jour­nal­ist Ryan Ba­choo tells the poignant sto­ry of Tar, a teenag­er work­ing in the cane fields along­side wise and in­flu­en­tial Un­cle Sun­dar as ra­dio opens their ears to glob­al events through the BBC World Ser­vice.

As Un­cle Sun­dar in­stils in Tar the de­ter­mi­na­tion to es­cape the grip of pover­ty and sys­temic racism, the nov­el takes read­ers on a pow­er­ful jour­ney of hope, am­bi­tion, and iden­ti­ty, with Tar set­ting his sights on New York or Lon­don.

Through Tar’s eyes, Ba­choo mas­ter­ful­ly con­fronts is­sues of racism, clas­sism and so­ci­etal di­vides, paint­ing a vivid pic­ture of life and strug­gles in 1970s Trinidad while ex­plor­ing the uni­ver­sal themes of growth and self-dis­cov­ery.

At the launch at Hayes Court in Port-of-Spain on Sat­ur­day, Ba­choo de­tailed the gen­e­sis of his book, re­veal­ing that it came “pure­ly out of his love for lit­er­a­ture” and was in­spired by the works of cel­e­brat­ed Caribbean au­thors like VS Naipaul and Samuel Selvon.

“In their books, I saw in my vil­lage those very char­ac­ters and all of us from the Caribbean . . . all our is­lands have that sim­i­lar­i­ty. Char­ac­ters you can put in a book or char­ac­ters you can put in a play,” he said.

“I saw a sto­ry in my own town, my own vil­lage. I saw a sto­ry in my own peo­ple and I said to my­self some­time around 2007/2008, ‘Dammit this place would be wast­ed. My life would be wast­ed if I didn’t put this in­to a book be­cause such rich con­tent must go in­to a book.”

He set about writ­ing his nov­el in 2009 “not re­al­ly know­ing how it would end or how long it would take.”

It took Ba­choo five years to com­plete the first draft as the jour­ney was not with­out chal­lenges.

“When the first draft was done in 2014 I called a copy ed­i­tor who said to me, “Okay, that would be $10,000 to copy ed­it it.’ I was just a free­lancer at CNC3 strug­gling to get from Princes Town to Port-of-Spain every day on the salary I was work­ing for,” Ba­choo said.

He put the book down for nine years due to that cost and al­so won­dered whether his work was “good enough.” How­ev­er, things took a turn in 2023.

“This book came back to me in the form of a Mi­crosoft Word doc­u­ment that I had saved on my lap­top. I said, ‘Let me at least get an ed­i­tor to at least hear what they had to say.’ I was pre­pared for the worst,” Ba­choo said.

How­ev­er, his hard work and ded­i­ca­tion, along with the in­valu­able ad­vice giv­en to him along the way by var­i­ous men­tors paid off.

In be­tween the first and sec­ond drafts, there were fun­da­men­tal changes in his writ­ing style, as well as per­son­al growth and how he viewed his life and fam­i­ly.

“This was the way I made not on­ly my­self but al­so my par­ents im­mor­tal. Books, good books, live on for gen­er­a­tions and this is my con­tri­bu­tion in the hope that when I move on and when my par­ents move on this book can still be on shelves in a way that makes not on­ly my­self but my par­ents im­mor­tal,” Ba­choo said.


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