There are reasons no one has attempted a full-scale fictional treatment of the 1990 coup, and Monique Roffey knows them better than most people. House of Ashes, her fifth novel, explores the unsteady terrain of a failed coup d'�tat. While the novel is set on the invented island of Sans Amen, no Trinidadian could mistake it for any other island but our own, thinly veiled and symbolically represented."This was a story I tried to talk myself out of writing for at least a year," says Roffey, who launched House of Ashes at Paper Based Bookshop on October 18. In the end, however, the irresistible lure of the forbidden drew her back to the page. The bloody uncertainty and conspiracy of the 1990 Red House siege, she felt, was a story worth multiple risks to portray in prose.
Roffey takes a grim view of the lingering and persistent effects of the coup's aftermath. "It's a mind-boggling tale of endemic corruption that has beset and beleaguered Trinidad for two decades," she says. The fact that due process seems to have escaped many parts of post-coup inquiry has left our nation with a sort of "compound despair that seeps into everything we do, and fight against," she added. Wayne Kublalsingh's protracted hunger strike wasn't far from her mind–Roffey views it as an act of resistance that has its roots in a disenfranchised post-coup societal malaise.
Bravery, coupled with an unflinching regard to her subject matter, aren't new tenets of Roffey's work: for her 2012 novel, Archipelago, she undertook a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, largely conducted by solitary sea travel in treacherous waters. Roffey's process of immersion in writing House of Ashes was arguably less physically demanding, but not inferior in intensity. The bastion of her research was anecdotal, taking the form of interviews with people who lived through the coup's six-day saga, including members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen.Talking to individuals from within the Jamaat, she reflected, was a sobering experience. She remembers that one such discussion, with a perpetrating member of the coup, revealed his "palpable sense of regret and error, made as a much younger man." Roffey's considerable archives of testimony, as well as her analysis of the Commission of Enquiry's report on the coup, led her to conclude that the insurgency was destined to fail. It was "a deeply flawed martyr plan," she says, "made on too many assumptions."
Seminal in her research was veteran journalist Raoul Pantin's nonfiction account of the coup, Days of Wrath. Roffey recollects the startling wake-up call of reading Days of Wrath on a beach in Greece, and being stunned into monosyllabic "wows" at the revelatory weight of Pantin's reportage. Noting that the book was only published in 2007, 17 years after the fact, Roffey says grimly that this points to the deep post-traumatic scars that the coup has left, particularly in the memories of those who endured the Red House siege.House of Ashes is dedicated to both Pantin and T&T Guardian columnist Ira Mathur, described by Roffey as intrepid journalists who have been in the vanguard of reporting history in the making. "While Raoul was on the inside, taken hostage, Ira was on the outside, covering the story," Roffey says, visibly brimming with admiration. She perceives them as friends, allies, and people who have supported her in the oft-troubling mission of writing the novel.
In the wake of publishing and promoting House of Ashes, does Roffey still retain fears for her safety? Admittedly, yes, says the writer, though she isn't necessarily living in anticipation of violent reprisals. "I'd love to sit and talk with Abu Bakr," she says, listing him as an interview subject who was nigh-impossible to track down during the research process for House of Ashes. Roffey never names Bakr specifically as the charismatic, deeply flawed Leader of the novel's insurrection, and she avoids demonising so-called villains of the fictional and real coup alike. "These men...are a product of Trinidadian society, of Caribbean society," she says, explaining, "they didn't get that way by themselves. We are all culpable, to different degrees."Critical and commercial success have marked Roffey's career in writing thus far.
Her books, originally published with Simon & Schuster UK, have been reissued in the United States, and translated for reading audiences in Brazil, Norway, Turkey, and Poland. Roffey joined past winners Derek Walcott and Earl Lovelace in 2013 when Archipelago was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Such acts of recognition, particularly those presented in a local and regional context, fill the writer with "gratitude and humility." "It's important for me to be here, and to write here," says Roffey of her relationship with Trinidad, where she spends roughly half her time, allotting the remaining moiety to her life in the United Kingdom. "The way in which my books are perceived in Trinidad is perfect to me, in a very relevant way," she says. "Even the direst of local criticisms, and even loathing, are both welcome and necessary for my work." Despite pronounced efforts within the regional literary community that have questioned her agency, and her right to tell certain stories, Roffey is adamant about her relationship to T&T."I am a Trinidadian writer, and I do not write nostalgically," she declares, adding that "the blanket critique that I don't really live here doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It might have done ten years ago, but no longer."
Roffey dismisses labelling as definitive seals upon her writing status: "You can call me a female writer; a sex writer; a European-based writer: but these are shelving tactics for people who don't have a great imagination, or tools for the publishing industry." In the final analysis, whether it comes to carnivals or coups, she isn't worried that her work will be misinterpreted by reading audiences at home, saying that "Caribbean people are the most astute readers of Caribbean fiction and poetry, of our own lives."
