The Swinging Bridge

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Ramabai Espinet is a Trinidad-born poet, critic, academic, and editor
who has lived in Canada for the past 25 years. Her debut novel is set in
contemporary Montreal, Toronto, and Trinidad, but it has its root in
19th-century India, home of the abandoned Brahmin widows.

During the first half of the 20th century, many poor East Indian
immigrants sought to make a living in the cane fields of Trinidad under
the colonial English masters. The island’s independence in the 1960s
brought racial, political, and economic problems, resulting in another
displacement for the East Indian émigrés. Some, like the protagonists
of this novel, settled in Canada.

A professional living in Montreal, the heroine, Mona, sees herself as
the steady centre of her family’s stormy life. She must deal with her
aging, unhappy parents in Toronto and the revelation that her beloved
brother Kello is dying of AIDS. In memory and in narrative, she revisits
the family home in Trinidad where she is reunited with her spirited
cousin Bess and learns to come to terms with her Indian past, her
Caribbean upbringing, and her Canadian present.

This beautifully written novel captures the spirit of exile and
displacement of emigrant experience. Espinet has a sharp eye and a keen
ear for the sights, sounds, and smells of her native island. Her lyrical
prose captures the rhythms and colourful speech of her Trinidadian past.
Notwithstanding the author’s firm grasp of local and national
concerns, The Swinging Bridge transcends the purely regional to comment
on the universal problems of the human condition.