Love After Love

I loved this read. The island patois of Trinidad quickly becomes familiar and intimate, it feels as if this story could be told in no other way. It's been awhile since I felt so much love for a collection of literary characters and was as devastated by their various trials. Betty Ramdin, newly a single parent after the death of her abusive husband, her son Solo finding his way in the world and Mr. Chetan, the boarder who enters into a platonic partnership with Betty to raise and give a home to Solo.

Persaud excavates a rich mine of feeling here without dissolving into soap opera parody despite wild emotional climaxes. To distill this plot into its individual beats you could be excused for dismissing it as a juicy telenovela but there is so much here at its heart. There is the struggle against loneliness, bigotry, prejudice and our past mistakes while forging a path forward against it all. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Love After Love (from the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.