The Swinging Bridge

We revisit Ramabai Espinet, our Storyteller of the Month

By Colin Rickards | Posted: March 29, 2005

Wetmore Hall at the University of Toronto's New College, reverberated with the sound of tassa drums, Caribbean voices and laughter. The savoury scent of Indo-Caribbean cuisine wafted as writer Ramabai Espinet and publisher HarperCollins gave her novel The Swinging Bridge a joyous send-off.

Trinidad-born Espinet is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto where she teaches Caribbean Studies and Women's Studies, and is involved in a South Asian Studies program. She is also a full Professor of English at Toronto's Seneca College.

Ramabai Espinet already has a solid body of published literary work, but The Swinging Bridge (HarperFLAMINGOCanada) is her first novel. Set largely in Trinidad as well as in Montreal and Toronto, it tells how Mona travels to San Fernando to oversee the re-purchasing of some family land. The trip brings back a flood of childhood, half-forgotten memories - good, bad and some distinctly ugly - and also makes Mona privy to a number of family "secrets" and petty scandals. Interacting with people from her childhood, she finds the answers, some of them totally surprising, to many questions which had long puzzled her and she is fascinated by vaguely-recalled references to her great-grandmother.

Only a shadowy figure in Mona's girlhood, great-grandmother Gainder had come from India as an indentured labourer in 1879. Mona is determined to learn more about her. In the course of doing so, largely from little references in her grandmother's notebooks and scraps of conversations, which fill in pieces of the jigsaw, she gains some understanding of Gainder and her life.

Espinet was born in San Fernando and attended Naparima College before coming to Canada more than 25 years ago. Working to pay for her education in the 1970s she decided to become a taxi driver. "I was one of the first two women - the other was a Native Canadian – to take the Ministry of Transport's taxi-driving course," she says. "We called it 'Cab College' and I drove for Metro, mostly at weekends, for about a year. It was a way of getting to know the city - and an education about the human side of things."

Other jobs, as she worked towards her first degree, included cocktail waitress, sorter with Canada Post, shipper, ace sandwich-maker and proof-reader. She went on to earn a Doctorate in Post-Colonial Literature. Espinet's first four books were all published in Toronto by Sister Vision Press a decade and more ago, beginning with her editing Creation Fire, a collection of poetry by Caribbean women, in 1990.

The following year Sister Vision published a collection of Espinet's own poetry, under the title Nuclear Seasons, and then two children's books, The Princess Of Spadina in 1992 and Ninja’s Carnival in 1993.

A performance piece called "Indian Robber Talk" has been staged in Toronto in several festivals and a poem called "Shay's Robber Talk" formed the Afterword in Sherene Razack's Looking White People In The Eye, which, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1998.

Espinet also worked with a women's collective to write and produce a play called "Beyond the Kali Pani," about Indian women and indentureship in the Caribbean. Between 1992 and 1996 she wrote a "Focus on Women" column for the fortnightly community newspaper INDO-CARIBBEAN WORLD and still contributes essays and commentaries. Latterly, she worked as a librarian, has judged Calypso contests and regularly ‘plays mas' at Caribana.

A gourmet cook, Espinet wrote an authoritative article on Indo-Caribbean cuisine and its cultural importance in THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW in 1993. She is also something of an authority on horse-racing. "I love it, though I don't often go to the track these days." Espinet said. "I enjoy the mathematical methods of calculating how horses ran in the past and will run in the future, and how they look and feel on a particular day. I consider this kind of forecasting to be an art form in its own right."

The Swinging Bridge is a powerful and evocative novel which will strike many chords with Indo-Caribbean readers and open up a new world for other readers. It has been highly praised by established Caribbean literary icons. Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid has called it "…beautiful, luminous and an utter pleasure to read." While George Lamming of Barbados describes it as "…an extraordinary achievement in the exercise of remembering."

Is she working on a second one, I asked Espinet? "Oh, yes!" she said - and smiled enigmatically.

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