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.

As a video producer, multimedia artist, painter and writer, Mootoo has come to grapple with some of the many themes in diasporic Caribbean work – those of identity, authenticity, hybridity and change – many resulting from her own experience of being a “multiple migrant”.

Of Indo-Caribbean ancestry, Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Trinidad. At the age of 19, she moved to Canada, and has spent time in Vancouver and London, currently calling Calgary her home. As she says about her own identity, “I’m not Indian… I don’t know what I am. I grew up in an island within a family of Indian decent… I lived in Vancouver for more than half my life and every year was about the need to go somewhere else.”

And that may be why, unlike many storytellers from the Caribbean who are searching for their 'origin stories' Mootoo's writing and artistic life has unsettled the easy narratives of some Caribbean storytelling. She says, "The reason I make my art is not to complain that I don’t fit in – but don’t try to fit me anywhere – I’m comfortable being uncomfortable."

"In Trinidad I couldn’t step out of my Indian family and still be myself – I would have to go somewhere else for that identity as an individual. Also, in Canada one has a place to run to and you can actually exist like you are on an island because everyone around you doesn’t know you or ask about your background."

Mootoo's resume is long and diverse. Her video work includes English Lesson (1991), The Wild Women in the Woods (1993), Guerita and Prietita (1995) and View (2000) among many others. Her photo and painted artwork have been showcased in exhibitions internationally. She has recently finished her second novel, soon to be released.

Her written work, like her life, challenges the borders and boundaries of the self, reworking old and lifeless tropes of Caribbean identity, gender and sexuality. Her collection of short fiction, Out on Main Street, released in 1993 “exposes the uncertainty of the hybrid individual”, where lines of what it means to be “Indian”, “woman” “lesbian” all become blurred.

One story that showcases this theme shares the title of the collection and revolves around two Indo-lesbians browsing an Indo market in Vancouver. The narrator, a butch lesbian, recounts the story of trying to purchase sweets by using Indo-Trinidadian words, that have no resonance with the “main street” Indians in the market. As she brings to light the ways in which language, culture and identity have gone through a process of displacement from their supposed “origin”, those in the market try to understand both women in a narrow understanding of “Indian-ness”. The tale is a witty and funny one, as Motooo focuses on the clash of diasporic identities, where ideas of sexuality and culture are not always so linear or so stable.

Challenging the ever existing tropes of “Indo Caribbean womanhood”, Mootoo comments that she insists on occupying the uncomfortable space: “I always want the freedom to imagine who I want to be, where I want to be, might be or re-invent myself.”

Reinvention, it seems, is also a major theme in her 1997 novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Once again unsettling fixed notions of gender and sexuality, Mootoo's work is “bold and lyrical, sensual and highly charged...Cereus Blooms at Night is layered with unforgettable scenes of a world where love and treachery collide.” The novel is one that can not be summed up in a few words, and begs you to pick it up, to experience the compelling and imaginative story that Mootoo creates.

Although highly accomplished, Mootoo continues to produce and seek change, in herself and her work. “I don’t only want to be a Trinidadian woman - I want to be everything that is possible for me to be… That means having a profession I want, writing about what I want. Having an opinion or questioning things is not a sign of rebellion,” she says.

"Finding out who you are is a painful process. But I don’t know where this feeling to always find yourself and identity comes from. One other reason could be that one feels that one can be better than what you are – that you can better your last work...I’m not a writer until I have written seven books."

Enjoy these video clips, as CaribbeanTales catches up with Mootoo, to find out about her passion for food, for writing and her comfort in the uncomfortable.

CaribbeanTales chats with him about his work and more…

Could you tell us a bit about your background and growing up in St. Kitts and Leeds?

I was born in St. Kitts, but I did not grow up there. I lived there for the first few months of my life, and then my parents migrated to England. I grew up in Leeds in the north of England, in a predominantly white working class environment. I had contact with the Caribbean community in so much as I had cousins, aunts and uncles there, but where we geographically lived, and where I therefore went to school, was pretty much white English.

What does Europe, especially England where you grew up, mean to you today?

I read the English newspapers every day, which is probably the best answer I can give to this question. In other words, I remain interested and connected. Similarly, I am interested in what is happening in Europe, particularly in those countries with a colonial history such as France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, etc. countries who are going through similar problems of coping with a multicultural population in the wake of decolonization and continued migration.

When did you start writing? How did you get into writing?

I started to write at school, but I had no notion of wanting to become a writer. It was only when I was a year or so away from leaving university that it occurred to me that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I had no experience of writing – had attended no writing workshops or anything. I therefore just sat down and started to write, and I was pretty disciplined about sending out my work to publishers and magazines. It all came back to me ‘rejected’ but at least I felt as though I was in the game in some respects. Eventually, a theatre company in Sheffield accepted a play that I had written and I was able to feel as though I was ‘in the game.’

What are the pleasures, for you, in writing fiction?

The greatest pleasure in writing fiction is being able to work at my own pace in isolation. Finding the right word to place in the right place in the sentence is satisfying. As is the feeling of relief when the characters begin to finally discover their own voices.

How has your extensive traveling around the globe influenced your writing?

I have been very, very fortunate to have been able to travel quite extensively since my twenties. Travelling frequently to Africa and Asia in particular has enabled me to see Britain and Europe in a broader context. Travelling constantly to the Caribbean has enabled me to see myself through a lens that Britain could, or would, never provide me with.

Who or what have been your writing influences?

I have no one influence. Reading assiduously as a teenager has been a great influence. I loved Pasternak, Hardy, Solzhenitsyn; large narratives in which one could get lost and discover new worlds and people. I also loved the psychological acuity and dramatic skill of Ibsen and Tennessee Williams in particular. And I discovered Richard Wright and James Baldwin at an important time in my life. These days I still read for pleasure but I have quite an eclectic reading list.

In what ways has your Caribbean heritage impacted your writing, if at all?

My Caribbean heritage has been important in that it provided me with an alternative view of looking at the world. The socio-cultural and racial fusion, and confusion, of the Caribbean seems to me to better reflect the reality of the real world – as opposed to the relative ‘narrowness’ of the view of the world as seen from the USA or Europe. I’m happy to explore and absorb this alternative view and feed it into my writing.

Do you consider yourself a storyteller? If so, what stories do you tell?

At the most fundamental level this is what I do. I tell stories, some of which are true.

At Caribbean Tales, we focus on the importance of reclaiming personal histories especially through the genre of storytelling and oral history. Does this resonate with you and within your work?

I don’t have any oral storytelling history in my family – or none that I am aware of. Reclaiming personal history does strike a chord with me; this is what so much writing of the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora seems to focus on.

How did you hear about Caribbean Tales and what do you think is the value of such a project?

I heard about it through the internet. And of course it’s valuable. Anything that seeks to place value on the imagination is, in these days of reality television and computer games, important.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m always working on things that I never talk about! Eventually what I do becomes public, and no longer ‘owned’ by me. While I own it I keep it close to my chest.