No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo ‘There aren’t any rules for writing in Trinidadian Creole English. Whether or not you wish to use elisions, or spell each word phonetically is up to you. School discouraged you from writing in such a way, so you received no guidance there. I imagine embedded in each young Caribbean writer is a sliding scale for dialect. On the left there’s “Total Tonal Authenticity” and on the right is “I’m Terrified British and American Readers Will be Alienated”. Most may figure to settle for somewhere in the middle. But if Sonny Ladoo had such a scale, he wasn’t afraid to slide his all the way to the left for No Pain Like This Body.
‘This novella focuses on an impoverished Hindu family in a rice-growing community during heavy rains and floods. I’m a descendant from such a family. The confident use of dialect in the book is identical to what I would have heard from my grandparents. It mayand what it means when someone has been
