Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and Jayanti prepares for her own sati. Determined to apply the “godly might of English justice” and uphold a law banning the practice, an English doctor and magistrate muscle in to stop her. In an 11th-hour volte face, Jayanti, desiring life over the afterlife, allows herself to be saved. Triumphant, the magistrate suggests she become his mistress, but instead she opts to be shipped off to Trinidad. The island, she’s told, is a place where the shame of her choice will be forgotten.
Ever Since We Small, Celeste Mohammed’s second novel-in-stories, is a more cohesive work than Pleasantview, which won the Bocas prize for Caribbean literature in 2022. The opening chapter follows on from an academic introduction and Mohammed’s style is more reverent, less ballsy and humorous, than the warts-and-all portraits drawn in Pleasantview; but casting characters from the distant past often has that effect on novelists. The tone is appropriate, however; Mohammed here is the sober observer taking in the fate of women like Jayanti, who if they have choices at all, they are between bad and worse.
The novel then jumps forward in time and place. By the second chapter, Jayanti is long dead and her descendant, 13-year-old Shiva Gopaul, is struggling through adolescence in the Trinidadian town of Bagatelle in 1973. This part of the story is narrated by “we”, the omniscient bois – guardian of the forest that hides ganja fields, bootlegging stills and Black Power camps. “Behold we are bois. We’ve always existed and we were once everywhere. Now, although carved from the southern continent and pushed back to the fringes of this island, still we see and listen and know.”
Shiva, however, knows little. He only has his mother, That Town Woman, to love – “the only time he seems happy, eats well, and goes to school is when she’s here,” bois observes. Lall, Shiva’s father, is bad, but he is often all Shiva has, as his mother frequently abandons him. The Gopauls are ethnically in the minority in Bagatelle, though Shiva’s mother is excluded not for her origins but for selling her body in town. One day Lall comes home with a bagged cage hiding the 12in-tall creature Godfrey, who briefly becomes Shiva’s “new secret friend”. With the arrival of Godfrey, the reader is being ordered to zip up their disbelief in a bag and throw it out to sea. When Shiva, in a panic, does exactly that to Godfrey, surprising even bois, he is consumed by the fear of being cursed.
There is a lot to take in here, but the disorientation is deliberate. The gear changes, panned-out shots, zooming in on intricate details, shifting of points of view; the jump-cuts in time, the alternate points of narration, the twangs and blends of multiple creole tongues, some translated, some not – all this flies in the face of creative writing guidance, and yet it works. Mohammed breaks the reader in; requires them to activate their imagination, to figure it out for themselves. There’s an intelligence and pride in Mohammed’s voice that refuses to preach, prettify or patronise. Chapter by chapter she builds a multilayered history of an island and its people through the stories of the Gopaul family, who are splintered and then drawn back to each other like filings to a magnet.
Ever Since We Small is deft, confident and big-hearted. Women curse, guide and heal, while love misleads, empowers and is satisfyingly capable of surmounting if not all, then at least a lot. A porous divide separates the real and the imagined. The novel’s world includes mystical figures such as Godfrey – saapins, diablesses and soucouyants – but it also has women making a living rubbing clients’ stomachs on YouTube channels.
As the book progresses, Mohammed’s formidable skills become increasingly apparent. The richness of creole permeates the palimpsest of cultures; the more Mohammed’s characters speak, the more insight one has into their thoughts, the more engaging, remarkable and downright funny so many of them are.
• Ever Since We Small by Celeste Mohammed is published by Jacaranda (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
