Ramabai Espinet

Ramabai Espinet (born 1948, San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago) is a writer and teacher. She lives in Toronto and teaches English at Seneca College. Quotes in Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Global Diasporas republished in Shifting Homelands, travelling identities: writers of the Caribbean diaspora edited by Jasbir Jain & Supriya Agarwal (2009) I think my main interests are to enlarge the horizon of the reader, but also to delight, to entertain and to educate. I would be thrilled if my language moves the reader into becoming one with the rhythm of my text...That's my purpose, to make the rhythm right and to have the reader taken up into the rhythm. Trinidad is such a crossroads of the Caribbean. At any given moment there are several cross-currents intersecting in that small island place - downwards from the north through the archipelago, southwards to Venezuela and beyond, outwards to North America and Europe, and then returning home to bring all of this to the Trini scene. An exciting place - full of failed effort, it is true, but also, so full of beauty and of possibility. Disparate and colliding identities are intrinsic to any home I have ever known. One cannot afford to be complacent. But there is too a very real sense of belonging and wherever I am, I recognise that belongingness instantly. Place does not matter to me because I know that things change constantly. For me, 'home' is a moveable shack on a beach, a moveable feast. I work as an educator/knowledge worker and this means that I am actively involved in the large human project of 'understanding' at all levels all the time. I don't know how this fits with the desire to convey the history of Indo-Caribbon settlement except that this area is still so underdeveloped untold, ill-understood. And maybe this novel is a small step in pushing this understanding forward in Talk Yuh Talk (2001) full title Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets edited by Kwame Dawes It is impossible to be alive and have nothing. Different works emerge differently and I pay no real attention to the external process. Internally I think there is an identifiable process which can be captured by one word: obsession. The thought, the line, the image, the one word: whatever is the germ of that particular poem stays and stays until it reaches its needed form on the page. In writing (poetry, fiction, plays, etc.) I am aware of functioning as an Indian woman from the Caribbean in dialogue with the world. The world may choose to ignore that dialogue; all the same this is what I am doing. And at a primal level, I and my kind (Indo-Caribbean women) are prohibited by the full weight of patriarchal law and authority from having dialogue with the world outside the home. Opening our mouths and saying our words, breaking the cycle of the "unknowable," seems to me right now an essential tool for our survival, on our own terms, and for that of our daughters and granddaughters. We can only become stronger as we build upon each other's experiences and strengthen that repository of woman-knowledge (also community-knowledge) of which we are the rightful inheritors. Who is the female artist functioning in a community such as ours? She speaks but her speaking drives her into a place of otherness when she speaks her truth. She is an outsider. She is subject to unbearable strain, from within and without, and she functions largely without supports. Now more Indo-Caribbean women are beginning to speak "themselves." There are poets such as Mahadai Das, Shana Yardan, Niala Maharaj, Asha Radjkoemar, Chitra Gajadin. They are writing themselves out of the family walls-breaking them down so that they can stare fully, unveiled, at the world outside. The act of writing calls for breaking faith with service-family service. Beginning the difficult task of consolidating a self-outside of family servitude. Quotes about A writer as necessary as Ramabai Espinet should be treasured by us for her unique voice and the unique world she shares with us. Jamaica Kincaid, used as blurb for The swinging bridge External links Asian Heritage in Canada from Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries Goodreads page Category:1948 births Category:Living people Category:Non-fiction authors from Trinidad and Tobago Category:Novelists from Trinidad and Tobago Category:Poets from Trinidad and Tobago Category:Women authors from Trinidad and Tobago Category:Women born in the 1940s