We're delighted to have Celeste Mohammed joining us for an event on the 23rd of October at 7pm to celebrate the release of 'Ever Since We Small'!Celeste will be in conversation with Emily Zobel Marshall.Ever Since We Small is a family saga which covers a sweeping landscape from the days of the British Raj in India, to multicultural modern Trinidad. Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavours of Trinidad kriol, the book follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, after her decision to become a girmitiya, anindentured labourer in the Caribbean. Jayanti’s grandson, Lall Gopaul, seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life. His son, Shiva, isforced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache follows for their three children - Anand, Nadya and Abby - who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example. Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls’ inheritance of pain into a “generation of gold” requires.
Celeste Mohammed has been a lawyer since 2001 but she has been telling stories all her life. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, in 2016, she graduated from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction). Celeste's goal is to dispel all myths about island-life and island-people, and to showcase the musicality and resonance of Trinidadian creole (kriol).
Emily Zobel Marshall is a Poet, Activist and Professor of French-Caribbean and British heritage and grew up in North Wales. She is Professor in Postcolonial Literature at Leeds Beckett University and her research specialisms are the cultures and literatures of the African Diaspora, with a focus on the folkloric trickster figure and Caribbean carnival cultures, and she is widely published in these fields.
