Trinidad and Tobago / All works
Novel
The Jumbie Bird
Ismith Khan · 1961
Synopsis
In Port of Spain, around Woodford Square, the novel follows three generations of a Muslim Indo-Trinidadian family. Kale Khan, the grandfather, a Pathan who came as a free man, a jeweller and a stick-fighting champion, took part in the Hosay uprising of 1884; grown old, he dreams of returning to India and counts on the arrival of an Indian commissioner. His son Rahim, born in Trinidad, feels bound to no land, and the grandson Jamini grows up admiring his forebear. The cry of the jumbie bird, a bird of ill omen, runs through the narrative.
Context
The novel appeared in London in 1961, from MacGibbon & Kee, on the eve of independence. It is partly autobiographical: the author, like Jamini, grew up on Woodford Square and had a Pathan grandfather named Kale Khan. Critics read in it the passage from an East Indian identity to a West Indian one, and Roydon Salick makes the author the novelist of Port of Spain par excellence. It was translated into French by Carl de Souza in 2001.
Who it is for
For reading a great Indo-Caribbean novel on exile and rootedness, available in French.
Prizes and reception
Caribbean Beat hails it as a finely built novel; it remains the best known of the author's books.
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