Lakshmi Persaud September 1937 - 14 January 2024
We have just learned of the sad news of the death of Lakshmi Persaud on the 14th January, peacefully at her home in Mill Hill, London, surrounded by her children. She was 86.
Lakshmi was very close to Peepal Tree. She and her late husband, Vishnu, always went beyond the call of duty in being supportive, taking on the task of organising the launches of her books at venues we could not have afforded, taking a real interest in our personal lives, as when Hannah was in the midst of producing her own family, and occasionally chivvying us in a maternal, teacherly kind of way (she had been a geography teacher at Harrison College - Barbados’ most distinguished girl’s high school) to keep us up to scratch.
Our relationship goes back to 1988 when I met her and Vishnu at a conference organised by David Dabydeen at Warwick University on Indo-Caribbean history and culture. I was shyly offered a package of typed materials which became Lakshmi’s first semi-autobiographical novel, Butterfly in the Wind, which was published in 1990 and has now gone through six reprintings.
From that point on Lakshmi’s sense of herself as a writer with important things to say expanded rapidly, winning for herself many admirers for the quality of the writing, the challenge to thought and her ability to take what was close and intimate, like family and food, and explore those territories in ways that were both intellectually rewarding and sensually appealing.
Hers was an example of how to seize the time in the second half of her life with zest, hardwork and an increasing sense of what the novel could achieve. She was 53 when Butterfly in the Wind was published and 75 when her last novel Daughters of Empire came out in 2012.
After Butterfly in the Wind, came Sastra (1993) where she began to take further the issues of gender and the inequalities of women within a still patriarchal Indo-Caribbean culture, to portray with great inwardness the costs of a woman’s self-determination whilst still wanting to embrace a heritage of Indianness and how that heritage had been reshaped in the Caribbean. Sastra is a novel where she writes about a love marriage with tenderness but without sentimentality, but also introduces the theme of the fragility of life which echoes through her other novels.
In each there is an ambition to take the novel form beyond the single character linear shape of Butterfly in the Wind. For The Love of My Name (2000) where she takes on the only barely disguised collapse of the state of Guyana in the 1970s and 80s (with resonances of the contemporary collapses of Bosnia and Kosova) and at the individual level of moral responsibility asks how this can happen. It’s an adventurous novel that invents a country about to sink below the waves, tells the story through multiple voices, including the supreme leader’s autobiography and questions the Caribbean cultural creativity of masks and masking for its negative side, as a means of denying responsibility.
Her last novel, Daughters of Empire, is perhaps not so technically adventurous, but in telling the story of an Indo-Trinidadian family long settled in England it replicates the central figure’s maternal concern that her children’s lives have passed out of her control, by telling much of the novel in their voices. It is a richly sympathetic exploration of a Windrush story that focuses on a group which until recently has been given little attention.
There is so much more to say about Lakshmi’s work, and more will follow, but for now we wish to pass on the news to the many people who have enjoyed her work and record our sadness over her death, our condolences to her family and our love and respect for Lakshmi as a person we have been attached to for over thirty years.
