Review by New York Times Review
WHEN KRYSTAL SITALS grandfather Shiva Singh suffers a cerebral hemorrhage, her grandmother Rebecca, after 53 years of marriage, reacts with calm indifference. Sitai, who reveres her tall, strong and generous grandfather, with his white hair and "skin the color of a sapphire sky," spends much of her suspenseful memoir, "Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad," elucidating this response. With the family patriarch debilitated, Sital's grandmother and her mother are safe for the first time, able to share their secrets with Sitai, who listens, her blood pumping to a "chant I cannot forget." These vivid memories attack us as they do her, "in waves." Sitai paints a credible and complex portrait of this illiterate, psychopathic man, a landowner of wealth and stature in rural Trinidad, a Hindu who practices his religion at Divali and carries a key to his strongbox at all times. Even his rare gifts to one or the other of his children - a shiny new bicycle for his young daughter Arya, the author's mother, who does not know how to ride, and a car for the eldest boy - cause jealousy and fury. He uses a whip soaked in gasoline to beat his wife and takes pleasure in her pain: "His pencil-thin lips were curved upward in a smile." In scene after scene, Sitai portrays his violent rage, his complete indifference to the suffering of his wife and six children, whom he treats as slaves, with no rights or means of protection. From a young age, Arya and her siblings are forced to slaughter and pluck chickens, tether goats and carry heavy branches on their heads before leaving for school in the early morning, walking a mile and a half barefoot. This brutality is widespread in Singh's community, from the teachers who use guava whips and water-soaked leather belts to punish, to the children who insult one another viciously: "Yuh nasty lil coolie," the girls scream at Arya - along with much worse. Education, the only way out of poverty, ends when exhausted students fail their exams. "Yuh wahn im dead eh?" one of Rebecca's children accuses her when she hesitates to authorize the surgery that might prolong her husband's life. "Sign de damn papahwerk." Discovering that he has fathered an illegitimate son, Rebecca tells her children: "Bite im. Beat im up." They do, savagely. The Trinidad depicted here is rife with prejudice and hate. Hostility persists between the Africans, brought as slaves, and the Indians, who arrived as indentured servants. Those of mixed race are called "mulatto," "dougla" and "cocopanyol" - "the words are hissed and spat at my family: My grandmother is mixed, my Indian grandfather is not." This is not the Trinidad of V. S. Naipaul, rendered with elegant sentences and brilliant introspection, but, rather, a place where women's and children's lives are held in thrall by cruel men. Sitai captures the island's lushness, its strong aromas of curry, its extreme heat and cool ocean, and, above all, its sounds - the local dialect, liberally sprinkled through the book, gives a flavor of the lives of these people reduced by extreme poverty and hard work to "an animal viciousness." Perhaps the most satisfying moment comes when Arya, having been beaten by her policeman husband, Dharmendra, as she has been by her father, finally turns on him: "Arya tightened her grip around the wood. Behind Dharmendra now, she raised it high over her head and in one sweep of strength clapped it on his back." She tells him, "Nevah ... in yuh life ... hit meh again," and he does not. One reads Sital's story appalled and moved by the suffering of these indomitable women - including Sitai herself, raised by Arya in cramped homes in New Jersey - as they valiantly struggle. Only in the kitchen, where they cook their delicious dishes, can they reign supreme and reveal their secrets. A reader can only applaud the author who has so skillfully preserved them in such loving, precise detail. ? This is a place where women's and children's lives Eire held in thrall by cruel men. sheila KOHLER'S most recent book is "Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Sital's evocative first book focuses on the lives of her mother, Arya, and her maternal grandmother, Rebecca. Both expansive and distilled, it is also transporting in its depiction of Sital's ancestral island home in its vibrancy, beauty, and blight. With her grandfather nearing death in a hospital in New Jersey, where most of the family now lives, Sital observes a disconnection between Rebecca's seeming indifference and Arya's and her siblings' buzzing worries for his fate. Sital, then a student, implored Arya for the full story; after long days of work and hospital visits, Arya talked, and Sital wrote. Recreating her foremothers' lives in episodes ranging from ordinary to painfully intense, with dialogue in patois, Sital's tribute is staggering. Most piercingly, she relays with a detachment that reads like love the ways these women were fiercely determined to escape the formidable hardships of their past, foremost for the sake of their children, yet were all but doomed to repeat them. Sital's bracing, loving blend of memoir and family history is not to be missed.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Sital, a New Jersey-based writer originally from Trinidad, tells the story of her family from the perspective of three women: her mother, her grandmother, and herself. In 2006, Sital's grandfather Shiva-a successful Trinidadian landowner and a man with whom she has always shared a special connection-falls into a coma. Her grandmother Rebecca's nonchalant reaction prompts Sital to start a conversation with her mother, Arya, and later, Rebecca. As she listens to Arya and Rebecca tell their stories, Sital learns that the grandfather she adores has a history of perpetrating unspeakable violence against his wife and children. In this captivating memoir, the author gracefully, honestly, and empathetically begins to reconcile her mother and grandmother's accounts of Shiva with her own pleasant memories of him, while weaving in a thoughtful analysis of how patriarchal culture limited her mother's and grandmother's choices in life. VERDICT An absorbing, beautifully crafted memoir for all readers.-Molly Hone, Pequannock Twp. P.L., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A freelance journalist (New York Times Magazine, Salon, etc.) debuts with a wrenching, deeply personal memoir about the lives of three generations of women in Trinidad and Tobago.Any romantic, sunny notions about Caribbean island life vanish quickly in this stark account of a place where cultures clash, men dominate, and women often suffer. The author's own story is generally in the background; instead, she focuses on the wretched early lives of her grandmother and mother, both of whom, especially the grandmother, had to deal with husbands so physically abusive that the descriptions, which seem almost surreal at times, become like blows themselves. Miscarriages ensued in some cases. In a few instances, the women lashed backthere's a beating of a man with a board and a chokingbut mostly it's men punching and women bleeding. Sital also provides horrendously eye-opening stories about class and cultural discrimination and abuse, in daily life and especially in the schools the women attended. What they had to endure is almost beyond belief, and the author captures it all. The women eventually escaped to the United States, where they forged new, more hopeful futures and also served caretaking roles for the head abuser himself, the grandfather, whose several brain surgeries put him at the mercy of the very women he'd dominated. Tears were rare as he sank toward his death. The author moves us back and forthone woman's story to another, one time period to anotherand she records the dialogue in dialect, so readers should slow down to take it all in. At times, it is astonishing to read the volume of specific detail from these women's lives: it appears that punches and kicks carry with them the details of awful words and deeds, all of which are recorded in bruises visible and invisible.A powerful, disturbing narrative in which pain flows out from the page, drenching readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
