Butterfly in the Wind.(Book Review)

Butterfly in the Wind. By Lakshmi Persaud. Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 2001. 120 pp. Textbook paperback, $14.95.

Lakshmi Persaud's debut novel, Butterfly in the Wind, fills a vacuum in the Caribbean literary tradition, as Persaud is among the first Caribbean women of East Indian descent to publish a novel. In many ways Persaud's novel is closely aligned to other works of fiction in the West Indian canon: Butterfly in the Wind is a novel of maturation and is at least partly autobiographical and thus reminiscent of novels such as Merle Collins's Angel and Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. Like her Indo-Caribbean male counterparts, Persaud engages with the specific experience of the East Indian Trinidadian in colonial and postcolonial Trinidad. Butterfly in the Wind also explores a number of recurring themes in Caribbean fiction: the creolization process, colonial education, the interface between tradition and modernity, and the special experience of the woman in an era of change. In this last area Persaud provides a compelling account of the special coming-of-age experience of the East Indian Trinidadian woman, with an accent on the …