Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

it’s equipped him with ways to think more capably
and clearly about his writing. Some of the ecological
detail in his Commonwealth prizewinning
short story, “Passage”, was lifted directly from his
degree, from his own walks on forest trails.
“
Passage” is a remarkable story on many
fronts. Told from the perspective of
a dedicated forester who goes on an
unlikely mountainous quest in Trinidad’s Northern
Range, it simultaneously suggests a landscape
victimised by the exploits of humans, alongside a
world in which nature always, ruthlessly, has the
final say. Hosein’s narrative was praised for its use
of the demotic. Hosein himself seems bemused
by the doggedness of this particular plaudit from
non-Caribbean readers, critics, and publicists: it
is, after all, how we people have been writing for
generations, he says. It’s telling, he points out, of
Hosein speaks at length about the
handsome list of rejections he’s earned
since starting to write. “No matter how
good your writing is, you have to have a plan
. . . a scheme”
how woefully under-read the literary metropolis
remains in a range of Caribbean voices, despite
recent bookish success emanating from our region.
This isn’t Hosein’s first rodeo with the
Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He’s entered six
times, from 2013 to 2018. In 2015, his story “The
King of Settlement 4” won the regional arm of the
prize. The first story he ever entered, “The Monkey
Trap”, was anthologised in Pepperpot: Best New
Stories from the Caribbean, the debut publication
of Peekash Press. Hosein, who speaks at length
about the handsome list of rejections he’s earned
since starting to write, quantifies these six years of
entries, largely populated with misses, as part of a
larger goal. “No matter how good your writing is,
you have to have a plan . . . a scheme.”
If "scheme" sounds like a slightly mercenary
word, you should remember that this is a writer
who earnestly gave great thought to sneaking into
a literature degree. Still, it’s prudence, not pugilism,
that’s the better part of Hosein’s endeavours in the
world of writing. This dates back to his secondary
school days, of showing his stories to his classmates,
acquiring their feedback, and repeating the
cycle. It was in form four, he says, that his work
began to acquire an especially grim, menacing
glint, layered with violence, tones of the macabre,
and an arsenal of baleful sexual suggestion.
62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM