Kevin Jared Hosein is a Trinidadian writer, perhaps best known for winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015 for his piece, “The King of Settlement 4.” He has written poems, novels and other short stories, one of which includes “The Monkey Trap” which was featured in an anthology of Caribbean writing (Pepperpot) published by Peekash Press (a joint publishing initiative by Peepal Tree Press and Akashic Books) in 2014. Of course, “The King of Settlement 4” is the stronger, more well-known story, but Hosein’s earlier “The Monkey Trap” is a good indicator of the ability to extract the emotions from people and places who often occupy positions of extreme hardship and pain in our Caribbean societies.
The story tells of an old man named Talon. He is senile and is convinced that a monkey lives in the gully close to the home she shares with his daughter, Sana, who is forever concerned about her father’s health and is bound by both love and duty to protect and take care of him. The story spends time establishing Talon’s obsessive belief in the existence of the monkey, presenting his senility in the way he forgets things and through his odd actions, as well as Sana’s attempts to ensure that he is comfortable and taken care of. Things take a turn, however, when Talon escapes out of the house one day in an attempt to capture the elusive monkey.
Talon and Sana are the main players in the story and they are all the characters the author really needed to tell this tale. Talon comes across as a very sympathetic character. He is a sharp and accurate depiction of everything that can come with old age: the loss of the sense of himself, as well as the knowledge of his environment and those close to him. His treatment of Sana, in particular, though done unconsciously and definitely not the most the troubling aspect of the story, is what creates the most emotions in the mind of the reader. The scene where he trashes the house and then listens to the song from her music box is a particularly poignant one – indicating, perhaps, that deep down Talon has some understanding of the things that bind him and his daughter, which is a point further underscored when Sana herself at the story’s sorrowful end turns to the same music box for some solace.
Sana can be seen as representative of the contemporary daughter figure, saddled with caring for her parent, bound by love (and perhaps guilt, as she too remembers how Talon once defended her by fending off an intruder and becoming injured in the process) and forced into a position where she is tasked with caring for a man whom it is incredibly difficult to take care of and on the other hand trapped and judged by both an unsympathetic society and her own conscience. She is an intensely relatable character.
The story invokes the true meaning of a short story, by being extremely concise and tightly written. The conciseness of the words and the way they are used sparingly almost has a poetic sense of being able to put to paper only that which is truly important. The story, therefore, not only indicates Hosein’s skills as a writer but also, through this use of brevity, highlights his own skills as editor/writer – which is something all good writers are. Hosein could have included more details than was necessary to tell the story; he could have introduced more characters and more plot twists, but it definitely seems like he knew when to stop, and that mark of discipline makes all the difference.
The shocking twist at the end of the story will not be spoiled in this recommendation of the text. Instead, the originality of the story, the memorable characters, the Caribbean vibes that emanate from it and the fact that it exists in a book alongside the work of Barbara Jenkins and Sharon Millar, marking Hosein, as much as his Commonwealth Prize win does, marks him as a Trinidadian writer to watch and should be enough to prompt readers to find a copy of Pepperpot and have a good read of several Caribbean short stories.