Harold Sonny Ladoo was the first Trinidadian and the second Caribbean novelist published in Canada, yet he remains little known except among a group of devoted enthusiasts. No Pain Like This Body was released in 1972 by House of Anansi Press, edited by the press’s co-founder and Toronto’s first Poet Laureate Dennis Lee. It’s a vivid and poetic yet devasting depiction of Indian indentureship. Ladoo’s second novel, Yesterdays, one of the queerest works of Caribbean fiction, was published in 1974, the year after his battered body was found by a roadside in Trinidad. He was 28. Beyond his literary achievements, Harold’s life and death remain mysterious, in part because he kept reinventing his biography. 

Directed by Richard Fung, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo (2024, 84min) rescues a 20-year-old archive of video interviews by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird with the author’s family and Trinidad intimates, and as well as the CanLit luminaries who advanced his career in Toronto: Dennis Lee, Graeme Gibson, Jim Polk, and Peter Such. Shot in Trinidad and Toronto, the film pieces together the puzzle of Ladoo’s life and death. Authors Shani Mootoo, Kevin Jared Hosein, Andil Gosine, Ramabai Espinet and David Chariandy bring his ground-breaking fiction to life. 

Following the screening of The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, director Richard Fung will be joined by Phanuel Antwi (Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, UBC) and Dharani Persaud (PhD student in the School of Information, UBC) for a conversation about the film and its place in Fung’s body of work.

Oceanic Asias: Richard Fung is presented as part of the Global Asias 30th Anniversary Speaker Series & the Margaret Lowe Benston Lecture Series in Social Justice.

Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, SFU David Lam Centre, SFU Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, SFU Global Asia Program, and SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology.