“He Had a Sympathetic Understanding of Everybody”: Remembering Sam Selvon — a Conversation with Ramabai Espinet

In this interview the writer Ramabai Espinet converses with Nalini Mohabir and Ronald Cummings about her encounters with Samuel Selvon and with his writing across the years. Her memories range from her girlhood in San Fernando to memorial gatherings for Selvon in the diaspora. Through these accounts she maps an understanding of Selvon as part of his literary generation and traces his unique place in Trinidadian letters. What emerges is a deeply sensitive portrait. This interview is a work of intergenerational memory that weaves together narratives of home and diaspora to offer readers a meaningful image of Selvon and his influence. It also advances a nuanced sense of the interconnected trajectories of Selvon and Espinet as two important writers of the diaspora.