Light Falling on Bamboo

Trinidad, 1848. Michel Jean Cazabon returns home from France to his beloved mother's deathbed. Despite the Emancipation Act, his childhood home is in the grip of colonial power, its people riven by the legacy of slavery. Michel Jean finds himself caught between the powerful and the dispossessed. As an artist, he enjoys the governor's patronage, painting for him the island's vistas and its women; as a Trinidadian he shares easy wisdom and nips of rum with the local boat-builders. But domestic tensions and haunting reminders of the past abound. His fiery half-sister Josie - the daughter of a slave - still provokes in him a youthful passion; his flirtatious muse Augusta tempts him as he paints her 'for posterity'. Meanwhile, letters from his white, French wife and children remind him of their imminent arrival on the island. After a gentleman's education in Europe, landscape artist Michel Jean Cazabon returns home to Trinidad in 1848 in time for his mother's death, and discovers the changes to his island since the emancipation of slaves. Plantation owners and colonial administrators still hold the power, leaving freed blacks and "coloreds" not quite free; the idealism of revolutionary Paris now seems a dream away and his French wife and children are waiting to join him on the island. The busy working artist makes friends with the governor and English colonial settlers and secures commissions and painting lessons, but his sensual desires always threaten to compromise his prospects. His career may prosper, but he is more worried about his white wife's reaction to a family secret kept hidden by his father, mother, and a corrupted colonial island Trinidad, 1865. Michel Jean Cazabon returns home to be at his beloved mother's deathbed. Life on the island seems very different after the freedoms of post-Revolutionary Paris, where his paintings have hung in the Louvre. Despite the Emancipation Act, his childhood home is in the grip of colonial power, its people riven by the legacy of slavery. Michel Jean finds himself caught between the powerful and the dispossessed. As an artist, he enjoys the governor's patronage, painting for him the island's vistas and its women; as a Trinidadian he shares easy wisdom and nips of rum with the local boat-builders.