I am what Trinidadians call a ‘dougla’ – of mixed African and Indian descent – and heritage months have never quite known what to do with me. Like former US Vice President Kamala Harris, I’m faced with discrete celebration boxes: South Asian Heritage Month, then Black History Month. But ethnicity doesn’t fit into tidy compartments, especially when your very existence was never part of the colonial plan.

My new novel Ever Since We Small enters UK bookshops this month, Black History Month, carrying a story born of that braided inheritance. It follows four generations of an Indo-Caribbean family shaped by the consequences of a deliberate continuum within imperial policy: slavery, emancipation, indentureship, divide-and-rule. Caribbean literature offers a place for those consequences and the resulting ethnic complexities to be aired.