Abstract
In this article, I examine Night Calypso’s depiction of the relationship between trauma and calypso narrative, particularly, the ways in which the music form is constructed in the novel as an apt narrative mode for traumatized and wounded peoples. I argue that the novel proposes calypso storytelling, with its linguistic and formal displacements, reenactments and masquerades, as a means by which traumatized postcolonial peoples wrest agency over their past, present and future.