Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXVII, Number 2, Fall 2004 Carol P

Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Department Publication - Studies in the English Department Publications Literary Imagination 1-1-2009 Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXVII, Number 2, Fall 2004 Carol P. Marsh-Lockett Elizabeth J. West Melvin Rahming Yakini B. Kemp Shirley Toland-Dix See next page for additional authors Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_deptpub_li Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Marsh-Lockett, Carol P.; West, Elizabeth J.; Rahming, Melvin; Kemp, Yakini B.; Toland-Dix, Shirley; Williams, Emily Allen; Braziel, Jana Evans; and May, Vivian M., "Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXVII, Number 2, Fall 2004" (2009). English Department Publication - Studies in the Literary Imagination. Paper 12. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_deptpub_li/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department Publications at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Department Publication - Studies in the Literary Imagination by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Authors Carol P. Marsh-Lockett, Elizabeth J. West, Melvin Rahming, Yakini B. Kemp, Shirley Toland-Dix, Emily Allen Williams, Jana Evans Braziel, and Vivian M. May This article is available at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_deptpub_li/12 Vivian M. May DISLOCATION AND DESIRE IN SHANI MOOTOO’S CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT “IN ANOTHER PLACE, NOT HERE”1 Shani Mootoo’s 1996 novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, highlights the violence at the heart of both sexual politics and colonization through the story of Mala Ramchandin.2 Mootoo weaves together multiple histories of dispossession that are usually conceptualized as “separate.” This allows her to demonstrate how the following intertwine: concepts of love and family dependent upon capitalist economies of possession (220); hierarchies of human value and “inherited nature” (49); the politics of colonialist language, grammar, and naming practices (22, 39, 53, 239); hierarchical scientific values and methods (49); arrogant Christian theological and religious practices (198–99); and internalized racism and shame (29–31, 34, 38, 51). Although deeply critical of heteronormative and colonialist epistemologies and ontologies, Mootoo offers, through the characters of Tyler and Mala, an alternative epistemology and economy of being that rely upon notions of love and desire which do not uphold the dysfunctional “family” of empire. Mootoo’s setting for the novel is the imaginary island of Lantanacamara rather than Trinidad, where she grew up.3 Choosing a fictional, non- specific island setting is not unique: Mootoo follows in the footsteps of many other Caribbean women writers. For example, Paule Marshall set The Chosen Place, The Timeless People “in a mythical island in the West Indies” because she wanted readers to see “its larger meaning; the fact that it makes a statement about what is happening in the Third World in gen- eral” (qtd. in Ogundipe-Leslie 20–21). Mary Condé suggests that “there is a deliberate haziness about [Cereus’s] setting in time as well as place” (64). Condé asserts that Mootoo’s fictional island setting and indeterminate time periods fit well with the novel’s evasion of certainties in its simultaneous exploration and subver- sion of various categories of belonging. Trinidad, for example, is not the setting of the book, but Lantanacamara, which is a mythical Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.2,97 Fall 2004 © Georgia State University Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night version of Trinidad, like Brenda Flanagan’s Santabella in You Alone Are Dancing (1990). Just as Paule Marshall’s Triunion in Daughters (1992) is and is not Barbados and Merle Collins’s Paz in The Colour of Forgetting (1995) is and is not Grenada, so Lantanacamara sub- verts the categories of “real” and “imaginary.” (Condé 64) Both Condé and Marshall point to the critical utility of a fictional island setting: they see an imaginary space as offering opportunities to remember identities and histories differently, while also providing room to imagine different futures. Carole Boyce Davies identifies this critical capacity in her own mother’s life and explains the importance of her mother’s ability to cross, continually, geographies of belonging: My mother’s journeys redefine space. Her annual migrations between the Caribbean and the United States are ones of persistent re-membering and re-connection.… Hers is a deliberate and funda- mental migration that defies the sense of specific location that even her children would want to force on her. (1) Focusing on migration between spaces, real and imagined, can be a means of highlighting and further understanding forms of persistent defi- ance, like that of Davies’s mother, which are often overlooked or appear innocuous. I therefore want to suggest that Mootoo’s fictional island space, a non-specific location, is particularly useful when writing about the con- joined histories of trauma and exile in diasporic contexts. Davies further contends that, “in the same way as diaspora assumes expansiveness and elsewhereness, migrations of the Black female subject pursue the path of movement outside the terms of dominant discourses” (37). In other words, the fictional Lantanacamara is a place outside the terms of “real” geographies and maps, spaces named by colonial rulers and mapped by colonial cartographers. Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Laura Gillman describe how “Black women’s radical subjectivity shatters the boundaries of geopolitical spaces traditionally defined through citizenship while creating alternative social imaginaries” (528).4 The seemingly minor decision to create a fictional island setting allows Mootoo to sidestep the constraints of dominant discourse or of mirroring “reality.” Moreover, it suggests that Cereus has larger political implications and social meaning, that it is, as Paule Marshall suggests about her own writing, more allegorical in nature. Using the fictional setting and indeterminate, multiple timeframes creates an opportunity to reflect back upon 98 Vivian M. May the “real,” to critique it, to push beyond what is already known, usually perceived. Thus, Mootoo’s Lantanacamara immediately signifies to readers that the novel will ask us to “migrate,” to move, like Davies’s mother, “outside the terms of dominant discourses” (Davies 37), to connect on different terms as we engage with the characters and their stories. MIGRATING SUBJECTS Who were we? As Trinidadians we did not all come on the same ship as the national(ist) myth held. Some of us, Indian, had been captured/brought under indenture to work on plantations evacuated after the “end” of slavery, with the broken promise of return to Calcutta, Bombay, Madras. A colonial betrayal pushed under the surface, constantly testing Indian loyalty to Trinidad, the home of forced adoption.… Some blacks captured/sold from a geography so vast the details would daunt memory and produce a forgetting so deep we had forgotten that we had forgotten. Missing memory. —M. Jacqui Alexander Cereus Blooms at Night weaves together multiple examples of exile and dislocation. Both of Mala Ramchandin’s parents, Chandin and Sarah, descend from indentured laborers brought from India as the economic “solution” at the end of legalized slavery. Then there are the white, Christian Thoroughlys, who arrive from the Shivering Northern Wetlands (SNW) to educate and “civilize” Indo-Caribbean indentured laborers at their mission school. Later, Mala’s Indo-Caribbean mother leaves Mala, Asha, and their Mission-educated father, Chandin, to escape from the island (first to the SNW, then to Canada) with her white female lover, Lavinia Thoroughly, the daughter of the Mission’s founders. Finally, there is Mala’s sister, Asha, who runs away from Chandin’s rape and abuse, first to the SNW, then later to Canada—just like her mother and Aunt Lavinia before her. The text also contains less evident forms of exile and escape. These are not all physical in the sense of movement across national borders, but they can be considered political nonetheless. For example, there is Mala’s psychological exile from trauma: her psychic split into the adult Mala who cares for the child Mala (Pohpoh), since nobody else would care for the pitied yet reviled child who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her father. Mala also finds ways to create free spaces or moments within her confinement, minute forms of border-crossing within her overly confined world. For example, as a child, she sneaks out in the middle of the night after her father rapes her to wander into other, more idyllic family houses 99 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night to peer in on happy children and parents asleep in their beds (Mootoo 156–59). At these times, she feels fearless, adventuresome, and “trium- phant” (159). She and Asha also find “momentary escape” (78) in the early morning hours, when they go to the town park to try to play with other children, only to be chased and bullied by Walter Bissey (ironically, Lantanacamara’s future judge) since the park is only for “decent” people (82–89). As an adult, after she kills her father in self-defense, Mala leaves forever the four walls of the house her father built to live in the garden first planted by Sarah and Aunt Lavinia. By choosing to live outside of the house in the unruly garden, Mala creates a space of freedom within the walls of her confinement. Gender-bending and migrating sexual desires in Mootoo also can be considered examples of unconventional modes of exile and escape. For instance, Mala’s suitor, Ambrose (also known as her childhood friend Boyie), retreats into a pragmatic marriage with Elsie and subsequently withdraws into a lifetime of deep sleep and inaction after discovering Mala’s abuse by her father, all the while living a life of what Elsie calls his “mental infidelity” (109).

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