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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
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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 his- tories 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 poli- tics 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 indeter- minate, 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). Ambrose and Elsie’s daughter, Ambrosia, escapes into masculinity and grows up as a boy, Ambrose; then, in young adulthood she migrates into gender ambiguity as Otoh (short for Otoh- boto, which stands for “on the one hand … but on the other”): “Ambrosia’s obviously vivid imagination gave him both the ability to imagine many sides of a dilemma … and the vexing inability to make up his mind” (110). There is also our narrator, Nurse Tyler, a homosexual who leaves the harm he faces on Lantanacamara by choosing an education abroad, where his island “foreignness” will distract from his “perversion” (47–48). When he is older and more confident, he returns to try and make a life in Lantanacamara. Tyler temporarily migrates into the identity of the “exotic” other to save himself from surveillance of and punishment for his unusual sexual nature. That so many examples of exile and of voluntary as well as involuntary migration permeate Cereus Blooms at Night is no surprise, for “exile and expatriation shaped West Indian culture and literature” (Kaup). Moreover, because “migration and exile are fundamental to human experience, … each movement demands another definition and redefinition of one’s iden- tity” (Davies 128). A key site of redefinition in Cereus is that of citizenship in a way that can account for multiple identities and hybrid histories. For example, although many discussions of Caribbean literature assume Afro-Caribbean contexts, Cereus requires readers to acknowledge Indo- Caribbean histories. Mootoo assumes readers have some knowledge of the
100 Vivian M. May role of Indian indentured labor on Caribbean sugar plantations: “between 1837 … and 1917, … approximately 430,000 men and women from India migrated under indenture to the British Caribbean, where they worked as laborers, primarily on sugar plantations” (Kale 1). However, attention to multiple histories and identities is not easy when the educational, political, and legal categories used to describe reality deny the existence of a whole group of people. Sometimes this invisibility only becomes visible through travel, via distance from the place of erasure or by means of a shift in one’s own status or identity. Merle Collins, describing the census categories in Britain where she now lives, remarks, “inciden- tally, the category Indian-Caribbean [simply] does not exist” (Berrian 32). And M. Jacqui Alexander came to understand “the positions of Indians … in Trinidad … as second-class citizenship, only after [moving to the United States and] experiencing U.S. racism” (92). Mootoo’s challenge, then, is to write about a group of people, Indian Caribbeans, usually ignored or subsumed under other categories or histories. Another means by which Mootoo strives to redefine citizenship away from fixed national geographies pivots around sexuality, traditionally a site for “the withholding of … belonging and cultural citizenship from lesbians and gay men in Caribbean cultural national space” (Smyth 143). As Alexander remarks, “anti-colonial nationalism [has] taught us well about heterosexual loyalty, a need so great that [nationalism] reneged on its promise of self-determination, delivering criminality instead of citi- zenship” (84). Forms of sexual crossing fill Cereus, refusing to separate or erase questions of sexuality from histories of exile and resistance. As Heather Smyth writes, “Cereus Blooms at Night presents sexuality as a fluid form of identity and parallels sexual indeterminacy or outlaw sexuality with other forms of border-crossing identitites” (147). By linking various forms of exile, Mootoo connects histories, narratives, and identities that are often conceptually separated. Mootoo therefore examines questions of representation, knowledge, and power not only to clarify the violence at the heart of practices of knowledge, faith, and love but also to claim queer space within the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas. Combining stories of family incest and rape, interracial love, same-sex love, imperial economies, missionary theology, colonial science, and histories of indentured and slave labor, for example, allows Mootoo to demonstrate connections across multiple legacies of imperialism and simultaneously to critique them. Cereus shows readers “traces” of colo- nialism (Kaplan 2) within institutions such as the church, family, lan- guage, education, and the law but also within epistemic and emotional
101 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night practices. Mootoo exposes the immorality and corruption of empire and makes palpable the stench of decay within Paradise’s garden.
A GARDEN IN PARADISE
The Botanic Garden, then, stands at the crossroads of the beginning of modern science (in its collection of data and the experiments of cultiva- tion) and the older Christian view of botanical gardens as re-creations of an earthly Paradise. In the Caribbean, however, this “Paradise” … existed from the seventeenth century onwards in the context of plantation slavery. —Helen Tiffin
Central to the novel and centrally placed in the town of Paradise is Mala’s garden—a place of refuge (Mootoo 130) and resistance (132–34). Birds and animals thought to be extinct thrive there in the center of town (154–55). As stated earlier, Mala moves out of the house her father built and into the garden her mother, Sarah, created with Lavinia, who “loved the freedom and wildness in Sarah’s garden, so unlike her mother’s well- ordered, colour-coordinated beds” (53). Rather than the house of colonial patriarchy, Mala claims this queer space as her home, choosing confine- ment on her own terms and crafting a sensibility Alexander describes in a different context as one of “politicized nonbelonging” (86). Of course, it is no mistake that Mala’s walled garden of “nonbelonging” is located in the town of Paradise. Reminiscent of Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Mootoo “confronts the myth that portrays Caribbean social and political problems in biblical terms and that identifies the islands as paradise or paradise lost” (Kaup). In fact, several Caribbean women writers including Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodson, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and Jean Rhys “express the impossibility of the retrieval, in the Caribbean, of that ‘Paradise Garden’ European botanists had hoped to find or sought to create” (Tiffin 154). This Edenic motif has not, of course, disappeared. Instead, it has transmogrified into the contem- porary notion of the Caribbean as “a playground for wealthy English and American pleasure seekers” (Scott 977). Mootoo plays with this paradise motif, neither inverting it nor dis- missing it but, rather, subverting it. In her alternative Eden complete with snake (121), Mala furthers the unruly aesthetic first crafted by her mother, Sarah. To outsiders, the garden is a space of chaotic, disorderly difference (176) and sensory assault (153). In fact, “except for the odours [Otoh] would have sworn he was in a paradise” when he first entered Mala’s garden (155). Although it is a place of refuge, the garden is neither
102 Vivian M. May a hiding place (128) nor a specimen collection created to serve the scien- tific and horticultural needs of empire. Nor is her garden the stereotypical “sentimental landscape” that is timeless, exotic, “lush,” “fecund,” and “primitivizing” (McCullough 597). Rather, Mala’s garden offers an alterna- tive economy of being:
Mala’s companions were the garden’s birds, insects, snails and rep- tiles. She and they and the abundant foliage gossiped among them- selves. She listened intently. With an ear pressed to the ground she heard ant communities building, transporting food and breeding. She listened to worms coiling arduously from place to place. She knelt on the ground and whispered to the grass and other young plants, encouraging them to grow, and then she listened as they stretched up to her. She did not intervene in nature’s business. When it came time for one creature to succumb to another, she retreated. Flora and fauna left her to her own devices and in return she left them to theirs. (127–28)
Helen Tiffin argues that “relationships with the land itself, and the practices of agriculture and horticulture were necessarily and variously associated by different Caribbean populations with dispossession, slavery, and servitude, torture, exile and colonisation” (149). She adds that rela- tionships with the land were, “more rarely,” associated “with memories, pleasure, even perhaps joy.” However, Mala’s garden is clearly not a space defined by dispossession and torture: rather, it is a space of pleasure, even resistance, for in it not only does Mala dare to remember all that has hap- pened to her in her life but she strategizes, always, to find a way to survive (Mootoo 131–34). Remembering her father’s rapes, Mala refuses to forget the years of viola- tion everyone would prefer she forget. Rekindling her love for her sister, she continues to shelter Asha in her memory long after she runs away. Recalling her Mama and Aunt Lavinia, Mala keeps alive a love story that the community would rather call perverted and leave at that. Mala creates a new relationship with the land around her while simultaneously refusing to silence or forget the social relations others would like to ignore. Davies argues that
the Caribbean understood (within the context of the Americas) as the history of genocide, slavery, physical brutality … demands some sort of understanding of culture either as oppositional or as
103 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
resistance, and further as transformational if we are to recoup any identities beyond the ones imposed. (12)
In other words, Mala refuses to have her garden or her person be defined as signifying only violation, pity, or madness—the way they have always been defined by the town’s “sowing and tilling and reaping [of] idle rumours” through gossip and its “spore-like dispersal” (Mootoo 6). Instead, Mala and her garden are oppositional, even defiant, and the hier- archy between human, animal, and plant forms of life has been abandoned. In fact, Mala resembles her own garden both in look and scent—her body and her landscape have intertwined, have become locked in an organic relation one with the other. Mala’s skin therefore looks like “ochre, like richly fired clay,” and she has a bodily “aroma resembling rich vegetable compost” (11). Thus, as a walled space in the center of Paradise, Mala’s garden can be understood to be not simply a “separatist strategy” (Hoagland 127) but, rather, a more subversive method of politicized resistance. Mala’s garden exemplifies what Sarah Hoagland describes as an “incommensurable operational logic” that “disrupt[s] conceptual coercion from within the belly of the beast” (128). Trinh T. Minh-ha conceptualizes this alternate place, in which “our attention is not riveted on the … [dominant] logic” (Hoagland 143), as an “elsewhere within here”—a site of enabling impu- rity in which unthought relationships emerge (Trinh, Cinema 63). Chela Sandoval conceives of such forms of subverting coercion as a “tactic” that she names the “differential”—a “sleight of consciousness that activates new space” (63). Importantly, the novel’s titular flower, cereus, grows profusely in Mala’s garden. An “unruly” plant (Mootoo 5), cereus blooms once yearly at night, “trembling … against the wall, a choreography of petal and sepal opening together, sending dizzying scent high and wide into the air” (134). This fragrance pervades the island, crossing geographies bound by class, reli- gion, and race. Its perfume, which has “two edges—one a vanilla-like sweetness, the other a curdling” (152), awakens desire across sexual iden- tities while also reinvigorating silenced memories of incest, miscegena- tion, and escape/migration. Helen Tiffin argues that
representations of crops, flowers, trees and gardens in contempo- rary Caribbean writing … cannot escape the symbolic intercultural significance of their own backgrounds and their further associations
104 Vivian M. May
acquired in the Caribbean, that is, the symbolic resonances they acquire and bring … from their places of origin. (151)
Understanding her attending to the cereus plant, as well as to other plants, is central to understanding how Mala’s garden can be seen as a radical space, a space where nonbelonging and incommensurability are politi- cized forms of resistance in their own rights. Like many of the novel’s characters, Mala’s particular cereus plant has been transplanted many times; yet under special care, with a little shelter, it thrives on its own terms. The first cutting from which Mala’s cereus grew actually came from the Reverend Thoroughly’s formal garden. The Thoroughly family first collected it as a specimen of exotic beauty. It was later taken by Lavinia to express her love for Sarah, left by Sarah and Lavinia when they escaped Lantanacamara, then transplanted once more for Mala by Otoh when Mala arrives at the Paradise Alms House. Mala’s horticultural approach defies the ordered and bordered gardens grown by the white SNW colonizers for either scientific or aesthetic purposes. In fact, her mix of medicinal plants, crops, brush, and decorative flowers more closely matches Creole horticultural practices that can be traced back to the gardening methods developed by slaves in their provision grounds on the sugar plantations.5 Ironically, although cereus is a native plant, it is not necessarily known by the island residents. Tyler, who went to the Shivering Northern Wetlands for his nursing degree, remarks, “I recognized it immediately. I had seen one in bloom in the Exotic Items Collection of the SNW National Botanical Gardens: the rare night-blooming cereus” (Mootoo 22). Jamaica Kincaid finds such seemingly minute forms of botanic ignorance to be evidence of a systemic, internalized colonization:
This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of) really only reflects the fact that when I lived there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so. (156)
The fact that Mala’s seemingly “wild” and “illogical” garden is in Paradise is also interesting in terms of both Caribbean history and scientific history. For example, the St. Vincent botanical gardens, founded in 1765, are the oldest in the western hemisphere (Tiffin 150). In the eighteenth century, there was also a place called Paradise Pen that became a botanic garden:
105 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
“By 1775 Thomas Thistlewood had replanted his half of the ruinate gar- dens and [slave] provision grounds of Paradise Pen with over three hun- dred different species both ‘native’ and exotic.” Prior to “Enlightenment” science, “recreating the lush, cultivated gardens of a ‘civilized’ society [was understood to signify] the horticultural equivalent of Christian conver- sion” (Waldenberger 240). This notion shifted over time with the rise of science, such that the “Bible ordained man’s [sic] conquest of nature; Enlightenment science fuelled it” (Lowenthal 55). Thus, this “convic- tion that exploiting nature to the hilt was God’s will and mankind’s [sic] blessing justified the imperial mission” (55). Tropical agriculture became a key site of colonial control and “improvement”—a means of furthering the power and wealth of the colonizers and slaveowners. In subverting the aesthetic, theological, and scientific paradigms of the colonizers, Mala’s garden links imperial compulsions to know, possess, and control with Christian origin stories of Eden and original sin. In Mala’s Paradise garden, original sin is no longer located in knowledge of embodi- ment, desire, and binary heterosexual corporeality. Instead, Mootoo con- demns the violent, eroticized domination of both incest and colonialism as twinned sites of penetration and conquest. Moreover, she crafts a vision of a deeply embodied, non-hierarchical relation between plant, animal, land, and human where sin is connected with violation or domination in any form. Her garden is, therefore, a site of “passionate renunciation” (Sandoval 7).
“NO LANGUAGE IS NEUTRAL”:6 WITNESSING AND MEDIATED TELLING
History is something official. Memory is in the mind of the people. —Maryse Condé, “No Silence”
The stories I recall, the ones that I re-tell and claim as my own, determine the choices and decisions I make in the present and the future. —Chandra Talpade Mohanty
What is so unbearable that we even forget that we have forgotten? —M. Jacqui Alexander
It is possible to read Mala’s psychic split into Mala/Pohpoh as a result of incest and her subsequent abilities to talk and commune with nature as
106 Vivian M. May simply evidence of a flight into madness. Like her garden, which is viewed by outsiders as disorderly, Mala too can be, and is, perceived and there- fore dismissed as disordered—“mad as a brainless bird” (Mootoo 107). Yet her psychic and linguistic splitting, reminiscent of what Vévé Clark describes as “an imagination out of mind” and signifying a severe “toll on consciousness at the level of the oppressor’s language” (45), can instead be understood as a form of double consciousness. In other words, madness is usually taken to mean being outside the working logics of society and therefore dismissable or meaningless rather than signifying alternative, resistant logics or epistemologies. The question becomes, then, how to use the oppressor’s language and narrative models to demonstrate Mala’s double consciousness as resistant, not simply “mad.” Verene Shepherd explains that, “in seeking to probe the history of Indian women in the Caribbean, one is largely dependent on the official records,” including plantation, church, and colonial office records (108). Thus, another element of Mootoo’s challenge in writing Cereus Blooms at Night is to “narrate … in terms other than those prescribed by a colonial archive” (Premesh 45). Taking into consideration Shepherd’s, Premesh’s, and Clark’s observations about the potential oppressiveness of narrative models and historical methods, it is interesting that we don’t read Mala’s story through her eyes/I’s but, rather, through Tyler’s. As Tyler tells us, “I had become her witness” (100). Mala’s story is mediated through Tyler—a “position of indirection”—because, as Trinh explains, “one can never go to the ruler in a direct way; in order to voice one’s opinion, one has to take an indirect way” (Cinema 25). It is as if Mala refuses to place herself in the position of the master tongue, the authoritative subject: instead, Tyler, who is differently mar- ginal, becomes her voice. This filtering of Mala’s voice asks readers to rec- ognize how “subject status,” as Gayatri Spivak points out, has been refused to the oppressed (qtd. in Donaldson 44–45). The mediated or double I of Cereus Blooms at Night therefore points to a “need for a different kind of re-membering”: one that is connected to “the making of different selves,” an ontology based on multiplicity rather than autonomy or singularity (Alexander 90). Of course, another obstacle to confront when striving not to write or speak in colonized terms stems from English itself as the language of empire. Many Caribbean Canadian writers, including Marlene Nourbese Philip and Dionne Brand, highlight “the agony that is English in the
107 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
Caribbean, … unnaming and unmaking it to release the disguised experi- ence, the colonial pain, hidden beneath” (Kaup). As Brand reminds us:
I have come to know something simple. Each sentence realised or dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a side. (qtd. in Kaup)
Given the various challenges and limitations of spoken and written lan- guage, Mala has for the most part left language as others know it behind. There are characters other than Mala who also find language inadequate: for example, Ambrose cannot find the words to express his love for Mala, so he intellectualizes about how “a word is not the substance itself.… A world free of nomenclature, syntax and lexical form is experienced” as a “vibrant network of synesthesia” (Mootoo 211). Unfortunately, Ambrose’s Wetland linguistic prowess prevents him from understanding other, more subtle forms of communication.7 In fact, he is unable to read the non- verbal messages about her abusive father that Mala tries to send him, for “she could never bring herself to graphically reveal her situation yet she desperately hoped that he, of all people, might understand the things she couldn’t say” (196). Clearly, language’s grammar and linearity are insuf- ficient when it comes to the unspeakable. Unlike Ambrose’s disembodied and “obscure” (Mootoo 198) prose, which parallels his ability to withdraw and socially distance himself from his surroundings, Mala becomes thoroughly grounded in the radical egali- tarian space of her garden, where she “all but rid herself of words” as an “unnecessary translation” (126). Mala’s (unheard) speech is, therefore, intimately embodied: “Every muscle of her body swelled, tingled, cringed or went numb in response to her surroundings—every fibre was sensitized in a way that words were unable to match or enhance” (127). Mala’s deeply embodied language of lexical images “punctuated by only one or two verbalizations” (Mootoo 126) is incoherent to any but her queer male caregiver, Nurse Tyler, who learns to hear her whispered, frag- mented life story among and between her talks with the natural world. In other words, Mala is simply discounted by others as an old madwoman: neither her person nor her stories are considered relevant or important. Tyler, however, is different—he comes to feel an affinity with Mala, thanks to their shared outsiderness or “queerness” (48). He explains:
108 Vivian M. May
To everyone else, Miss Ramchandin appeared to have a limited vocabulary or at least to have become too simple-minded to do more than imitate [sounds].… I knew it was no accident that she chose to chatter only in my presence.… I began to recognize in her mutter- ings elements of the legendary rumours. (99)
Tyler is used to being a “curiosity”—so much so that even he finds it hard to function outside of this objectifying explanation of his differ- ence (Mootoo 22). He understands what it means to be placed within an already-made frame of “understanding,” a framework built upon the epistemological and ontological values of the dominant social order, an understanding that simply places one as outside of logic, perverse. This is not only a matter of being misunderstood or even dismissed but a case of being “understood in a way that disallows recognition that there is still something that needs to be understood” (Babbitt 303). Linda Alcoff argues that we must, therefore, always account for differences among “frames of intelligibility” (68) because perception is not a form of mere reportage but, rather, an “orientation to the world” (72) that affects who or what is marked as “unintelligibly silent” (74). In other words, any possibility for meaningfulness, for alternative moral or social values, to be found in different lives and experiences becomes impossible because those who are more powerful or socially central contain stories of difference by means of ready-made explanations that reinforce the status quo. For example, Mala’s suffering from incest only has meaning as a pitiful yet perfectly acceptable result of homophobic panic: the community ratio- nalizes that Chandin could not help himself due to the shock of Sarah’s affair with Lavinia (I will discuss this issue in more detail later in the essay). As time goes by, the community simply sees Mala as a crazy old woman: not only out of touch but out of her mind. The community’s read- ings of Mala entail no understanding at all: they place Mala within socially acceptable cognitive frameworks so that the community can move on. Madness has no meaning other than as a repository for the abject. There are no questions here, no suggestion that an alternative understanding might be possible if read from a different set of moral-social values—from Mala’s point of view. Thus, “understanding” often curtails possibilities for multiplicity or conflict. Instead, “understanding” another’s story can simply be a way of buttressing one’s own, replicating what Elizabeth V. Spelman calls “boomerang perception” (12). Epistemologist Susan Babbitt, in exploring what she calls “adequate understanding” and the role of storytelling, argues that thinking objec-
109 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night tively must, then, be redefined to mean being “biased in an appropriate way” (298). This necessary bias, however, is difficult in contexts of ineq- uity even if, legally speaking, there is “freedom” of expression, no undue constraint on one’s person:
freedom from restrictions, and the ability to organize and express oneself as one pleases, is not real freedom for everyone. For some views, under systemically unjust social conditions, are much more difficult to make plausible. And some possibilities for human devel- opment are not imaginable. (Babbitt 308)
Particularly in cases of the unimaginable or even the studiously avoided (in the case of Cereus, stories of incest, colonial trauma, and queer, inter- racial love), “we need to try to control the story in order that other stories become possible” (312). By having Tyler narrate Cereus, Mootoo accomplishes this necessary bias: we can read Mala’s story only through his eyes—we must depend on him to emphasize some details and leave out others. The mediated narrative form requires that readers engage with both Tyler, as narrator, and with Mala, as silent partner, as full subjects. Moreover, it asks readers both to recognize “systemically unjust social conditions” and to develop an awareness of stories and lives of which we have no “adequate under- standing.” Through Tyler, we gain “recognition that there was something important that needed to be explained … that was not yet adequately explained” (Babbitt 304), a cognitive awareness of a lack of understanding that is absolutely central to social change (311). Now, it is not the case that Tyler immediately senses his own lack of understanding of Mala or that he immediately, upon first glance, senses their “shared queerness” (Mootoo 48). At first he assumes, like the others at the Paradise Alms House, that she is mad, but this quickly changes. Through touch, Tyler senses Mala’s humanity and identifies as problematic his own patronizing attitude toward her:
I rested my palm gently on her silver hair. I expected it to be coarse and wiry, qualities that would have fit the rumours. But her hair, though oily from lack of care, was soft and silken. This one touch turned her from the incarnation of fearful tales into a living human being.… I needed to know the woman who lay hidden by the white sheet. (11)
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In other words, as they begin to develop a friendship, Tyler develops a curiosity about what Babbitt describes as “a certain possibility for mean- ingfulness, not currently available” (306). Their relationship creates “an explanatory burden” such that Tyler develops “cognitive needs,” a “shifted orientation” (Babbitt 309) toward Mala and her life story. Because readers rely on Tyler as narrator, we follow his cognitive and affective path, shifting our “orientation” alongside his. However, we must also accept that we can never fully know the depths of his empathy for Mala’s life and for her capacity for resistance because “words alone cannot describe” it (Mootoo 19); once again, readers are confronted with the limitations of language. Mala and Tyler’s “illicit conversations” (Hoagland 143) become the decentered center around which the narrative pivots. The novel shifts between the first-person narration of the outcast Nurse Tyler and omni- scient third-person accounts that function as Mala’s disembodied memo- ries of trauma. Cereus’s form suggests that language itself is a site of displacement and dislocation. Rather than a revelation, reading Cereus is more an encounter with concealment, with what “knowing” in its conven- tional parameters cannot make available (Davis 147). Like Trinh’s “writer in exile” who “stands in that undetermined threshold place,” Mootoo also “resorts to nonexplicative, nontotalizing strategies that suspend meaning and resist closure” (Trinh, “No Master Territories” 217–18). Recognizing that ruling requires certain forms of rationality, Mootoo writes Mala’s unruly tale between the “cracks in imperial authority” (Bauer 18), from the space of the “interval” (Trinh, Cinema xi–xiv). Like Ambrose, readers feel we are “being told [Mala’s] story in code” (Mootoo 210). The novel’s narrative form therefore flies in the face of colonial frames of intelligibility based on an evidentiary impetus or a “metaphysics of presence” (Davis 152). Of course, this story filtered through two I’s/eyes also challenges imperial notions of the autonomous, individual subject. Mootoo asks us to acknowledge that “the enunciation of the ‘I’ is never, in spite of what it espouses, an act of singularity” (Bauer 17). This shift away from a singular narrative I/eye suggests an approach to remembering and to witnessing trauma that necessitates collectivity and intersubjective relations rather than individual accounts. Moreover, by reading through the interpretive lens of Tyler, who empha- sizes that he is “bound to be present” and “cannot escape [himself]” as narrator (Mootoo 3), readers are aware not only of our own interpretive role but also of the impossibility of transparent, unmediated telling. As Michael Dash states, “Caribbean writing exploits precisely this terrain of
111 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night the unspeakable … [and] resists systematic construction of transcendent meaning” (335). Importantly, Cereus’s nonexplicative form accentuates what Kelly Oliver describes as the impossibility both of recognizing and bearing witness to trauma. In fact, Oliver identifies “the recognition model of identity as the particular pathology of colonial or oppressive cultures” (23). Importantly, in addition to highlighting some of the concealed histories of colonization, the form of Cereus Blooms at Night also highlights perva- sive silence around incest. The narrative form, then, serves both projects simultaneously, suggesting that the horrors of incest and colonization are interrelated, open secrets—known but unacknowledged or ignored forms of trauma. By shifting the responsibility of narrating Mala’s secret to Tyler, Mootoo mitigates the burden of telling usually placed upon an individual who is an incest survivor to tell what others (in the family and in the wider community) already know but will not acknowledge. In addition, it lightens the weight of Mala’s having to engage in “the continual call to legitimate [herself] as a self, to legitimate [her] right, or ability, to speak, [that makes] witnessing [her] own oppression even more painful and problematic” (Oliver 100). It is clear throughout the novel that the whole community knows Mala’s (and Asha’s) situation yet does nothing to stop it. First, there are the “legendary rumours” (Mootoo 99) about the Ramchandin family that even Tyler remembers hearing as a child from his Cigarette Smoking Nana (24). Of course, the fact that the community looks on Asha and Mala with pity (82) suggests that their suffering is widely known. In addition, the linguistic hurdles everyone uses to avoid actually saying the word incest reinforce the fact of the community’s knowingness combined with their unwillingness to acknowledge the situation. Mala’s suffering is always described as being caused by the fact that Chandin “mistook Pohpoh for Sarah” (65). This phrasing implies that Chandin’s raping of his daughters nightly for decades was accidental, without intent, such that he cannot and should not be held accountable for his actions. The gossip continues into Mala’s adulthood, resurfacing once she and Ambrose become an item after he returns from his foreign education: “It seemed a waste to the townspeople that such a catch would be so preoccupied with a woman whose father had obviously mistaken her for his wife, and whose mother had obviously mistaken another woman for her husband” (109). Not only does the community know and not act, they take pride in their inaction, justifying it through the defense of homosexual panic,8 ableist
112 Vivian M. May fears of madness, or by claiming their inaction to be evidence of their own moral superiority. For example,
there were those who took pity [on Chandin], for he was once the much respected teacher of the Gospel, and such a man would take to the bottle and to his own child, they reasoned, only if he suffered some madness. And, they further reasoned, what man would not suffer a rage akin to insanity if his own wife, with a devilish mind of her own, left her husband and children. (Mootoo 195)
Later, we find out that Asha, after running away, had sent letters and money to Mala one after the other for years, begging Mala to leave, promising Mala the protection and safety that she had once provided for Asha. But, thanks to an arrogant, “righteous postman, [who deemed] the Ramchandin house a place of sin and moral corruption” (243), the letters were never delivered, leaving Mala to think her sister had abandoned her and Asha to think Mala chose to stay with Chandin rather than escape. This is not to say that Mala succumbed to these arrogant, moralizing judg- ments on herself and her life. Later in the novel, Mala confronts this his- tory of such “virtuous” community knowing combined with inaction. In one of the rare moments when Mala chooses to speak out loud in English, she states point blank to a condescending police officer who claims to be searching her property without a warrant in order to “protect her,” “‘You never had any business with my safety before’” (179). Mootoo therefore asks her community of knowers, her readers, to be accountable for sanctioned ignorance and arrogant moralizing in multiple contexts. Mootoo wants readers to recognize how seemingly separate or different forms of violation intertwine and reinforce one another. The tale of incest is incomplete without the story of Chandin’s adoption/conver- sion by the missionary Thoroughlys. Understanding the full dimensions of his adoption/conversion is incomplete without awareness of the forced “adoption” of the Caribbean as new “children” to be raised for subser- vient, infantilized roles in the family/economy of empire. The story of the community’s inaction, justified by means of homophobia, can be called into question only by highlighting histories of queer exile in the Caribbean and disentangling notions of the state from compulsory heterosexuality. Each story is incomplete without the others: each fragment gains meaning in relation to, not in isolation from, each other, which is why Tyler finds himself as narrator “fashioning a single garment out of myriad parts” (Mootoo 105).
113 Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
Through Mala/Tyler’s remembering and retelling, Mootoo inserts trauma and misgiving into accounts of “Paradise” and connects marginalized histories, one “private” (incest), the other “public” (colonization), desta- bilizing lines of containment around narratives, identities, and forms of violence usually categorized as distinctly different. Ella Shohat explains that “the retrieval and reinscription of a fragmented past becomes a cru- cial contemporary site for forging a resistant collective identity” (qtd. in Richards 6). In collecting the fragments of Mala’s story and becoming Mala’s friend, Tyler experiences a growth in his own sense of agency and ability to resist oppression. In turn, we as readers are asked to take up Tyler and Mala’s resistant questioning, rethinking, and outrage. Mootoo’s choice to tell Mala’s story through Tyler, therefore, is no “mere reporting”: it matches what Shari Stone Mediatore describes as a politicized “rethinking” and rearticulation that allow stories and lives, unintelligible within hegemonic history, to emerge (123–24). Mala’s/Tyler’s remembering and retelling are part of crafting a different collective memory, an oppositional community consciousness to resist the rigid mores and violent rationalities of empire, heteronormativity, and sexual domination.
CONCLUSION: ALTERNATE PRACTICES OF LOVE, KNOWLEDGE, AND ETHICS
Our first task is to become attentive to the soul’s desire and to place our- selves in its service. —M. Jacqui Alexander
The revolutionary possibility of love requires identifying and deconstructing historical alliances between love and reason and between benevolence and imperialism. —Dawn Rae Davis
Cereus Blooms at Night asks readers to disentangle coercive benevolence from love, for benevolence is a problematic rhetoric both of “compas- sionate” forms of empire and of family “care.” Mootoo connects the violence hidden within ideologies of the loving, happy family with the violence of heteronormative, racist, “humanizing” colonial institutions (including the Christian mission, colonial education, and slave and inden- tured labor) created to serve the needs and ideals of the “productive” family of capitalist empire (Davis 147, McCullough 578). Importantly, Mootoo
114 Vivian M. May tells secrets usually silenced in order to “keep the ‘family’ together” (Ford and Crabtree 82). Of course, “telling” on “the family” is generally taboo because it threatens to disrupt the cycles of violence hidden under rheto- rics of love, care, and benevolent protection. In drawing these lines of connection between the public family of empire and the private family unit, Mootoo pushes her readers to ask, “What atrocities have been done in the name of ‘love’?” Cereus Blooms at Night emphasizes how “love’s discourse must be examined for the history it shares with colonialism in the context of the civilizing-Christianizing mission and enlightenment ethics conditioned by [Enlightenment] reason” (Davis 146). Simultaneously, Mootoo “challenges formulations of Caribbean culture that rely on an assumed parallel between Caribbean or African-based culture and heterosexuality on the one hand, and between European or imperialistic culture and homosexuality on the other” (Smyth 143). The task of extricating love from benevolence, knowing from objectifi- cation, and care from coercion requires rethinking notions about “home” at all levels of meaning—from the family home to the mother tongue to the imagined/remembered “back home.” And the “‘home’ question,” as Mohanty puts it, is significant. She asks, “Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional, sensory space? … I am convinced that this question—how one understands and defines home—is a profoundly political one” (487). Mohanty adds that “settled notions of territory, community, geography, and history don’t work for us” migrants and immigrants (490). “Home,” then, is not a settled place but a site of displacement; it becomes, according to Homi Bhabha, “unhomely”—symbolic of an event of disjuncture and crisis rather than cohesiveness and safety (445). Obviously, Cereus con- tains several examples of homes that are not sites of “cohesiveness and safety,” including Chandin Ramchandin’s internalized racist shame once “adopted” into the Thoroughly family as a “model” convert to parade around on missionary tours of the islands; Sarah and Lavinia’s secretive love affair which, thanks to homophobia and racist fears of miscegena- tion, necessitates escape and leads accidentally to abandoning Asha and Pohpoh; Chandin’s ceaseless sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of his daughters; and the wrenching away and hiding, at a young age, of the brother of Mr. Hector (the Paradise Alms House gardener) by their mother to protect him and his queer ways from their abusive and patriar- chal father.
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By thoroughly deconstructing the romantic ideology of the happy family home, Mootoo also makes her childhood home, the Caribbean, “unhomely.” Hers is not, in other words, an exilic tale of longing based on rosy, romanticized memories. “Back home” is neither the exotic and fertile Eden of the colonialist imagination nor the overly idealized but forever lost past of the mournful expatriate imagination. Of course, Mala’s abandonment of conventional language signifies that language itself is no shelter either: telling stories in the adoptive “mother tongue” will not simply “fix” the displacement, violence, and trauma. Moreover, not every- thing can be “told” anyway—the imperial dream of transparent knowing by means of a first-person native informant is stymied by Mootoo’s medi- ated narrative form. Knowing we can never really “know what happened” on Lantanacamara, and knowing that what we do know of Mala and Lantanacamara’s other residents is mediated by Tyler’s angle of vision on the world, Mootoo sug- gests that such gaps in knowledge can be generative, can open up new ways of thinking. Within the disjunctures between the idealized imagery (of the family, of the home, of love, and of the Caribbean) and the trau- matic events of her novel, Mootoo introduces other worlds and ways of being. In other words, Mala’s state of “lovelessness” becomes, as Franz Fanon suggests, “a space of radical possibility” (qtd. in Davis 147). Out of the pages of Cereus emerge alternative visions of love and ethics as affili- ated with multiplicity, interconnectedness, and difference. Showing Mala’s different relationship with nature is one way that Mootoo is able to introduce love-ethics-knowledge as interrelated prac- tices that are, in and of themselves, ideally about interrelation itself. For example, Mr. Hector, the Paradise Alms House gardener, would like to give Mala a cut flower to make her feel more welcome, for she is known for her garden. However, Tyler explains that Mala would be opposed to this gift: “‘You see,’ I said, … ‘she does not like things in nature to be hurt. To her, the flower and the plant would be both suffering because they were separated from each other’” (69). For Mala, being connected to her natural surroundings has been a key form of survivor knowledge, of loving herself when nobody else would, and of protecting herself when in danger. If she had not learned this at a young age, she would have found no rest or refuge from her abuse. This way of knowing and relating, in fact, was key to her nighttime prowls as a child, her moments of escape under the shelter of darkness where usual ways of knowing, based on visual epistemes, would have failed her because,
116 Vivian M. May
[e]ven though her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, they were of little use. To negotiate her way, Pohpoh had to experience her surroundings, become one with the trees, shrubs, weeds, fences, thorns, water and mossy ground. She stood in the ditch and lifted her hands into the blackness before her, meditatively feeling the shape of the moist air, inspecting and greeting the space. Her heart drummed with excitement. (Mootoo 151)
This anti-hierarchical sense of the interrelation of all forms of life, and of all stories and histories, is a way of thinking Mala passes on to her child- hood friend Boyie and to her adulthood lover Ambrose Mohanty. Mala’s philosophy of life is so compelling to Ambrose that he gives up his theo- logical scholarship when studying abroad in the SNW. He cannot abide the anthropocentrism at the heart of the SNW approaches to Christian theology. He rejects the idea “‘that we humans are the primary sun around which the entire universe revolves. Unstated but certainly implied is the assumption that humans are by far superior to the rest of all nature, and that’s why we are the inheritors of the earth. Arrogant, isn’t it?’” (Mootoo 198). In fact, the “‘eminent theologians’” whom Ambrose finds not “‘equal to their theories of theology’” (198) insist that he cannot, in his study of “‘the importance of the insects and bugs mentioned in the Bible’” (198), treat all forms of life as equal. Instead, as Ambrose tells Mala, he must “‘posit the insects and the bugs and all creatures not of the human species as lesser, as dumb, and … relegate them to being God’s tools, servants or as doom that He would send down upon mankind as punishment’” (199). Tyler knows well this theological approach, not only because of his Bible Quoting Nana but also because these arrogant attitudes have infiltrated Lantanacamaran society. Due to his “perversity,” Tyler is used to being thought of as “doomed” and to being treated as “different” and, in fact, has no experience with being accepted for who he is. Most of the time, in fact, as a means of self-protection, Tyler objectifies himself—he watches himself being watched by others in order to anticipate how to act, interact, or respond. Not that he tries to “pass,” but he keeps his guard up and remains “quietly proud” (Mootoo 15) while retaining his survivor knowl- edge (71). Yet soon after he begins to work as Mala’s caregiver/nurse, Mala steals a nurse’s uniform and stockings for him from the laundry line at the Paradise Alms House. But her giving of this gift is not a means of objecti- fying Tyler’s difference. He reflects, “I felt she had been watching me and seeing the same things that everyone else saw. But she had stolen a dress for me. No one had ever done anything like that before. She knows what
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I am, was all I could think. She knows my nature” (76). Tyler puts on the dress and stockings while Mala builds a barricade of furniture at her door to protect them both, but Tyler is at first dismayed when she pays him no attention, does not look upon him as a spectacle to either admire or scorn. But then, Tyler tells us, “a revelation came. The reason Miss Ramchandin paid me no attention was that, to her mind, the outfit was not something to either congratulate or scorn—it simply was. She was not one to manacle nature, and I sensed that she was permitting mine its freedom” (77). Of course, embedded in all of these various discussions of “nature” and its hierarchies or lack thereof are other political debates about groups of people (or even places) more historically affiliated by those in power with “the natural,” be they slaves, indentured laborers, women, queers, or the colonized. Mala’s worldview introduces a wider argument against the vio- lent, arrogant hierarchies embedded in notions of being “greater than” or “lesser than,” in being someone’s “tool,” in being “doomed” or “cursed” by one’s “nature.” Mootoo uses Mala’s philosophy of nature to further her vision of a radicalized, egalitarian form of “love as a social movement” (Sandoval 184) rather than as a means of possession, objectification, or domination. In the end, Mootoo points to the need for an epistemology that engages with “the limits of knowledge” (Davis 151), that is informed by an ethics of interrelation and alterity (146–47, 156–57). Knowing, love, and ethics must no longer be thought of as separate but as conjoined practices politi- cally engaged with social transformation for all. As Alexander explains, this requires us to “cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually-marked attention upon each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other’s company” (91). Any “hope for a revolutionary love” requires a “radically alternative” epis- temology and ethics able to acknowledge the unspeakable or what simply cannot be known (Davis 152). Thus Mala’s silence, her refusal of first-person narration, asks readers to rethink, question, and alter our practices of loving, knowing, and relating to others. At the same time, Tyler’s narration asks us to think collectively, to recognize the possibility for change if we keep each other in mind, if we gain resistant consciousness through our knowledge of each other’s (unknowable) stories. Connecting the individual and the collective is, in and of itself, a political strategy. Doing so in the context of Mala’s resis- tant garden in an imaginary space is not any less political because it is fictional. Rather, Mootoo’s strategy fits what Anthony Bogues describes as Bob Marley’s “symbolic insurgency”:
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to practice symbolic insurgency means that an individual is engaged in consistent efforts to rearrange the ways in which mainstream reality is both constructed and explained. This … shatters the legitimacy of the dominant order … [and] creates everyday spaces of hope.… It punctures the self-image of the old order … while seeking to profoundly influence people. (199)
Cereus Blooms at Night, then, engages readers in the act of “symbolic insurgency,” inviting us to resist while also demanding that we imagine liberation from oppression.
Syracuse University
NOTES
1 In Another Place, Not Here is the title of the 1997 novel by Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand. 2 Mala has a sister, Asha. Their parents, Sarah and Chandin, both grew up in indentured labor camps. Sarah and Chandin converted to Christianity while attending the Mission School, run by the Reverend and Mrs. Thoroughly, missionaries from the Shivering Northern Wetlands (SNW) who adopt Chandin. Although Chandin loves the Thoroughlys’ daughter Lavinia, when he realizes he can never marry her (ostensibly because they are family but really because of both race and class bias), he marries Sarah. Later, Lavinia and Sarah become lovers and run away, leaving Asha and Mala behind. Chandin then raises the girls, becomes a drunk, and rapes his daughters nightly. Asha eventually runs away while Mala remains. Once Mala is an adult, her friend Ambrose returns from study abroad and they fall in love, but he remains unaware of Mala’s plight, despite town gossip about incest. When Ambrose discovers Mala being attacked by her father, he finds himself unable to act in Mala’s defense and even doubts her role in the whole circumstance. He then marries Elsie. Ambrose and Elsie have a daughter named Ambrosia, who wishes she were a boy, and so becomes Otoh. As a young man, Otoh meets Mala and becomes fond of her, eventually playing a key role in the story because he acts to protect Mala in her old age even though his father still can do nothing but despair over his own lack of action. When Mala gets in trouble with the police, Otoh burns her house to ruin evidence of her father’s corpse. After Mala’s court-ordered move to the Paradise Alms House, Otoh visits her and meets her caretaker, a queer man named Nurse Tyler. Ambrose and Mala reconnect, Elsie departs, and Otoh and Tyler fall in love. 3 Mootoo was born in Ireland, grew up in Trinidad, and now lives in both New York and Vancouver. 4 In addition, Mootoo’s focus on Indian Caribbean characters and histories within a Caribbean setting also pushes readers to re-think the boundaries of Black identity to include multiple, even contested, histories of people of color. In other words, my use of “Black” identity or critical frameworks in this essay is meant to be inclusive—as in a Black British cultural studies context—and not hierarchical or falsely homogenizing. 5 For more detailed histories of Creole and slave horticultural practices, see Tobin and Wyels.
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6 No Language Is Neutral (1990) is a collection of poems by Dionne Brand. 7 Later in life, Ambrose would use his Wetland English as both shield and weapon, as a means to protect himself from feelings of loss and despair over Mala and as a way to distance and alienate his wife Elsie: “Once upon a time Elsie had been enraptured by the silken petals that fell from Ambrose’s Wetlandish-affected lips. Now she wished that he would either shut up or talk simply and plainly with her again” (Mootoo 108). 8 For a detailed critical reading of the so-called “logic” of this defense, still legal in much of the United States, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, particularly her “Introduction: Axiomatic,” pages 1–90.
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