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...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, nonspecific 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 general" (qtd. in Ogundipe-Leslie 20-21). Mary Conde suggests that "there is a deliberate haziness about [Cereus's] setting in time as well as place" (64). Conde 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 subversion of various categories of belonging. Trinidad, for example, is not the setting of the book, but Lantanacamara, which is a mythical 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 subverts the categories of "real" and "imaginary." (Conde 64)
Both Conde 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 fundamental 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 defiance, 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 conjoined 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 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 to peer in on happy children and parents asleep in their beds (Mootoo 156-59). At these times, she feels fearless, adventuresome, and "triumphant" (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 Boyle), 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 Otohboto, 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 identity" (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 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...
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