“A Shared Queerness”

Abstract

A passage from Shani Mootoo's 1996 novel Cereus Blooms at Ni^ht demonstrates the author's fascination with flora, fauna, and the language of natural history: At first, Hexapoda, Gastropoda, and Reptilia burrowed instinctively into nooks and crevices. They realized eventually that they had no cause to hide. Mala permitted them to boldly and to multiply at leisure throughout her property (Mootoo 1996, 128). The main character of this novel, Mala Ramchandin, is a gothic madwoman figure who haunts the fictionalized Caribbean town of Paradise, Lantanacamera, residing in a moldering house slowly being overtaken by nature. This passage describes the seeming freedom that the fauna have over Mala's house, where they are permitted to roam boldly and to multiply at leisure. Yet even here the animals are not known as birds, insects, snails, and reptiles, but as Aves, Hexapoda, Gastropoda, Reptilia, identifiable only through their Linnaean, Latinate, natural historical classifications. In this passage, these classifications are not discarded, but they are certainly not kept intact and coherent. Mala's odd domesticity-here represented by her relationship to the creatures that cohabit her house and garden but described throughout the novel as a strange but internally consistent form of housekeepingepitomizes the novel's complex and contradictory relationship to colonial and neocolonial discourses. In