Uncanny Communion: Trauma, Touch, and Vegetal Being in <em>Cereus Blooms at Night</em>

Abstract

Shani Mootoo's 1996 novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, a complex and often baroque text about sexual and other forms of violence, metamorphic identity, and an impressively Gothic garden, demands attention to plants, gardens, and the racial, sexual, and colonial structures that shape our relationships to them. Though many scholars (for example, Kincaid, Tiffin, O'Brien, Casteel, Casid, Crosby, Thieme, DeLoughrey, and Lincoln) have analyzed the complex significance of gardens in Caribbean and postcolonial experience, little attention has been devoted to vegetal life in these contexts per se, or to the ethical resonances of the passivity, indignity, and vulnerability often ascribed to "vegetal" lives. In this novel, trauma is deeply entangled with ecological relations and multispecies being, troubling approaches to trauma, testimony, and healing predicated on anthropocentric understandings of the self. Cereus explicitly invokes the broader historical resonance of colonial botany and agriculture, while offering a queer ethic of touch, vulnerability, and failure as ecological and social alternatives to the violent legacies of those forms of cultivation. In the text, Caribbean gardens are both sites of imperial power, where boundaries are asserted and policed, and potentially experimental spaces where human bodies are exposed to one another and to other forms of life, their flows of touch and relation forming what Deborah Bird Rose identifies as "multispecies knots of ethical time." As such, the novel itself experiments with the representational challenges of thinking and feeling beyond the human.