Cereus Blooms Research Articles

Nature and Shadows in the Caribbean: Queer Subjectivity and Identity in Helen Klonaris’s “Ghost Children” and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Nature and Shadows in the Caribbean: Queer Subjectivity and Identity in Helen Klonaris’s “Ghost Children” and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Trans Bodies and Embodiments in Shani Mootoo’sCereus Blooms at Night

This article studies how three kinds of trans embodiment—trans-speciation, sartorial metamorphosis, and nonmedical gender transition—in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) unsettle the anthropocentric idea of nature, the genital view of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the pathological framing of trans people in colonial epistemologies. In a postcolonial novel set in the colonial Caribbean, these kinds of trans embodiment interrogate the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide, allowing certain characters to feel at home in their trans bodies rather than, as per liberal narratives of progress, seeking a new home elsewhere. Like intersex nonhuman species (particularly the snail and the cereus), some trans embodiments also interrogate the enterprise of sex/gender dimorphism.

Indentured History in Lore: Theorizing the Communal Discourse Archive

ABSTRACT This article theorizes the discursive endeavors of indentured communities to archive history, through comparing Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Set in fictional labor colonies in the Americas, the two antirealist narratives show how collective literary form reveals the persistent ways in which historical knowledge is recorded and circulated. Drawing on Rey Chow’s scholarship, the article contends that the assemblages of discourses and acts of lore-making manifested in both novels gesture to the alternative modes of recounting the untold histories of indentureship. I conceptualize the communal archive through three key frameworks: movement, network, and imagination. The disciplinary forces of the indenture system are theorized in movement, a term that explicates the workers’ liminal positions in the colony. Network captures each community’s dynamism, multiplicity, and cacophony. By paying attention to the gossip culture, I examine how gossip as discourse network redefines the unruly acts of collaboration among the indentured. Finally, my analysis identifies imagination as a conceptual agent that gives form to the rebellious network and promises its continuation. The polyphonic and motley communal archive offers a new method of engaging with diasporic literary texts that serve as alternative historical accounts for the footnoted and silenced.

“Cric, crac, queer”: queer storytellers and story-membering in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and David Chariandy’s Brother

ABSTRACT In the field of Caribbean literature, the figure of the storyteller is commonly associated with an ethos of resistance against the racist and sexist representations of the colonial version of history. Furthermore, some creative writers have turned to this emblematic character to highlight the existence of Caribbean LGBTQI+ identities. In this article, I explore three novels that present such queer storytellers: the intersex character Lavren in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom (1992), the transgender woman Tyler in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and the “gay” man Jelly in David Chariandy’s Brother (2017). By queering storytelling, these writers draw attention to the imbrications of systems of oppression, and to the empathetic bonds that can potentially be created between oppressed individuals. Without occluding the possibility of unreliability that characterizes human subjectivity, the queer storyteller becomes a reconciliatory figure who offers alternative visions of the past, of the present and of the future.

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

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.

Terrestrial Cosmopolitanism, Posthumanism, and Multispecies Modes of Being in Cereus Blooms at Night

Cosmopolitanism has generally been used to describe a philosophy that imagines all humans as citizens of a single “human” community. This article explores a terrestrial cosmopolitanism that challenges the colonial discourse of human exceptionalism by extending the democratization of people to include environmental bodies within their global context, replacing hierarchies with collectivities to reveal humanism’s underrepresented others. Examining interspecies alliances in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, I look towards terrestrial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to anthropocentric forms of cosmopolitanism that continue to reinscribe colonialist aspirations and ontologically exclusionary practices. Mootoo’s work decenters how we think about humans and the environment and offers a nuanced depiction of a positive interspecies community that resists harmful humanist taxonomies. Reading the novel’s protagonist, Mala, as a posthuman figure, I argue that her rejection of human language, in conjunction with her nonhuman interactions, positions her as a keeper of collectivity, as she creates a third space of subjectivity in her garden that blurs the boundaries between humans and nonhumans.

문학적 장애 재현이 창출하는 공감과 연대 - 샤이니 무투(Shani Mootoo)의 장편소설 『밤에 피는 선인장 꽃』(Cereus Blooms ar Night)을 중심으로 -

문학적 장애 재현이 창출하는 공감과 연대 - 샤이니 무투(Shani Mootoo)의 장편소설 『밤에 피는 선인장 꽃』(Cereus Blooms ar Night)을 중심으로 -

Queer potentialities and queering home in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

This article employs queer potentiality as a reading strategy to unpack the ways in which Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night adroitly brings forth queer voices and visions on home and belonging that have been rejected, erased, or ignored. More precisely, through the juxtaposition of Gully Queen, a real-life transgender Jamaican woman, and Tyler and Otoh, Mootoo’s transgender protagonists, I demonstrate how these gender non-conforming bodies use queer potentiality to create a necessary disruption to conventional ideas of home; such a disruption educes a re-articulation of belonging. Here, queer potentiality is understood to be a specific kind of resistance that functions as an adjuvant for envisioning and inventing home. By interjecting queer voices and experiences into various Caribbean spaces and discourses, the non-conforming bodies explored here produce “queer moments of significance” that signal not only how non-conforming bodies will exist in the nation but also the manner in which they demand legitimacy and a place to call home.

Jean Rhys et Shani Mootoo ou la fragmentation de l’être

Identity in a colonial context cannot be defined through singularity. It has to be redefined through a multiplicity of origins. The human being thus becomes a mosaic of smaller identities struggling against inner trouble. This inevitable fight leads him/her towards implosion. Madness thus remains the only way out of a demanding and masculine world. In this article, we will study fragmented identities in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Cereus Blooms At Night by Shani Mootoo. Feminine identity crisis will be analyzed in correlation with narrative strategies used in post-colonial and queer literatures as well as deconstruction and subversion of literary canons.

Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination by Rosamond King

Reviewed by: Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination by Rosamond King Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (bio) King, Rosamond. Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014. This book takes as a point of departure the notion of Caribbean bodies, first as a locus of colonial exploitation through labor and sexual work, and then as a locus of pleasure, desire, resistance, and enjoyment. For King, it is important to recognize the agency and autonomy of Caribbean eroticism, as well as the diversity of desires and sexualities in a region that has been dominated by more than one imperial system. Island Bodies debunks the myth of the Caribbean as one of the most homophobic regions in the world, to explore the multiple ways in which non-normative genders and sexualities are part of the daily lives in the communities of this region. The book focuses on two major aspects: “the uses of the transgressive erotic (building in Audre Lorde’s work) and the power of desire as a motivating force for individual fulfillment” (9). Island Bodies is composed of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction the author reviews and justifies the rich comparative analysis proposed in [End Page 1185] the book based on the study of cultural productions and legal debates taking place in the French, Anglo, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean. King develops her arguments through a comparative approach that examines a diverse array of genres of cultural expression, such as poetry, novels and short stories, documentaries and feature films, carnivals and festivals, popular music, visual art, and political texts in the form of legal cases and mission statements of organizations produced from the 1970s to the present in the Caribbean and its diasporas. This is an important time period in the region, since it is precisely in these same years that fields like Caribbean feminism and Caribbean sexual minority activism emerge. King also discloses some of the limitations of her study, particularly in the inclusion of the Dutch Caribbean, the representation of the physically smaller islands, and the inclusion of certain ethnic groups, like the Chinese and Arab Caribbeans. One of the central notions in King’s book is what she denominates as the “Caribglobal.” Taking into account how globalization and transnationalism have an impact in the region, this term is used to refer to the individual and collective experiences within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. Island Bodies questions passive oppositions between the local and the global, especially in a region of the world where translocality and displacements are central historic and social experiences. This allows King to make a unique critical intervention using an archive firmly linked with a women of color feminist tradition—that includes Audre Lorde, Jacqui Alexander, Donette Francis, and Omise’eke Tinsley, among many others—while documenting a whole array of local terms used in the multilingual context of the Caribbean to refer to gender, sexuality, and desire. Each subsequent chapter engages a diverse and rich corpus to study the following forms of sexual transgression: unconventional genders, male and female homosexuality, women’s sexual agency, and interracial relationships between men of color and white women. This is an important critical gesture, since it conceives sexual transgressions as part of a continuum that includes heterosexual and non-heterosexual experiences. Chapter 1 studies the representation of transvestite characters in carnivals and festivals, in literary depictions, as well as in three cases on legal definitions of trans identities in Guyana, Cuba, and Trinidad and Tobago. The main thesis is that trans identities are widely represented in Caribbean cultures, but these representations are usually done in a “backhanded way.” Many of these trans characters do not enjoy the social validation and depth of development of most of the other characters. This is the case in the representation of trans characters and narrators in No Telephone to Heaven (1987) by Michelle Cliff, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), and Sirena Selena by Mayra Santos Febres (2000). According to King, the trans characters represented in these narratives excel in spaces in which their cisgender counterparts fail. In their perfection and utopianness, these characters do not attain the...

Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination by Nicole Seymour (review)

STRANGE NATURES: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. By Nicole Seymour. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013.What does it mean to practice a queer ecocriticism? Such a query animates Nicole Seymour's Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, a work as invested in lingering with the paradigms of intersectionality that such a question foregrounds as it is in developing a definitive answer to it. While Strange Natures is not the first monograph in the field of queer ecology, it is-to this reader's mind, at least-a groundbreaking book, one that carefully traces the barriers to such work (namely, queer theory's vexed relationship to nature and the two fields' ostensibly conflicting relationships to the status of futurity) in order to develop a queer ecocritical practice that engages, rather than resists, such difficulty. Indeed, Seymour's work revels in the surprising and the paradoxical; from its chosen archive to a reading practice that insists upon interrogating how conceptions of nature have been wielded to validate harm to vulnerable populations, human and non-human, Strange Natures is not necessarily what readers expect from traditional ecocriticism. And that, of course, is part of the point.Also part of the point is the book's commitment to complexity, philosophical and ethical; Seymour is not content to demonstrate how the queer and the ecological meet, but also seeks to show how a queer ecological project intersects with other political projects, including anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-classism. This is perhaps the chief accomplishment of Strange Natures ', that it refuses to think queerness and environmentalism apart from questions of social justice, insisting that a queer ecological methodology, practiced well, cannot help but attune us to questions of race, class, disability, and colonialism.After a powerful introduction outlining the difficulties of queer ecological work, Strange Natures unfolds over four chapters. The first, which puts Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues in conversation with contemporaneous works of Caribbean literature (Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night), argues for an organic transgenderism, an understanding of gender transitionality that is as natural as it is cultural, that can dwell outside the medical establishment (or before medical intervention), and that contributes to an environmentalist and anti-capitalist imaginary. Conceptually, this chapter is echoed not by what immediately follows it but instead by Seymour's final chapter, which treats Shelley Jackson's novel Half Life-a sardonic depiction of conjoined twins living in the fallout of Nuclear testing-as the occasion to imagine an ethic of care that is performed irreverently, that embraces ugly landscapes and grotesque bodies (164), and that welcomes the dissolution of self-sovereignty. These two chapters are linked both by their insistence on the role of the non-normative body in queer ecological ethics (Seymour explicitly reminds us that conjoinment is not unlike transgenderism [149]), and by questions of genre (Cliff's and Mootoo's magical realism returns implicitly as a concern in Seymour's engagement with Jackson's speculative fiction). …

Incestuous rape, abjection, and the colonization of psychic space in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) both apply a strategy of connecting rape to other forms of oppression, suggesting that incest is at least partly the result of the dynamics of being colonized and “othered”. This article brings out the problematics of closely associating colonization and (incestuous) rape by exploring the associations made in these two novels. It uses Kelly Oliver's concept of “the colonization of psychic space” to argue that the novels demonstrate that without a positive space of meaning, victims of racial oppression and of sexual violence find themselves among the abjected. The close association made between colonization and incest is criticized for ignoring the specificity of the processes by which incest and rape function to make one feel abjected.

Reading between the “posts”: Systemic violence and the trope of hybridity in the postcolonial novel

The late-20th-century convergence of post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial theories has engendered a critical discourse network that privileges hybridity. These accounts contend that it (re)inscribes the agency of minority subjects, destabilizing hegemonic discourses, but, paradoxically, hybridity has become a stabilizing trope for – as well as the dominant way to read – the postcolonial novel. This essay discusses three postcolonial novels that “disidentify” with this master narrative of postcolonialism: Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. When reread as performances enacted between the “posts”, these novels suggest that hybridity can expose the systemic violence of colonial rationality.

Gardens and Gastropods: Space and Form in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night

(2012). Gardens and Gastropods: Space and Form in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. Green Letters: Vol. 16, Global and Postcolonial Ecologies, pp. 77-90.

Neocolonialism, queer kinship, and diaspora: contesting the romance of the family in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory

This essay asks how configurations of family and kinship are rendered particularly queer in the context of diaspora, both for those who are part of the diaspora and for those left behind. It argues that the question of queer diaspora must develop a critical language for resisting the romance of family that subtends the liberal humanist paradigms of citizenship and activism; more specifically, it aims to expand the notion of queer diaspora beyond the specific conditions of same-sex desire in the framework of relocation, immigration, and exile, to suggest that queer diaspora provides a framework for thinking through the complicity of state policy, global neoliberal corporate regimes of exploitation and accumulation, and intimate mechanics of desire and attachment. In looking at Mootoo's and Danticat's work, I explore how the narratives of diaspora reveal a complicity between state violence and sexualized discipline – or rather, how ‘home’ and family become sites for the reproduction of state violence, episodes in which the enforcement of political power is privatized into the realm of the family and thus rendered natural, ‘private’, or invisible. The production of such subjects, I argue, involves the privatization of particular forms of labour as well as the public regulation of seemingly ‘private’ matters of desire, attachment, and kinship.

Resurgence and Creative Resistance in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

In Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), the theme of resurgence develops as an introspective journey that opens on an array of motifs linked to colonization— violence, order and chaos, gender, cultural identity, and memory. This paper examines how Mootoo aims at a readjustment of history by imagining a redemptive process of creative resistance consisting in the reactivation of the memory and speech of protagonists traumatized by colonial violence.

“A Shared Queerness”

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

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance in<i>Cereus Blooms at Night</i>

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance in Cereus Blooms at Night

Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.

Caribbean Literature and the Environment (review)

Reviewed by: Caribbean Literature and the Environment Martin Munro Caribbean Literature and the Environment Ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, René K. Gosson, and George B. Handley Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xii + 303 pp. ISBN 0-8139-2373-5 cloth. It is always a risky endeavor to apply a set of theories conceived in developed nations to other, less-developed regions. From Marxism to surrealism, and perhaps the generalizing strands of postcolonialism, there is a long history of cultural and ideological mismatches between "first" and "third" worlds. Fortunately, the editors of this volume are well aware of the risk of intellectual imperialism in applying their particular critical perspective—ecocriticism—to the Caribbean without paying due attention to the contradictions and pitfalls of such a project. The lengthy introduction stresses the editors' sensitivity to accusations of "grafting" (27) ecocriticism onto the Caribbean, and also contains a useful critique of the introverted focus of North American ecological criticism. Indeed, such is their concern with stressing their sensitivity that they tend to overstate the importance of "neoimperialism" in perpetuating Caribbean environmental degradation, while giving a pass to the region's independent governments, which (as the editors do realize) have failed to prioritize the environment, and in many cases mistreat the land as if this were their historical right, passed down from Conquistador and colonialist. The introduction points to the risk that unless it is applied with some conviction and courage, as well as sensitivity, this potentially useful critical perspective might wither under the weight of its own good intentions. Thankfully, the volume's essays and interviews do not lack for critical incisiveness and analytical precision. Antonio Benítez-Rojo sets the standard for the rest of the book with his concise, poetic, personal, and collective sweep through thousands of years of Cuban ecological and political history. His intimate familiarity with the various post-Columbian economic "machines" leads him to say that a "clean, green" development is a future possibility for Cuba, but, he asks with some skepticism, "Is it probable?" (50). Derek Walcott's "Isla Incognita" is written in similarly beautiful, poetic prose, though it deals less with ecology than with internal, or internalized geography, the relationship between landscapes, seasons, climate, and creativity. Another accomplished poet, Cyril Dabydeen, offers an evocative piece, which details how he and his ancestors gradually embedded themselves in the coastal landscape of Guyana, a place where "King Sugar was lord and master" (61) and where the experience of place is shaped irrevocably by the plantation. Dabydeen's essay is complemented by Shona Jackson's lucid and compelling chapter on the El Dorado myth, and its re-incorporation into Guyanese nationalist discourse. Taking Wilson Bigaud's Paradis Terrestre as her poto mitan, and subtly adopting the spinning movements of the trickster spider Anansi into her prose, LeGrace Benson weaves her way around the history of Haitian paradise landscape painting with such skill that one hardly notices the visual absence of the paintings she describes. Jana Evans Braziel's essay takes up directly the editors' challenge to rethink ecocriticism in a Caribbean context, and her engaging analyses of Glissant, Kincaid, and Walcott show effectively the potential of these authors to "move ecocriticism beyond nature writing" (124). While all of the essays are of a [End Page 217] high standard, of particular further note are Isabel Hoving's eco-feminist reading of Shanti Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Natasha Tinsley's original and engaging essay on how colonial discourses of nature in Suriname shaped conceptions of what is sexually "natural" and acceptable, Helen Tiffin's masterful account of how English representations of the tropics have influenced anglophone Caribbean writers, and Heidi Bojsen's equally impressive reading of "rhizomatic narration" in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes. Analytic precision is not therefore compromised by the volume's breadth of focus; appropriately enough, there is a finally a feeling of organic wholeness, of each part being in dialogue with all the others, and of critical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries dissolving in a most promising way. Martin Munro University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press