Through the story of an Indian family, the Ramchandins, it superimposes the evocation of individual dramas and of the collective suffering endured by deported labourers during the colonial period of Trinidad. Cereus Blooms at Night is built along a fragmented and polyvocal narration. Consequently, it is worth examining how, in an allegorical “subterranean” journey, 1 she breaks the negation of memory, the individual as well as the collective, in a literary exploration of the space of the human spirit, which culminates in the resurgence of painful but salutary memories.

1 In reference to Wilson Harris’s concept of “subterranean tradition,” which implies that binary oppo (.)ģ For Mootoo, writing is a creative process whose main achievement is to deconstruct silence.

Nevertheless, in a postmodern perspective, she develops these themes in a queer and deconstructive dimension which gives her novel an innovative tone. Indeed, like her Caribbean or diasporic “sisters”-Jamaica Kincaid, Zee Edgell, Dionne Brand or Erna Brodber-Mootoo explores the questions of women’s invisibility and voicelessness, but also of female sexuality, violence and madness, in the domestic space. They also situate her writing in the double movement of Caribbean and Indian female writers and scholars reclaiming voice. The themes developed by Mootoo both relate her fiction to a Caribbean literature whose counter-discursive style is closely linked to the notions of memory and history, and to the denunciation of colonisation.

After the publication of some collections of short stories and poems, she wrote Cereus Blooms at Night, her first novel, as a cathartic deliverance, as she announces in the preliminary presentation of her work. This multitalented artist (she is also a video artist and painter) migrated to Canada at the age of nineteen, to flee Trinidad and the violent space of a family where life had become hellish under the assaults of an incestuous uncle. In her novel, this Indo-Trinidadian Canadian writer situates her narration in the prism of ambiguity, evoking, in a chaotic superposition of contradictory and crude images, the life of a mad woman, Mala, who is arrested by the police for having killed her father.Ģ Shani Mootoo is one of the most unsettling of the new generation of Caribbean writers. Shani Mootoo, the author of Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), has undoubtedly been seduced and convinced, when naming her novel, by the attractive and disconcerting sensuality of this tropical cactus, and by the symbolic load of this wild night-blooming plant.

1 Once a year the cereus produces a giant white flower exhaling an indecent fragrance of female sexuality.

Cereus blooms at night