CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT
0. Background
Experience of multiple migration:
n born in Ireland in 1958 and raised in Trinidad.
n moved to Canada at the age of 19, where she began a career as a visual artist.
n Mootoo has said that she has gravitated to the visual most of her life, because as a child, when she told her grandmother of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of an uncle, she was told never to say those words again. “So, in different ways, I found it safer not to use words and started making pictures.” Finally acknowledging and naming her experience of abuse prompted Mootoo to return to words, and write her first collection of short stories. (source: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Motoo.html )
n Out on Main Street (1993), a collection of short stories set in Vancouver.
n Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). – main issues
n Colonization(division, ambivalence, mimicry)à Hatred, Guilt vs. Love
n Community Building
n Nature & Gender Category
n Narrative and Memory (Magic Realism)
n Cereus Blooms at Night: plot
n Part I – [present -- Tyler] [past –Chandin, young Mala and Asha left alone]
n Part II – [present – appearance of Ambrose and Otoh] [past –Otoh’s approach to Mala; Mala’s memories of the past [the day of departure, Pohpoh’s venturing out]; end: the burning of the house]
n Part III -- [past –Ambrose back from the Wetland – Mala’s killing the fater] (only one break)
n Part IV -- [present – no dawn in the morning, Otoh talking to Ambrose and Elsie]
n Part V -- [present – the Judge comes with the letters – Otty and Ty, Mohanty and Ramchandin, to Asha]
n [History of Indian indentured laborers]
[After] the Emancipation Act of 1834, British planters needed new
sources of labor competition to lower wages and reassert their control over the
newly freed Afro-Trinidadians. These planters turned to India, and the laborers
they brought to Trinidad, as Aisha Khan dryly notes, “are known either as ‘rescuers
of empire’ or ‘scabs,’ depending on the point of view” (Khan 2004, 5).
The 149,939 East Indian indentured laborers recruited between 1845 and 1917
(Reddock 1994, 28) allowed Trinidad to remain productive in the sugar industry
that, as Sidney Mintz (1985) observes, was the lynchpin of the entire British
economy. Trinidad’s sugar production quadrupled from 1828 to 1895, in contrast
to other British Caribbean islands, where sugar production declined,
mainly because planters in Trinidad imported more indentured laborers from
India than those in any other Caribbean island (Mintz 1985). (82 grace kyungwon hong)
[the text]
Listen. Since the Africans let go from slavery, all eyes on how the government treating them. It have commissions from this place and from that place making sure that the government don’t just neglect them. They have schools, they have regular
and free medical inspection. Now, you see any schools set up for our children, besides the Reverend’s school? When we get sick and we have pains, who looking after us? We looking after our own self, because nobody have time for us. Except the Reverend and his mission from the Shivering Northern Wetlands. All he want from us is that we convert to his religion. If I had children, I would convert! Besides, nobody but you really know which god you praying to. Convert, man! Take the children yourself to the mission school. And when you praying you pray with you eyes and you mouth shut. Simple so. That is all. ( 28–29)
Morality and de-colonization [source: Grace Kyungwon Hong “A Shared Queerness”Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Sexuality in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2006, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 73–103]
In the particular contexts of Trinidad and Tobago, sexuality, morality, and
propriety are the discourses that carry over from colonial to neocolonial
modes of rule, albeit to different effects. Scholars of Trinidadian history have
convincingly narrated the transition from the colonial era to the postcolonial
(or neocolonial) one as mediated by an elite anticolonial nationalism that
mobilized decolonization movements by, ironically, preserving the notions of
propriety and morality first established in the colonial era. In the contemporary
era, Caribbean nation-states attempt to reconsolidate a sense of national
identity undermined by transnational economic restructuring. They do so by
blaming the dissolution of the nation-state not on such processes as structural
adjustment, privatization, and international investment but on those
figures that are defined as deviant and threatening because of their lack of
“propriety” and “morality,” such as sexualized women, prostitutes, and
homosexuals (Alexander 1994). The emergence of a specifically East Indian
Trinidadian identity in the 1990s, culminating with the election of East Indian
Basdeo Pandey as prime minister in 1995, may be an explicit disruption
of previous notions of Trinidadian national identity as Afro-Trinidadian; but
as postcolonial critic Tejaswini Niranjana has shown, this East Indian national
identity also centrally defines itself in relation to morality and propriety,
particularly that of Hindu women (Niranjana 1998). (75 grace kyungwon hong)
Natural System and Colonization (grace kyungwon hong 80-)
1. In her study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes 1992) establishes the centrality of the classifying and standardizing function of the science of natural history to colonial epistemes. Coincident with the rise of the plantation system that made Caribbean islands such as Trinidad the lynchpin of the English economy, the classificatory science of natural history emerged in the early eighteenth century with the publication of Systema Naturae by Carl Linne (better known as Linnaeus), which standardized the categorization of living forms into the familiar dual Latinate nomenclature of genus followed by species. Pratt notes that Linnaeus’s system, unlike previous nationalist and continentalist systems, “alone launched a European knowledge-building enterprise of unprecedented scale and appeal” (Pratt 1992, 25). Pratt details the ways in which Linnaeus’s classificatory system, although seemingly benign and ancillary to colonial ventures, was actually instrumental to the colonial project insofar as it became the language through which Europeans articulated and thus understood their relationship to the world in this period. In other words, Pratt argues that Linnaeus’s system, which claimed to be able to classify all manner of life on the planet, whether known or unknown at the time, made imaginable a schema of the world that made sense of that stage of colonialism. The simplicity of the Linnaean binomial system made for a democratizing accessibility that allowed for a great number of amateur practitioners, so much so that botany became a required accomplishment for educated women (King 2003, 131). Thus, Linnaean categorization provided the language for a new European episteme attempting to make sense of the plurality of their colonial world.
2. P. 81 – the other studies: e.g.
n Sexuality -- Amy King (2003): although Linnaeus classified plants—and not the various races of man— through their sexual function, his description of plant sexuality depended on analogy with human sexuality, and promiscuous human sexuality at that.
n Sexual knowledge à racial knowledge; Botanist as “a New Adam”; colonist as “gardener”;
n Kay Dian Kriz (2003) -- Violence to the living plants and human beings in plantation economy erased in Natural History of Jamaica
n Gopinath (2005) – Indian nuclear family structure in support of its male leader.
3. (grace kyungwon hong 82) I would argue that Cereus Blooms at Night is an example of one such “act of resistance” from a “West Indian descendent,” though not descended from African slaves but from indentured workers. This act of resistance must emerge as a form of memory, as Cereus Blooms at Night remembers this process of forgetting and erasure, and in so doing, imagines new modes of subjectivity and collectivity.
Therefore, this text asks us to investigate the ways in which natural history’s taxonomic classifications mediated the racial and sexual classifications that emerged out of the racialized hierarchies of work in the Caribbean plantations, not only in the era of slavery but also in the later era of indentureship and “free” labor.
[the text] discrimination against homosexuals
Characters
Tyler the narrator / His prologue6 – I and the eye of scandal
22; 106 His “digression” – his hopes for freedom
14-15 Wearing kerchief mocked by the others
17 Wearing dressing gown
47 (after Nana’s story) ponder the gender and sex roles available to people,
48 cannot differentiate Chandin’s perversion and his own.
76-77 Wearing the dress and nylon stockings given by Mala
90 speaks to Asha, etc. two different ways of coping – going far away, going mad
& Mala / turning points
17 – first job
19- Holds her
23 – parrot
24 -- Her insect cries (cricket chirp)
74-75 -- sings the old lady rhyme
75 -- Her first real communication “Where Asha?”
76 dress "1 felt she had been watching me and seeing the same things that everyone else saw. But she had stolen a dress for me. No one had ever done anything like that before. She knows what 1 am, was all I could think. She knows my nature" (76).
77 - "a revelation came. The reason Miss Ramchandin paid me no attention was that, to her mind, the outfit was not something to either congratulate or scorn—it simply was. She was not one to manacle nature, and I sensed that she was permitting mine its freedom" (77).
97 -- too modest for a man,
98 - assigned another patient
99 – furniture moved around, “Where Asha” à full-time job caring for Mala.
Cigarette
Smoking
Nana / Tells the story of Chandin 26
48 both Nana and Tyler have their mother’s secrets ???
Nana and Mala Confirms each other for him 46
Mala / Pohpoh / 48- 67 Starts to tell the story/ 99 murmuring words
Polpoh protective of her mother and Levinia 55, 56, 57. (The photo 56, another one she keeps 64
63 Turning point— Sarah and Lavinia forced to leave without the kids
78 – story resumes Asha and Pohpoh go out
Mala as a mad woman 113 – with magical power; 117 (a ball of fire)
Mala in her world of nature 114-
With the photo 116
Mala’s becoming wordless 126-
Mala fighting the silver light 132-34 vs. Cereus blooms at night (love) 134
Mala remembering, Pohpoh 142, protecting Asha
146 – Pohpoh out to release herself, picking up a bug
151 – Pohpoh venturing into another’s yard, saw a cereus plant,
156 – Mala into a two-storey house, see herself in a mirror but feeling successful
200 - Decides not to be called Pohpoh
& Asha / 67 – hand shadows
70 Asha’s observation of Pohpoh
80-81 Ahsa’s curly hair
81- their trip to conquer Walter Bissey
88 – the ant in the circle
91 – burning the mantis, Pohpoh invisible to all of them.
92 –96 Boyie approaching, Pohpoh seducing him.
96 Pohpoh imagines flying, trying to find ways to evade her father
Sarah and Lavinia / Riding the buggy to go to town or the market,
Stay indoors
The beach: seen by Chandin thru’ the lens 57-58
Sister
And the nurses / Discipline 12, 14
Doctor / 22-23, T not a curiosity
Hector / Hector – 10 helpful, 67 sympathetic his brother (Randy)
[Mr. Hector, the gardener] recoiled from me and it was his recoiling that stung, made me feel as though my back were exposed, or more pointedly, as though I had been caught with my trousers off, awaiting a whipping with a guava cane” (70).
“Trying to change [Mr. Hector] or his reactions might well bring only grief. I decided there and then that I would change my own feelings about myself” (71)
Cereus and blossom / 5 – [present] will bloom soon, nothing but an unruly network of limp, green leaves
22 – the plant as a gift (from Otoh) an exotic plant in SNW National Botanical Gardens
128-29 – Mala with both the fragrance of the cereus blooms as much as the smell of the bucket and the stink of decomposition
the wall of cereus 128, 130, 134 -- Mala like a moth 143, 156
134 - Cereus blooms at night (love) 134
153 –saw a cereus plant, could almost taste the scent with her tongue
Tyler and Otoh get closer, and wait for the cereus to bloom (246, 248)
105 “bloom” – Tyler –“My own life has finally begun to bloom.”
48 -- “blossom” the affiliation blossoming between Miss Ramchandin and me”
Blush – Tyler
Ambrose Mohanty / 100- `
Ambrose and his wife Elsie: 107-
Ambrose’s formality 111, 145
Ambrose noticing Otoh’s familiarity, his lack of hair --
Elsie – her fatigue sleep into the day 236, finds her territory invaded once Ambrose stops sleeping 239
understands Otoh’s gender orientation 237-38
Otoh Mohanty / “breathtakingly beautiful” to Tyler 101
Joins in story-telling 102
Ambrosia – 125-26
Otoh and Mala 118 – notices that she observes him
Otoh’s feeling about Ambrose (his rebellion) and Mala (a helpless bird) 120 wants to share his secret with Mala ( in his mother’s dress)
134 Otoh going to Mala’s with Mavis at night 134
139 Otoh ignores Mavis
140 Otoh in his father’s clothes (his female body 141)
148 Otoh picked up by an out-of-towner, Otoh going to Mala’s, with Mala in her memories
152 Otoh into Mala’s place, the smell choking him, sees Mala (155)
159 Mala mistakens Otoh for Ambrose –the smell 161, Mala in tears 164
Town people / Pelting stones at Mala
Other lives – out-of-towner ; Constable 165-66
Views of “weak man” 265
Rumor spreading -- 166
crowding effect – 167
Ambrose – the one with a degree
Many enjoy watching Chandin grow furious 210
Policemen: enjoy egging Mala on 186
Part I: Main Issues