Joshua Prescott

In-Between Self and Other: Space, Sexuality and Subversion in

Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Indo-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo’s first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), explores the relationship between the colonization of bodies and the construction of national boundaries, or the possibility of realizing a project of national identification following the exploitation of Caribbean colonial labour. Set in the fictitious town of Lantanacamara, Mootoo examines the idea of “home” as a means of producing and maintaining a recognition of space that can be severed from a history of colonial oppression. By placing questions of personal and cultural identification at the forefront of her novel, Mootoo asks that we examine the politics of language, sexuality, and violence, particularly from the perspective of the colonized subject, as they are filtered through the perception of colonial contact. What is more, the text creates a community of individuals “who find healing and selfhood through their recognition of ’shared queerness’” (May, “Sexual Citizenship” 147), thereby asking that readers recognize the validity of a group of individuals who use this sense of shared queerness as a point of identification.

This paper will argue that by surpassing an epistemology focused on historical narrative progress in favour of locating the significance of challenging normative, colonial discourses in the concept of space, Cereus Blooms offers a new understanding of identity that works to disrupt traditional conceptions of heteronormativity. Referencing both the benefits and limitations of Michel Foucault’s work on discourses of sexuality, I suggest that Mootoo’s text responds to the colonization of bodies and space by producing sites of recognition that escape the need to identify with a project of national self-realization, what Vivian May names an “alternative epistemology and economy of being” (“Dislocation” 97). By writing characters that are able to cross presumed social and sexual borders, the novel effectively subverts a colonial project that seeks to create, indeed produce, normative, heterosexual, Western subjects. In turn, I argue that Cereus Blooms offers new sites of subversion, particularly the garden space, that, quite ambitiously, imagine the ever-fluid and changing nature of sexuality, bodies, and one’s understanding of both home and belonging.

Joshua Prescott is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He completed his B.A. at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. and his M.A. in English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ont. His current research explores the relationship between sexuality, citizenship, and nation in contemporary Canadian Caribbean fiction.