"A Shared Queerness": Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Sexuality in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night

A passage from Shani Mootoo's 1996 novel Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates the author's fascination with flora, fauna, and the language of natural history: "At first, Aves, Hexapoda, Gastropoda, and Reptilia burrowed instinctively into nooks and crevices. They realized eventually that they had no cause to hide. Mala permitted them to roam 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 housekeeping—epitomizes the novel's complex and contradictory relationship to colonial and neocolonial discourses. In this novel, the language of natural history produces a normative structure but necessarily also becomes the vocabulary through which alternatives to this structure are described. When Mala finally gets a visitor after decades of living alone, for example, the visitor notices "decades of dust; clumps of matted cobwebs; old cavities eaten away by wood lice; lazy, unperturbed daddy-longlegs clinging to the siding, motionless; stout cloud-white moths polkadotting the wood; remains of snake eggs, lizard eggs, hatchlings lurking, squirming squishily as they sought the warm sunlight. An old glass aquarium lay on its side" (Mootoo 1996, 153). The aquarium, symbolically meaningful as a tool basic to the science of natural history, has a place here, although it does not function in its natural historical mode as a means of caging animals for display and analysis. The aquarium exists alongside the unfettered proliferation, reproduction, decay, and decomposition that happen in Mala's house and garden. This novel does not purport to shun outright the language of natural history. Instead, it uses it, while turning it on its side.¹

What explains the centrality of a seemingly archaic branch of science for a novel published in 1996? An unexpected blend of antirealism and historical fiction, this contemporary text is set in a fictionalized Caribbean island patterned after Trinidad, where Mootoo lived in childhood. The setting is clearly pre-independence; Lantanacameran society is a colonial one. Given its colonial setting, it may seem that the novel is deliberately limiting itself to a consideration of the past, rather than producing a commentary on the present. Yet I would argue that the novel's reference to a historical past is not about depicting this past "faithfully"—as evidenced by the deliberate ambiguity of physical place and chronological time as well as the antirealist elements of the text. Walter Benjamin observes that "to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (Benjamin 1969, 97). The moment of danger is the neocolonial present where, as M. Jacqui Alexander (1994) reminds us, "deviant" sexualities are produced and policed in the service of a transnational economy. As such, the text references the language of natural history to thematize a more complex relationship between the neocolonial present and the historical past. Natural history is a discourse that corresponds to a past colonial regime. Yet the past gets recycled and emerges in unexpected ways, as fundamental aspects of the workings of neocolonialism. Natural history is such a compelling trope for this novel because it reveals the ghostly residues of the colonial past within the neocolonial present. Cereus Blooms at Night uses the colonial language...