Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography

11 An Ethnos of Difference, a Praxis of Inclusion: The Ethics of Global Citizenship in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

247 Break a vase, and the love that reassembles its fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. —Derek Walcott1 You will hear little more of me as I apply myself to the story of Mala Ramchandin , fashioning a single garment out of myriad parts. —Shani Mootoo2 T raditionally defined as a “nation,”3 the “ethnos” connotes group identification, based on the presence of shared traits which serve, in turn, as markers of differentiation from other groups. If autoethnography signals a shift from the “retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self [to] the rewriting of [. . .] ethnic history,”4 or the relocation of the self within the ethnic community, what are the conceptual and aesthetic limits of autoethnography when the ethnos itself is configured as a group of migrant hybrid subjects, affiliated through difference and allied through “otherness”? Conversely, what are the possibilities for writing or imagining the ethnos “beyond” these limits? Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night tentatively poses this and other questions of (self-) representation for those whose subject positions are, by virtue of the multiple sites of identification and “situatedness” associated with diasporic and migrant identities, simultaneously local and global. Moreover, in foregrounding communities as affiliative and filiative bodies which travel across the asymmetrical contact zones of culture as much as they erect the seemingly impenetrable boundaries of exclusion, Mootoo [chapter eleven] An Ethnos of Difference, a Praxis of Inclusion The Ethics of Global Citizenship in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night Mariam Pirbhai strives to widen the epistemology of the ethnos and, by extension, the relationship between the self and the ethnic community. By redrawing the self and the ethnos within the correlative relationship between the local and global, Mootoo’s engagement with the autoethnographic project rejects any overreliance on “a spatially localized people,”5 that does not acknowledge the already dislocated and globalized positionality of the diasporic subject . This is not to suggest that Mootoo sacrifices historical and cultural specificity for a utopian6 vision of belonging or a postmodern de-territoriality . Rather, in situating the ethnos as part of the wider human community , Mootoo’s text appears to advocate an ethics of global citizenship which considers the interdependent relationship of past and present hegemonies as they are, in turn, simultaneously (re-)constituted within local and global geographies. The widening of the episteme of belonging and community plays itself out as a productive tension between time frames, narrative modes and perspectives , private and public spheres, the “here” and necessary “elsewheres” of diasporic experience, etc. Set in a fictitious island that is nonetheless fully evocative of the Caribbean, Cereus Blooms at Night conflates myth, history, and fantasy, as well as the inexplicable alongside the ordinary. As Vivian May suggests, the novel offers a “mythical version of Trinidad”7 which echoes other kinds of quasi-fictive locales found across the body of Caribbean women’s writing, wherein the “critical utility of a fictional island setting” offers “opportunities to remember identities and histories differently.”8 Within its own multiple, shifting time frames and narrative frames alike, Mootoo’s hybrid text also bears the traces of magical realism in its attempt to accommodate the Caribbean’s creolized space as a fusion of different cultural groups, as well as of the diasporic subjects whose private selves bespeak a history of dislocation and rupture therein. The novel’s “deliberate haziness […] in time as well as place”9 further imbues the text with allegorical possibility . In other words, the text becomes meaningful both within and “beyond” the framework of its historical and cultural specificities. The story of Mala Ramchandin, a victim of incest and protracted sexual abuse, is presented as an amateur biographer’s attempt to re-member “differently”—that is to say, outside the delimiting framework of ideological and (af)filiative rupture—the history and identity of one such fractured self. Mootoo’s wholly self-conscious narrator, Tyler, engages in a metafictional exercise in which authorship is at best a tenuous enactment of narrative control, subject to self-reflexive “lapses, for there are some.”10 Moreover, as soon as Tyler discloses his potential for narrative slippage, so too does the text assume an added writerly dimension of autobiography, 248 Part Four Global Affiliations for, as he tells us, to have erased the lapses “would have been to do the same to myself.” Thus, from our first introduction to Tyler...