Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting (review)
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In Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada, Rinaldo Walcott argues that blackness in the multicultural but not always egalitarian space of Canada is characterized by an "in-between" sensibility that reflects the material and, more persistently, psycho-spiritual migrations of the black subject (48). He stresses that first-generation immigrant authors in Canada, such as Dionne Brand and Claire Harris, use language as a tool "to come to terms with the past in the present" and to make evident "the unsettled restlessness of the exile and refugee who must rechart, remap and regroup so that both self and collectivity are made evident and present" (48–49). In recent years a new generation of authors, influenced by and seeking to expand the focus of their predecessors, has emerged in Canada. Their use of language signals a sensibility that is both immigrant and Canadian, foreign to and yet enmeshed with the landscape. David Chariandy is among this second generation of writers. His debut novel, Soucouyant, aptly subtitled A Novel of Forgetting, speaks to the concerns of both generations who struggle with the need to remember the past in order to remain sane in hostile territory and the desire to forget the past in order to better inhabit the inherited terrain. Chariandy's novel strikingly illuminates that haunting and haunted immigrant space between nations, between past and present, and between remembering and forgetting.
On the surface, Soucouyant appears to be a novel about a family's struggles with a woman's dementia, a degenerative brain disease that is marked by a decrease in memory, cognition, and language skills. But this story is far more complex, as it peels back the layers of the mind to expose the coping mechanisms that immigrants deploy in order to negotiate the boundaries of the in-between space of (un-)belonging, "between countries and belonging to neither" (91), where one is under pressure to recall roots and cultural fragments and to forget them at the same time. Soucoyant explores what happens when people sometimes "forget to forget" and "blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided," thus "awaken[ing] to the stories buried deep within our sleeping selves or trafficked quietly through the touch of others" (32). In tracing the history of the arrival at the in-between space of (un-)belonging and forgetting, Chariandy subtly weaves from fragments of various characters' memories an alternative narrative that, in recalling the lives of members of a Caribbean immigrant family in Canada, offers a challenge to the metanarratives of Western history in general and of Canadian multiculturalism more specifically.
Adele, a black woman of mixed race, arrives in Canada from Trinidad in the 1960s, when Caribbean immigrants migrated en masse to the "Great White North," influenced by Canada's new policy of multiculturalism. This policy encouraged the incorporation of new immigrants into the nation and a recognition of their unique cultural contributions [End Page 887] to Canada. Unfortunately, the discourse of multiculturalism never quite aligned with the actions of the nation, particularly in terms of daily life as it is lived by Canadian citizens. Adele's story mirrors the many true stories of Caribbean immigrants whose foreign subjectivity does not map well onto the white space of the Canadian nation. Treated by white Canadians as invisible, as invaders who taint the landscape, or as the punch line to the latest multicultural joke, Adele, her husband, and her two sons all become victims of opposing cultural forces. Adele counters the violence wrought by these forces on her family by relating tales of her childhood in Chaguaramas, Trinidad. One tale in particular, of a soucouyant, a female vampire spirit of Caribbean folklore, allows Adele's youngest son to make peace with the burden of caring for a mother who slowly forgets herself and to create his own narrative of self, born from the in-between space which he occupies.
While the pain of this family's cultural displacement is palpable and at times almost unbearable, Chariandy's deployment of the soucouyant myth exposes the haunting history of marginalization...
