CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT
0. Background
Experience of multiple migration:
 born in Ireland in 1958 and raised in Trinidad.
 moved to Canada at the age of 19, where she began a career as a visual artist.
 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 )
 Out on Main Street (1993), a collection of short stories set in Vancouver.
 Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). – main issues
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Colonization(division, ambivalence, mimicry) Hatred, Guilt vs.
Love
Community Building
Nature & Gender Category
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Narrative and Memory (Magic Realism)
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 Cereus Blooms at Night: plot
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Part I – [present -- Tyler] [past –Chandin, young Mala and Asha left alone]
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]
Part III -- [past –Ambrose back from the Wetland – Mala’s killing the
fater] (only one break)
Part IV -- [present – no dawn in the morning, Otoh talking to Ambrose
and Elsie]
Part V -- [present – the Judge comes with the letters – Otty and Ty,
Mohanty and Ramchandin, to Asha]
[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.
 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.
 Sexual knowledge  racial knowledge; Botanist as “a New Adam”; colonist as
“gardener”;
 Kay Dian Kriz (2003) -- Violence to the living plants and human beings in plantation
economy erased in Natural History of Jamaica
 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 prologue
6 – 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”  full-time job caring for
Mala.
Cigarette
Smoking
Tells the story of Chandin 26
Nana
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)
48 both Nana and Tyler have their mother’s secrets ???
Mala in her world of nature 114With the photo 116
Mala’s becoming wordless 126Mala 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: 107Ambrose’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
1) Community building the development of the relationship between Tyler and
Mala, Sarah and Levninia, Mala and Asha, and Tyler and Hector and then Otoh.
2) Gender Category Tyler’s desire for being seen “ordinary.”
3) Colonial Heritage stories about the Ramchandin family (told by Nana and Mala)
4) Colonial Heritage – Chandin the impact of colonization and missionary
a) hierarchy
b) self-hatred
5) Narrative Method – Tyler getting the stories from his grandmother and Mala.
4. Missionary, hierarchy and colonialism
 Ramchandin’s expectation 26-27 social upgrading (out of the labor class) –
 Thoroughly –name unchanged, to keep him as “one of their kind” 30;
treat all
his converts as “children” 49
 Uses education to trade conversion (tangible benefit 30), get Chandin to do
translation for him
 36 Performed as Chandin’s father … , to draw a line between C and L.
Racial:
Chandin -- p. 49 hierarchies of human value and "inherited nature" (49);
Gender 22
At the seminary 39-40 cricket [called the third-person] and admitting Lavinia to the seminary
“ ‘Chandin, what splendid batsmanship, my boy! Inspired, simply inspired!’
Chandin, sweating in the heat yet still wearing his cricket sweater, blushed and
mumbled thank-you. He was aware of being spoken to by the Reverend as thought
he were a third person standing off to the side observing the two of them” (39)
The splitness of Chadin’s identity
Different attitudes toward patois language: Chandin’s and Lavinia’s attitude 53
2. self-hatred – Chadin’s internalized racism and shame:
29—32 leave the barracks; conversion = rejecting his family background; his chair,
31- admiration of the chandelier and the other pieces of furniture,
31 - of Levinia (whose attractiveness first lies in her white hair, fair skin, and her being the
principal’s daughter)  passion turns to flames of anger and self-loathing when he is not
noticed
34 – mimicking Reverend
38 – mimicking the other white men in the seminary
Chandin - “was the only person of Indian descent at the seminary. He was . . the only
non-white person there. . . . The others had all come from the Shivering Northern
Wetlands to study theology and get first-hand experience in a tropical climate among
non-Christians” (38)
49 feels chained both to the church and the Thoroughlys
51 – distanced from Sarah and his children, whose skin too dark
195 – Chadin in the present time: driven out or pitied
3. Lavinia --
53 -- Lavinia, who "loved the freedom and wildness in Sarah's garden, so unlike her mother's
well-ordered, colour-coordinated beds" (53).
54 – about killing snails
4. Mala’s madness -- mad as a brainless bird" (107).
5. Exile -- Tyler, -- tries to understand and break boundaries
-- chooses temporary exile as a survival strategy: he leaves Lantanacamara to study
nursing so that he can trade in being treated like a “curiosity” at home because of his
sexuality for being treated as an exotic “other” while a “foreign” student abroad.
(47–48). “I have come to discern that my desire to leave the shores of
Lantanacamara had much to do with . . . wanting to be somewhere where my
‘perversion,’ which I tried diligently as I could to shake, might either be invisible or
of no consequence to people to whom my foreignness was what would be strange”
-- “I was preoccupied with trying to understand what was natural and what was
perverse, and who said so and why” (48)
(77) felt flat footed and clumsy -- “Not a man and not ever able to be a woman,
suspended nameless in the limbo state between existence and nonexistence”  Mala,
not one to manacle nature.
Part II: Main Issues
1. Community + Natural World: Mala and the “natural” world
(Mala’s insect cries 24)
-- names: Aves(鳥綱), Hexapoda(昆蟲(六足綱), Gastropoda, Reptilia (128)  birds,
insects, snails, and reptiles
-- sensitive to smells and sounds 114
-- nature as her companion 127, mutual respect and her happiness when seeing them.
-- her way of collecting insect corpses in her bucket, 128 -- Mala roams her house and
garden with the implements of natural historical exploration—a specimen container
and tweezers—picking up the corpses of “ants, beetles and cockroaches, different
kinds of spiders, some bees, flies, a wasp, two fetid lizard skins and the brittle remains
of their skeletons, six butterflies, a stick insect the length of her forearm, two
dragonflies, a handful of crickets and other creatures that in the world of naming
remain untitled”
-- her setting a partition with pieces of furniture 129
-- like the fragrance of the cereus blooms as much as the smell of the bucket and the
stink of decomposition 128-29  death feeding life 130
-- the wall of cereus 128, 130, 134,
-- Mala like a moth 143, 156
5. Colonization, Hatred, Guilt vs. Love:
 Ambrose’s and Otoh’s love for Mala, a reversal of Chandin’s for Lavinia
and his family
6. Gender Category Ambrosia for Mala and her change of sexual identity
Ambrosia/Otoh
7.
Narrative Method – & Memories
 Tyler  Otoh: Tyler’s intrusion 105, 122 - ; Otoh tells him about Ambrose,
what he feels about Ambrose 126
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Otoh’s story and Mala/Pohpoh’s memory in turns
 2) Otoh’s story delivers food to Mala’s “she had obviously been
observing him” (118)  his memory about the snails (of himself at 11
years of age) 119  father’s story of his childhood 119-120  goes to
Mala to share his secret (120) 5) goes to Mala’s with Mavis at night
(134)  goes alone with the gramophone and in his father’s clothes
(140) 7) Otoh with his father, “reincarnation of a forgotten memory”
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(144) 9-1) Otoh picked up by an out-of-towner, 10) Otoh
approaches the house, smell “the full-bodied foulness” (152),
approaches Mala in her day-dreaming, confronts her (155)  11-2) is
mistaken for Ambrose (159)  the smell and the sight (163)
3) Tyler and Otoh talking about Mala and Ambrose (122)
11-3) town people (164)  11-4) Ambrose and Otoh about what he
saw –going up to Mala’s,
1) Mala in her world of nature 114  With the photo 116 4) Mala’s
becoming wordless 126-  Mala about 10 o’clock ( p. 63), fighting
the silver light 132-34 vs. Cereus blooms at night (love) 134; 138  6)
Mala remembering, Pohpoh 142, protecting Asha 8) 146 – Pohpoh
out to release herself, picking up a bug  9-2) 151 –11) Pohpoh
venturing into another’s yard, saw a cereus plant,  156 –Pohpoh into
a two-storey house, see herself in a mirror but feeling
successful.—Mala with a smile of triumph, not sure about the memory
(159)  11-5) Mala back to her memory of Pohpoh (172)
Pohpoh rescued by Mala 172—Pohpoh entering the house (180)-- facing the
corpse (183) – flying (186)
Part III-V: Main Issues
Colonization, Hatred, Guilt vs. Survival and Love –(the issue mimicry)
A. Chandin – completely distorted personality -- self-centered and violent, treats
Mala as his wife
-- does not think that he hurt her before the last night 221
B. Mala’s survival skills
1. Mala’s escape (before Part III: venturing outdoor [206], day-dreaming) -- being
with Ambrose, as a child193;
2. Mala with Ambrose: suggests her situation without saying it 196
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3.
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dancing 209
Ambrose enjoys desiring 218
Mimicking rich women 202
With her father:
cooks a dead pigeon and mimicking sounds of the pigeon’s being caught 206
Mala and Chandin – Mala’s fear and sympathy 212
Final rebellion 226-28
C. Mala reduced to the same position as Chandin 228
D. Ambrose: shame 228; sense of guilt 233-36
E. Mala with her madness – strategy of self-protection and distantiation; retains
knowledge significant to her (Pohpoh, flight 249)
Community Building: 1) Nature, Gender Category and Geography
1. Ambrose’s interest in entomology 198, opposed to theology 199
2. Ambrose and the spider 220
3. Tyler and Otoh get closer, and wait for the cereus to bloom (246, 248),
4. Hector “Well, I never! If I didn’t know better . . . I wish my brother could meet
you two. Christ, where is he, I wonder? Where my brother? By any chance, you
know my brother?” 248
5. Lantanacamara as an “alternative social imaginary” (Floyd- Thomas and Gillman
2002, 528) not tied down by real geographies and maps, not limited to the spaces
named by colonial rulers and mapped by colonial cartographers. (May 108)
Community Building: 2) Narrative
1. The use of insect markers: only 1 in Part III, whose central story could have been
a piece of imagination
2. Expansion of the narrative community: to include Elsie, Ambrose and Asha.