Abstract
David Chariandy’s lauded 2007 debut novel Soucouyant explores the way that immigrants transmit lessons, beliefs, and ways of being to their children both intentionally and unintentionally, and the ways that these transmissions can contradict one another. This article argues that while much of the critical writing about Soucouyant has foregrounded the relationship between the unnamed narrator and his dementia-suffering mother, the text is just as concerned with exploring intragenerational relationships as it is with intergenerational ones. Indeed, the text demonstrates the interweaving of both intergenerational and intragenerational relationships in a unique and compelling way. The lessons that get passed on between the generations shape the lives and interactions of second generation subjects between themselves. In particular, the relationship between the narrator and Meera, the mysterious woman who has moved in with and is taking care of his mother when he returns to her home after deserting her for several years, poses the question of how these two second generation subjects of differing class backgrounds might reconcile themselves with both their parents’ Caribbean pasts, their own Canadian presents, and uncertain futures. The novel’s subtitle, “a novel of forgetting,” signals the central role of memory and forgetting play in the novel. The immigrant parents’ desire and attempts to forget the past are not wholly successful and their second generation children are forced to first remember before they can move forward without being haunted by the traumas, silences, and anxieties of their parents. The complex racial and class politics of Trinidad and Canada lead to the narrator and Meera receiving very different legacies from their parents. However, their eventual coming together, in all its difficulty, suggests that there is hope for second generation subjects who wish to choose a different path than the one set for them by either their parents or the nation-state.
For immigrants, past lives in their home countries can bear many meanings. For some, the homeland is an idealized space to which they hope to return. For others, it is a place of pain and loss that is better forgotten. For many, it can be both simultaneously. Yet, regardless of their emotional relationship to their place of origin, immigrant parents are a main source of their children’s understanding of the ancestral homeland and the shapers of their children’s experience in the new land. The complexities of their parents’ experiences and emotions influence how second generation subjects view the world, but not simply through the decisive passing on of cultural practices and belief systems, as is often believed. David Chariandy’s 2007 debut novel Soucouyant explores the way that immigrants transmit lessons, beliefs, and ways of being to their children both intentionally and unintentionally, and the ways that these transmissions can contradict one another. The dementia of Adele, the mother of the unnamed narrator, as a realistic representation of difficult familial circumstances and as an allegorical exploration of colonial trauma, offers a heartrending but productive site through which Chariandy can probe these issues. As children of immigrants, the narrator and Meera, his mother’s mysterious caretaker, receive what their parents pass on and react to it in varied ways by virtue of their own experiences as subjects born and raised in Canada to parents whose elsewhere, Trinidad, remains a central, if silenced, element of their lives. The complex racial and class politics of both Trinidad and Canada lead to the narrator and Meera receiving very different legacies from their parents but their eventual coming together, in all its difficulty, suggests that there is hope for second generation subjects who wish to choose a different path than the one set for them by either their parents or the nation-state.
Chariandy’s novel has garnered a significant amount of critical attention in a relatively short period of time. The excellent critical writing on the novel has thus far paid particular attention to the symbolic role of the soucouyant in the text (Alonso Alonso, 2011; Anatol, 2015; Coleman, 2012) and the novel’s engagement with memory, postmemory, and the second generation positionality of the narrator (Delisle, 2010; Mackey, 2012; Moosa, 2014), both of which are concerns of this article as well. Most of this critical writing, like the novel itself, is primarily concerned with the relationship between Adele and the narrator. Yet the text does not end with that relationship, but rather with another significant connection that emerges in the midst of the narrator’s attempt to return to and live with his mother. This relationship is between the narrator and Meera, whom he finds living with his mother upon his arrival. Taking up Meera and her mother’s place in the novel, and the relationship which develops between the two second generation characters, allows this essay to consider two forms of second generation inheritance that hold significant similarities as well as telling differences — a comparison that reveals the importance of class in the text’s representation of migration and settlement. By examining the contrasting intergenerational relationships and intragenerational relationships that are at the heart of the text, this essay aims to add to the growing scholarly conversation on Chariandy and on second generation writing more broadly. Like many postcolonial novels concerned with trauma, Chariandy’s addresses “the articulation of race and space; the uncanny historicity of colonial (and other forms of) violence; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; and the problem of unequal recognition of disparate traumatic histories” (Rothberg, 2008: 226). What sets the novel apart is its recognition of the intragenerational transmission and processing of trauma. This intragenerational component opens up a space to consider how forms of solidarity and healing are possible for the inheritors of familial and postcolonial traumas that are not wholly bound to the experiences of the previous generation.
Soucouyant is concerned with memory and forgetting, as is clear from its subtitle, “a novel of forgetting”, particularly in relation to traumatic experiences. As such, this article situates the novel’s representation of the intergenerational and the intragenerational silencing and narration of trauma within the wider critical conversations about postcolonial trauma. Chariandy’s novel demonstrates that “reconceptualizing postcolonialism as a post-traumatic cultural formation” (Craps and Buelens, 2008: 2) can offer insight into the continued psychological and social effects of colonialism, in a way that neither downplays the political significance of this formation nor marginalizes the intensely personal experience of it. Soucouyant contains both the more common form of trauma as “sudden, unexpected catastrophic events”, and the less commonly recognized “insidious trauma” theorized by Laura S. Brown that Craps and Buelens argue is often represented in postcolonial texts (2008: 3). In this way, I argue, the novel is able to “offer a corrective to the individualizing, psychologizing, and ultimately depoliticizing tendencies characteristic of Western models of trauma treatment” (Craps and Buelens, 2008: 4). Meanwhile, the text also foregrounds the diverse ways that postcolonial trauma might manifest in the lives of individuals, especially within and across generations. This article recognizes that the class differences the novel identifies exemplify how the internal complexity of colonial structures produce differentiations that serve those same structures. Through the representation of solidarity between second generation characters of disparate class backgrounds, this article demonstrates that postcolonial “trauma can weaken individuals and communities, but it can also lead to a stronger sense of identity and a renewed social cohesion” (Visser, 2015: 263).
The novel’s first person narration, as well as its fragmentary and nonlinear style frame, are integral aspects of its exploration of memory and transmission. The most explicit stylistic way that the novel foregrounds the role of memory is by leaving the narrator unnamed, as a response to his mother forgetting his name but not letting him tell it to her because that would be an admission that she had forgotten it (Chariandy, 2007a: 24). 1 This signals the way that the narrator is shaped by his mother’s trauma and its effects on her memory, as well as the fact that the act of pretending that nothing is wrong cannot solve the problem it elides. The nonlinear form mimics the way that memory functions; the narrator’s memories are organized, like “real” memories, more thematically than chronologically. Thus, the story of the Heritage Day Parade comes before the story of his parents’ meeting; which comes before the story of his times with Miss Cameron, the librarian; and temporal relationships between these various stories are not always clear. All of the stories that the novel contains that are not experienced firsthand by the narrator are told to, and then reconstructed by, him. As such, readers are invited to share in the disorientation of learning about his mother’s life through accidental slippages, in the sudden reframing of his relationship with Meera when he finds out about their shared history, in the romance of hearing about his parents’ first meeting, and his desire to fill in the details that they never shared with him. The novel makes his role as collator and transmitter explicit. Ironically, when he interjects into her story of seeing the soucouyant, Adele shouts: “Child? […] Is I telling this story or you?” (45); of course, for the readers, the narrator is the one who tells us the story. By positioning the narrator in this way, the novel makes clear that the narrator is collating and contextualizing these stories for a purpose. I argue that his purpose is to understand his, Meera’s, and his family’s pasts by making explicit what was suppressed, unspoken, and unintentional, and recognizing its confluence and its tension with that which was transmitted purposefully.
Both of the narrator’s parents, Adele and Roger, have difficult relationships with their pasts and with Trinidad. The stories of their pasts are told by the narrator in the present tense, as if their stories are concurrent with his own. For Roger, his lack of investment in his past comes from the fact that his family’s poor, low caste background, first in India and then in Trinidad, “had no business being remembered” (79). They come from Madras, a city that literally no longer exists, having been renamed in the postcolonial period, and that metaphorically no longer exists, in that present-day Chennai is a vastly different place from the Madras that was left by his ancestors. As such, Roger’s family’s connections to their cultural and religious past are vague and phantasmal. Chariandy expands on this in his interview with Kit Dobson, saying that Roger’s ancestors “were not at all light-skinned or high-caste Indians, but dark-skinned people of Tamil background whose language and cultural practices didn’t survive long in the New World, and whose histories, due to the oppression associated with caste, race, and wealth, could not easily have been remembered with great fondness” (2007: 814). Roger, therefore, is already trained in the practice of forgetting by his ancestors’ first migration. His own skill at the willful forgetfulness that he enacts in Canada is ironically rooted in his cultural heritage. His cavalier, enthusiastic approach to life in Canada is not, however, rewarded in the way that he hoped when he was still “intoxicated with possibility” (72). Anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig points out that such an experience is not uncommon: the tradition of viewing cultural values and modes of behavior associated with British middle-class society as a sign of high social standing meant that the migrants who traveled to Western destinations had a strong expectation that these societies would provide the opportunity to earn a position as respectable citizens if only they were ambitious and hardworking. They were not prepared for the discriminatory racial and ethnic regimes in the migration destinations, and this had an important impact on the ways they, and their descendants, perceived themselves as possible citizens in the receiving society and their Caribbean society of origin. (2007: 30)
Their lack of preparation can be read as a failure of forgetting, an idea which preoccupies both the narrator and the novel. In what I consider the philosophical crux of the text, the narrator says: “The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided” (32). Migrants from the Caribbean were, after all, coming from a society where a racial hierarchy based on British colonialism was the basis of social organization, and travelling to a society with the same British colonial roots. Indeed, the historical similarities between the islands of the Caribbean and Canada are numerous and often under-discussed. After listing the many parallels between Canadian and Caribbean history and social development in his “socio-demographic profile” of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, Wolseley W. Anderson states that “racism has been as endemic, systemic and pervasive in Canada as it has been in the Caribbean experience” (1993: 14). How then could Caribbean immigrants to Canada arrive expecting a non-racist environment? How could Roger be so recklessly hopeful in the face of Canada’s obvious racial hierarchy? Olwig’s statement seems to suggest that this seemingly inexplicable hope comes from Caribbean migrants’ internalizing of the British colonial command to forget that slavery and indentureship were the very basis of their current circumstances, and instead embrace the ahistorical but attractive idea that the colonies could become meritocracies where anyone can succeed regardless of race. Olwig argues that the idea of “respectability” came to stand in for all of the values and behavioural patterns encouraged by the British, ways of seeing and being that were “an ideal of citizenship that became an important ideological basis of post-emancipation colonial society, and thus of individual and economic mobility” (2007: 29). Caribbean immigrants are therefore primed for the kind of pretense of civility that they experience in Canada, even as all of their experiences suggest that hard work and “respectability” are not enough to gain them access to Canadian society. By recognizing the Canada is just as much a potential site of colonial trauma as the Caribbean, the novel undermines the expected distance between homeland and site of settlement, instead foregrounding how this perceived distance is constructed.
Roger’s skill at forgetting is part of what draws Adele to him, because she too has a past that she has no desire to remember. Her desire to forget stems from a traumatic experience as a child first displaced and then physically scarred by the presence of the US military in Trinidad during the Second World War. Adele’s trauma is the central mystery of the text, and her reimagining of it as a mythical encounter is the central metaphor. An analysis of her wartime experiences and the trauma that results from them could, and should, be an essay unto itself; but for the purposes of this engagement there is one aspect of her story that must be highlighted. Adele’s wartime experience was at the nexus of numerous personal and political issues that as a young, poor girl living in the bush, she was not given the tools to understand. Local class, gender, and territorial issues; international conflict; the long history of British colonialism and how it facilitated and was a template for American imperialism on the island; American racial attitudes — all of these larger issues not only influenced Adele’s experience, but in fact created it. That is, the “insidious trauma” she experiences predates and produces her “sudden, unexpected event” trauma. During the narrator’s telling of his mother’s story, he consciously slips into a hegemonic, “official history” voice, stating: “The locals presented their own problems for the base, of course. Few seemed mentally equipped to understand the logic behind curfews and the rationing of food and the strict rules on movement” (178). Far from the actual war, but thrust into the outer reaches of the war machine, Adele and her mother became outsiders after having previously belonged somewhere, “plunged into new forms of poverty without trusted networks of support” (179). These numerous, complex factors lead to her being physically as well as emotionally scarred when she sets herself and her mother on fire in front of the American soldiers with the flick of a lighter given to her by one of them (192). These circumstances are significant because she is forced to be implicated in her and her mother’s destruction, which makes her experience all the more traumatic and unspeakable. Adele’s desire to suppress her past is completely understandable; who would want to tell of such a horrific event to anyone, much less her own children? But the existence of her physical scars is a reminder that such experiences cannot be fully hidden, because they leave marks both visible and invisible and cannot help but affect all that comes after them.
Roger and Adele have individual histories that they want to leave behind, and their coming together is both a product and a part of the process of their distancing themselves from the past. The narrator recognizes the way that his parents’ union crossed the social barriers they lived within before coming to Canada. Their ability to forget, or at least disregard, the histories that denied their right to be together comes from their distance for Trinidad: “Mother was black and Father was South Asian, and though they met here, they both came from a place where there were serious misgivings between these peoples […]. Despite history and tradition, they had loved each other” (21). While there are certainly couples who cross such racial lines within Trinidad, it is clear that at least Adele would not have even considered being with him back in Trinidad. When she first encounters Roger, Adele catches “a waft of something discomfortingly familiar” (69). The combination of discomfort and familiarity is significant, because it notes how the familiar is not always a happy thing to encounter. It is not, at first, Roger’s familiarity that brings them together; indeed, it is what initially could have driven them apart: “They didn’t know each other, but there was history between them” (70). Caribbean racial dynamics do not simply disappear in the process of migration; individuals still carry the often-unconscious racial lessons about themselves and others with which they were raised. Chariandy describes this in sensory terms: “they have been raised to detect, from a distance, the smell that accompanied the other. Something oily that saturated their skins, something sweet-rotten and dreaded that arose from past labours and traumas and couldn’t ever seem to be washed away” (70). Otherness is manifested in smells and bodily secretions; it is something that cannot be controlled and is registered almost unconsciously. Adele at first seems to have learned these lessons too well. She calls Roger a “Coolie fool!” (70), immediately marking his class and racial designation, and she is offended when he calls her sister. But soon, cracks form in her learned antagonism. The first major breach in her resistance to him is seeing him receive scotch bonnet peppers from one of his customers, which makes her burn with jealousy (71); although his familiarity does not draw her, his access to their shared past does. The text ironically relays Adele’s negative thoughts about Roger: “He seems to think that she’s admiring him. He seems, quite foolishly, to think that this could ever be the case”, even as she responds sexually to his body, noticing the “burnt chocolate darkness of his shins […] Like wet earth. Like molasses” (71). The dramatic irony of the reader being aware that this man — who she could not possibly be admiring — becomes her husband draws attention to the way that her transition from instinctive rejection to tentative desire is facilitated by his recognizability in this often-unrecognizable place.
Adele does not fall for Roger while he is sailing through the streets on his bicycle; she falls for him once he has fallen off his bicycle and stands back up, even with a chicken feather plastered to his forehead (72). His familiarity is enough to make her desire him, but it is his ability to bounce back that makes her love him. Adele and Roger are well matched for each other precisely because they are invested in forgetting and leaving the past behind: “they are here now, and they have almost no interest in their respective pasts. Without actually discussing the matter, they agree never to wax nostalgic” (73). As memory scholar Julia Creet points out, this “suspension of memory itself” is often an effect of migration (Creet and Kitzmann, 2011: 10). This suppression of memory is a safety mechanism, but not a successful one for the wellbeing of the next generation.
The immigration experience of Antoinette, Meera’s mother, is quite different from those of Adele and Roger, even though it is shaped by the same historical circumstances. Unlike Adele and Roger, Antoinette comes from Trinidad’s middle class, if from a lower rung of it than she generally admits. Rather than coming to Canada to better her circumstances, she is “lured” to Canada in order to enhance her already promising career (55). Significantly, she is the type of immigrant that can be publicly held up as an example to other immigrants, as can be seen by her inclusion in an issue of Maclean’s magazine “devoted to ‘immigrant success stories’” (155). Such articles serve to obscure the dissimilar circumstances from which various immigrants come that affect their ability to “succeed” in the Canadian context. They suggest that Adele could have been like Antoinette if she just made the right choices, thus denying that any blame for the existence of those immigrants who do not become successes can be apportioned to Canada’s policies or culture. Moreover, the text emphasizes the degree to which her respectability is gained at a terrible cost. As an alcoholic and verbally abusive parent, Antoinette is only a model for other immigrants in superficial terms that privilege the economic viability of Canada over the wellbeing of immigrants and their families. Yet Antoinette herself is so invested in the type of respectability described by Olwig (2007) that she is unable to see how her idealized and consciously edited view of Canadian society is not borne out in the experiences of her daughter. She tells a young Meera, “This is Canada. What you look like is completely beside the point. You have endless opportunities for wealth and happiness. Always make sure to capitalize. Always make sure to distinguish yourself” (157). The last part of her advice, that Meera must distinguish herself, is significant because it is clearly code for ensuring that people do not conflate her with the likes of the narrator’s family. Ethnographic profiles of the Caribbean Canadian community identify this impulse as a common one among those who have forged a middle-class identity: “the more affluent members of the community express some shame when its less wealthy members are stereotyped negatively in the Canadian media with regard to matters such as poverty and criminal activity” (Simmons and Plaza, 2006: 146). It is worth noting that they are described as experiencing shame — not anger or even embarrassment — as a result of the negative stereotypes; their response is an inward-focused one, implying their acceptance that they have something about which they ought to be ashamed. This shame is enacted by Antoinette when she verbally attacks the narrator’s family to her neighbours. Her vehement disavowal of the narrator’s family is her means of “distinguishing” herself. When she says, “But we have standards here, do we not?” (155), she places herself within the “we” of normative Canadian society in a way that is meant to protect her from being lumped in with those that the neighbourhood rejects. The overt lesson of immigrant success is therefore inextricably linked to the concealed message of immigrant shame.
Roger, Adele and Antoinette each arrive in Canada burdened by their lives in Trinidad and gather more baggage through their experiences in the not always hospitable social (and atmospheric) climate of Canada. Each has lessons they wanted to pass on to their children, and each has a past they wish to forget or deny. Yet mixed in with the messages they actively try to impart to their children are those lessons they transmit unconsciously. In their own ways, the parents all try to teach their children to ignore the past and focus on the present and the future. Antoinette tells Meera that “this is the seventies” (157), suggesting that all that matters is the present moment which she claims is full of possibility. Yet despite her claim that “what you look like is completely beside the point” (157), she attributes her daughter’s moods to people teasing her about her birthmark, and suggests that they get it removed (161). There is an inherent contradiction between her assertion that looks and race do not matter, and her actions that indicate how much they do. She soothes Meera by saying, “You’ll have a fresh start when you finally go away. Regardless, it’ll all be different when you’re older. You’ll see dear. Things like that won’t matter in the future” (161). Antoinette is evidently sincere, but she is also willfully shallow and unable to recognize her daughter’s understanding of the world around her through her own eyes, rather than through Antoinette’s imposed narrative of colour-blind Canadian upward mobility.
Although Antoinette tries to teach Meera that she can do or become anything she wants, Meera’s observation of Antoinette’s life passes on numerous inadvertent lessons and behaviours. Meera “learn[s] to match” her mother’s violent temper (157) and observes her mother’s misery up close; it is difficult to teach a child that academic success and respectability should be her primary goals in life when her would-be teacher who has achieved these things is desperately unhappy. Antoinette sets out to teach her daughter to “distinguish herself” from the narrator’s family, but she also inadvertently teaches Meera to fear and hate them. Rather than instilling in Meera the idea that race does not matter, as she hopes, she has instead taught Meera that she is alone in the face of the racism that her mother chooses to ignore. The neighbourhood children’s failure to “grasp fully the significance of coming from a ‘good family’ of coloured folk” (157) reflects their parents’ white supremacist attitudes, revealed in their commitment to the Heritage parade and their status as a “traditional community”. The racist taunting that Meera experiences at the hands of her peers and even her teachers, coupled with her mother’s well-meaning but misguided instruction, leads Meera to fear being associated with the narrator’s family so much that she fakes violent illness to avoid sitting beside the young narrator on the bus to a field trip (158). She is able to make herself physically sick, so much so that her stomach is pumped. She has learned her mother’s lesson so well that she can physically sacrifice herself to adhere to it. The novel’s emphasis on embodiment reinforces the theme of memory as not just mental but integrated into the whole being.
As such, in order to overturn her docile acceptance of the racist status quo, Meera must also reject her mother. Antoinette’s dedication to respectability is maintained even when she confronts Meera at the narrator’s house. She asks if the reason Meera has left school is because of superficial reasons like wanting to live somewhere better than in the residence hall and assures Meera that her reputation is not ruined because “nobody needs to know you’ve dropped out … You can still be successful” (124). Antoinette is incapable of seeing how Meera has been hurt by the conscious and unconscious lessons that she taught her, and thus cannot fathom how she could possibly bridge the gap between herself and her daughter. This unbridgeable distance between mother and daughter creates meaningful contrast within the text between each family’s relationships. That more reconciliation is possible between the dementia-affected Adele and her son than between Antoinette and her daughter raises the question of whether the mental gymnastics required for Antoinette to maintain her sense of the world is not its own form of mental ill-health.
The primary lesson that Roger and Adele teach their children is how to pretend. This lesson, like Antoinette’s, is passed on both intentionally and unintentionally. Roger and Adele teach their sons how to pretend that nothing is wrong with Adele, how to cover for her when necessary. This lesson is conveyed in little ways, as when Roger offers to teach the rules of All Fours when Adele cannot remember, and is reinforced by Adele’s refusal to recognize why the narrator was crying (40). The success of this teaching is evident when the narrator’s brother is able to jump in and rationalize his mother’s behaviour when she fills the sugar bowl with salt (14). But even as he learns to lie to protect her, he is learning to lie to her to get what he wants. Repeatedly able to tell his mother there is a PD day, he rarely attends school, and this practice is facilitated by the same mode of behaviour that created it: for Adele to question him or investigate his claim, she would have to admit that she is forgetting. His exploitation of her unstable memory is only possible because of the pretence that he has been raised to practice.
In keeping with Adele and Roger’s shared desire to distance themselves from their pasts, they attempt to teach their sons not to value the past through denigrating their own histories. When he recounts back to her the story she has told him in her less lucid moments, Adele asks the narrator: “Whatever you think you want with some old nigger-story” (194). By calling the central trauma of her life “some old nigger-story”, she attempts to denigrate the importance of the past and in doing so denigrates herself. As this scene indicates, as her dementia worsens, Adele is unable to maintain the lessons that she and Roger spent her children’s childhoods passing on. As the narrator points out, “Mother wasn’t simply forgetting” (22): she remembered and forgot to forget. As a result, she reveals information and events that she would have otherwise intently kept hidden. The narrator learns anything he knows about his mother’s past because of what she tells him unintentionally: “Mother never deliberately explained to me her past, I learned anyway” (23). This slippage is the way the narrator comes to know his mother; it is what pushes him away from her and what draws him back. This unintentional transmission of trauma is why so much of the critical writing on this novel invokes Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which she describes as a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove. (2008: 106)
In both the second generation of Holocaust survivors, of whom Hirsch writes, and the second generation of immigrants, of whom I do, only the traumatic recall of the first generation, not the willed passing on of those experiences, is necessary for the second generation to experience postmemory.
Adele reveals bits and pieces of her past through numerous means. She tells snippets of stories and lists healing herbs that she learned from the old woman; she even offers hints of her trauma through song. The narrator sings a stanza of “Rum and Coca Cola” by Lord Invader that mentions “Both mother and daughter | Working for the Yankee Dollar…” (179), and the mother freezes, burning the shirt she is ironing. Catherine A. John points out that in the Caribbean context, “The song, the folktale, and the poem function as an alternate register of consciousness, one that at its most profound seems to connect to ancestral knowledge in both conscious and unconscious ways” (2003: 2). While what John describes can be easily interpreted as a positive thing, Chariandy’s novel asserts that such ancestral knowledge may well be traumatic rather than uplifting. Adele conveys, without meaning to, that her mother was one of the women that Lord Invader so cavalierly sang about; her dementia causes her to function, however unwillingly, on this alternate level of consciousness. Indeed, John’s overall argument that song “is a literal strategy of survival, in which the exclusively rational mode of ‘modern’ Western consciousness has reached its metaphysical limitations and something else must step in to save the individual from psychospiritual death” (2003: 2) is worth considering in relation to Adele’s propensity to reveal her past under the guise of song and folklore. Through her songs and stories, Adele’s past leaks into the narrator’s consciousness piece by excruciating piece. The narrator powerfully presents the strange position his parents have put him in because of their desire to suppress their history, even as that same history has an endless ability to affect his life: “I caught her reading me all the way through. The person I’d become, despite all her efforts. A boy so melancholy, melancholy despite the luxuries that she’d worked so hard for him to enjoy. A boy moping for lost things, for hurts never his own…” (194). For all that his parents tried to protect him from their past, they failed to realize that the very existence of their past experiences, and their effects within themselves, could not help but spill into the lives of their children.
During one of the many moments when Adele begins to tell the story of when she saw the soucouyant, the narrator says, “I know Mother. It doesn’t matter. You’re here now” (47). But the narrator’s later need to piece together her story suggests that it does indeed matter, and that being here, now, does not take away the power of that past event. In his interview with Dobson, Chariandy articulates one of the central questions of the text: “And so what, we may ask ourselves, might [the narrator’s] mother’s elsewhere past, uttered now in broken pieces, and in a language not entirely his, ultimately mean to him here and now, in apparently very different circumstances? What, indeed, might he owe to such an elsewhere past, really?” (Dobson, 2007: 813). The text demonstrates that while we may not owe an elsewhere past very much at all, we owe it to ourselves to engage with it. As Hirsch points out, “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (2008: 107). Engagement with the past may be inevitable, but we may have some control over how that engagement takes place. The narrator and Meera are stuck with the lessons, values, and ghosts passed on to them by their parents, whether they like it or not. This does not necessarily mean that they must sacrifice their own lives in order to right the wrongs their parents and the older generation experienced, as Mrs. Christopher suggests (148–149); but it does mean that in order to build their own lives, they must work to understand the histories that created them, so that they can build futures that are not haunted the way their parents’ lives were. They must also unlearn those lessons from their parents, intentionally transmitted or not, that hinder rather than help their growth. This is so that they can live “ethically and soulfully”, something Chariandy has suggested (2007b) is possible for second generation subjects, even if they do not feel a sense of belonging to the nation (Chariandy, 2007b: 828). The question of how they live such lives is a difficult one; the text offers insight rather than any definitive answers.
Adele’s dementia makes her into an inadvertent truth-teller. When the narrator leaves her, she is in the midst of recounting the various mythical creatures of the Caribbean. While she is not fully aware of what he is trying to tell her, her oblique response in fact encapsulates the lesson that he learns by the end of the novel. When she says: “… and that’s why, child. Why you must always speak the proper rites. Why nothing dead can lie still without the proper rites. And why you must always curl you body away from the evil at night” (184), she speaks to the nature of the past and the means by which one must engage with it. Adele, Roger, and Antoinette’s attempts to sweep the past under the rug without performing the proper rites — that is, without acknowledging the things that haunt them and doing what it takes to coexist with them — constantly fail. Their children are still burdened by their pasts, and this burden is even more difficult because it is a confusing one: the narrator and Meera grow up haunted by times, events, and places that they know very little about. Spiritual rites are often about acknowledging the past as a part of the present. Acts like Communion or the burning of candles during Hanukah involve recounting and re-enacting significant past events in order to confirm their importance in current lives. Spiritual activities, such as carrying around a specific herb or pouring a libation, are about recognizing the existence of spiritual entities and forces as well as their influence on one’s life. The existence of ritual bathing or submersion in numerous religious traditions demonstrates the symbolic power of water and the need for flushing out and cleansing. The narrator and Meera’s actions at the end of the text are their attempt to perform the proper rites that will allow them to live with who they are and who their families have been. I read these as examples of what Hirsch calls “postmemorial work”, which “strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (2008: 111). Importantly, the narrator and Meera engage in this reactivation and re-embodiment together.
Both the narrator and Meera are compelled to tell stories of what has come before — to speak the truth, or what they know of it, out loud to one another, echoing the novel’s investment in the power of storytelling to produce understanding, empathy, and solidarity. Meera tells of how she came to live with Adele as penance for her participation in the neighbourhood’s ostracism and abuse of the narrator’s family, and as an acknowledgment of her link to them by way of skin colour and history, no matter how much her mother hoped to deny such a connection. The narrator needs to tell his mother’s story in order to be at peace with her life and her death. Before the narrator begins his recounting of his mother’s wartime experiences, Meera tells him, “You don’t have to tell me the story” to which the narrator responds, “I know” (172). Of course, he does tell her the story; he may not have to, but he needs to. That these stories are shared with Meera, who is also the second generation Canadian daughter of a Trinidadian immigrant, is vital. This sharing, across their connected but quite different lives and experiences of second generationness, ends the novel with a new form of connection, and the promise that the narrator and Meera can come to understand each other in a way that they were not able to understand their parents. Allison Mackey insightfully notes that not only does the novel draw attention to “inter-generational relationships”, it “also signal[s] the importance of forging new forms of intra-generational relations, pointing toward a need for the second generation to come to some sort of new terms with itself” (2012: 229). This intragenerational relationship is the key to the novel’s forward-facing ending; as Farah Moosa points out, Meera is the ideal listener to the narrator’s story since she has an affiliative relationship to Adele’s story, not a familial one (2014: 335). Their future is undoubtedly grounded in the stories of their parents, but the fact that they are having this conversation in the shell of the narrator’s parents’ lives, the home emptied and sold, and the vast majority of mementos thrown away, suggests that this does not mean that these second generation characters must or even could continue their lives in the shadow of their parents’ losses and struggles.
Recounting their stories is a spiritual act: Meera and the narrator must name and confirm the existence of those experiences (both their own and others’) that haunt them. By recognizing that they exist, the two characters are not able to expel them, but to integrate them into their lives in a way that does not hold them back. The narrator sells the house knowing it will be torn to the ground, letting go of the material evidence of his past, but not before going through and looking at the things in the basement. The process of clearing out the basement is thus a ritual of both seeing and purging. He throws out the family photos, but he looks at each of the many long unused items that populate the basement before disposing of them: “An old silver-plated spoon, now bent and useless. A recipe book with ingredients added in pencil. Half a spoon of nutmeg” (153). Significantly, this delving into the material remnants of the past is at times banal and at other times painful. The literal pain that the narrator causes himself opening his brother’s red tool box — “I look down once and see my thumbnail purple and a jagged cut on my left hand” (170) — is the sacrifice he must make to come to terms with the role of his brother in his childhood, as well as both his own and his brother’s present.
The narrator gives the proceeds from the sale of the house to Mrs. Christopher, his mother’s old friend. Despite how resentfully he performs this act, it suggests that for the second generation to be at peace with the trauma of their parents, they must be willing to give up both the painful and the lucrative results of their parents’ suffering. Mrs. Christopher calls this justice (149) and while the narrator tries to resist, he must give in to her. Tellingly, Mrs. Christopher laughs at him when he tries to make her thank him; the younger generation must question what they owe to the older generation, but it is clear that the older generation is past owing anything to the younger. For all that the text leaves no doubt that Adele, Roger, and Antoinette’s choices, beliefs, and actions negatively affected their children, it does make it clear that they did the best with what they had. The novel thus places the onus on the second generation characters to find their way into a new mode of relation to themselves and each other. By bringing together Meera and the narrator, Chariandy puts forward a vision of a tentative solidarity between second generation subjects from different class backgrounds. The relationship between the two characters is rocky, built on secrets and betrayals, distrust and neediness. Nevertheless, that the novel ends with them together, with Meera literally reaching out to touch the narrator, is a beautiful testament to the fact that while these circumstances absolutely matter, they do not necessarily render such a bond impossible. In that last scene, they sit in a bare, curtainless, doomed house on the boxed-up past of the narrator. It is raining outside, which the narrator describes as “the year’s parting joke” (196); but the fact that they are talking about the narrator’s blessing in the water by his grandmother draws a connection between the rain and the symbolic spiritual cleansing of baptism. In the shell of his parents’ life in Canada, the narrator is preparing to start a real life outside of this place and its ghosts. His previous departure was a running away, but this leaving is different. This time he is leaving without guilt, and with a person who holds an understanding of a shared, difficult past; who, like him, has come to a point where it can be acknowledged and engaged. It is important that the novel ends before they leave the house. In his interview with Dobson, Chariandy openly admits that he wrote this novel as a way of working through the past, not projecting the future: “I had to address the ghosts of my own upbringing, the shadows and complexes that appeared to stem from growing up black and working class in a suburb that, at least at the time, openly prided itself on being the ‘good’ part of Scarborough, precisely because people like me didn’t live there in any great numbers” (2007b: 815). Even outside of Chariandy’s personal need to probe the treacherous ground of his childhood, clearly the work of this text is to demonstrate the need to engage with the past before one can move into the future. It is, therefore, necessary for the novel to end where it begins, while still offering hope for what will come afterwards.
The past haunts second generation subjects because it inevitably facilitates the present, for good or ill. The narrator and Meera’s parents may have left the Caribbean, but they remained products of it. They can no more wash away their Caribbean history and heritage than Canada can erase its colonial past and that past’s very real effect on its present. Meena and the narrator are children of Trinidadian immigrants to Canada, young adults raised in the shadow of two deeply flawed societies engaged in rewriting and sanitizing their histories to create unrealistically celebratory visions of their present. As such, they are charged with the difficult role of piecing together those suppressed histories for the sake of their psychological survival, while simultaneously fighting to not let those histories determine their future. While at the end of the novel the two characters are nowhere near completing this process, they are both much closer to an ethical and soulful future than they were when the narrative began.
