“I'm comfortable being uncomfortable”...
Shani Mootoo, our Storyteller of the month
By Shana L. Calixte and Tumelo E. Phali | Posted: March 16, 2005
Both in her writing and her life, Shani Mootoo can not be summed up in just one word.
As a video producer, multimedia artist, painter and writer, Mootoo has come to grapple with some of the many themes in diasporic Caribbean work – those of identity, authenticity, hybridity and change – many resulting from her own experience of being a “multiple migrant”.
Of Indo-Caribbean ancestry, Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Trinidad. At the age of 19, she moved to Canada, and has spent time in Vancouver and London, currently calling Calgary her home. As she says about her own identity, “I’m not Indian… I don’t know what I am. I grew up in an island within a family of Indian decent… I lived in Vancouver for more than half my life and every year was about the need to go somewhere else.”
And that may be why, unlike many storytellers from the Caribbean who are searching for their 'origin stories' Mootoo's writing and artistic life has unsettled the easy narratives of some Caribbean storytelling. She says, "The reason I make my art is not to complain that I don’t fit in – but don’t try to fit me anywhere – I’m comfortable being uncomfortable."
"In Trinidad I couldn’t step out of my Indian family and still be myself – I would have to go somewhere else for that identity as an individual. Also, in Canada one has a place to run to and you can actually exist like you are on an island because everyone around you doesn’t know you or ask about your background."
Mootoo's resume is long and diverse. Her video work includes English Lesson (1991), The Wild Women in the Woods (1993), Guerita and Prietita (1995) and View (2000) among many others. Her photo and painted artwork have been showcased in exhibitions internationally. She has recently finished her second novel, soon to be released.
Her written work, like her life, challenges the borders and boundaries of the self, reworking old and lifeless tropes of Caribbean identity, gender and sexuality. Her collection of short fiction, Out on Main Street, released in 1993 “exposes the uncertainty of the hybrid individual”, where lines of what it means to be “Indian”, “woman” “lesbian” all become blurred.
One story that showcases this theme shares the title of the collection and revolves around two Indo-lesbians browsing an Indo market in Vancouver. The narrator, a butch lesbian, recounts the story of trying to purchase sweets by using Indo-Trinidadian words, that have no resonance with the “main street” Indians in the market. As she brings to light the ways in which language, culture and identity have gone through a process of displacement from their supposed “origin”, those in the market try to understand both women in a narrow understanding of “Indian-ness”. The tale is a witty and funny one, as Motooo focuses on the clash of diasporic identities, where ideas of sexuality and culture are not always so linear or so stable.
Challenging the ever existing tropes of “Indo Caribbean womanhood”, Mootoo comments that she insists on occupying the uncomfortable space: “I always want the freedom to imagine who I want to be, where I want to be, might be or re-invent myself.”
Reinvention, it seems, is also a major theme in her 1997 novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Once again unsettling fixed notions of gender and sexuality, Mootoo's work is “bold and lyrical, sensual and highly charged...Cereus Blooms at Night is layered with unforgettable scenes of a world where love and treachery collide.” The novel is one that can not be summed up in a few words, and begs you to pick it up, to experience the compelling and imaginative story that Mootoo creates.
Although highly accomplished, Mootoo continues to produce and seek change, in herself and her work. “I don’t only want to be a Trinidadian woman - I want to be everything that is possible for me to be… That means having a profession I want, writing about what I want. Having an opinion or questioning things is not a sign of rebellion,” she says.
"Finding out who you are is a painful process. But I don’t know where this feeling to always find yourself and identity comes from. One other reason could be that one feels that one can be better than what you are – that you can better your last work...I’m not a writer until I have written seven books."
Enjoy these video clips, as CaribbeanTales catches up with Mootoo, to find out about her passion for food, for writing and her comfort in the uncomfortable.
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