The Mad Woman in the Garden: Decolonizing Domesticity in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

This chapter examines interrelations of colonial violence, madness, and queer expressions of gender and sexuality in Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo’s 1996 novel Cereus Blooms at Night. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanacamara (a thinly veiled version of Trinidad), the novel relays the story of Mala Ramchandin, a sexually traumatized and “insane” woman, through the perspective of her caregiver, Tyler, a queer nurse. Iovannone argues that the novel illustrates how the violence of colonialism both produces and erases queer and disabled subjects. Colonialism, within the novel, produces a set of normative social conventions whereby queer subjects are expelled from the social order or are rendered “mad” as a method of coping with an environment hostile to their very existence. Mootoo suggests that this “othering” of queer and disabled subjects occurs through the maintenance of hetero-patriarchal domestic spaces inhospitable to those considered sexually and/or mentally inferior. To this end, the novel demonstrates that queerness is not the result of individual or familial pathology, but is produced and necessitated by the oppressive discourses that form practices of colonialism in both national and domestic spaces. The novel ultimately reimagines domestic reality so as to reimagine the lives of marginalized subjects in both private and public. The normalizing forces of colonialism are therefore resisted through the creation of alternative, or queer, domestic spaces, kinship arrangements, and modes of self-expression.