Arts
Telling other people’s stories is important—Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo began her career as a visual artist and video maker in Canada. Her literary career was launched with a collection of short fiction, entitled Out on Main Street, followed by work such as ‘The Predicament of Or’, ‘He Drown She in the Sea’ and ‘Valmiki’s Daughter’.
Shani Mootoo
‘Cereus Blooms at Night’ was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in Canada and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. When we sit down for our interview in Kandy, she has just finished a session on ‘Cereus Blooms at Night’ and another book ‘Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab’, both dealing with sexuality and gender.
If she was a trifle tired, a few minutes later, she’s back in form, buoyed by the fact that the world outside the hotel is just like her childhood home of Trinidad; right down to everyone being cousins (hers are a bit more highbrow than yours though- V.S.Naipaul is a relative).
Mootoo is no longer resident in Trinidad. She moved to Canada over 35 years ago (aged 19) because she didn’t want to “live a lie” after coming out to her parents.
“I left the island but in some ways it felt like the island had abandoned me when I was younger because it wasn’t happy with who I am,” she says. “There was a sense of rejection and abandonment.”
She wrote Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab to try to understand and “enter” Canada. It was actually a challenge posed by Naipaul himself-“he said stop writing stories that are ‘snow, coconut tree. Write about what you don’t know’.”
So she wrote Moving Forward(…), about a man who must come to terms with his mother’s abandonment when he was a child and her new gender identity as a man, Sidney, in Canada.
The book was inspired by a young man Mootoo encountered at a party for his mother, who had undergone a gender reassignment process. “He walked in and started calling him ‘Mom’ and it was very distressing.
But then I realized that this young man has a story to tell. He has had his own struggle.”
Telling other people’s stories appeals to Mootoo. ‘Cereus Blooms at Night’ her first novel, is about an old woman named Mala Ramchandan, narrated by a nurse.
Mala was abused by her father as a child – it would have been easy to write the senior Ramchandan as a toss off character, says Mootoo, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
“As a writer you don’t make excuses, but you must also tell a story without judgment. You have to face the reality and love your characters. You can’t label them.”