Cultural Bastards: Caribbean-Canadian Humor in Shani Mootoo's Out on Main Street

Abstract

Wife battering and murdering, prostitution and suicide have long been hushed incidences that nevertheless have finally been addressed by some Indo-Caribbean writers, one of which is the Canada-based artist and writer Shani Mootoo. In her novels Cereus Blooms at Night, He Drown She in the Sea, and Valmiki’s Daughter, her poetry collection The Predicament of Or, and her short story collection Out on Main Street, Mootoo picks up the culturally specific ways of inscribing a culture of violence and shame onto Indo-Caribbean female sexual identities in ways that Mehta has described as being "associated with a series of taboos and restrictions imposed by male-ordered strategies of confinement and inhibition" (192). Even while living in Canada, Mootoo exemplifies Mehta's claim that Indo-Caribbean women find it difficult to free themselves – and the works they produce – from the haunting national and diasporic legacies of repression and invisibility. A reading of Mootoo's work as an example of the interlacing of sexuality and diasporic Caribbean identity reveals that a reconfiguration of "home" in terms of optional exile does not erase one's innate ethics, but actually magnifies them, since diasporic communities like the Indo-Caribbean tend to maintain their "cultural identity through migrating notions of gender-role conformity" (Mehta 209).

"Shut your arse up, before it have trouble between we in this street."
(V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street)