ABSTRACT
Despite, or perhaps because of, the taboo of same-sex relationships and nonheterosexual identities in the Caribbean,1 gay, lesbian and queer topics have in the past 10 years been intensively brought to the foreground of inquiry in Caribbean literary studies (cf. O’Callaghan 1998; Lewis 2003; Chancy 2008; Ilmonen 2008). This interest is in part thanks to a proliferation in fiction that through its creative imaginings has served to generate more conceptual space for non-normative sexualities. Particularly expatriate authors, such as Patricia Powell (1994), Thomas Glave (2000) and Shani Mootoo (1996) have drawn creative as well as critical attention to the issues at stake in a social and cultural setting that generally allows for few queer expressions and experiences in everyday life.2 At the same time, what is broadly referred to as queer of color critique has continued to further problematize what was perceived as the white hegemony of queer theory from its onset (Ferguson 2003). Concurrently, in the past ten years feminist theory has witnessed an
emphasis on the role of ‘affects, emotions and embodied experiences’ (Koivunen 2001: 7). This emphasis marks the advent of the affective turn in feminism according to which, to quote Sara Ahmed (2001: 10), ‘emotions are crucial to politics’. Feminist scholarship is also equally preoccupied with questions of ethics (Hogan and Roseneil 2001: 147), particularly in crosscultural feminism (see Ahmed 2000; Haggis and Schech 2000; Davis 2002; Mohanty 2003). The affective and ethical turns in feminism become conflated not only because of their temporal proximity of emergence, but also because of the inextricable link between ethics and politics as imbued with affect. In feminist literary theory, the affective dimension becomes most prominent in the role of the reader in a text’s meaning production. Particularly Lynne Pearce (1994, 1997) has theorized the act of reading as a dialogic and affective process, where the text has the capacity to position, move and evoke feelings in the reader, contrary to what the cognitive focus of traditional reader theory has us believe (Pearce 1997: 7). In this chapter, I bring together the idea of the Caribbean queer with the
affective and ethical turns in feminism in order to investigate the role of reading in the ethics of empathy at play in Trinidadian Shani Mootoo’s first novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996, henceforth Cereus). My question in this
chapter is how to read the ‘queer feelings’, as Sara Ahmed describes ‘the affective potential of queer’ (Ahmed 2004: 146) in Shani Mootoo’s novel? Cereus, through its key phrase, ‘shared queerness’ (Cereus: 48), highlights the importance of coming to terms with one’s queer identity through co-operative sharing. The novel, set on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanacamara,3
is narrated by Nurse Tyler, who cares for Mala ‘PohPoh’ Ramchandin, an elderly woman taken into custody at the nursing home after the discovery of the decomposed body of her sexually abusive father. Gradually, Nurse Tyler discovers Mala’s life story, and relates it to the reader. In coming to terms with Mala’s life story, Tyler begins to make sense of his gender and sexual identity.4
