“A Garden of Her Own”: Toward a Wilful Politics of Hope in Shani Mootoo’s Out on Main Street

Abstract

Born in ireland to Indian parents and raised in Trinidad, Shani Mootoo chose Canada as her homestead, thus positioning herself amongst those contemporary writers from multicultural and multi-ethnic backgrounds who do not only speak of these hybrid spaces but also engage in the task of bearing witness to those who have been silenced and erased from dominant history and culture. Indeed, by drawing upon her own hybrid identity as an Indo Caribbean Canadian lesbian woman, Mootoo’s works evoke an urgent need for narratives of belonging, exploring a set of recurrent dichotomies related to identity categories and notions of place present throughout her fiction, either in the form of homeland (nation) or merely home as a communal space. By articulating counter-histories, nostalgia, and recovery, Mootoo aligns herself with other postcolonial Canadian writers whose interest lies in “treatments of buried memory, witnessing, and recuperative healing” (Sugars and Ty 10). Likewise, as I have argued elsewhere, her fiction belongs to a cluster of works aimed at examining a politics of memory that acknowledges the ways in which subjugated groups have sought to shift or transform memory. Additionally, the complex interplay between female sexuality and being a diasporic Caribbean Canadian subject brings to the fore histories of exile and trauma “A Garden of Her Own”: Toward a Wilful Politics of Hope in Shani Mootoo’s Out on Main Street