Cereus Blooms At Night

In the novel Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, the author tells the story of Mala and her father, Chandin, in the fictional Caribbean island Lantanacamara. Published in 1996, the novel focuses on the effects of European colonization and Asian indentured labor on the people of the Caribbean. Through her portrayal of Chandin, the son of indentured Indian laborers, Mootoo shows her readers the suffering, political strife, and racial injustices he faces as he navigates his need for acceptance by the people he views as European superiors. With her attention to sexuality, race, gender, and social normativity, shows the harms colonization place on the lives of the characters in the novel. As she gives this attention to these harms, she also

As Chandin tries to mold himself into the person that aligns with European ideas of perfection, he begins to turn the racist ideas of colonization into his own beliefs of racism and self-hatred. “He began to hate his looks, the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, his accent, the barracks, his real parents and at times even the Reverend and his god” (Mootoo 33). In this excerpt, Mootoo’s attention to Chandin’s self-hatred shows the developing hatred that racism causes within the people upon which such hatred is cast. Through her depiction of Chandin, readers see that Chandin’s feelings of hatred for his looks and the ways in which he speaks causes him to project those feelings upon the people who embody those ideals. Since the people of his community cannot live up to standards of his believed racial superiors, Chandin tries to distance himself from them through intellectual superiority. Because he cannot change his outward appearance, he begins manifesting the hatred for himself upon those that look like him. Since his children embodied the lifestyle and looks that he hated, his abuse served as punishment, for they did not align with his ideals of racial perfection. With focus on the

Due to the colonial ideas of heteronormativity and traditional family roles, Caribbean people, much like Chandin, forced themselves to embody these ideals (Rosenthal 3/20/17). “But evenings, sitting quietly in the living room with his new family, he had a very definite place. The Reverend had a chair that he alone sat in, as did Mrs. Thoroughly, and Lavinia invariably lay on her back or stomach on the very same portion of rug… near her mother. Chandin found that… [his] chair became an antidote to the chaos of his uprootedness” (Mootoo 31). With this depiction of the family member’s place in their living room, Mootoo suggests that European family’s heteronormativity places family members in ridged and fixed locations in the family hierarchy. As Chandin feels that he is integrated into this family system, he feels more accepted into the European way of life. Because of this acceptance, he further distances himself from the society in which he formerly belonged. With the acknowledgement of the changes caused by the heteronormative family roles, one sees that the family roles reinforce European images of how society should look (Rosenthal 3/20/17). This reconfiguration of the home makes it a more disputed and contentious place for those that do not parallel with the roles of heteronormative families (Rosenthal 3/22/17). Because the home becomes a disputed place, it