Transparent
BOOKS: Shani Mootoo’s fourth novel illustrates the extreme difficulty of really seeing someone, of understanding a life
Story by Gordon Bowness
In Toronto magazine, June 2014
Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab is a bewitching, complex novel about intimacy, our ability—or more likely our inability—to really see someone, to understand a life. There are so many obstacles to understanding, obstacles the world creates and ones we make for ourselves; incredible effort and heart are required to overcome them.
Born in 1957 in Ireland to Indo-Trinidadian parents, Mootoo grew up in Trinidad. She moved to Canada to attend university and now lives in rural Ontario with her girlfriend. Mootoo burst onto the literary scene in 1996 with Cereus Blooms at Night. Her debut novel was an international sensation, placing on the Giller Prize shortlist and the Man Booker longlist. Her next two novels, He Drown She in the Sea from 2005 and Valmiki’s Daughter from 2009, both lived up to Mootoo’s initial hype. The multi-talented writer, painter and videomaker stakes surprising new territory with Moving Forward, her fourth novel, out this June from Doubleday.
Jonathan, the main protagonist, is a straight white male, a middle-aged author from Toronto with writer’s block. He’s spent much of his young-adult life searching for his mother, Siddhani, who abandoned the family when Jonathan was 10. Nine years ago, Jonathan found Siddhani, then Sydney, living as a man in Trinidad, and made repeated visits to reconnect with his trans parent.
The book opens with the aged Sydney’s impending death. Time is running out and Jonathan’s plangent need for redress, for some satisfactory explanation for his abandonment, becomes paramount. But his needs collide with Syd’s mysterious, elliptical story. There will be no easy answers. There is hope, however, of understanding shimmering in the distance.
“What I was interested in is how we hear stories,” says Mootoo, “and how we tell back other people’s stories, the parts that we don’t hear or can’t hear.”
Syd loves to talk of his friendship since childhood with a girl named Zain. She holds the key to Syd’s story. There are stories, too, about life in Canada, but never enough for Jonathan’s sake; details are scant about him and his other mother, India. Then there’s the story about walking in a blinding snowstorm to a sex reassignment clinic for top surgery. It’s a story full of portent that Syd returns to again and again while Jonathan searches in vain for meaning.
“There are some stories that are very difficult to tell in a straight line,” says Mootoo. “You have to keep trying to come at them and come at them and come at them from all kinds of different ways. Sometimes you repeat yourself. You can’t get the end out. They’re so hard to tell.”
Only after Syd dies and Jonathan comes into possession of Syd’s notebooks and a stack of letters from Zain, does Syd’s life slowly come into focus. Jonathan finally finds the words he’s so longed to hear; he finally understands his parent’s choices… and love. Jonathan starts to write. With its shifting narration, the book is an epistolary origami with letters, diary entries, writing sketches and recollections folded and nestled against each other.
“I think what Jonathan needed to understand was that there was a huge story there of immigration, race, class and gender within the lesbian community,” says Mootoo. “I wanted Jonathan to be a receptacle, in a sense, for all these stories that Syd contained within [him]. And I wanted this straight white man to hear them.”
Mootoo was deep into writing the book when her mother died in 2010. Her death haunts the pages. “There certainly was never any funeral in the book, nor any death in the book at that time. I think my experience of that particular death was so profound, that it couldn’t but come out [in the book].
“My mother wasn’t a transgendered person. My mother didn’t leave me when I was 10 years old. But I know the experience of having this estranged type of relationship and this constant desire to connect with her.
“I’m trying to write that, and I’m getting Jonathan to write it. It’s removed and imposed on Jonathan. So it’s not just my own. It’s all the things that I can’t say, want to say so desperately to my mother.”
The climax of the novel is Syd’s funeral, a Hindu service where the body is cremated on a pyre with Jonathan acting as chief mourner. He actually has to touch flame to Syd’s body and then stand watch for hours as the body burns. Mootoo’s telling of the scene is detailed and visceral.
“You know here in Canada you don’t see the body, you don’t touch the body, you don’t have anything to do with the body,” says Mootoo. “That’s why Jonathan keeps thinking he’s just going to go push a button. But in the end he’s got to go and deal with the bodyand a body that has changed so much. I really wanted for Jonathan that sense of everything he knew falling apart and the possibility of being something else.” By the end of the funeral, Jonathan knows his life will never be the same. Syd has bequeathed to him much more than letters and a house.
A white man finds home in the Caribbean through baptism by fire. A woman of colour becomes a man in Canada through baptism by snow. It’s as if Mootoo has reversed the diasporic journeys common to her other books. And despite seeming very specific to the immigrant and trans experience, these journeys hold universal truths. No child grows up in the same culture as its parents; inheritance is always messy. No one inhabits the same body as they age; we are different people at different stages in our lives. Facts are meaningless; context is everything. You have to really look to see.
Mootoo doesn’t like how the term magic realism is often applied to her writing, especially Cereus Blooms at Night. But real reality offers all sorts of quotidian conjurings: spectral absences, time folding in on itself, and the transubstantiation of writing. Echoing the Hindu concept of reincarnation, Syd and Zain are reborn inside the writer, Jonathan, and these characters will live on inside readers’ hearts. A beautiful haunting.
MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB. Shani Mootoo. Doubleday Canada. $29.95. Mootoo readings this month: 7pm. June 12. Bryan Prince Bookseller. 1060 King St. W. Hamilton; 6:30pm. June 16. Bonnie Stern Literary Salon. Location TBA. bonniestern.com.
Story by Gordon Bowness
In Toronto magazine, June 2014
Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab is a bewitching, complex novel about intimacy, our ability—or more likely our inability—to really see someone, to understand a life. There are so many obstacles to understanding, obstacles the world creates and ones we make for ourselves; incredible effort and heart are required to overcome them.
Born in 1957 in Ireland to Indo-Trinidadian parents, Mootoo grew up in Trinidad. She moved to Canada to attend university and now lives in rural Ontario with her girlfriend. Mootoo burst onto the literary scene in 1996 with Cereus Blooms at Night. Her debut novel was an international sensation, placing on the Giller Prize shortlist and the Man Booker longlist. Her next two novels, He Drown She in the Sea from 2005 and Valmiki’s Daughter from 2009, both lived up to Mootoo’s initial hype. The multi-talented writer, painter and videomaker stakes surprising new territory with Moving Forward, her fourth novel, out this June from Doubleday.
Jonathan, the main protagonist, is a straight white male, a middle-aged author from Toronto with writer’s block. He’s spent much of his young-adult life searching for his mother, Siddhani, who abandoned the family when Jonathan was 10. Nine years ago, Jonathan found Siddhani, then Sydney, living as a man in Trinidad, and made repeated visits to reconnect with his trans parent.
The book opens with the aged Sydney’s impending death. Time is running out and Jonathan’s plangent need for redress, for some satisfactory explanation for his abandonment, becomes paramount. But his needs collide with Syd’s mysterious, elliptical story. There will be no easy answers. There is hope, however, of understanding shimmering in the distance.
“What I was interested in is how we hear stories,” says Mootoo, “and how we tell back other people’s stories, the parts that we don’t hear or can’t hear.”
Syd loves to talk of his friendship since childhood with a girl named Zain. She holds the key to Syd’s story. There are stories, too, about life in Canada, but never enough for Jonathan’s sake; details are scant about him and his other mother, India. Then there’s the story about walking in a blinding snowstorm to a sex reassignment clinic for top surgery. It’s a story full of portent that Syd returns to again and again while Jonathan searches in vain for meaning.
“There are some stories that are very difficult to tell in a straight line,” says Mootoo. “You have to keep trying to come at them and come at them and come at them from all kinds of different ways. Sometimes you repeat yourself. You can’t get the end out. They’re so hard to tell.”
Only after Syd dies and Jonathan comes into possession of Syd’s notebooks and a stack of letters from Zain, does Syd’s life slowly come into focus. Jonathan finally finds the words he’s so longed to hear; he finally understands his parent’s choices… and love. Jonathan starts to write. With its shifting narration, the book is an epistolary origami with letters, diary entries, writing sketches and recollections folded and nestled against each other.
“I think what Jonathan needed to understand was that there was a huge story there of immigration, race, class and gender within the lesbian community,” says Mootoo. “I wanted Jonathan to be a receptacle, in a sense, for all these stories that Syd contained within [him]. And I wanted this straight white man to hear them.”
Mootoo was deep into writing the book when her mother died in 2010. Her death haunts the pages. “There certainly was never any funeral in the book, nor any death in the book at that time. I think my experience of that particular death was so profound, that it couldn’t but come out [in the book].
“My mother wasn’t a transgendered person. My mother didn’t leave me when I was 10 years old. But I know the experience of having this estranged type of relationship and this constant desire to connect with her.
“I’m trying to write that, and I’m getting Jonathan to write it. It’s removed and imposed on Jonathan. So it’s not just my own. It’s all the things that I can’t say, want to say so desperately to my mother.”
The climax of the novel is Syd’s funeral, a Hindu service where the body is cremated on a pyre with Jonathan acting as chief mourner. He actually has to touch flame to Syd’s body and then stand watch for hours as the body burns. Mootoo’s telling of the scene is detailed and visceral.
“You know here in Canada you don’t see the body, you don’t touch the body, you don’t have anything to do with the body,” says Mootoo. “That’s why Jonathan keeps thinking he’s just going to go push a button. But in the end he’s got to go and deal with the bodyand a body that has changed so much. I really wanted for Jonathan that sense of everything he knew falling apart and the possibility of being something else.” By the end of the funeral, Jonathan knows his life will never be the same. Syd has bequeathed to him much more than letters and a house.
A white man finds home in the Caribbean through baptism by fire. A woman of colour becomes a man in Canada through baptism by snow. It’s as if Mootoo has reversed the diasporic journeys common to her other books. And despite seeming very specific to the immigrant and trans experience, these journeys hold universal truths. No child grows up in the same culture as its parents; inheritance is always messy. No one inhabits the same body as they age; we are different people at different stages in our lives. Facts are meaningless; context is everything. You have to really look to see.
Mootoo doesn’t like how the term magic realism is often applied to her writing, especially Cereus Blooms at Night. But real reality offers all sorts of quotidian conjurings: spectral absences, time folding in on itself, and the transubstantiation of writing. Echoing the Hindu concept of reincarnation, Syd and Zain are reborn inside the writer, Jonathan, and these characters will live on inside readers’ hearts. A beautiful haunting.
MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB. Shani Mootoo. Doubleday Canada. $29.95. Mootoo readings this month: 7pm. June 12. Bryan Prince Bookseller. 1060 King St. W. Hamilton; 6:30pm. June 16. Bonnie Stern Literary Salon. Location TBA. bonniestern.com.