‘Naipaul’s daughter’? Queer/cross-racial satire in Valmiki’s Daughter

ABSTRACT

Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) is mostly set in Trinidad’s East Indian minority community, one which becomes associated both with (hetero)normativity and with a subversion of the ‘national consensus’ through its claims to racial and cultural specificity. Racial and gendered social norms are recurrently posited and transgressed, in actual fact or through a discourse of resistance. Valmiki’s Daughter superimposes Viveka’s and the narrator’s distanced perspectives in relation to Indianness, especially in its dealings with the sexual/gendered body, and with the other ethnic groups in Trinidad. Norms are seen as objects of ridicule but also as a potential site for renewed social configurations; I connect this interrogation of normativity with the device of satire. The link is corroborated by the intertext of Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a largely satirical novel where, as in Valmiki’s Daughter, (not) belonging becomes a metafictional concern. As this article demonstrates, Naipaul’s legacy is the occasion for Mootoo to revisit satiric modes so as to project inclusive but evolving social links. She extends the critique, but also the possible evolution, to readerly practices of identification as well as to the transgressive and corrective potentialities of language.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial
• satire
• queerness
• race relations
• Caribbeanness
• Naipaul
• Mootoo
• national consensus
• transcultural reading practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kerry-Jane Wallart is a Senior Lecturer in postcolonial literatures at Sorbonne Université. Her interests are Caribbean genres, performance, and audience response. Her Alma Mater is the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow (Princeton University). She is the recipient of the Jacqueline Bardolph PhD Prize (2006). She published book chapters and articles in various journals, including Sillages Critiques and Commonwealth Essays and Studies. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Writers as Performers where she introduces the notion of ‘instanciation’ in order to re-think the opposition between the oral and the written in anglophone Caribbean literature.

Notes

1 On the distinction between satire as a mode and as a genre, see Paulson (1967). In this article I will treat satire as a mode.

2 A more positive reading of the ending is offered by McCormack in the last pages of her article; she identifies the future wedding as a return to the family fold and to the bisexuality of Viveka’s father, concluding that ‘queer may emerge not only in oppositional discourses but also within the most familiar space of the Hindu Indo-Trinidadian home’ (2013, 220). Such an acceptance seems problematic to me as it also meets the expectations of the by-gone colonial era, when landlords favoured marriage, monogamy, and fidelity in order to keep the labour population stable, in all senses of the term (see Poynting 232–233 in Dabydeen and Samaroo 1987).

3 The literary notion of encouragement is connected by V.S. Naipaul to his father’s legacy, in an article concerned with Joseph Conrad. He writes about his father, the model for Mr. Biswas: ‘He read less for pleasure than for clues, hints and encouragement’ (Naipaul [2003] 2004, 162).

4 When having dinner at the Victory Hotel with Trevor, Viveka is struck by the alienation of women around her: ‘She looked around the lounge and noted that there was not a woman there who did not appear to be posing’ (Mootoo 2008, 374).

5 This distinguishes Naipaul’s generation from Mootoo’s. In such novels as A House for Mr Biswas ([1961] 1992), fully written in English, it is made clear that characters mostly speak in another language, possibly Hindi. The narrator actually plays with these moments, as when ‘Bhandat said in English, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is the soap used by lovely film stars”’ (450). The shift from one language to the other is clearly satirical, and points to the capitalistic alienation that has replaced indentureship. English also becomes for Mohun Biswas an escape from traditional Indian households: ‘Mr Biswas nearly always spoke English at Hanuman House, even when the other person spoke Hindi; it had become one of his principles’ (119). English is seen by the Tulsis as a symbol for the perversion of European ways: ‘In a disappointed, tired way Tara said, “They showed me a love letter.” She used the English word; it sounded vicious’ (101).

6 For the historical reasons why plantation owners and colonial authorities ‘tried to keep the Indian as close as possible to the plantations even after his personal indentureship had ceased, in order that his labour could be tapped’ (31) see Samaroo in Dabydeen and Samaroo 1987, 25–41.