Chapter 3: From mas’1 to metamorphosis: through ecofeminist eyes

This chapter develops an ecofeminist reading of Nalo

Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,

via Bakhtin’s analysis of medieval carnival celebrations and the

carnivalesque aesthetic, and Gordon Rohlehr’s theoretical

positioning of the masque in Trinidad Carnival. The novels

themselves are expressly feminist and concerned with issues such

as gender, ethnicity, identity and power, and, although neither

Bakhtin nor Rohlehr speak explicitly to feminism, it is clear

that women are included in the “cultural power of the people”

(Taylor 278) which Carnival implies. However, this is not a study

of Carnival itself, but one that posits that the interweaving of

Carnival characters/celebrations and folklore underpin some

Trinidadian women’s writing, providing a cultural ‘material’ from

which authors fashion “...a single garment of myriad parts.”

(Mootoo 105) This interweaving of folklore with carnival

indicates that the distinction between the different elements is

not clear-cut, and blend into each other to form the cultural

context. If carnival can be seen as deriving from culture and

1

forming part of the narrative structure of the novels,

anthropocentrism can be seen as the positioning which the authors

are querying. As Ambrose in Cereus Blooms at Night points out: “…

there is a premise that we humans are the primary sun around

which the entire universe revolves... [and]…that humans are by

far superior to the rest of all nature, and that’s why we are the

inheritors of the earth. Arrogant isn’t it? What’s more not all

humans are part of this sun. Some of us are considered to be much

lesser than others – especially if we are not Wetlandish or

European or full-blooded white.” (Mootoo 198), thus linking

anthropocentrism with racism. Anthropocentrism is defined as

“regarding man as the most important and central factor in the

universe”2. Anthropocentrism (and androcentrism) and its

consequent effects on human/nature relationships is at the ‘eco’

heart of ecofeminist perception. As the ‘eco’ in ecofeminism

implies, the ecological concerns which inform ecofeminism arise

out of ‘green’ discourse (see Introduction) and combine with

feminism in a framework which views all forms of oppression as

linked. Anthropocentrism is part of the cultural paradigm which

is seen as underlying the “…culture-wide blindspots…” which “…

2

foster illusions of invincibility and hide our real danger…”

(Plumwood Environmental Culture 2), and is a concern of both novels,

albeit expressed in different ways and in different contexts.

This chapter begins with outlining the theoretical positions

of Bakhtin and Rohlehr and their relevance to the novels and to

ecofeminism. The reading will examine the links between the way

in which cultural perceptions influence the way in which nature

is ‘constructed’ in Trinidad and will lead onto the next chapter,

which will consider the effect that this has on representations

of the more than human in the texts.

According to Bakhtin, the role of carnival in medieval

Europe was one of renewal and redemption,3 being a celebration in

which the population at large participated:

...carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the

prevailing truth and the established order; it marked the

suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and

prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast

of becoming, change and renewal. (Bakhtin 10)

This role may have changed in modern European carnivals, where it

has become a spectacle with performers and audience (and

3

therefore Carnival in name only, according to Bakhtin (Bakhtin

5)), but in the case of Trinidad Carnival, the cyclical

celebration still appears to be an all-encompassing, popular one

– perceived as an ‘absolute freedom’4 for the individual and a

release from everyday existence.5 There is a popular saying in

Trinidad that at Carnival time, “all o’ we is one”, which implies

that the essence of Carnival still remains current: the

“dissolution of footlights and suspension of hierarchy served to

unite the participants in the carnival as one, affirming the

collective power of the people.” (Taylor 278) However, this does

not imply any stagnancy in the development of Trinidad Carnival -

rather the reverse. Caribbean scholars6, have commented on the

African elements surviving in the cultures of those islands to

which African slaves were brought by European colonisers, which

were both repressed and denied during and after slavery and

perhaps the syncretism of cultural phenomena in Trinidad has

contributed to the relatively enduring ethos, which has been lost

elsewhere.

In The Dragon Can’t Dance, Earl Lovelace describes carnival as a

ceremony or ritual with antecedents in Africa:

4

...a ritual heralding the masqueraders’ coming, that goes

back centuries for its beginnings, back across the Middle

Passage, back to Mali and to Guinea and Dahomey and Congo,

back to Africa where Maskers were sacred and revered...

(Lovelace 112)

Rohlehr confirms7 that the origins of Trinidad Carnival probably

lie in the cultural convergence of African and European

celebrations (as well as those of indigenous peoples) which

occurred when European masters and African slaves each brought

their own cultural heritage to the new space of Trinidad and its

popularity remains high because of the syncretic admixture of

other, later cultures.

However, Bakhtin makes clear that modernity forever changed

the way in which people conceived of the world, in that the split

between ‘self’ and ‘other’ created the ability to ‘laugh at’

rather than with, others, and the forms of humour which grew out

of this changed perspective were largely satirical, as Taylor

points out in his analysis of Bakhtin’s theories in relation to

postmodernism “...Jameson...has argued that postmodernism has

replaced the parodist with the pasticheur, producing a culture

5

that is ‘devoid of laughter’” (Taylor 283)8. Rather than ‘devoid

of laughter’ the humour reflects the irony and satirical nature

of the ‘postmodern condition’.

According to Bakhtin, for medieval people, the grotesque

body represented everyone; it was a part of being human and

accepted without irony. Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’ (a term he

somewhat hesitantly calls ‘conditional’) is an aesthetic which

stems from folk culture (18) arising out of the same festivals

which gave birth to carnival, and is ‘deeply positive’ (19).

Bakhtin considers previous ages ‘primitive’ (16) and draws

distinctions based on historical time scale, as well as

perspectives - “in our days” (16). He euphemistically describes

what we (in the class-conscious and political 21st Century) would

probably call the language of the ‘underclass’ as ‘billingsgate’

and the language of ‘the marketplace’. Although ‘grotesque’ has a

number of meanings associated with it, Bakhtin appears to use it

as a euphemism for the ‘natural’ body; its functions and

materiality, without the cultural impositions of propriety.

Perhaps this description of the body and its natural functions as

‘grotesque’ is an indicator of Bakhtin’s awareness of how the

6

mind/body dichotomy was viewed by his contemporaries. Similarly

his use of ‘degradation’ brings with it negative connotations

(like ‘debasement’) which his text wishes to avert:

“[d]egradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with

the earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the

same time.” (21) In this quote, Bakhtin draws an analogy between

the earth, materiality and the body, and degradation; his use of

the terms indicates his acknowledgement of (if not agreement

with) the way the earth and the body are viewed in the cultural

context in which he was writing. He therefore sets up a contrast

between what he perceives as the past having accepted materiality

and the body, and the present, which is divorced from it. This

is exactly the ‘moment’ at which ecofeminism becomes relevant.

Bakhtin is describing an aesthetic which does not separate the

human from nature, but sees all life as part of the world as a

whole:

...The logic of human-centredness which conceives nature,

external and internal, as the ‘lower’, denied aspect of self

and society, also constructs dominant human identity and

virtue by exclusion as the identity and virtue of the

7

master, built on the exclusion of a lower order of alterity

and externality both within and without. (Plumwood

Environmental Culture 141-42)

Bakhtin’s theoretical positioning of carnival and the

carnivalesque describes what he perceives as a ‘primitive’ set of

associations which have become defunct with the advent of

politics and class. Following Bakhtin’s logic, in which the body

is degraded and aligned with the earth (i.e., ‘nature’), the

association of women with nature and the earth9, would serve to

implicate them in this ‘degradation’, whereas the implication of

a non-degraded nature, such as pertains at carnival and in the

carnivalesque, would serve to (relatively) empower women. The

carnivalesque spirit, which includes the breaking down of

barriers and hierarchies and the insistence on the body, stands,

like ecofeminism, in contrast to the normative position of

enforcement of hierarchies and denial of the body. This is not

to say that the carnivalesque is ecofeminism or vice versa;

merely that the aesthetic which Bakhtin describes is part of a

world-view which would be potentially empowering for women.

Additionally, the foregoing should not indicate that ecofeminism,

8

any more than the carnivalesque, denies that there is a

difference between the mind and the body. Rather, the mind/body

dualism operates as do other dualisms, to hyperseparate the two

halves of the dichotomy. This also applies to Bakhtin’s

perception of the primitive. From an ecofeminist perspective,

‘primitive’ equals ‘nature’ in the hegemonic world-view and

Bakhtin is therefore referring indirectly to the culture/nature

dualism, which itself is intertwined with the mind/body dualism.

These dualisms cannot be denied or erased, but require

reconstruction. “The denial of difference leads theory to the

attempted elimination of the distinction between mind and body

(via reductive physicalism, for example)...[b]ut in general such

a merger strategy is neither necessary nor desirable, because

while dualism makes difference the vehicle for hierarchy, it

usually does so by distorting difference.” (Plumwood Feminism and

Mastery 59-60)

In Trinidad, and other parts of the Caribbean, the existence

of a thriving carnival culture allows for some examination of how

the practice of carnival aligns with the carnivalesque aesthetic,

particularly in respect of Gordon Rohlehr’s theorising and Nalo

9

Hopkinson’s use of the carnival tropes in her novel, Midnight

Robber. Gordon Rohlehr explores the cultural meanings behind the

traditional ‘Ole Mas’ characters, of which the Midnight Robber is

one, which Hopkinson places centrally in her novel, Midnight Robber

(MR). (Rohlehr) He posits that Mas’ allows the assumption of a

‘masque of power’10; that is, taking on forms and attributes of

power held by others in the act of masquerading. For example, in

pre-emancipation Trinidad, a favourite Carnival character assumed

by the white planter was that of ‘Negue Jadin’ (translated as

field slave11). The white man blackened his face and dressed as

his slaves did, thus taking on the identity of the black man.

This characterisation of the ‘Negue Jadin’ allowed the white man

to mimic and satirise the black man, making him seem harmless –

taking his power – and thereby ameliorating the fear of the

potential power of the black man to kill him and his family in

slave revolts. This was a very real fear, since such

‘insurrections’ were regularly plotted and sometimes carried out

(and the example of Sante Domingue was always in the background).

After emancipation, the ‘Negue Jadin’ was one of the figures

which the newly-freed people adopted in their Carnival

10

celebrations, but does not appear in even those ‘reclamations’ of

Ole Mas’ characters which can increasingly be observed in

Carnival season12. The assumption of the masque was one which

took away the power which the white man had held, according to

Rohlehr. This adoption of clothing of the ‘enemy’ is one which

is seen by Frazer as a kind of ‘sympathetic magic’ which allows

the ‘transference of evil’. Attributes of an enemy can be taken

on by wearing his/her clothes (or mask) and, when discarded,

those attributes are destroyed or at least shifted to another

being or entity (or to the earth). (Frazer 711)

The duality of the masquerader and the masque is one which

Rohlehr sees as important. The adoption of the masque can be a

“shamanistic form of possession” – a gateway to another life or

self, or a metamorphic transformation. The masquerader can

achieve an “empowering release from the ordinary” or allow the

“suppressed dimensions of the self” to surface. (Rohlehr)

Rohlehr quotes a masquerader of Dragon Mas’ as saying “every

dragon smiles behind his mask”. This implies a consciousness

that the self is not always subsumed in the masque, so there are

levels of ‘possession’. The dragon is part of Devil Mas’ and

11

hence, represents and embodies the evil parts of oneself or

society, or the evil one has done, and this evil is then

discarded with the mask, once Carnival is over. (Significantly,

the costumes and masks are not recycled, but are made anew every

year.) The dualism of Mas’ – the masque and the masquerader – is

not hierarchical, but is dyadic; one is not superior to the

other, but two sides of the same coin. Rohlehr’s analysis of the

specifics of Trinidad Carnival indicate that there are still many

ways in which Bakhtin’s theories are relevant, not just to the

carnivalesque, which is a mode of narrative which incorporates

the carnival spirit, but to the actual celebration of Carnival

and its role in art in Trinidad.

The idea of superiority is one which is essentially turned

on its head in Carnival:

However divided, atomized, individualized were the ‘private’

bodies, Renaissance realism did not cut off the umbilical

cord which ties them to the fruitful womb of earth…The

private and the universal were still blended in a

contradictory unity. The carnival spirit still reigned in

the depths of Renaissance literature. (Bakhtin 23)

12

This stands in stark contrast to the duality of Enlightenment

rationality, which stresses the individual, denies the body and

distances itself from the earth. It places dualisms in a

hierarchy, to the detriment of women, and all ‘others’.

Distance from the body and distance from nature are both

results of the ‘splitting’ of elements of being (mind/body,

culture/nature), and an inability to see anything but the

anthropocentric world view. Dualisms which privilege the mind

over the body also align masculinity with ‘reason’ and femininity

with ‘emotion’. However, there is no wish to imply that reason

should be denied entirely in favour of emotion, but that the

cultural narratives currently in play are not those of any

objective reasoning, but are part of a political and social

context. The absence of emotion in such narratives validates

them: “[i]t is not reason itself that is the problem…but rather

arrogant and insensitive forms of it that have evolved in the

framework of rationalism and its dominant narrative of reason’s

mastery of the opposing sphere of nature and disengagement from

nature’s contaminating elements of emotion, attachment and

embodiment.” (Plumwood Environmental Culture 6)

13

In Midnight Robber, the trope of carnival is used explicitly.

The child Tan-Tan dons the masque of the Midnight Robber in

carnival on the planet Toussaint, and then, transported through

the ‘dimension veil’ to an alternative universe, ‘becomes’ the

character on New Half Way Tree (NHWT). However, she, like the

dragon masquerader, is always aware of the distance between

herself and the masque. Tan-Tan’s voyage itself is an

‘inversion’, since it takes her from Toussaint to NHWT and

therefore from ‘civilisation’ to ‘anarchy’ and from ‘normal’ time

to carnival time. The transformation of place prefiguring Tan-

Tan’s journey around NHWT and echoes the transformation of earth

to NHWT and from NHWT to Toussaint. The transformations Tan-Tan

undergoes produces a child who becomes two (her father’s rape of

her forcing a split in her psyche); a girl who becomes a woman, a

woman who becomes the Midnight Robber and a (female) Midnight

Robber who becomes mythologised.13

Cereus Blooms at Night, however, is firmly set in an Indo-

Trinidadian context, and does not mention carnival explicitly

(other than in the ‘carnival frenzy’ of the moths 140).

Carnival’s centrality to Trinidadian cultural expression ensures

14

that is no longer the province of one group and its absence from

Cereus, therefore, acts as a presence, where the main characters

are becoming/changing, in a non-linear and never-ending

masquerade. All boundaries are permeable – those between genders,

between human and non-human and even that between life and death.

Fluidity is woven into the narrative and the complexities of both

human and more-than-human life are conjoined in materiality and

metaphor. Rohlehr’s theoretical constructions of ‘the masque of

power’ and the ‘masque of transformation’ enables a reading of

Mala’s otherwise confusing attempts at metamorphosis and flight.

Initially, Tan-Tan’s assumption of the masque of the

Midnight Robber on Toussaint intimates the assumption of the

power of adulthood for a child who feels overwhelmed by the adult

word she does not understand. Later, on NHWT, the Robber Masque

is Tan-Tan’s attempt to use the power of the character to heal

her fractured personality caused by her father’s abuse and to

exonerate herself of his death “her cracked voice came out in two

registers simultaneously. Tan-Tan the Robber Queen, the good and

the bad” (Hopkinson Midnight Robber 325), illustrating the healing

aspect of the masque. Tan-Tan’s assumption of the Robber masque

15

gives her the power to resist the role (or mask) of ‘woman the

sex object’:

Rick, Pappy, Antonio; you could rule man easy, with just one

thing. Sometimes she wished for something more, wished they

wouldn’t make it so easy. She’d get vex...[t]hen she’d go

and talk to Melonhead whose eyes met hers and who talked to

her face, not her bubbies. (151) [this situation in Bruised

hibiscus]

Tan-Tan’s recognition of the hollowness of ‘feminine’ power

allowed to those who obey the patriarchal rules, makes the

assumption of the Robber Masque – a masque usually played by a

man - an assumption of ‘masculine’ power, which she “dislocates

from the time and space of Carnival”. (Feshkens 148) Tan-Tan’s

healing is complete when she combines confession and Robber talk,

which has morphed into Calypso, ending with the traditional ‘sans

humanitie’ (326) Barbara Lalla posits that Hopkinson’s

appropriation and reinterpretation of the language of the

Anglophone Caribbean is a flaunting of accepted rules of

representation of Creole – a ‘facetiness’ or ‘rudeness’:

16

Behind the protagonist’s facetiness is her author’s

disobedient discourse. Not only does the overwhelming choice

of Creole in Midnight Robber flout old-time prescriptive

rules and the intelligibility requirements of the

metropolitan audience but the Creole of Midnight Robber

thoroughly re-constitutes actual Caribbean Creole.(Lalla 10)

However, it is not only the language which Hopkinson

reinterprets. She combines aspects of Caribbean language, culture

and folklore in her own way; Trinidad Carnival and Jamaican

‘Junkanoo’ become part of a single carnivalesque celebration, in

a “weaving in of disparate references” (Lalla 18), producing a

narrative that has elements from many different places, leading

to a conclusion that the novel itself is a form of “Robber Talk”

(Lalla 18) and Tan-Tan’s journey a Carnival ‘road march’.

Although anthropocentrism is defined as a ‘human’

perspective, the definition of who is defined as human is not a

simple matter, and this gives authority to many forms of

oppression, including the oppressive practice of colonialisation:

The category of nature is a field of multiple exclusion and

control, not only of non-humans, but of various groups of

17

humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature.

Thus racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their

conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic

difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as

a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity,

lacking the full measure of rationality or culture.

(Plumwood Feminism and Mastery 4)

As a postcolonial entity, the Caribbean (and Trinidad) sits

astride two worlds – as Harris has posited; at ‘the crossroads of

civilisations’ - the locus of many different cultures, some of

which are privileged and some almost subterranean. Arguably,

Plantation Economies were the first Capitalist Economies and

attitudes of material gain are as widespread in the Caribbean as

elsewhere in the ‘developed’ world.14 Although ‘universalising’

the western and Caribbean perceptions is a mistake, there are

some ways in which attitudes towards the natural world are

applicable across both western and Caribbean cultures. The

attitudes of perceiving the non-human and human others as

commodities is questioned in many of the texts, (for example, the

mudra tree and the peekoplats in Cereus, the genetically-altered

18

plants in Prospero’s Daughter and the lives of women and children in

all of the novels) being at root patriarchal, capitalist and

anthropocentric (and androcentric).

MR’s plot – colonisation of other worlds – is not an unusual

one in Speculative Fiction and in Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for

World is Forest (WWF) there is a similar situation. Initially, the

human colonisers of New Tahiti attempt to force the indigenous

people – dismissively called ‘creechies’ – to work for them.

Their detachment is perceived by the colonisers as stupidity, but

they are in fact living such a different life from the human one,

that the humans cannot see it – just as Hopkinson’s NHWT humans

cannot see the douen’s culture, nor even recognise that the

‘Packbird’ is a douen female. The perceptions of the humans are

completely anthropocentric, capitalist and patriarchal. The

attitude of Davidson, the man in charge of the ‘work’ of

stripping the planet of its resources for shipping back to a

concreted-over Earth in WWF, is typical:

But he still couldn’t see why a soybean farm needed to waste

a lot of space on trees if the land was managed really

scientifically...if you wanted corn you grew corn, and no

19

space wasted on trees and stuff. But then Earth was a tamed

planet and New Tahiti wasn’t. That’s what he was here for:

to tame it. (Le Guin 10)

Like the colonisers of Toussaint, the colonisers of Le Guin’s New

Tahiti see it as a commodity to be used up, without any

consideration of the existing life on the planet, which is

perceived as ‘lesser’:

...nature in the west is instrumentalised as a mere means to

human ends via the application of a moral dualism that

treats humans as the only proper objects of moral

consideration and defines ‘the rest’ as part of the sphere

of expediency. The natural world and the biosphere have been

treated as a dump, as forming the unconsidered,

instrumentalised and unimportant, background to ‘civilised’

human life; they are merely the setting or stage on which

what is really important, the drama of human life and

culture, is played out. (Plumwood Feminism and Mastery 69)

This neo-Cartesianist context “organises moral concepts so that

they apply in hyper-separated, all-or-nothing ways”. (Plumwood

Environmental Culture 144) Should an entity not be considered human,

20

then it is considered as less than human and deserving of no

moral consideration. Antonio’s perception of the Douen is voiced

in the words of Le Guin’s master subject, Davidson: “...

[p]rimitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or

be assimilated.” (Le Guin 21) Neither the douen nor the Altheans

are considered morally considerable by the colonists. This begs

comparison with colonialism and resonates with postcolonial

discourse.

Antonio’s perception of the douen as ‘beast’ is a

categorisation based on exclusion; anything which is not human is

automatically animal, lesser and not deserving of consideration:

“Oonuh tallpeople quick to name what is people and what is

beast...”

“Why I making deal with some leggobeast that look like bat

masque it own self?” (Hopkinson Midnight Robber)

Here Antonio not only conceives of the douen as ‘animal’ and

therefore lesser, but also likens Chicibud to a carnival

character, in this case the bat – the embodiment of the vampire

and implying not only the supernatural, evil and blood-sucking,

but also a living creature which is it is reasonable to hate and

21

fear. The creatures on New Half Way Tree are the indigenous

species which have been eradicated from Toussaint, and are

presented in the narrative as carnival or folklore characters

which have been embodied in ‘reality’. Using Rohlehr’s conception

of carnival characters as receptacles of social meaning,

Hopkinson’s use of these characters (and folkloric characters

similarly) allocates new meanings, or changes meanings from the

familiar to the unfamiliar. The characters may stay the same (in

terms of the way they look, move and act) but the meanings

attributed to them change. The douen are traditionally the ghosts

of “aborted children stuck in limbo” (Lalla 27). In NHWT they are

an alien species who look as though their feet are attached

facing the ‘wrong’ way. However, “Tan-Tan looked at the douen’s

head, then its feet. They seemed to attach the right way, even

though its knees were backwards” (Hopkinson Midnight Robber 93),

indicating from the first meeting, that she would not judge the

aliens in the way that the other colonists had. The colonists’

inability to perceive these beings in their own terms represents

an anthropocentric world view which categorises and classifies

everything and everyone in relation to humanity. The material

22

existence of what appears to the humans to be creatures of myth

or folklore in NHWT, presents a carnivalesque inversion; they are

‘real’ in their world, but they belong to the world of magic and

the supernatural in the minds of the humans. This alternative

universe is a Carnival or ‘dub side’ universe, where ‘misrule’

rules, where order is maintained by criminals and where to be

human is to be alien. In presenting this vision, Hopkinson

highlights the way in which western humans relate to non-human

nature – which is to be completely alienated from it:

The key to existential homelessness and to our denial of our

dependence on nature is the dualistic treatment of the

human/nature relationship, the view of the essentially or

authentically human part of the self, and in that sense, the

human realm proper, as at best accidentally connected to

nature, and at worst in opposition to it. (Plumwood Feminism

and Mastery 27)

So Toussaint is terra-formed to eradicate nature and NHWT is a

wild, ‘natural’, untamed place to which convicts are sent.

There are many points of similarity in Hopkinson’s and Le

Guin’s novels, besides the plot of extra-terrestrial

23

colonisation. In both, the humans respond to the wilderness by

attempting to tame it and its inhabitants, but the constructions

of the indigene which are used in the novels differ considerably.

Hopkinson’s narrative draws on tropes of Caribbean folklore and

history, whilst Le Guin’s draws on those of the veneration of the

Native Americans; the ‘ecological Indian’ (Buse 269). The

narrative of the superiority of the indigene in respect of their

relationship with nature is prevalent in wider discourse on

‘wilderness’ and ‘nature writing’, and appears frequently in

North American ecocriticism. Le Guin’s ‘creechies’ (Altheans) are

in this tradition. They belong to a people of the tree and live

in harmony with nature, as do the Douen (whose home is the ‘Daddy

Tree’), but they are human, in the sense that humans and Altheans

share a common ancestor (the Hain) and are equally intelligent.

The contrast between their lifestyle and that of the colonisers

is a parody of that between the original colonisers of the

American West and the indigenous people they found there, even to

the point that ‘bad’ things (in this case, murder) learned from

humans must forever be part of the Althean’s lives:

24

Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to

balance your sanity not on the razor’s edge of reason but on

the double, support, the fine balance of reason and dream;

once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more

than you can unlearn to think. (Le Guin 116)

However, the Altheans are also endowed with a kind of mysticism

(‘dreaming’) which gives them a higher level of insight and

belonging to their world and to each other than the humans

possess. The ‘indigene’ in MR, as represented by the douen, is

not endowed with any ‘special’ powers of spirituality; they are a

simple people, whose lifestyle is suited to their planet, but

might not be to another. They have much to offer humanity in

terms of their attitudes to, acceptance of, and cooperation with

nature and life itself, but are portrayed as alien and therefore,

as having different needs and wants to humans. Le Guin’s aliens

are perfect humans, whilst Hopkinson’s are a definite ‘other’.

Hopkinson here seems to be acknowledging the douen’s difference,

whilst at the same time acknowledging their ‘rights’ to their own

existence, whilst Le Guin’s stressing of sameness, depicts the

Altheans as extensions of the human self (‘us’ only better). As

25

Plumwood argues, there is a problem with assuming that ‘others’

are extensions of the self: “...once one has realised that one

is indistinguishable from the rainforest, its needs will become

one’s own. But there is nothing to guarantee this – one could

equally well take one’s own needs for its.” (Plumwood Feminism and

Mastery 178) This acknowledgment of difference could indicate the

difference between western and postcolonial discourses on

identity, and an understanding of the position of ‘other’ in a

sharply divided, hyperseparated world.

Without the douen, the humans would probably not survive the

initial arrival through the ‘dimension veil’ - as is apparent in

Antonio’s case, where he disregards what Chichibud says and is

injured (almost killed) because of this (besides putting Tan-Tan

in danger):

Antonio sucked his teeth. “Look, I ain’t business with

your bush nonsense, yes. Take we to this Junjuh.”

But as Tan-Tan had looked where Chichibud was pointing,

she had slowly discerned something different through the

mess of leaf and mould and stem. She tapped Chichibud on the

26

shoulder. “Mister, I see some little lines, like the tracks

badjack ants does leave in the sand.”

Gently, Chichibud touched her forehead with the back of

his hand, once, twice. “Good, little tallpeople. Sense

behind you eyes. That is sugar-maggot trails. If you follow

them, you could find their nest. Boil them to sweeten your

tea.” Chichibud looked at Antonio. “You must learn how to

live in this place tallpeople, or not survive.” (100)

Tan-Tan’s open-mindedness is contrasted with Antonio’s refusal to

see anything beyond himself. Antonio does not recognise the

natural world as important or of any intrinsic worth; its worth

is judged only by its usefulness to him, in true master subject

fashion. Antonio’s disregard of the lore of the indigenous douen

reflects the colonisers’ view of the colonised. The

hyperseparation which allows the creation of hierarchical

conceptions of the relative worth of individuals and of nature

are used by Hopkinson as a parodic representation of the

relationship between the ancestors of the colonisers of Toussaint

and their former European masters. The knowledge of the douen is

ignored, trivialised and denied, as was that of the indigenous

27

people in the Caribbean and the Africans who were transported

there. The colonisers of NHWT are faced with a nature which

cannot be ignored or instrumentalised, and must be lived and

negotiated with, rather than ruled over.

The largely egalitarian culture of Toussaint has not ironed

out all the human insecurities. Problems of power-seeking,

intrigue and adultery (which assumes ‘traditional’ ideas about

men’s and women’s roles) are still present, although Granny Nanny

ignores activities and machinations which it does not perceive as

harmful to the society as a whole. Significantly, most of the

transportees to NHWT are exiled as a result of violent action –

inability to control themselves - which could not be prevented.

One-Eye, the leader of the transportees on NHWT explains: “…

[m]ost of we get send here because anger get the better of we too

often. Almost any other crime the Grande ‘Nansi Web could see

coming and prevent, but Granny Nanny can’t forsee the

unpremeditated, seen?” (127) Antonio’s crime had been to kill his

wife’s lover, Quashee, in an act of cold-blooded jealousy and

possessiveness. In the narrative, Hopkinson questions the

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underlying assumption that Antonio has a right to his wife’s

(Ione’s) body:

“Is me, Marshall. Antonio, mayor of Cockpit County,

against Quashee, the man who take away me wife honour from

me”.

Somebody muttered, “Eh-eh. Like her honour is yours to

have or lose.” (59)

Whilst making it clear elsewhere that both Ione and Antonio are

selfish individuals involved in a mutually-destructive

relationship, Hopkinson makes the feminist position clear; both

Antonio and Ione behave in ‘traditional’ ways, which are not in

keeping with the egalitarian ethos of Toussaint. Ione has bought

into the ideology of ‘woman power’ which Tan-Tan rejects.

Antonio’s machinations with the pedi-cab drivers are aimed

at his obtaining some power advantage in being able to block out

Granny Nanny’s for a period of time, using ‘nannysong’. When he

arrives on NHWT and finds that his yearned-for privacy is the

norm, he relishes the lack of control and oversight:

“And no Nanny to watch everything you do. No web

nowhere.” Daddy sounded like a man in prayer.

29

One-Eye grinned. “No nanoweb to mind you, but no-one to

scrutinize you either.” (128)

Without the nanoweb to ‘mind’ (look after) Antonio, he is thrown

on his own devices, which appear unsuited to anything other than

political scheming and manipulation. Le Guin’s colonists also

quickly slip into oppression of the Altheans without the commands

and oversight of their government, using the logic of capital –

the acquisition of power and resources.

Without technology to mediate between human and nature (or

to actually mould nature into the form which human’s require),

the outcasts find NWHT a dangerous and frightening place. On

Toussaint all physical work is done by machines, or occasionally

by individual humans who wish to make a gift of their labour,

craft or skill, and there are no dangerous animals, plants or

places which they need to learn to negotiate. However, the

utopian ideal is rather less than utopian when examined further.

Besides Toussaint having been ‘terra-formed’ to eradicate all

life and to enable it to be seeded with the ‘right’ kind of life

(i.e., that which humans can use), an inauspicious origin for a

utopia, the resulting society is lacking in many respects. The

30

lack of physical work appears to encourage a selfishness and

moral immaturity, which requires the control of the overarching

computer, the ‘Grand Nanotech’, ‘Granny Nanny’, the ‘Anansi Web’

– the many ‘nicknames’ emphasising the element of control which

the computer exerts (and the element of perceived ‘trickery’

involved in that control)15 - as well as the resentment which

this control generates. The protective interface between human

and machine is portrayed as infantalising, and leading to

stagnancy and homogeneity. The computer allows little deviation

from a ‘norm’ which is defined by the artificial intelligence.

Within this ‘Nanny State’, it is not only those who are selfish

and power-seeking who yearn for privacy and unmonitored

communication:

Private messages! Privacy! The most precious commodity of

any Marryshevite. The tools, the machines, the buildings,

even the earth itself on Toussaint and all the Nation Worlds

had been seeded with nanomites – Granny Nanny’s hands and

her body. Nanomites had run the nation ships. The Nation

Worlds were one enormous data-gathering system that

31

exchanged information constantly through the Grande Nanotech

Sentient Interface: Granny Nansi’s Web. (10)

The existence of the overarching AI produces the conflict between

living selfishly and living in a society. The implication is that

all humans (at least men) are power-seeking, but that most weigh

the benefits of a life where all needs are met on the one hand

and the loss of some privacy on the other, and choose the former.

Technological advancement, which further distances the human from

non-human nature, does not produce ‘advanced’ humans, but stunted

ones, who have not learned from history. The triumph of

technology over nature ensures the survival of those who conform,

but those who are not completely assimilated and homogenised are

deemed criminals and are exiled from Toussaint, providing an

example of Plumwood’s illustration of the final, ‘devouring’

stage of the mastery of nature:

Devouring is the project of the totalizing self which denies

the other’s difference (Brennan 1994)…[o]therness is

destroyed…and what is not of use is eliminated. It seeks to

produce a slave-world, a ‘terra-formed’ landscape which

offers no resistance, which does not answer back because it

32

no longer has a voice and language of its own. (Plumwood

Feminism and Mastery 193)

Toussaint is that ‘slave world’. It is both terra-formed and

voiceless (voiceless indicating without dissent). Hopkinson sets

up a conflict between the ‘good’ people of Toussaint and the

‘bad’ people of NHWT. However, NHWT folk are in some ways the

‘good’ as they are the non-conformists and the individuals. They

do not follow the rules or live with respect for others - but at

least they are not homogenous robots, who seek only to live

without conflict.

As a result of her father’s rape of her, Tan-Tan has a child

which, reached through the dimension veils by Granny Nanny and

the house eshu, is joined with the Grande Anansi Nanotech

Interface and infused with nanomite technology. He becomes the

first of a new kind of human. The baby’s body ‘is one living

connection with the Interface. He becomes the true cyborg, whose

‘bodystring will sing to Nanny tune’ (328). This ending to the

novel explicitly links the baby (‘Tubman’) to a future without

slavery. This ‘slavery’ is a slavery to human nature as the

perpetual primate, forever attempting to overcome its ‘animal’

33

nature. The only remedy for this is ‘evolution’ to the cyborg – a

blending of human and machine. However, the ethical implications

of this are not explored. Tubman was ‘created’ without his

consent and potentially could be the first of a new type of

human. The positive ending which this appears to provide could

be viewed very differently, since the control the Interface

exerts will presumably be even greater, once it controls all

children from embryo to adult, leaving the question of what would

a future peopled with such creatures look like? Would it be a

utopia, where all needs are met, leaving all free to develop to

unknown and giddying heights, or the antithesis of freedom, where

all are machine-like; rationality without emotion brought to its

logical conclusion?

The setting of Cereus Blooms at Night is not in a futuristic

potentiality, but in a barely-disguised Trinidad, the island of

Lantancamera. However, the disguise serves to dislocate both

Lantancamera and the village of Paradise in both space and time.

Just as Hopkinson names the settlements on NHWT for their

attributes, giving them characteristics of mouldy bread

(‘Junjuh’) or a cake (‘Sweet Pone’), Mootoo’s naming of the

34

Island as ‘Lantancamera’ (a beautiful but foul-smellling plant)

and ‘Paradise’ (the opposite of the hell on earth she describes

for Mala), is ironic. However, unlike Toussaint, there is no

artificial intelligence to ensure fairness and equality; the

power in Lantancamera is firmly located in the hands of men.

From the overarching authority of the coloniser, represented by

Reverend Thoroughly, to the authority of her father and

eventually, the judge, Mala’s existence is controlled and self-

determination is blocked.

Introducing her collection of short stories Skin Folk,

Hopkinson writes:

Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you’ll find

stories about people who aren’t what they seem. Skin gives

these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off,

their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be

vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden

their skins bear, once they remove them – once they get

under their own skins – they can fly. (Hopkinson Skin Folk 1)

highlighting the way in which the supernatural creatures of

Caribbean folklore disguise themselves in various ways; sometimes

35

presenting a mask of humanity behind which a monster lurks. The

idea that after shedding their skins, not only do their ‘true

selves’ emerge, but ‘they can fly’ resonates with Mala’s attempts

to change, release the self that has never been allowed

expression and ‘escape’ the confines of not only space, but time.

For Hopkinson, the mask is potentially a burden these creatures

must bear, and the flight a release from this burden. But as

Rohlehr points out, there are many elements to mas’ and

potentially many meanings can be attributed to one element. The

phrase “once they get under their own skins” is reminiscent of

the dragon masquerader’s contention that the mask hides a smile.

The layering of masks recognises that for human beings, the

assumption and discarding of various masks (gender roles,

relational roles, familial roles etc) bear a nuanced relationship

to the individual assuming these masks. ‘Under their own skins’

can also be read metamorphically. The caterpillar’s skin becomes

a case or receptacle for the moth or butterfly; that which looks

like one being has the potential for a completely different being

within it, as Mala particularly exhibits in Cereus. Lovelace

articulates this transformative aspect of masquerade: “[he]

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felt, as he put on his dragon costume, a sense of entering a

sacred mask that invested him with an ancestral authority to

uphold...the unending rebellion they waged, ...threatening

destruction if they were not recognized as human beings.”

(Lovelace 113) However, recognition as a human being is what men

aspire to, as this is seen as being denied to men of colour, and

clearly, for Lovelace, the idea of masculinity and humanity are

bound together in his concept of ‘warriorhood’. For women, the

association with nature distances them from the concept of

‘human’ which is characterised as half of the human/nature

dualism: “[t]he concept of the human has a masculinist

bias...because the male/female and human/nature dualisms are

closely intertwined, so much so that neither can be fully

understood in isolation from the other.” (Plumwood Feminism and

Mastery 33) To be considered fully human, one must be male.

When her father is injured and Ambrose runs away, leaving

her alone with her father’s dying body, Mala begins her

preparations for metamorphosis and flight. Before the attempts at

transformation, she must cleanse herself of the associations with

the past and with the trappings of culture:

37

Many of her sounds were natural expansions and contractions

of her body. She grunted when lifting something heavy. She

dredged and expelled phlegm. She sighed melodiously. Cried

and belched unabashedly. She coughed and sneezed and spat

and wiped away mucus with no care for social graces. She

laughed, sometimes as quietly as a battimamselle flapping

its wing tips agains water in an old drum, or as raucously

as a parrot imitating her imitating it. She farted at will,

for there was no one around to contradict her. (Mootoo 127)

This ‘stripping away’ is the essence of rebellion and non-

conformity; to reveal the layers of inhibitions and constraints,

they must be exposed and discarded. The assumption of the masque

is preceded by a ritualistic cleansing ritual, in which the old

self is prepared for the transformative possession of the masque:

“[t]he stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to

the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world

enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body

itself goes out to meet the world...”. (Bakhtin 26) This

stripping away of the social, hierarchical, religious and

38

ethical, prepares the self for a rebirth into a different plane,

space, body or spirit.

Mootoo uses the idea of transformation seen in moths as a

trope of this intrinsic and continuous instability. Moths, as

insects which transform from earth-bound caterpillar to flying

insect, are the very epitome of metamorphosis – the chrysalis

being the site of the crossing between one stage and another, but

yet containing both. The associations of moth with the night (as

opposed to butterflies and the day) and their propensity to seek

the light, regardless of the damage done to them in the process,

is echoed in the human ritualistic and damaging behaviours in

which Chandin and Mala (however unwillingly) engage.

Mala’s actions are ritualistic and shamanistic, designed to

bring her to a metamorphic state. Both Mala’s and her ever-dying

father assume the ‘moth masque’; his decomposing body occupies

the liminal space between life and death, keeping Mala imprisoned

in her position of caretaker. They are joined in the moth

masque, as they have been joined throughout life. Mala’s

transformation is preceded by rituals of making pepper sauce, of

stopping eating meat, of stopping the use of language, walking in

39

her own footsteps, pinning dead insect carapaces on the wall of

her father’s room etc. This preparation uses the power of ritual

and performance, in an attempt to ensure she does not dissolve

altogether in the mystic period where time and the conjunction of

roof, sun and sky brings her to the circumstance when

metamorphosis is possible, and which inscribes within it either

rebirth or death:

Time would collapse. Every inhaled breath was a panicked

tremble sustained and each exhale a heavy sob. In anguish

Mala would clutch her blouse, petticoat, handkerchief into a

ball in front of her breast, her harried breathing

punctuated with fits and spasms. Her skin and bones,

especially her upper arms and the back of her neck, would

become chilled, unable to dry out or warm up. (Mootoo 132)

The imagery recalls the insect emerging painfully from its

cocoon; its wings damp and laid limply against its body. Her

‘upper arms and the back of the neck’, are precisely where the

wings would be attached, if the insect’s anatomy were to be

transposed to the human’s:

40

With effort she lifted herself off the ground, pulled in her

chest and thrust her shoulders forward. She cried out the

only words she had spoken in ages. “Oh God. I beg you.

Please. Doh leave me, I beg you, oh God, oh God, doh leave

me, I beggin you. Take me with you.” (Mootoo 133)

Her wings refuse to unfold; they remain encased and immobile and

she remains rooted to the ground. Looked at from one direction,

as she reaches for the chasm opening overhead, she is yearning to

leave the chrysalis and be ‘reborn’ but looked at from the other

‘side’, the reaching for the light might be a journey to death.

Both possibilities are equally present:

The sun had begun its ascent to its highest point. All

around her the quality of light signaled the approaching

collision of sun and roof. Lying on the floor, looking up

at the crack in the roof, she breathed slowly. For a while,

staring up at the slit, all she saw was sky in various

shades of hypnotic blue. Gradually the slit darkened. The

edges turned harsh silver. Mala sat up. Her heart began to

gallop, the beat crescendoing in her temples…A shaft of

harsh light poured through the gash in the roof. Crickets

41

began to screech, the running water grew torrentially loud.

Mala shook her head. A wave of nausea washed over her. She

raised the bottle to her face, shoved the open rim against

her face, her nose deep inside, a wet, red ring imprinting

across her nose cheeks and lips. (132-133)

Like a birth canal, the crack in the roof becomes the threshold

between one life and the next, and yet is a wound (‘gash’). The

violence of the language and the action of embracing the pain of

the hot peppers recalls Chandin’s forcible, violent use of Mala’s

body. Pain and ecstasy, life and death are both

present/potentialities in the same moment of inversion – the act

of procreation in one direction, the act of birth in the other.

Her tongue, burnt raw, unfolds and trembles in the air – as

though her abused vagina had turned inside out. And like those

moths which are also battered and bruised in their ‘frenzied

carnival’ (140) “[h]er flesh had come undone. But every tingling

blister and eruption in her mouth and lips was a welcome sign

that she had survived. She was alive.” (134)

Mala does not metamorphose and become the moth – which would

allow her to fly away. She remains the dual entity of Pohpoh the

42

child and Mala the adult, until Chandin and the house and yard

are consumed in fire, releasing her. The painful attempts fail

because she is bound by her guilt, arising from her pivotal role

in both her and Asha’s captive state, just as Tan-Tan’s Robber

Masque was necessary to allow her to expiate her guilt and

reintegrate her split psyche. Mala’s guilt also extends to her

father, who she has accidently killed. Viewed in one way, the

journey from Pohpoh to Mala is one of sanity to madness, but

viewed in another way, it is that of caterpillar to moth, of one

being to another. This is not the Cinderella-like metamorphosis

of scullery-maid to princess, but the entirely life-affirming

transformation which has nothing to do with socially-constructed

femininity or appearances, or the beauty associated with youth

and wealth and, perhaps, butterflies rather than moths.

The ritualistic, magical parodying of carnival dance draws

attention to Chandin’s participation in the event. Just as both

the cereus and the moth are implicated in the violence of the

ritual, so Mala and Chandin are joined in theirs. The moth which

is “…thirstily lapping sweet nectar, bruising and yellowing its

body against the large stamens that waved from the flowers” (138)

43

injures itself in its frenzy, and the flowers, which bloom to

attract the attentions of the moth, are both damaged by their

mutual acts. Chandin’s ‘rituals’ of drinking and violence fail to

bring him to the point of metamorphosis – he is in the

degenerative rather than regenerative stage of the cycle - until

he is injured by Mala. He then becomes caught at the threshold

between life and death, in the liminal space of the garden. In

this space where time does not operate as it does outside/beyond,

he is ever-dying and ever-moving. The carnival cannot end and

the parodic ‘revels’ carry on in an unending cycle. Chandin’s

‘masks’ – first the mask of the Hindu then the Christian, then

husband and father – are replaced by the masks of transgressor;

atheist, drone, child abuser. The imagery of metamorphosis,

transcendence and rebirth incorporates states of renewal and

rebirth, but also death and decay.

In her essay ‘Moving the Caribbean Landscape’, Hoving’s

perception of Mala as “...wholly other to the patriarchal,

colonial, social and symbolic order...” (Hoving 158) recognises

the important metamorphosis which she has undergone, but does not

recognise the way in which this metamorphosis has been achieved,

44

which is via shamanistic ritual and the assumption of a ‘masque

of power’. To Hoving, the events and the yard are seen as

“excessive”, by which she appears to mean exaggerated, or

magical. However, her reading indicates that there is a norm

which Mootoo’s text transgresses. In realist terms, the years in

which Chandin’s body has been rotting in the garden would not

account for any remnants of the body beyond a skeleton. However,

a reading based on psychological trauma misses the essence of the

processes which Mootoo is describing. Looked at in this way, time

and space have not only become warped in Mala’s mind, but in the

minds of the inhabitants of the village, since Mala and her yard

have become mythologised, so in realist terms everyone behaves as

though they have suffered traumatic memory loss, which is

remembered when Mala enters the Alms House. If, on the other

hand, the text is seen as representing cultural perceptions of

reality as a blending of both the real and the magical, just as

Midnight Robber blends folktale, carnival tropes and the ‘magic’

of technology, the meaning one attributes to the events shifts.

Hoving observes that the text is scattered with drawings of

insects which warns readers that “words alone cannot tell this

45

story since it exceeds the boundaries of the cultural”. (157) To

which culture does this refer? The insects ‘crawling’ in and out

of the text represent quite clearly the way in which the

boundaries between the magical and the real do not form an

impermeable barrier, but each exist in the same moment. The

‘ambiguity’ of the text which Hoving considers uncomfortable

(157) is further explained in her analysis of the text as not

associating “...nature with femininity in any traditional way”.

(157) Mootoo’s alignment of woman and nature is particularly

interesting, since it presents a construct in which woman (Mala)

becomes nature. This refusal to accept the association of woman

and nature in a ‘traditional’ way (157) is a powerful statement,

which is dealt with in various ways in ecofeminist novels, like

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and stories like

Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out to Play? In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood’s

protagonist, like Mala, goes through a ritual of stripping away,

laying bare and expiating guilt, in order to achieve a

metamorphic transformation which takes her beyond or away from

the culturally-condoned feminine, to a condition which is

presented as ‘natural’:

46

They would never believe it’s only a natural woman,

state of nature, they think of that as a tanned body on a

beach with washed hair, waving like scarves; not this, face

dirt-caked and streaked, skin grimed and scabby, hair like a

frayed bathmat stuck with leaves and twigs. A new kind of

centrefold.

I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being

killed: a mouse, a bird? (Atwood 248)

Mala too, has undergone this change from a woman who can be

desired, objectified and used to one who has redefined what it is

to be ‘woman’. The loss of language which both protagonists

undergo, represents not a trauma in the sense which Hoving uses

it, but the ‘stripping away’ of cultural constraints and

constructions, and with it the modes of oppression. This is not

a ‘return to nature’ (163), since modern humanity’s distance from

nature is a dangerous illusion, but an acceptance of nature as

part of the self, and a recognition that we are all part of the

natural world.

Mala, Otoh and Chandin are all in a state of flux, as though

they are trying on successive masks – or, to use Rohlehr’s

47

constructs, assuming various ‘masques of power’. Inhabiting the

boundaries or liminal spaces of normative society, they are

masqueraders in a process of metamorphosis. Mootoo does not label

these ‘states of being’ with the words used in the hegemonic

society – like ‘transgender’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’. These

terms are not only markers of difference from a culturally-

constructed norm, they imply stasis or completed action, rather

than continuous movement. Similarly, the idea of ‘border

crossing’ implies an action completed – from one state to

another. In Cereus, the characters are in a state of continuous

change and do not recognise the boundaries between one ‘state’

and another, since each state is part of the other. There is no

‘normative’ position, since all the characters are in some way or

another in flux – this in itself the state of being in biological

organisms, where stasis is an illusion. This is, however, also a

statement about gender and sexuality and the cultural boundaries

imposed upon them. Gender, sexuality and sexual orientation are

clearly drawn as fluid and changing ‘categories’. Mootoo’s

depiction of Mala, Otoh and Tyler playfully mixes these together,

with a person born a girl who lives as a boy (and achieves this

48

by exercising her body to rid it of the ‘excess’ flesh of women

110), a person born a boy and ‘becoming’ a girl (this

transformation is more troubled) and Mala herself magically

changes from girl to organic being of no specific gender. By

peopling her text with “border-crossers par excellence” (Hoving

163) Cereus advocates acknowledgment and acceptance of the

differences between humans and the more than human world, whilst

asserting their ‘rights’ to existence without labels which demean

or disparage them, or place them in a hierarchical relation to an

imaginary (but socially-condoned) norm. Cereus gently points the

way to a utopia in which all life is valued for its own sake.

Both Midnight Robber and Cereus Blooms at Night use a specifically

Trinidadian cultural context to explore ideas about gender,

nature and anthropocentrism. The novels draw analogies between

the treatment of nature and the treatment of human beings under

colonial rule. They also present an underlying utopian vision of

what an imagined future could be like, without the interference

of either an unchanging human nature (MR) or the cultural

restraints which limit and define humanity (Cereus). MR posits a

49

potential future, where the immutability of human nature is

altered by the addition of an integral technology to form a

cyborg civilisation and Cereus posits a future in which human

beings are not confined by their sexuality or gender and non-

human nature is not commodified and sold for profit.

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1 Mas’’ is used to refer to Trinidadian Carnival Bands (the apostrophe indicating the elided que of ‘masque’) and meaning ‘masquerade’. ‘masquerader’ refers to a participant in ‘mas’’’ and ‘masque’ refers to any Masquerade (i.e., not specifically Trinidadian). ‘Mask’ refers either to a face covering or an identity.2 Dictionary.com3 Bakhtin Rabelais4 Miller, D 5 This is not to imply that there is anything more ‘primitive’ or unchanging in Trinidad Carnival than in European Carnivals, just that the trajectory of change has taken a different course in both.6 Rohlehr, Mellon Lecture7 Rohlehr, Mellon Lecture 8 Taylor gives a review of the literature on theories of comedy, for which there is no space in this thesis.9 See chapter ? for a consideration of the woman-nature connection.10 Rohlehr, Mellon Lecture 11 www.tntisland.com/carnivalcharacters.html12 Personal observation which is based on the increasing appearance (since 2007) of Ole Mas’ charactersat events and processions before and at Carnival itself, together with the coverage in magazines like Caribbean Beat, January/February 2014 which posits ‘Traditional Mas’ as “…a strand of cultural DNA leadingback to the festival’s origins. Every year, Carnival season brings familiar laments about the dwindling and dying of these traditional forms. It’s often portrayed as a story of cultural amnesia and loss.” (44)13 The character of the Midnight Robber in Trinidadian Carnival is normally male and is portrayed as a boasting, articulate and amoral character. He recounts tales of his exalted origins and his ‘trickster’ exploits and the ways in which he is going to make life difficult for Trinidadians. (c.f. http://thebookmann.blogspot.com/2007/06/midnight-robber-speaks.html for an example of a recent robber speech) In Midnight Robber, Tan-Tan overhears local storytellers telling tales of her exploits. These are based in truth but have been exaggerated, resulting in ‘Tan-Tan the woman’ becoming a mythologised ‘Tan-Tan the Midnight Robber’.14 Snell, A ‘TT is a Developed Country’. 15 The nicknames for the ‘Grande Nanotech Interface’ are derived by blending elements with ‘Nanny’ (as in ‘of the Maroons’ and ‘Nanny State’) ‘Nanotech’ (nanotechnology) and ‘Anansi’