JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

– Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1994) and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant
(2007). These novels’ fairly recent publication dates (with the exception of Kogawa’s
1981 publication) and their similar attention to intergenerational relationships and
diasporic storytelling engagements reflect a particular generational diasporic subjectivity,
one that results from an individual’s negotiation of the contradiction between the
discourse of Canadian multiculturalism and the social reality of being constituted ‘Other.’
I argue that this generational condition, common (albeit not restricted) to many Canadian
immigrant children who have grown up in Canada within the climate of multicultural
ideology, can manifest into a sense of displacement that propels a search for origins,
which, in many cases, necessitates not reclamation but a reconstitution of familial stories
and cultural memories. I have grouped together these novels because they all address
geographic displacement, cultural dislocation, experiences and discourses of exclusion,
and the silencing of personal and collective histories. Like many diasporic authors, these
specific authors speak through their writings with and for individuals who can identify
with similar experiences of discrimination, alienation, displacement, and a sense of
unbelonging in Canada. Interestingly, each novel presents an intergenerational
storytelling engagement between an old 3 woman and a younger listener character that
3 I have deliberated over whether to use ‘old,’ ‘older,’ ‘ageing,’ ‘aged,’ or ‘elderly’ within
my writing, and yet I am not altogether satisfied with any one term. For instance, French
feminist theorist and novelist Simone de Beauvoir protests in 1970 that “old” has
“pejorative connotations” with “the ring of an insult” (288), whereas Beverly Hungry
Wolf, writing in 1980 from her perspective from the Blood Reserve of the Blackfoot
Nation, legitimizes her use of the term “old” because “old woman, or old lady, is a proper
one to use among my grandmothers” (100). In 2005, feminist Foucauldian theorist Zoe
Brennan justifies her adoption of “older” because, as a signifier, it is “relational,
destroying a linguistic barrier that posits youthful on one side and the old on the other”
(25). However, I am ultimately convinced by what Brennan positions as “a persuasive
argument for employing the word old as part of a strategy of reclaiming language by
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