JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

eader is reminded of who is speaking and for whom. Adele’s son asserts his dominance,
shouting, “Mother! How can I tell the story if you don’t listen to me?” (190). At other
times, he confesses “I’m telling you what I know, what you accidentally told me” (184)
and then, in each instance, the narrative shifts from first-person to a third-person account
detailing his mother’s experiences. Even when Adele questions her son, “Is I telling this
story or you?” (original italics, 45), her son diverts her attention to other things.
Occasionally Adele voices fragments of her own story in her own voice and in her own
language, yet invariably her son fills in the gaps. He does not possess the necessary
knowledge to bear witness to her trauma; yet, he also realizes she has forgotten “the
routes to salvation” (12), and thus he now desires to do what no one has ever done for her
before: listen and support her. Therefore, her stories become interpreted, reconstructed,
even re-imagined, by her son, who admittedly does not have complete access to “[t]he
clutter of a past never [his] own” (113).
THE SOUCOUYANT AS ‘OTHER’
This novel weaves the allegory of the soucouyant throughout the narrative and, at
first glance, the soucouyant exists as a marginal character, relegated to snippets of
memory and unfinished stories. However, a closer investigation reveals the centrality of
this figure, as both Adele and her mother possess character traits associated with the
soucouyant. In fact, the son explicitly views his grandmother as “a monster. Someone
with a hide, red-cracked eyes, and blistered hands” (116). Only at the end of the novel
does the reader come to understand the significance of this old woman’s distorted
features, caused by the traumatic fire at Chaguaramas. Chariandy carefully illustrates
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