Shani Mootoo --full-blooded Trinidadian

Shani Mootoo Admires Earl Lovelace’s Literary Rhythm… An Immigration Officer says she is not a Trinidadian

By William Doyle-Marshall
Shani Mootoo, an Irish-born Trinidad and Tobago author sits with me in the office of Random House Publishers downtown Toronto to talk about her latest novel “Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab”.
From Ireland she moved to Trinidad, when she was six weeks old, where she grew up and subsequently moved to Canada. She concludes the shifting scenes did not present her any challenges in terms of writing. “I think the distance from Trinidad has served me well in the sense that it is a place and a time I would have to say Trinidad is not the same now as when I left it. It was a place that I longed for and when I go home to Trinidad I go looking for and the funny thing is that I can’t find it anymore but I can in a place like Tucker Valley that hasn’t changed too much and I try to hold on to it by writing about it. So in that sense it suits me well to be away from it, to try to write the Canadian landscape. I did a little bit in “He Drown She” but I didn’t really pay it any attention.

Shani Mootoo, author

In “Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab”, Mootoo a writer who does not have an ancestry of snow, made a conscious effort to write about snow. Longing for home, longing for the sound of a monkey as she is walking through the snow, longing for the sound of people with transistor radios and cricket commentaries are some of the developments that engineer her creativity. “So being here in Canada I have consciously decided to do that, to capture this landscape, the Canadian, the Toronto landscape in my style, my kind of English which remains very Trinidadianized. Some people say I don’t have a real Trinidadian accent. I have been here forever but I know that my desire for rhythm, my pacing and so on comes from home,” the San Fernando writer reflected during our conversation. One of the people she admires tremendously and loves his writing, is Earl Lovelace. If she could achieve Lovelace’s Trinidadian poetic sense, Shani would be in seventh heaven.

   When Ms. Mootoo took out Canadian citizenship she completely forgot that she was born in Ireland and was therefore an Irish. However upon returning back home to Trinidad she went into the residents line. That experience is still fresh in her memory to this day. It is a painful development that she cannot forget. “I got to the officer and he said ‘but you are a Canadian”. I said ‘yes, but I am a Trinidadian’. He said ‘you are not Trinidadian. I kinda start laughing and he says ‘no’. I said ‘of course I have dual citizenship’. He said ‘what two countries are you a citizen of? And I said ‘Trinidad and Canada’. He said ‘no. you have no Trinidadian citizenship. You were born in Ireland. You are Irish and Canadian’.”
    At her publisher’s Toronto office she recalled getting into an argument with the man and telling him ‘well my parents still live in the house. I have my bedroom still there, all my belongings are still there, all my parents are still here’. He said ‘next time, go in the visitors’ line.’  Shani says she has no ancestry in Ireland. But she considers the situation pretty funny as she notes that the place where you were born can mark you or it has such an impact on you. “To be told by a Trinidadian that I am not a Trinidadian. But to hear the immigration officer say I am not a Trinidadian is quite shocking,” she concluded.
   Shani’s works have been receiving serious and respected acclaim from critics and the Canadian literary fraternity as a while. Starting with “Cereus Blooms in the Night” and continuing with other very succinct works like “Valmiki’s Daughter and “He Drown She in the Sea” her works have been long and short listed for numerous prizes in the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Man Booker Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.