Re-mapping the Caribbean Gothic in Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine and Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea

Abstract

AbstractAs Caribbean Canadian immigrant novelists, Nalo Hopkinson and Shani Mootoo construct narrative circumstances that bring together Caribbean, diasporic, and Canadian-born characters. Hopkinson’s Sister Mine (2013) is a supernatural fantasy caper, whereas Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea (2005) tells a postcolonial, neo-Gothic love story. Both novels use water imagery to convey the diasporic connections linking Caribbean and Canadian life; these novels discuss Canadian lakes rather than the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean thereby challenging the prevailing concept of tidalectics, a term coined by Kamau Brathwaite to describe the shared experience of oceanic connections linking various parts of the world together. Hopkinson and Mootoo infuse their shared traditions of Caribbean and Canadian Gothic with a political engagement with feminism and self-determination that breaks with the stranglehold that Indo- and Afro-Caribbean family traditions can place on their female family members to arrive at a new Caribbean Canadian Gothic. Both novels reject the misogynistic traditions that require a woman’s complicity in her own disempowerment, like remaining in a loveless marriage or acquiescing to an overbearing mother-in-law’s unreasonable demands. In their evocation of Canadian freshwater landscapes, both texts imagine woman-led futures that treat their desires for romantic love or familial connections seriously.