letter to shani mootoo re: Out on Main Street

08/29/09 Out on Main Street

my dear shani mootoo,

these stories are weird. “Out on Main Street” is the jewel of this collection, reflecting the complexity of the indians in the caribbean in a funny, smart, thorough manner. the queer factor is brilliant; the queer women’s culture that permeates the space of the indian sweetshop over the course of the text fully centers the women’s presence in a normative space peopled with first-generation married indian couples. the sweetshop is an illustration of crossing between multiple realms; gay and straight, first-generation indian immigrants to the west indies and the ones born and grown up there, female and male, normative and oppositional to the norm. the story is well paced, the timing measured to deliver the jokes throughout. there is much to learn and analyze here.

i asked myself why you exaggerated the characters, sketching them in black and white in some of the stories, especially “A Bright New Year’s Eve’s Night,” in which the man and woman characters are caricatures of a patriarchal, heteronormative world. at first they seemed less believable to me as a result of their over-the-top characterization and i saw too starkly the unforgiving lesbian lens that positions Tanya and Bobby in a diametric opposition of power—Tanya’s only agency is to kill Bobby to stop his physical and psychological abuse. after a few days of reflection, i remembered your background — west indian. these points are exaggerated in order to make the scene, the moral, the outcome of the story unmistakable. this, along with “Lemon Scent,” is a cautionary tale.

“Sushila’s Bhakti” isn’t deep enough. the painter loses her edge as a result of internalizing the orientalist criticism of her work. she loses herself and needs the labels of indian food coloring and basmati rice to make her feel authentic and free again? the narration is choppy, unintegrated, forced. the logic of this story depends too much on Sushila’s unquestioned sense of exile.

while your work could be described as somehow less conciliatory than jhumpa lahiri’s, for example, because you write through that lesbian-feminist lens, it still operates as a series of distortions in these writings. but the voice is there, and while i think you’re better suited to novels—Cereus Blooms at Night is among my favorite south asian diasporic novels—the short stories need more layers.

thank you,

Tahminah Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

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