~ Out on Main Street, by Shani Mootoo ~
I was favourably inclined towards this book before I opened it: I’d read Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and had heard good things about Out on Main Street already. Still, the title story blew me away.
Mootoo wrote this in 1992, before the tidal wave of South Asian fiction. It’s written in Caribbean dialect, and is about an Indo-Caribbean lesbian couple in an Indian strip somewhere in Canada. It sounded a lot like Toronto’s Gerrard St. area. The mithai shop is run by a Fijian family, and the story beautifully encapsulates the many and varied forms of the desi diaspora.
Indian sweets are called by different names in parts of the Caribbean (Fiji’s ‘kheer’ vs. Trinidad’s ‘sweetrice’) and the Trinidadian customer practices the words before entering, so that the shopkeeper won’t sneer at her. A couple of drunken Caucasian men enter and (perhaps unintentionally?) humiliate the owner by their attempts at conversation (‘Alarm salay kum’, a slapdash attempt at a Muslim greeting to a Hindu shopkeeper). The mood in the shop changes as those with brown skin tense and group together against this ‘invasion’. After the men leave, one of the waiters gets over-familiar with a female customer and she irritatedly turns him down; the sympathetic looks between the women customers are part of another bond.
The two main characters have been trying to downplay their lesbianism in this cultural environment, but then two of their very obviously lesbian friends enter;the atmosphere in the place turns perceptibly colder, and the earlier female bonding vanishes.
It’s not a long story, just a few pages, but is really quite fabulous. I was particularly pleased to find it because I’ve had an overdose of expat-Indian angst of late, and this story focuses entirely on the diaspora. It demonstrates quite beautifully that we are all part of many intersecting identities, and can select or be forced into one or more at any time, depending on the situation.
Out on Main Street, by Shani Mootoo. Press Gang Publishers, 2002
This review was first published in 2009 on the South Asian Women’s NETwork (Sawnet) website.
Recent Comments