"A Bruise Still Tender": David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Cultural Memory

David Chariandy's highly acclaimed 2007 novel, Soucouyant, proclaims itself to be a of forgetting. But it is also a novel of remembering, of personal and of that define the book's second-generation Canadian protagonist. Soucouyant tells the story of a young man in 1980s Scarborough who returns to his mother Adele's home after a two-year absence. Adele suffers from early-onset dementia, illness that the book suggests may have been triggered by the traumatic fire that she and her mother survived when she was a young child in Trinidad. As Chariandy explains in interview with Kit Dobson, Adele's dementia enabled me to explore the fragility and endurance of memory, and, most particularly, the challenge of for a second-generation immigrant. Obviously, because Adele is now forgetting her in Trinidad, the burden of is thrust upon her Canadian-born and raised son. (Spirits 813) Chariandy's comments point to the relationship between and a specifically second-generation subjectivity, a relationship troubled by the fact that the protagonist doesn't have anything at all like absolute or infallible access to the past (813). The very term signifies a belatedness in relationship to the and the diasporic moment. Chariandy goes on to ask ... might his mother's uttered now in broken pieces, and in a language not entirely his, ultimately mean to him here and now, in apparently very different circumstances? What, indeed, might he owe to such really? (Spirits 813). The novel itself is a meditation on these difficult questions. Soucouyant demonstrates how second-generation Canadians often construct identities in the space between the dominating mythologies of multiple homelands. In this article I show how the protagonist negotiates inherited and unwilled diasporic memories, recuperating them into personal that serve to witness his mother's trauma and reinforce the bonds of familial belonging. These diasporic are formed in tension with the troubled legacies of the Canadian home, a tension that is at turns both damaging and creative. The elsewhere past, in other words, does not remain in the broken pieces spoken by others, but is reformed by the second generation and incorporated into a complex new narrative of identity. My analysis here centres upon the concept of cultural memory as Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith articulate it in a 2002 special issue of Signs on Gender and Cultural Memory. Cultural is, for Hirsch and Smith, informed by what Paul Connerton calls an of transfer: in the present by which individuals and groups constitute their identities by recalling a shared on the basis of common, and therefore often contested, norms, conventions, and practices. These transactions emerge out of a complex dynamic between and present, individual and collective, public and private, recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, conscious and unconscious fears or desires. (5) As act of transfer is central to the formation of identity in relationship to the group, whether family, nation, diasporic imaginary, or ethnic community. Cultural is not simply the same as public memory, but references the role of social relationships, including private family relationships, in the of remembering. Cultural therefore has a particularly important role to play in the formation of second-generation identity, for those individuals whose earliest acts of transfer, the shared invoked by their parents, are dominated by other spaces, by various elsewheres. In Chariandy's novel, is embodied by the image of the soucouyant, a Caribbean myth used to convey the particular generational condition, a state of sensing but not really knowing one's origins, and, consequently, a process of exploring one's origins without easy recourse to official meanings or narratives (Spirits 811). …

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