Topographies of Desire

Descriptions like “seductive” and “tension-filled” adorn the back cover of Shani Mootoo’s fifth novel, Polar Vortex, which perceptively details the lives of Priya and Alex, an older interracial lesbian couple living in the Southern Ontario community of Prince Edward County. The novel narrates the imminent arrival of Prakash, an estranged male friend of Priya’s from university, whose presence threatens Priya and Alex’s seemingly idyllic queer domesticity. Through the confluence of these characters, Mootoo presents a thrilling psychological drama that asks us to consider how structures of desire are constantly being negotiated through competing intimacies, operations of survival, and yearnings for belonging across the diaspora. Moreover, the novel animates recurring themes across Mootoo’s oeuvre—namely, stratifying identity politics, family relations, and diasporic affinities. Her return to these subjects alludes to the persistence of these matters for people of Caribbean diasporas whose collective memory is haunted by transhistorical experiences of displacement, indentureship, and cultural genocide. These issues are further complicated through the novel’s absorbing characterization and deft narrative style that emphasize the difficulties of intimacies in the face of the often-competing politics of race, class, sex, and gender.

Polar Vortex is divided into four sections, three of which are narrated by Priya. Mootoo mobilizes a first-person perspective to provide insight into Priya’s internalizations as a queer Indo-Caribbean postcolonial subject. Priya maintains a meditative and vulnerable tenor, which lends to the reader’s understanding of her as a trustworthy, albeit precarious, figure. However, this tone is at times undermined by contradictions and denials that attest to her ambivalence toward her own sexuality and desires, which Mootoo presents as unruly, relational, and thus complex. Indeed, with the anticipation of Prakash’s visit, Alex begins to question the exclusivity of Priya’s same-sex attraction. Alex’s indictments of Priya’s past relations with Prakash in turn impel Priya to parse through the performances of her sexual identity over the forty years she has known Prakash. “Why on earth would [Alex] be worried about a man?” Priya contemplates. “Is there something about me that I myself can’t see that makes her think I’m not as committed to my sexuality as I profess to be? It unsettles me. It makes me angry” (47). Alex’s accusations are distressing for Priya as evinced through her questioning language. Rather than typify Alex as a paranoid spouse, Mootoo—over the course of several chapters—forces us to question whether this response from Priya is earned, as we learn that there has always been an ambivalent and unstable attraction between Priya and Prakash.

In relation to the question of suppressed sexual attraction, Mootoo emphasizes, through interior monologues, that Priya and Prakash’s relationship is more so one that is characterized by a shared yet incommensurable affiliation with the Indian diaspora. Mootoo suggests that Priya represents the possibility of an Indian heteronormative family structure that Prakash unceasingly pursues and that Priya likewise, albeit abashedly, desires. “I sort of fell, little by little, into him for comfort and support,” Priya confesses (30). “There were times I played the Indian woman to Prakash’s Indian man” (32). Yet Prakash’s persistent heteromasculine advances—“Come on. Give me a proper hug” (265)—assume that Priya will eventually acquiesce to gendered expectations. By bringing these characters together, Mootoo reveals how projections of sexuality and diasporic domesticity rooted in gender essentialism are just some of the conditions queer diasporic postcolonial subjects must contend with.

Priya’s attraction to Prakash is also informed by past experiences of sexual surveillance from both her Indo-Trinidadian household and Trinidad at large:

Time has passed since I’d emigrated, and yet I had long remained terrified there’d be a Trinidadian lurking somewhere who’d see me and report back home to the entire country. The idea that another Trinidadian in that situation would likely have had the same concerns about me, and that our secret identities might have been safe with each other, could not be fully trusted. (134)

Readers understand (from Priya’s accounts) that Prakash is a “willing foil” to her fear of exposure (134). Mootoo creates here a tension brought forth by Priya’s affiliations to both the Indo-diasporic and Indo-Caribbean communities. In this regard, the novel offers a close consideration of how overlapping cultural inheritances and legacies of colonialism inform the expression, and reception, of diverse sexual identities.

“The Visitor” is the only section of the novel told from Alex’s perspective. If we consider Frantz Fanon’s study of the colonial psychological condition, then we may, in one sense, read the inclusion of Alex’s perspective in terms of Fanon’s notion that to better understand the colonial, and subsequently postcolonial and diasporic, condition, the psychology of the colonizer needs to be studied in addition to that of the colonized.¹ Approaching the section in this way—even as Fanon’s pathologizing of queerness has been critiqued by scholars such as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Rosamond S. King—allows us to understand Alex’s narrative sieving of Prakash’s refugee family history as the dissociative acts of White Canada with racialized migrant voices.² “Despite my discomfort,” Alex muses, “I actually didn’t mind, at this point, hearing more of what he had to say. I had no investment in him, nor am I attracted to stories of trauma and escape, but he was willing to be open and weak in front of me, and wished, I thought, to be seen as good and brave” (238). Alex’s malaise throughout “The Visitor” reveals how internal percolations reproduce systemic schemes of colonial dissociation. Put differently, Alex’s narrative filtration imitates the social and structural procedures that screen, countermand, and expunge voices of the colonized. Certainly, Mootoo insists that adding Alex’s voice “was originally more about writing craft than anything else,” but it eventually “served a bigger purpose, and the novel’s direction changed—for the better.”³

Mootoo’s choice to situate Polar Vortex in Ontario’s outlying Prince Edward County expands representations of diasporic relations beyond metropolitan enclaves that are more prevalent in Caribbean diasporic writing. This unfamiliar setting reflects Mootoo’s ongoing interests in what it means for racialized peoples to inhabit, and make homes, in spaces previously considered uninhabitable for both queer people and people of color, as well as what it means for diasporic people to form relationships with Indigenous lands. Even as Mootoo widens our conception of the kinds of stories that can be told about diasporic peoples in Canada, she also illuminates how the challenges faced by diasporic subjects remain consistent. Mootoo implies this through the title, which relays how systems of varying pressures and pulls endured, historically and contemporaneously, by diasporic subjects may produce a return to past traumas and “chilling” conditions. Despite the alienating contexts diasporic people find themselves within, their stories—especially those told by Mootoo—are ones of survival and resistance in the face of contentious and antagonistic forces. These are necessary stories and compelling illustrations of what it means to live within our current moment, as well as the urgent need to recognize the legacies of coloniality that live on in the conditions of our desires. 

Courtenay Chan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching focuses on critical race and mixed race studies, Asian diaspora studies, and Asian North American and Canadian literature.

[1] In his The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon includes the stories of both Europeans and Algerians. See Frantz Fanon, “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 1963), 181–234.

[2] See Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

[3] Shani Mootoo, in “ALU Summer Book Club: Interview with Shani Mootoo,” All Lit Up, 15 July 2020; https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2020/ALU-Summer-Book-Club-Interview-with-Shani-Mootoo.