Keywords

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Caribbean literature scholar Judith Misrahi-Barak heralded the arrival of a new generation of Caribbean Canadian writers who were “creating a future in which part of the Caribbean tradition is contained and yet it is a world apart. Caribbean-Canadian writers have attempted to create a new tradition while integrating the old one” (1999, 96). Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson and the cosmopolitan Dublin-born, Trinidadian raised, Canadian immigrant Shani Mootoo are two of the writers Misrahi-Barak identified as part of this group; their later works continue to dramatize the uneasy coexistence of traditional Caribbean and modern Canadian values within their protagonists’ lives. As Caribbean Canadian immigrants and novelists, Nalo Hopkinson and Shani Mootoo frequently 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 by discussing Canadian lakes as well as the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. In so doing, they challenge the prevailing concept of tidalectics, a term coined by (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite (1974) to describe the shared experience of oceanic connections linking various parts of the world together. Hopkinson’s and Mootoo’s preference for a more regionally specific idea of how water connects people to local landscapes recalls Maryse Condé’s skepticism about the universalism of Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde, something which Valérie K. Orlando discusses in her chapter in this collection.

The novels triangulate their central love stories through a connection to the Canadian landscape (the lake) that sparks the recognition of desire for a space in which the Canadian Caribbean character can dwell with her beloved. Through this mechanism each text questions the strict cultural hierarchies that forbid relationships between people of unequal social standing in patriarchal Caribbean culture. In Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea, Canadian lakes appear to be imbued with quasi-magical properties that resonate with the supernatural elements usually associated with Caribbean landscapes; Mootoo and Hopkinson imagine their respective lakes as entities with the power to root secondary characters to their new homeland’s landscape. In contrast, the Caribbean Sea or Atlantic Ocean present only the possibility of an alternate (escapist) reality within the worlds of these novels. Together with each text’s references to those who perished during the Middle Passage and Kala Pani journeys, respectively, Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea embrace narrative elements of the Canadian Caribbean Gothic through which Caribbean colonial history, along with threats from supernatural haints and nightmares about out-of-control tidal waves, haunt these love affairs and postpone the ultimate fulfillment of each protagonist’s desire beyond the timespan of the novel.

The references to the Caribbean region in Hopkinson’s and Mootoo’s novels lack geographic specificity by design. This strategic vagueness contrasts with the references to actual Canadian and Latin American locales in both texts as sites where desire is located and fantasies of domestic bliss can be imagined in keeping with Paul Rodaway’s concept of “sensuous geography.” Rodaway (2002) outlines three central elements that render place into a sensuous geography and the most applicable to my reading of how Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea do so is “the rediscovery of the sensuous (and the body) as a potent part of social, political, historical and geographical experience” (7, emphasis original). In what follows, I argue that Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine and Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea offer a shared vision of Canada as the alternative “sensuous geography” where female protagonists claim the embodied self-determination that their Caribbean heritage denies them. This analysis of how tropes of femininity travel and differ between island and diasporic spaces parallels Megan Jeanette Myers’ reading of Julia Alvarez’s depiction of female “in transit” subjects in the novel Afterlife in her contribution to this collection.

Caribbean Gothic

Though all the action of Sister Mine takes place in Toronto, the plot involves elements of various Afro-Caribbean religious traditions writ large without specifically naming a particular geographical tradition. These supernatural plot points constitute the novel’s most explicit Gothic plot elements. The lovers in Sister Mine met as adults of different orders of existence: Cora was a human woman who fell in love with an Afro-Caribbean Celestial demigod, Boysie, whose power (mojo) is the ability to control the vegetation around him. This couple’s love leads to the birth of a set of conjoined twins, the titular siblings Makeda and Abby, whose health deteriorates after being separated. The Celestial matriarch, Grandmother Ocean, punishes Cora for this initial transgression by turning her into a marine monster trapped in Lake Ontario. Grandmother Ocean’s punishment parallels the twins’ surgery since both interventions tear asunder the family unit. However, these events constitute the backstory to the action in Sister Mine. What Makeda wants most in the world is to be reunited with Cora, thereby mapping female desire in the novel vertically rather than horizontally, as longing for the maternal. To bring about this reunion, Makeda fantasizes about traveling to Puerto Rico, a US territory in the Caribbean, to gather materials she hopes would reinstate Cora to her human form. Since she is the twin who inherited none of her father’s mojo, Makeda’s unrealized fantasy stands in stark contrast to the magic the rest of her family members perform within the world of the novel. Her desire for a domestic reunion also has problematic overtones that recall Canada’s investment in extractive industries at home and overseas, as I will discuss in the next section.

Much in the same way that Hopkinson refuses to identify a specific Caribbean island as the homeland from which her Canadian Caribbean characters migrated, Shani Mootoo also splits the setting of He Drowns She in the Sea between a fictional Caribbean island, Guanagaspar, and a specific Canadian city, Vancouver. Mootoo’s preference for a fictionalized version of Caribbean islands was also evident in her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, which takes place in Lantanacamara. The dual setting strategy emphasizes how something as simple as the physical act of leaving one’s island of origin allows the female protagonist, Rose, to break free from the sociocultural strictures within which she had been raised. The star-crossed middle-aged couple in He Drown She in the Sea are both Indo-Caribbean, but they belong to different social classes. Harry St. George’s mother was a servant in Rose Sangha’s family compound, and the two were childhood friends. Rose later married a rich and politically connected man and adopted his surname, Bihar. Only when she and Harry meet again as adults in Vancouver can they admit their mutual attraction and love. Both Rose and Harry fear the social reprisals that their rekindled relationship would bring in either Canada or Guanagaspar and so Rose fakes her own drowning and reunites with Harry as they sail off in search of a new land to call their own.

Much like Makeda in Sister Mine, Harry imagines himself saving his mother from an impending natural disaster—a tidal wave—that they never experienced in real life but is the central conceit of his nightmares. He Drown She in the Sea opens with the third person narrator emphasizing the geographic divide between the dream’s Caribbean setting and Harry’s physical location in Canada: “Almost a decade after he left Guanagaspar, a dream he used to have recurs. Though he lives by the sea now, the sea in his dream is invariably the other one, that of his earliest childhood” (1). The Caribbean Sea haunts Harry’s memory even from the relatively safe distance of his Canadian life. As the text that frames Harry’s and Rose’s love story in He Drown She in the Sea, the nightmare does two kinds of work: First, it portrays the sea as Harry’s proxy because it decimates those who humiliated and taunted him while he lived on the island. The sheer scale of the structural damage and the huge body count marks this nightmare as a Gothic text. The narrator describes in minute detail the stages of the sea retreating and then returning in full force as the wave crashes against the land, taking everything and everyone with it. However, despite the devastation Harry witnesses in the dreamworld, his family survives the onslaught unscathed. The second type of work the nightmare does is to vindicate Harry’s own judgment and good sense, for within the dreamscape he succeeds in saving his mother, and later Rose, from the menacing waters. By writing a recurring nightmare with a happy ending while leaving the lovers’ actual fates a mystery, Mootoo suggests that Rose and Harry’s shared rejection of the strict caste and class rules that kept them apart in Guanagaspar constitutes a victory regardless of whether they ever reach Honduras.

Together, the tidal wave nightmares in He Drown She in the Sea and the haints and supernatural family members in Sister Mine hearken back to another Caribbean narrative modality, the Caribbean Gothic. Discussing a wide array of multilingual literary texts set in the Caribbean, including those penned by Caribbean authors themselves, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert contends that the European textual inscription of the archipelago as a Gothic landscape full of magic and monsters led the area’s inhabitants to highlight the strangeness and uncanniness of their own surroundings in their fictive works. This Caribbean Gothic style of writing, she argues, could be read as a critical meditation upon “the very nature of colonialism itself” (Paravisini-Gebert 2006, 233). Following this logic, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno seizes on the trope of time travel within Caribbean Gothic science fiction as a tool through which to analyze colonialism’s lingering impact: “[T]ime travel—a device common in science fiction narratives—allows for the exploration of a past characterized by the monstrous and the uncanny. However, much like the Gothic mode, this past constantly returns in the present and projects itself into the future” (2018, 110). Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea bend narrative time through references to fantasies and nightmares, thereby partaking of the Caribbean Gothic mode even though neither text could be classified as science fiction. Kertsin Oloff’s analysis of the Gothic elements of Haitian Marie Vieux Chauvet’s novel, Amour, provides a framework through which to understand the physical violence Cora endures at her mother-in-law’s hands in Sister Mine and the emotional abuse Rose endures from her husband in He Drown She in the Sea. Oloff argues that “it is through Chauvet’s insistent focus on the ecology of the racialized monstrous-feminine that she exaggerates, and ultimately rejects, the social atomization and structural marginalization of women epitomized by female zombie tales” (2018, 122–23). Cora’s and Rose’s subject positions within their narratives resemble those of female zombies since each is forcibly alienated from the axis of power in their respective society. Their association with bodies of water—the lake and the sea—help Cora and Rose transform from a suffering victim into the object of desire for their respective partners: Makeda and Harry.

Tidalectics

Water imagery features prominently throughout both Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea as central plot points but these narratives complicate its original Caribbean connotation by shifting the emphasis from seas or oceans to Canadian lakes. Kamau Brathwaite elaborates the concept of “tidalectics” across his body of literary and poetic work. In Contradictory Omens (1974), for example, Brathwaite claims that “the unity is submarine” (64). For him water, especially the Atlantic Ocean, ties together not only the peoples of the Caribbean but also the past and present histories of capitalist exploitation of the peoples and resources of the islands and inhabitants of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas in an unending cycle that is even more pressing with the undeniable effects of climate change. In an interview she conducted with Brathwaite in 2005, Joyelle McSweeney asks him to respond to her summary of his theory of “tidalectics”:

A way that you have conceived of tide and tidalectics and almost taken that ocean of the Middle Passage and turned it into a cognitive space, a space in which perhaps Caribbean peoples can think outside the Western mode of the dialectic. A kind of tide which touches things. And as I was having this thought, I was really struck by this amazing tide in New Orleans. It does seem connected. (McSweeney)

McSweeney here encapsulates Brathwaite’s previous references to water during their conversation in order to get him to expand on his views of the Greater Caribbean. And, although his response is tinged with a sense of foreboding due to the recent experience of Hurricane Katrina, it nonetheless also captures something of his view of the supernatural as another factor that links together these territories: “I always say that the one factor you can never take out, is the human one. And what human beings can do in New Orleans, now, we have no idea, but I get a sense that they are going to miracle-ize that place all over again” (McSweeney 2005). With this example, Brathwaite applies the logic of tidalectics to a place overcome by water from a large salt lake rather than the sea itself. By suggesting that miracles are the purview of humans, Brathwaite articulates a fluid continuity linking the physical (the weather, the flood) and the metaphysical dimensions of a major metropolis in much the same way that McSweeney claims Brathwaite turned the actual Atlantic Ocean into a theoretical space for the free play of ideas.

While Brathwaite’s concept allows for the flexibility to think through the commonalities linking Caribbean nations to one another, rather than pausing on the differences that distinguish their daily realities, extending the notion of “tidalectics” beyond the Caribbean basin comes at a price. In her influential article, “Tidalectics: Charting the Space/Time of Caribbean Waters,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey (1998) argues against the loss of specificity that such an expansion entails:

The concern with remapping, or imaginatively occupying, Caribbean seascapes differ from other theories of “reterritorialization” because tidalectics are concerned with the fluidity of water as a shifting site of history and document the peoples who navigated, or were coerced into, transoceanic migrations. (1998, 19)

The references to two Hispanophone lands, Honduras and Puerto Rico, in He Drown She in the Sea and Sister Mine serve as examples of what DeLoughrey (1998) calls an impulse to “remap” or imaginatively occupy seascapes within the Caribbean Basin, but with the added twists of having the journeys being triangulated through Canadian urban centers and involving air travel as well as sea. There is no “emplacement” in these sites since neither Rose nor Harry in He Drown She in the Sea, nor Makeda in Sister Mine ever arrive at these destinations within the story arcs of their respective texts. Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea invoke the Caribbean region writ large through their strategic inclusion of the shared and overlapping histories of coerced migrations to the Caribbean basin, thereby introducing the idea that colonial history haunts both the mother-daughter’s and the lovers’ desires for a physical reunion.

DeLoughrey’s criticism of tidalectics in the context of both Caribbean and Pacific Islands literature influenced Elvira Pulitano’s (2008) analysis of the significance of river imagery in Edwidge Danticat’s novels and short fiction. Pulitano explains that references to the sea are “used to glorify fluidity and unmarked territories in Caribbean discourses of identity,” and warns against trying to universalize water metaphors as a key component of colonial histories writ large:

If on the one hand, the discourse of deterritorialization, as advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, might work to account for the complex identity politics in the Caribbean, I agree that the same kind of discourse applied indiscriminately to all colonized peoples runs the risk of becoming a mere form of aquatic nomadologic model, one in which the political and socio-economic realities of the individual islands are consistently obliterated. (2008, 3)

While the vagueness or fictitious nature of the Caribbean settings of both He Drown She in the Sea and Sister Mine do intentionally obliterate, “the political and socio-economic realities of the individual islands” they reference, I would argue that they do so in the service of a larger goal: critiquing the patriarchal elements of Indo- and Afro-Caribbean cultures across the archipelago. Both novels deploy seafaring imagery to reject the misogynistic traditions that require a woman’s complicity in her own disempowerment, such as remaining in a loveless marriage (Rose) or acquiescing to an overbearing mother-in-law’s unreasonable demands (Cora).

Canadian Caribbean Gothic

In Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea, 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. Their shared emphasis on the Canadian landscape via the discussion of the lake as a site of potential bewitchment or imprisonment reveals Hopkinson’s and Mootoo’s awareness of the white, settler-colonial literary tradition of Canadian Gothic as imagined by Margaret Atwood or Anne Hebert. Analyzing the prevalence of what she calls the “wilderness Gothic” in Atwood’s literary works, Faye Hammill mentions two key concepts related to it: “[t]hese explicitly Gothic conceptions of the forested and frozen North” and “her haunted wilderness settings [which] are sites for the negotiation of identity and power politics” (2003, 48). Arnold E. Davidson (1981) also mentions the enduring role that the wilderness plays in the Gothic imagination of twentieth-century novelists like Anne Herbert. He contends that “[t]he questions originally prompted by the wilderness persist for Canadians, even if the wilderness does not, and they continue to be embedded in novels that are essentially gothic” (246). As an example, he provides a close reading of Herbert’s Kamouraska, which features a body of water (river, rather than lake) through which the lovers travel to kill the woman’s husband. Thus, Hopkinson’s and Mootoo’s portrayal of the Canadian landscape as uncanny, when combined with an evocation of the historical horrors of slavery and indentured servitude, create their own Caribbean Canadian Gothic that reflects not only more diverse histories and cultures but specifically the interconnectedness of the diaspora situation that maintains footholds in more than one country simultaneously.

The novels’ respective references to the established histories of the tragic toll that the triangular trade took on Africans enslaved and transported to the Caribbean during the Middle Passage and later, on indentured Indian workers during the Kala Pani in Sister Mine and He Drown She in the Sea suggest that Caribbean colonial history continues to haunt the diasporic experience abroad. Sister Mine refers to this obliquely, through a discussion of Makeda’s room decor:

The blue of the ceiling was the same colour as the porch ceiling of our—of Abby’s house. Dad had done that for me ages ago. Ghosts can’t cross water without help. Plus they’re stupid. Get the right shade of blue, paint your floor or ceiling with it—doesn’t matter which, ‘cause ghosts don’t have a right way up—and they’ll mistake it for the glint of light on water and be unable to pass. Paint your porch ceiling that colour, and your door and your window frames, and you have a haint-proof house. (3)

This tradition is most closely associated with the Gullah people of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States. However, critics like Robert L. Broad (1994) have noted the association between haints/ghosts and the Middle Passage in novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which simultaneously invokes the cruelty and death that took place on board the vessels transporting enslaved Africans and bringing them to Caribbean and American shores and also reinforce the belief that ghosts/haints are unable to cross water.

Like Beloved, Hopkinson’s Sister Mine literalizes the metaphor of the ghost/haint and Makeda spends the majority of the novel trying to stay safe from, and then learn to counter, the attacks of the various supernatural haints who pursue her and her family:

My haint was upon me. Its small, heavy body scrambled, quarrelling, up my side. Hideously contorted baby face, brown as my own, its hair an angry, knotted snarl of black. Now it had those large hands at my throat. It punched small knobkerries of knees against my rig cage, all but knocking the breath out of me. I staggered. Managed not to fall. One of the haint’s searching thumbs pushed brutally past my teeth into my mouth. It tasted of dirt, and of nastily salty skin. (57)

This haint attacks Makeda when she is outside by the shore of Lake Ontario. Thus, the blueness of her new apartment’s ceiling provides a brief respite from such chases and the novel differentiates between the mindless haints, who cannot tell the difference between aquatic and paint-based barriers, and Cora, whose punishment bars her from emerging out of the waters of Lake Ontario.

Grandma Ocean had seen to Mom. Grandma’s province is the waters of the world, salt and sweet both. She tossed Mom over her shoulder into one of them, and didn’t even look back to see which one she’d landed in. She didn’t deprive my mother of life, but of the beautiful form with which, Granma convinced herself, Mom had bewitched her sons. Loch Ness has Nessie, its monster of fame and fable. Okanagan Lake has Naitaka a.k.a. Ogopogo, a snake demon. As with them, no one has ever found proof that the monster that people began sighting in Lake Ontario just under thirty years ago really exists. She does have a name, though, and it’s Cora. I call her Mom, or I would, if I ever met her. (95)

According to the metaphysical calculus at play within the futuristic world of Sister Mine, Cora is an anti-haint, a still-living being imprisoned within a watery jail by her vengeful Caribbean goddess/mother-in-law. Because Lake Ontario is the location of Cora’s confinement, her fate does not inherently recall the thousands who died during the Middle Passage journey.

He Drown She in the Sea recalls the history of a different transatlantic journey that is the origin story for the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. The name, Kala Pani (meaning “dark water”), refers to the journey through which Indian workers were transported to the Caribbean plantations where they served out their indenture contracts. Dolly, Harry’s mother, reminds her son that though Guanagaspar’s Indo-Caribbean population is divided into the economic elites and those who work in the service economy, their ancestors share a common history of displacement and mistreatment:

She and Mrs. Sangha were Indians and Indians alike. Their circumstances were different, it was true, but their ancestors had all landed up in Guanagaspar the same way, by boat from India and as indentured servants. Mrs. Sangha’s family came as indentured servants, and it was only chance that had led them down different paths. Mrs. Sangha was a madam and Dolly was a servant, and the boy would have to learn that difference, too. (123)

Though her intentions are good, Dolly breaks Harry’s heart when she explains class prejudice to her young son in simple terms: Rose’s family can be friendly toward the St. Georges but cannot consider them either peers or actual friends. This new knowledge emotionally scars the boy as the tidal wave nightmare sequences that open and close the novel demonstrate.

By toying with the trope of sea imagery as a hallmark of Caribbean storytelling, and then rejecting it in favor of a celebration of the freeing possibilities offered through the considerably larger urban and rural Canadian landscapes, both novels suggest that interaction and exchange between and across diasporic populations enrich each subject’s sense of self within a specific nation-space. Instead, the novels propose a third-space as a possible alternative to the cultural and geographic deterritorialization that their protagonists experience from their home countries. Because of her experience in Vancouver, Rose not only reconnects with her childhood flame, Harry, but she also draws inspiration from her daughter’s freedom and independence and used it to fake her own death after returning to Guanagaspar. Through this subterfuge, Rose sets a trail for Harry to follow and they successfully reunite at their friends’ Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie’s house. The narrator recounts that “Rose, before she ‘drowned,’ had made contact with a man who fixed up documents to help people leave the island and enter a foreign country without the intervention of Immigration” (317). Learning about Rose’s newfound determination and ingenuity shocks Harry. In a grand display of her hard-won independence, Rose plans to navigate, and three days later the pair will rendezvous with another vessel that will smuggle them to shore. Rose and Harry’s sea voyage maintains some of the echoes of the Kala Pani journey as described earlier because the lovers will face the “same-same” future together. Through the artifice of her drowning, Rose Bihar abandons her husband thereby “leaving something unsavory behind” while Harry St. George is once more “looking for a fresh start” (178) with his beloved in yet another foreign land.

Canadian Lakes and Latin American Locales

In He Drown She in the Sea, Canadian lakes are simultaneously attractive and repellent, offering the possibility of inclusion at the cost of Harry’s complete assimilation to dominant, white, Canadian social norms. Before Harry and Rose rekindle their childhood love for one another, he had considered pursuing a relationship with a Canadian woman, Kay. Though intrigued by the possibility, Harry fears that such a relationship would entail the complete loss of his Caribbean identity since Kay represents “the Canada of postcards, and tourism posters” (39). When he thinks about a possible future with her, Kay’s thorough embodiment of the ideal of an outdoorsy Canadian woman appeals to Harry. Interacting with her makes him want to feel accepted as a citizen of his adopted country: “Yes, it would be very Canadian of him to be able to say that he used to get up early on mornings, drive to a lake high up, awfully high up, in the mountains, and go canoeing” (40). However, as alluring as Harry finds Kay, the thought of being together with her also frightens him. He even goes as far as to imagine some solidarity as a fellow immigrant with Kay’s Iranian ex-husband, who abandoned her and their family: “Harry wondered if she had taken Ali out on a lake in an attempt to Canadianize him” (44). This is a transformation both Ali and Harry ultimately refuse. The lakes Harry sees in his mind’s eye function as metaphors for a large baptismal font, bestowing upon immigrant bathers absolution from the original sin of having been born elsewhere and baptizing them in the name of the Dominion of Canada.

If the Canadian mountain lakes in He Drown She in the Sea have outward, sacramental connotations, Lake Ontario in Sister Mine is evocative of amniotic fluid since Makeda’s mother Cora became imprisoned there days after delivering her twins by cesarean section. Makeda fantasizes about collecting a sufficiently large amount of drift glass in her mother Cora’s favorite color, blue, to succeed in “hoodooing her back into a woman from the sea monster shape they’d told me she’d been forced into” (62). And, Makeda decides that the only likely locale where she could find such a prize would be in Puerto Rico:

Apparently Puerto Rico used to use a lot of cobalt glass in olden times, and much of it made its way into trash heaps there and, eventually, into the water. I’d never been to the Caribbean. Ever since I read about the Puerto Rican driftglass as a kid, I’d had this fantasy image of myself down there, surrounded by an ankle-height circle made up of hundreds of perfectly rounded, frosted pieces of deep-blue driftglass, each one found by me personally. My mother’s favourite colour. Of me standing in the middle of the circle, spreading my arms wide, throwing my head back and summoning my mother forth from the depths of the waters. Of hoodooing her back into a woman from the sea monster shape they’d told me she’d been forced into. (62)

In this brief internal monologue, Makeda demonstrates her knowledge of arcane geographical information about this US territory in the Caribbean. This passage conflates the historical reality of cobalt mining in Puerto Rico, which the US Department of the Interior chronicled in a 1959 report that makes no reference to glass of any kind, Nickel-Cobalt-Iron Bearing Deposits in Puerto Rico (Heidenreich & Reynolds, 1959), with an embedded allusion to Samuel R. Delany’s 1971 short story collection, Driftglass. Thus, in this formulation, Makeda’s imagined power to reverse her mother’s curse depends as much on the plentiful availability of cobalt, a Puerto Rican natural resource, as it does on the postmodern allusion to pioneering fantasy writer Delany, who occupies the space of another of her Afro-diasporic “ancestors.”

Makeda’s fantasy constitutes a female imaginary that negates or seeks to subvert the male-identified matriarchy that has separated the mother from her children in this family. It also posits a new and embodied vision of sustainability wherein discarded goods, drift glass, can be repurposed to simultaneously clean the island’s waterways and reunite mother and daughter. The latter accords with a pattern Gina Wisker (2007) pointed out in Hopkinson’s short story, “A Habit of Waste,” in which: “Hopkinson’s female protagonist regains and re-establishes self-worth and body image in the face of that which would deny her. In this sense, the tale enacts a transformation as the protagonist moves beyond cultural and historical constraints” (120). In Sister Mine’s imagined scene in a Puerto Rican beach, the treasure trove of drift glass only has affective, rather than monetary, value.

Though Makeda does not actually free Cora within the novel, she rescues her twin sister from the haints and helps her father, whose dementia threatened Toronto with overgrown kudzu, regain control over his powers. Through imaginative exercises like fantasizing about the Puerto Rican sea glass and standing on the shore of Lake Ontario, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother Makeda becomes self-assured and overcomes her deep-seated jealousy of her sibling and resentment of her father. Focusing on what these landscapes have in common, the water, rather than what separates them allows Makeda to mother herself into being as an independent woman who can afford to care for others, including her unsuspecting fellow Torontonians and keep them safe from attack by supernatural forces.

He Drown She in the Sea engages in some neocolonial fantasizing of its own when the novel introduces the idea of Honduras as a destination where Rose and Harry can live out their lives together unfettered by the fear of social reprisals. In a transaction that both resonates with contemporary discussions of human smuggling and also recalls the traumatic Kala Pani journey through which both Harry’s and Rose’s ancestors arrived in the Caribbean, Rose has secured new identity documents, learned how to navigate using a compass, maps, and the stars, and acquired a boat in which to set sail for Honduras (317). Despite having rekindled their childhood attraction for one another in Vancouver, neither can imagine beginning a new chapter of their lives together there. Thus, the idea of Honduras functions as a bit of a deus ex machina within the narrative: it is only mentioned in the last few pages of the novel and neither Rose nor Harry has any personal connections to it, thereby suggesting that their quest has imperial overtones of discovery and conquest. The novel’s open ending makes it unclear whether the couple survives the pirogue sea journey and, thus, the future of this domestic idyll is as much wish-fulfillment in He Drown She in the Sea as in Sister Mine.

Unlike Canada, which is a former British colony with English as one of its two official languages, the two Hispanophone national territories of Honduras and Puerto Rico play a purely symbolic role within the territorial imaginaries of He Drown She in the Sea and Sister Mine. Neither Rose and Harry nor Makeda spend any time wondering about the practicalities of making themselves understood in these spaces, for their value is primarily as escapist fantasies providing an alternative between oppressively strict Caribbean culture and seemingly open Canadian landscapes which nonetheless try to seduce immigrants into assimilating into the ways of the Great White North. By interacting with other characters from circumstances entirely unlike their own in Canada, Rose Bihar and Makeda finally reckon with their past and realize how much the relationships of their youth mean to them. Shani Mootoo explicitly situates He Drown She in the Sea within a spectrum of possible iterations of Indianness and indigeneity, from Indo-Caribbean protagonists, to diasporic Indian Canadians, and tourists from India, all against a backdrop of forests, lakes, and landscapes indigenous to North America. For her part, Nalo Hopkinson’s explicit allusions to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass, along with the many layers of popular culture references from hoodoo trees to Jimi Hendrix, anchor her narrative firmly to both a Gothic sensibility and North American Afrodiasporic cultural networks. However, Hopkinson’s Toronto is far from a haven of multicultural harmony. One of the first things Makeda does when negotiating the rent with her new landlord is challenge his profiling of her as a potential drug dealer based on the color of her skin, thereby demonstrating that redlining is still a facet of the local real estate market. In conclusion, neither Sister Mine nor He Drown She in the Sea absolve Toronto or Vancouver from any of the actual problems that afflict such urban centers. In their evocation of Canadian freshwater landscapes, both texts find the freedom to imagine woman-led futures that treat their desires for romantic love or familial connections seriously and worthy of having a space in which to live them out.