Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, visual artist and video maker. Her body of work, which explores gender and ethnic identity, alongside deep trauma, suffering, and the overcoming of it has received international acknowledgement.

Early life and education

Shani Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1957 to Trinidadian parents. Mootoo’s father, Ramesh Mootoo, was a medical family doctor and politician. Mootoo's mother, Indra Mootoo (née Samaroo), had grown ill after giving birth to her; Mootoo's maternal grandmother acted as her primary caretaker for the first five years of her life, raising her in Trinidad. Mootoo's parents retained custody of her upon their return to Trinidad. This abrupt separation from the life she had known before caused pressure on Mootoo to fit into a new environment and to gain the respect of her mother. Mootoo has expressed feeling like an outsider, stating that she, "was from the very beginning - starting in her own family that had grown without her being part of it for her first five years of life – on the outside. She saw that they were a close-knit family, and side-by-side with the trauma of the separation from her grandparents and being thrown in with these people who were strangers to her, she wanted, too, to be part of that closeness. It was perhaps the beginning of a pattern of lifelong contradictions related to the insider/outsider status". Mootoo's belief that she has always "felt like a migrant" stems from this childhood struggle.

Mootoo showed interest in wanting to be a painter from a young age, and discovered a passion for writing later on. Many of Mootoo's earliest poems described the love between two men or two women. While Mootoo's mother supported her daughter's painting aspirations, Mootoo's parents were upset by her poetry as they worried about the potential negative implications that writing about queerness could have for her future.

Mootoo has discussed her sexual abuse by a friend of her grandfather's. After her grandmother told her to "never say such words again" when Mootoo informed her, Mootoo began to fear that her words were getting her into trouble. This, coupled with the reaction from her parents about the themes she tackled in her writing, caused Mootoo to redirect her full attention to painting, feeling that it had more potential for ambiguity and equivocalness. Mootoo did not begin to grasp the abuse she had endured until her late twenties and found the support she received from others to factor into her decision to "use the most correct words, phrases, sentences, analogies, and stories" to communicate her trauma, the manifestation of it, and how it impacted the person she became. This realization inspired Mootoo to get back into writing. Mootoo has expressed insecurity about being a painter before being a writer, saying that she eventually came back to writing "accidentally".

Mootoo earned a Fine Arts BFA Degree at the University of Western Ontario in 1980, and an MA in English and Theatre from the University of Guelph, 2010. As a multimedia visual artist in Vancouver and New York City, where she lived from 1994 to 1999, she explored in her paintings, photographs and videos themes of gender, sexuality, and race. The themes of her work resonated with her experiences as an adolescent in Trinidad and as an immigrant adult in Canada. Her visual art and video work have traveled and been acclaimed internationally. She is now teaching the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto.

Mootoo cites Trinidad's "disregard for equal rights and justice" for her decision to reside in Canada.

Career

Visual and video art

Mootoo's visual art and video work have been exhibited internationally, including at the New York Museum of Modern Art. On the topic of her visual work, she has said that as a victim of child abuse she found it safer to use pictures rather than words. Mootoo uses her art as a way to deal with the trauma of her childhood and has discussed feelings of confusion as to why the universe would let child abuse happen, while also claiming that as a survivor, she and all those that have suffered at the hands of abusers must come to terms with the trauma and understand what to do with suffering. Her film and video work was revisited by Rungh in its program Longing and Belonging: 1990s South Asian Film and Video, a featured program at the 2019 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. Mootoo reflected on her film and video work in the 1990s in the commissioned article "Streams Coming Together: 1990s video in Vancouver and beyond". Some of her other videos include; "English Lesson", "Wild Woman in The Woods", and "Her Sweetness Lingers". These videos have been screened in films, videos festivals, and art exhibitions both locally and internationally.

Writing and literary career

Mootoo's painting and writing have always informed one another; she became published when Persimmon Blackbridge took one of her paintings when writing to a publisher, where it was suggested that Mootoo write a novel or book of short stories.

Mootoo's first literary publication, Out on Main Street, a collection of short stories, was solicited by the Vancouver-based feminist publishing house Press Gang in 1993 and was the beginning of her literary career. The collection's title story centers a narrator who feels "ethnic inferiority" as a "watered-down Indian". She struggles with not being able to go out onto Main Vancouver's Main Street with her girlfriend because of issues with her identity, sexuality, and gender expression. It explores the realities of both forced conformity and attempts to fit nuanced humans into boxes, as well as analyzes the effects of homophobia, heterosexism, and notions of cultural authenticity.