Behind the Book with Shani Mootoo
Today, we invite Shani Mootoo to the Book*hug blog to share the decades-long origin story behind her latest novel Starry Starry Night! Read on for insights into Shani’s earliest forays into writing, as well as the process of transforming Starry Starry Night into a work of autofiction. Take it away Shani!
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One can say that I began working on Starry Starry Night almost forty years ago, but without knowing back then that it, or any book for that matter, would ever be written by me. I was in my thirties then, and a full-time visual artist, regularly scribbling random private thoughts on paper by way of trying to answer a question that had been gnawing at me for many years. The first line I committed to paper had effortlessly fallen onto the page:
When does a man’s child lay her father bare and pick the flesh off his bones, leaving a skeleton as white and empty as that of a fish preyed on by vultures?
My attempt at an answer to that question outlined a number of incidents that really did occur in my family, and included my emotional response to them. Even though this was a private ramble, I entrusted the sixty-five pages I’d written to a friend who took them away to read. Unknown to me, however, she passed them to a publisher. The publisher approached me, not letting me know they had read those pages and asked if I was, by any chance, writing. I said I was, because that was, in the most basic sense, true. They asked if they could see what I was writing, and chuffed, I, the artist who never grows out of being a child who is ready to show anyone the little scribbles they just made, eager for praise and applause, titled the pages “In His Image” and handed them over.
They got back in touch to suggest I develop what I’d written—the manuscript, they called it–and allow them to publish it.
But publishing those private thoughts was something I couldn’t do. The man in question was my father, with whom I might have had trouble as a youth and as a young woman but, for all kinds of personal and cultural reasons, I had no intention or desire to air laundry, mine or his, in public.
I was also aware that this writing was blatantly personal and cathartic. What stopped me from accepting the publisher’s offer, as flattering as it was, was a sense gained from a long practice of professional rigorous art making; I had come to believe that what made strong, interesting work, work that ended up having a good, long shelf life, answered big questions regardless of the size of the work, and always illuminated something about life, about the meaning of life. While such answers often came to the artist out of personally wrestling with the darkest parts of her experience, they are not the raw unfiltered material of the dark itself. They are the dark transformed. I had always felt that emotional catharsis had a role to play in art making, but I thought then, and still do, that this catharsis is the early, necessary, important, and ultimately private stage in a process, a vehicle through which slight and large traumas and unfiltered emotions might be transformed. In the case of professional art making (then, and to the point nowadays, writing), this must be transformed into something useful, enlightening, illuminating. Not uplifting necessarily, but illuminating.
The personal material I had written was necessarily purple; it was, by design, therapeutic. I was well aware that it had not risen beyond the level of recording–a well-done recording mind you, but, nevertheless, a recording, and as such was ‘pre’ writing. For that reason, I declined their publishing offer. The publisher, however, intrigued me with a modified offer, which led to me writing my first book, a collection of short stories.
One book led to another, but none of the stories I was putting out ever alluded to that old material the original publisher had seen. Except that in between every published book, I would take out the hand-typed bulldog-clipped pages from their folder and begin to add to them, attempting to use language to record, and logic to understand why what happened in my family, and to me as a young girl and woman, had happened–to answer, that is, the same old question, “When does a man’s child lay her father bare and pick the flesh off his bones, leaving a skeleton as white and empty as that of a fish preyed on by vultures?”
Time passed, old family wounds healed, and as we all grew up (so to speak) we all become supportive of each other. With such healing I was drawn to the story of my youth again, but now without the hurt I had originally been trying to express. I had come to recognize the richness of my childhood, of that particular time in my family’s life and in Trinidad’s history, despite the truths of my personally difficult times. But now, having healed so many sores, I again did not want to let my parents know which of those sores, while no longer festering, had left scars on me. My parents eventually both passed away, giving me the gift of freedom to reconsider that first story, the one I had always wanted to write. At the same time, that freedom in becoming an orphan in one’s advancing age, had now fallen into the hands of someone who had written nine books and understood a thing or two about storytelling, about fiction and nonfiction, about catharsis and art, and the sweet spot between them all. It was time to return in earnest to the old manuscript, as that first publisher had called it.
I made my decision to write Starry Starry Night as autofiction because I believe that when a reader comes to a work called a “memoir”, they assume that what they are reading reflects the writer’s true memory of things they witnessed happening and were part of. What I had originally scribbled was exactly this, true memory, but it lacked something more that is vital to memoir writing. Separating a good piece of memoir writing from a police-report-type recording, is the voice of the writer herself observing what she is recalling and committing to paper, a commenting, questioning, and analysing. She is not only questioning how and why something might have happened, but questioning, too, and then accounting for, her own actions and memory. But, by the time I was ready to seriously approach “In His Image” as a literary project, I was done with trying to figure out my father, and understood the ultimate futility of wrestling for answers; I had already let go of blame and come to an understanding and appreciation of my father and our family. And, ultimately, I had become a writer in love with the art and craft of story-telling, the fictions that hold unruly facts together. I wanted now to both record the ways of a family in a particular social and historical time, and to explore and imagine a time, a place, a history, and culture I once knew, but that had changed many times over ever since I left the island of Trinidad. The place in which I grew up no longer exists, and that world is fading fast now in my memory. I wanted also, as a storyteller, to make up and elaborate the gaps needed to bridge one incident, one period of growth, one emotional advancement to another. At the same time, I decided to go further, and to poke at the innocence of autofiction, by putting into the book, photos of real people, who were, however, not called in the book by their real names. The push and pull of what is fact, what is fiction, where lines are crossed or simply blur, and the trick of juggling nostalgia with criticality dramatically transformed ‘In His Image’ into Starry Starry Night.
In short, after having written several works of fiction and poetry, I felt well-enough equipped to leave that old picking of flesh apart and to create a work that affirms both my own memory and an enduring love of creating and storytelling. That first original question asked in high and purple prose no longer exists in my story–Starry Starry Night is more than a transformation. If it is an answer, it is one that now illuminates and transcends the question; it records and honors, and acknowledges the child who lived during the time of the story.
