Soucouyant Splices History, Memory, and Fiction
Hannah Stephenson
The characters that inhabit David Chariandy’s spellbinding first novel, Soucouyant , desperately want to remember and to forget. The nameless main character of Soucouyant is quite the prodigal son — the novel opens with his returning home to Ontario after two years to face his mother, who is steadily losing her memory due to early onset dementia. His mother, Adele, has difficulty identifying where and when she’s living, and compulsively retells stories from her childhood in Trinidad. The intriguing title comes from one of Adele’s most frequently repeated stories; she claims that when she was a child, she saw a soucouyant. In Caribbean legend, a soucouyant is a demon, “something like a female vampire,” that disguises itself as an old woman, and sucks the blood of its victims.
The protagonist confesses about his relationship with his mother, “I don’t know what meaning there can be between us now.” Throughout the novel, he works (not always successfully) to create new meanings. He parents his mother, telling her stories about herself; he tries to fall in love with the young woman that cares for Adele and appears to be her nurse. Adele’s tale of the soucouyant haunts the novel, and it’s clear that this memory is filled with angst. Chariandy’s main character realizes, “It’s not really about a soucouyant…it’s a way of telling without really telling.”
While Adele struggles to reclaim what she remembers as an encounter with an evil creature, the main character battles his frustration and guilt regarding his relationship with his own soucouyant, his mother. Chariandy’s novel (which has earned a well-deserved nomination for the Giller prize) is fraught with vulnerability; he hauntingly investigates the way that storytelling both yields and conceals personal history. |
