David Chariandy’s first novel, Soucouyant (2007), is misleadingly subtitled “a novel of forgetting.” In contradiction to this statement, the novel deals with the effort to re-member and records the devastating effects of colonial legacies and neocolonial practices on the psyches of a Trinidadian migrant couple and their mixed-race sons. Set in multicultural suburban Scarborough (Toronto) in 1989—the year immediately following the passing of the Multiculturalism Act in Canada—Chariandy’s text craftily weaves intersecting threads of race, gender, class and age that paradoxically separate but also link the characters in what he has elsewhere called a “diasporic haunting.” This is a term that refers to the often-unconscious anxieties of second-generation racialized youths about the hidden secrets in their parents’ past in ‘the old country’, a past they openly reject but that inevitably has a strong impact on their lives.
I propose to analyze Soucouyant as a powerful critique of Canadian neoliberal discourses on multiculturalism, paying special attention to the uneasy construction of diasporic identities under the weight of “the heaviness of a history that couldn’t leave.” I will read Chariandy’s text in the context of the wider resistance by second-generation racialized writers of that country to being comfortably subsumed into fixed ethnic categories, a politics of dissent that is represented in the novel by the nineteen-year-old narrator.