“Death Feeding Life”

Images of death and decay appear throughout Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night, especially in descriptions of Mala’s house and yard. While her father was still a tyrannical presence, Mala’s life revolved around tasks of cooking and cleaning that were necessary to keep her father tenuously appeased. Although the reader is not given access to the part of Mala’s life directly after she imprisons her father, we can safely assume that Mala no longer attempts to keep up the house after she moves her father to the sewing room. However, when Tyler’s narration first gives the reader access to Mala’s life after her father’s death, death and decay are by no means the predominant images. Rather, Mala’s life before she comes to the Paradise Alms house is characterized by its harmony with the natural cycles of life and death that take place around her. The presence of her father’s decaying body and of the decay taking place throughout her yard do not cause Mala to deteriorate. Instead, she and the lush vegetation in her yard thrive on the products of death. Mala’s coexistence with the decay taking place all around her can be read as her means of coping with the trauma and abuse that she has experienced.

After Mala escapes the control of her father, she lives in harmony with the cycles of death and decay that take place around her. Tyler describes, “Every few days, a smell of decay permeated the house. It was the smell of time itself passing, but lest she was overcome by it, Mala brewed an odour of her own design” (115). Here, Mala’s actions demonstrate how she has accustomed herself to living among death and decay. Rather than succumbing to the odour of decay caused by the decay of lives coming to an end around her house, Mala creates an odour of her own by boiling snail shells, which “obliterate[s], reclaim[s], and [gives] the impression of reversing decay” (115). The words obliterate and reclaim and the phrase “reverse decay” work at odds with one another in describing what Mala is trying to accomplish when she creates her own odour by boiling the snail shells. Although the act of boiling the snail shells could be read as Mala’s attempt to gain control over the passing of time that decay represents, the word reclaims suggests that she wants to use the power of decay, or of passing time, for her own purposes. The fact that her own odour comes from the boiled shells of dead creatures supports this line of thinking. Finally, the suggestion that Mala wants to reverse the process of decay by boiling the shells of other dead creatures implies that Mala wants to counteract the effects of death by creating the smell of more death.

However, I think that what Mala is actually trying to do here is to find some way to create life out of death, or to create the means for herself to live in the midst of decay and death. Her ritual of collecting dead insects to pin to the walls of the room where her father’s corpse rots suggests that she wants to learn how to create life out of death. When Mala pins the insects to the wall, she observes how the fallen insects have created “fodder for a vibrating carpet of moths, centipedes, millipedes cockroaches, and unnamed insects that found refuge in Mala’s surroundings. Death feeding life” (130). This process of insects feeding on the bodies of dead insects gets at the heart of what Mala is trying to do by keeping her father’s decaying body locked away in the sewing room of the house. Like the insects that feed on the bodies of their fellow creatures, Mala attempts to derive life from her father’s decay.