Mala Ramchandin was forced to endure a horrific childhood. When she was quite young, her mother had planned to leave their home of Paradise Falls with Mala, Mala’s sister Asha, and her lover, Lavinia. When that did not happen, Mala and Asha were left to live with their father, who turned to raping Mala as a way to get back at his wife, Sarah, for leaving him. Eventually, Asha leaves too and Mala is left alone with her father, Chandin. Things all come to a head when Mala starts a secretive relationship with Ambrose Mahonty and when Chandin finds out, he attempts to kill Ambrose, but Mala kills Chandin first.
After all of this, Mala ends up living a life of solitude. With a minimal use of spoken language, she lives amongst nature and seems to enjoy life, but never forgets her horrible past. Mala becomes very deliberate with her use of spoken language and only uses it when she deems it absolutely necessary. One moment is when the police are searching her house and they say that they are worried about her safety. She responds with “You never had any business with my safety before.” and “Why now for…?” (Mootoo 193).
So why has Mala retreated from speaking? It is because she has learned that people will not help her, even if she is asking them to. Throughout her whole childhood, the town of Paradise Falls knew what her father was doing to her but did nothing. They continued to respect Chandin for he was still a man of God. Everyone who ever showed care for Mala leaves her as well. Her mother and Aunt Lavinia (even though they did not plan on leaving Mala and Asha behind, they still did), her younger sister Asha, and eventually Ambrose after her learns that Chandin had been raping Mala her whole life. For Mala, spoken language had never helped her in the past, it only seemed to hurt her. When she decided to live a life of solitude, she removed all of the things that caused pain in her life and being ignored was one of them. If she never spoke again, her words could never be ignored.
Your post reminds me of both “Taking Flight” and “Cereus Blooms at Night and Language Use”. As I commented on one of them, the posts are connected through the fact that they both explore Mala’s coping mechanisms: nature and language/speech. Yours sort of combines these two things by highlighting the fact that Mala finds her solice not through language, but through nature. Her use language protects her from the outside world that has hurt her while the nature is a safe space for her to fall back onto. It will always be there for her, unlike other humans. In a way, she is still communicating, but instead with nature rather than other people.