Interview with author David Chariandy

The Canadian Living Book Club pick for March 2008 is Soucouyant by David Chariandy. We spoke with the author about his experience with dementia, the value of history and memory and the nature of being Canadian.

Canadian Living: What was your inspiration for this novel?

David Chariandy: My grand-aunt suffered from dementia during the last few years of her life. She had been a sharp and fiercely independent person in earlier times, and I watched her decline, her relentless unbecoming, with enormous sadness, but also with something akin to awe or wonder. Even in the latest stage of her condition, my grand-aunt would occasionally remember details of her upbringing in Trinidad, although she was now living in Canada. She would utter the lyrics of a pre-WW2 calypso, or the names of people who had attended a party, or even some embarrassing detail about a relative’s life that she normally wouldn’t have revealed.

The irony was that my grand-aunt was both forgetting and remembering. She was forgetting how to perform the most ordinary of daily tasks; but she was also remembering, sometimes in astonishing detail, an "elsewhere past" that was both fascinating and mysterious to me, particularly as someone who had been born and wholly raised in Canada. My grand-aunt’s passing forced me to confront not only the sorrow one feels for the death of a loved one, but also the responsibility one might feel towards another’s personal memories. What, if anything, do we owe to the memories of others? This question seemed especially acute to me because I wasn’t sure if I could properly decipher my grand-aunt’s memories, or if, in the end, they were truly relevant to me. I wasn’t even sure if some of my grand-aunt’s memories might, in fact, be best forgotten.

I don’t think that the situation that I faced is at all unique. I’ve always felt profoundly humbled when I’ve heard stories about the courage and fortitude and everyday creativity of those who have cared for a loved one afflicted with dementia. (And I should admit, right now, that my aunt and parents were my grand-aunt’s primary caregivers, not me.) Also, I know that many children of immigrants have wondered about the relevance or even plain meaning of their own "elsewhere pasts," and what, if anything, they might owe to the cultural legacies or historical experiences of their ancestors. I guess Soucouyant was my own very personal effort to address these concerns, although I’ve always known that my goal was not to settle these matters, but to dramatize just how difficult it is to arrive at any clear answers in the midst of the complexities of our everyday lives. I also wanted a good part of my novel to be about the relationship between immigrant mothers and their sons, and so I decided to represent the main relationship in the novel as that between a Caribbean-born mother with dementia and her Canadian-born son.

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