Novelist explores transgender world
TORONTO — “I started with this person walking on this street in Toronto’s Regent Park area — just walking in the snow,” Canadian novelist Shani Mootoo remembers. “I didn’t know where this person was going or who this person was.”
And then the answer came to her and became the springboard for her new novel, Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab.
“I thought — ah, this person is on his or her way to the hospital to have transgender surgery.
“That’s how it started. And I didn’t know what was going to come out of it. What I did realize was that there was going to be a child involved …”
Ask this internationally acclaimed writer about what drives her creatively, and she’s quick to reply. “There are images inside me to begin with,” she says simply. Those images can be powerful — which is not all that surprising, given that in an earlier life she had established herself on Canada’s West Coast as a major visual artist before moving on to fiction.
Mootoo’s books have earned her a solid profile within the gay and lesbian community, but they also enjoy a far wider audience. She has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Edmonton Journal says her narrative skills touch on “genius” and The Washington Post calls her “a masterful storyteller.”
Her latest novel is the first-person narrative of Jonathan LewisAdey, who happens to be straight and raised by two women in a samesex Toronto household. When he is nine, his mother Sid vanishes. Her departure leaves a huge void in his life, and he is an adult before he tracks down his absent parent in Trinidad and discovers the woman who had meant so much to him is now a courtly but melancholy man named Sydney. The novel moves backward and forward in time as Jonathan strives to overcome his anger and sense of loss. And in his attempt to rediscover the parent he once loved, he learns more and more about how and why Sid morphed into Sydney.
Transgender needs are not necessarily the same as gay needs — and Mootoo was herself involved in a journey of discovery with this book. Her contacts with this culture left her wary of making snap judgments. She was encountering lives that didn’t always encompass the feeling “of being trapped in the wrong body — that cliched phrase I cannot bear anymore.” Things seemed more complicated than that. Labels seemed meaningless when placed against the greater challenge “of being trapped in a society that did not accept them in all their complexity.” But don’t expect her novels to be driven by a political or social agenda.
“If there’s anything I hope from my books, it’s that they make people feel a little kinder to each other.”