The new readings of Chariandy’s exploration of the relationship between history, memory, and myth, included in this collection, disclose the stakes and scope of the author’s use of the myth of the soucouyant, and of the mythologies of Scarborough and Canada.

It brings a new exploration of relationships between dementia, animality, forgetting, transformation, and identity, as well as an original analysis of the implications and stakes raised by Canadian middlebrow reception of Soucouyant in 2007. Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy presents second-generation Caribbean Canadian cultural affiliation to the Caribbean and North America as an outcome of a self-managed reparatory postcolonial aural transmission.

The works presented in this collection about Chariandy’s novels Soucouyant and Brother consider new aspects and bring a fresh gaze to themes that have previously been explored. Adele's, Meera's and the narrator's relationships with their mothers intersect affectingly in this haunting coming-of-age story.Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy explores the fiction written by this Caribbean Canadian writer to bring new perspectives to the existing scholarship on memory, history, trauma, myth, second-generation issues, cultural inheritance and transmission. As the narrator seeks a sense of his family's history and an understanding of what his mother's Soucouyant experience actually amounted to, he grows closer to Meera, who brings baggage of her own. In an embedded narrative, Chariandy unravels the hidden tragedies of Adele's youth, which included an encoutner with the spectre of the book's title.

After the narrator himself tries to leave but returns, he finds Adele now cared for by a dubious caretaker named Meera. Within 40 pages, Roger is killed in an industrial accident, and the narrator's brother, an aspiring poet, leaves home after Adele ceases to recognize him. Her story is narrated by her unnamed son, 15, who is growing up Canadian suburb with his mother, his elder brother and his South Asian-descended father, Roger, as Adele slides into early-onset dementia. Said to wear the skin of an old woman by day and take the form of a wandering fireball by night-sucking the blood of her victims-the specter of the Soucouyant haunts Adele, the Trinidad-born mother at the center of Vancouver novelist Chariandy's debut.

Sparknotes brother david chariandy