He Drown She in the Sea

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Shani Mootoo is the cosmopolitan writer par excellence. Novelist,
short-story writer, visual and video artist, she was born in Ireland,
grew up in Trinidad, lived in Vancouver since the early 1980s, and is
now based in Edmonton. The poetic qualities of her first collection of
verse, The Predicament of Or, also revealed themselves in her first
acclaimed novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, a finalist for the Giller
Prize.

The poetic, magical qualities of Cereus Blooms at Night re-emerge in He
Drown She in the Sea. This powerful and sensual novel, set in the
Caribbean and Canada, evokes and then explores the birth and growth of a
deep love affair, with the ensuring pains of separation and unrequited
love. Mootoo moves skilfully from present-day Vancouver back to the
World War II years in the Caribbean. The protagonist, Harry St. George,
now a successful landscape gardener in Canada, cannot escape the
haunting memories of his youthful life and love of the 1940s in the West
Indian island of Guanagaspar. His link with the past is evoked by the
memory of his mother, Dolly, a humble laundress in the upper-class home
of a rich lady, and Rose, the daughter of the rich mistress of the
house. Domestic circumstances throw Rose and Harry together, but the
social and class system quickly separates them, geographically and
chronologically—at least for a time.

He Drown She in the Sea is a beautifully crafted and lyrically
expressed story of human love, hope, disappointment, and reconciliation.
Mootoo’s masterly handling of the languages, rhythms, smells, setting,
and imagery of the Caribbean landscape, skilfully woven into the fabric
of modern Canadian society, produces an entertaining and gripping novel.