ven this early in her relatively short career, Nalo Hopkinson is widely celebrated in SF and fantasy. Brown Girl in the Ring was the winning entry in the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, which also earned the Locus Award and the John W. Campbell Award. Her second book, Midnight Robber, nominated for a Hugo and shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, is the coming-of-age tale of Tan-Tan, who as a young girl pretends to be the Midnight Robber of Carnival festival tales but later acts out the role as a means of surviving a harsh—and undeserved—expulsion from her home world. Hopkinson is also editor of Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, published by Invisible Cities Press. Upcoming in December is a collection of short stories, Skin Folk. She's currently at work on her third novel, Griffonne.
Our discussion began with her rightful upbraiding of me for referring to her work as based in "African-American" culture. Catching me with my "ethnocentricity slip" showing, Nalo makes some pertinent observations about the assumptions oftentimes made about race, particularly those made from a "white" perspective.
You've said that you've used Afro-American culture and diction within the idioms and settings of speculative fiction as a way to subvert a genre which deals in the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves. Of course, SF and fantasy is a favorite of alienated adolescents (which is perhaps almost by definition an alienated state) for that very reason, and some of these kids grow up to be authors themselves.
Hopkinson: First off, let me clarify that I did not say anything about my using Afro-American culture; I know very little about Afro-American culture, but a certain amount about Caribbean culture, which comprises Aboriginal, African, European, Asian and South Asian histories. I've noticed that in the U.S., a lot of people use "African American" to mean "black." But there are many kinds of blackness and most of them are not American. I am not American. My background is Caribbean, and I am predominantly of African descent.
However, you're presumably speaking about those who are alienated because of their skin color, culture and dialect. Could you elaborate a bit on exactly how characters whose ethnicity is clearly foreign to the "white-guy scientist/geek" often typical of SF is subversive, and why you even want to subvert it?
Hopkinson: Yes, alienation is a theme that adolescents understand well. In fact, I'd say it's a theme that humans understand well. We experience many flavors of not being included. One of the flavors I tasted was when it finally occurred to me that the science fiction and fantasy I'd been enthusiastically reading for decades didn't particularly reflect people like me in its pages. I can find any number of excellent SF&F stories that appear to be about and by middle-class, North American or British "white guy scientist/geeks" (to borrow your own phrase). Many of those stories hold pride of place on my bookshelves and I recommend them to people in a hot minute. But I only began to feel more included when the feminist wave of SF&F took hold and I could also read about women protagonists whose femaleness figured in their lives and life choices.
However, SF&F still overwhelmingly employs the markers of culture, race, class, geography and history of those who control or have the best chance of access to most of the world's resources and technologies. There have been inroads made into SF&F by writers talking about sexualities other than hetero dyads. And there are white writers who are doing their best to make their worlds diverse and make them incorporate an awareness of the types of power dynamics based in difference that we hierarchical humans will manufacture if they don't seem to be there. For example, the aliens in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy—Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago—identify that human beings are hierarchical, and as a result are prone to prejudice and divisions amongst groups. They believe that these characteristics bid fair to cause humanity to self-destruct. There's a lot to think about in those notions.
Added to their efforts, I'd like to see more SF&F written from perspectives other than white middle-class North American, and I'd like to see more SF&F that interrogates what it means to be white middle-class North American. One of the things I like about a book such as Angry Young Spaceman, which is the second novel by Canadian writer Jim Munroe, is that his straight white-male North American protagonists at certain points have to think about their relative positions of entitlement in the world, as disadvantaged as their specific situations might be.
Why would I like to see SF&F as it currently exists subverted? Why would I like to see more writers of color and writers from other than the wealthiest nations of the world? Can you see where it might be valuable to get more worldviews on the map? What does a fiction about mastery of self and others through technology become in the hands of writers who have cause to be wary of that mastery? What does a fiction which talks about colonizing other races and spaces become when written by people who've recently—as the history of the world goes—experienced that colonization? What does a cautionary fiction become when you expand the zones of experience from which those cautions are coming? What might a visionary fiction become when there are visions of the best possible worlds coming from a world of cultures, rather than coming as it does now from a minority of them?
The point always made about you is that you were born in the Caribbean but began living in Canada when you were 16, when it's natural enough to feel alienated, let alone transported (albeit not via tornado with your pet dog Toto) into a foreign culture. Did this experience lead to your interest in SF and fantasy, or was it something you'd been drawn to before becoming a "stranger in a strange land"?
Hopkinson: I'd been reading fantastical writing from a very young age; works such as folk and fairy tales, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. I'd also lived in North America before. And I'd moved to a new country with my parents every few years or so since I was eight months old, so although Canada was strange, everywhere I'd been had its strangenesses. Perhaps I just liked fiction that reflected that the world was a strange place.
There are readers who might be fans of, say, Toni Morrison, an author who employs fantastical imagery in depicting the black American experience, but wouldn't necessarily be drawn to your work because it is shelved in SF and fantasy. Do you feel at all marginalized by this? Any ambitions to "cross over" or write a more mainstream "literary" novel?
Hopkinson: Kind of like having ambitions to "pass," huh? Well, I don't have a very good handle on the ideological differences between science fiction, fantasy and other types of fantastical or fabulist writing. The boundaries waver in my mind. My suspicion is that many people who are leery of science fiction and fantasy might well pick my writing up if it weren't presented as genre literature. But although it would be nice to be able to be a bridge between genre literature and non-genre, I'm not going to give up my identity as a writer of science fiction and fantasy. I do feel the need to identify my work as such; it seems like a political act, small "p" political though it is. Remember Gloria Steinem saying, "This is what 40 looks like?" Well, Mumbo Jumbo and Clay's Ark and My Soul to Keep and books of that sort are what science fiction and fantasy look like.
It seems, though, that my work is doing a bit of "crossing over" already, by nature of the hybrid space which I occupy. I get asked to speak about my work in discussions of women's issues, black and people of color issues, issues of Canadian and Caribbean identity, discussions of science, social systems and of belief. I do feel kind of marginalized by the ideological differences, but no more so than most other SF&F writers. There is this advantage to being marginalized: being somewhat on the outside it makes it easier to see and deconstruct the status quo. When you're soaking in it, it isn't as easy.
But let's step back a second to where your question began. I'd like to address the comment that Toni Morrison "depicts the black American experience." Certainly she does, and one hears it said of her often. But does it make you wonder why you're rarely going to hear a corollary sentence such as "Ray Bradbury depicts the white American experience?" He does, but his depiction is taken to 1) be base norm and 2) only represent a part of the whole that is the American experience. Whereas Toni Morrison is perceived to be doing something "other" than "normal" and to somehow be able to represent the whole of a complex and diverse set of experiences. While saying that she depicts the black American experience identifies something that she's consciously doing in her writing, it can rob her of the opportunity to have her work read as being in some wise reflective of all human experience. It's two-edged, that one.
Brown Girl in the Ring is set in metropolitan Toronto (and at least one reviewer considers the fate of the CN tower as deserving). I was wondering if you were familiar at all with the work of Charles De Lint, whose "urban fantasies" set in recognizable Canada are based in Celtic folklore, and whether this may have been an inspiration to set your first novel in a near-future where you actually live?
Hopkinson: Yes, I know Charles De Lint's work. I enjoy his writing. He and writers like him have been an influence on me, as have those SF&F writers whose work feels grounded in their own worldview and context. The more well-trodden SF&F narratives got that way because they're compelling, and I appreciate writers who can re-invent them or make new ones, particularly with reference to their own communities. I'm aware that the feel of the setting of Brown Girl in the Ring is a bit like a cross between De Lint and Samuel Delany.
Both your novels feature strong female protagonists whose significant males are, at best, unreliable and deceitful. In the case of Midnight Robber, the central character's father evolves (if that's the word) from buffoonish to evil. Indeed, the admirable males in your fiction often are not human—they're either supernatural or alien creatures. Any underlying message about men in general here?
Hopkinson: I guess that you could read me as down on men (as though men operated from a single group mind) if of all my published fiction and produced plays you'd only read Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber. But come to think of it, I don't follow that reasoning either; what about the character of Melonhead, who shows up as an important character halfway through Midnight Robber; at about the same time that Antonio goes away? He becomes a "significant male" to my protagonist, and he's reliable, loving and honest.
In my published fiction to date you'll find something like 12 human male characters who have significant roles to play in the stories. Of those 12, three are clearly positive and supportive. Three are clearly negative doers of harm. Six are complex and not easily slotted into good or evil. I'd like to write more characters who fit into that last category. So far, I've been a little better at doing so with female characters than with male ones, so in short stories on which I'm currently working, I've been deliberately turning my hand to "complexifying" the male characters. In fact, I began that process in Midnight Robber with Melonhead. I deliberately created his healing male presence as opposition to the character of Antonio. I very much enjoyed imagining him and writing him. I'm half in love with him myself.
Comedian Marcia Johnson has said: "I've heard that from a lot of men, their greatest fear is to be laughed at by a woman. Well, I can understand that. No one wants to feel shamed or humiliated by the person that they love. Of course, a woman's greatest fear is to be killed by a man, but that's OK. I feel your pain." She's talking about the statistic that a man who is killed is most likely to have been murdered by a male stranger, but a woman most likely to have been murdered by a male husband or lover; someone she should have been able to trust. So perhaps you can also think of the way I represent violent male characters in the context of the real social dynamics that human beings have created for ourselves. We can all do harm, but violent harm, to both genders, comes most often at the hands of men. I don't think that's hardwired, I think it's systemic. What I like about science fiction and fantasy is that they can point out systemic flaws in our social systems. I hope that that's what I achieve sometimes.
Midnight Robber in part could be read as a parable of Africans taken from their native land and forced to make the best of hard physical labor (though in the book it's not outright slavery) in order to survive and in some ways transcend their situation. In this context, Antonio's abuse of his child could be explained—though hardly excused—as resulting from his forced separation from his wife. Was this your intent?
Hopkinson: I wasn't thinking of Midnight Robber as an allegory for slavery. Certainly it often references the slave trade in Africans, but that's because it is so much a part of the history of the people in the novel, as is the indentured labor that brought poor people from India, Scotland, Asia and Ireland to the Caribbean to work under horrific conditions, albeit as ostensibly free people. Recall that Tan-Tan and her family are actually mixed race. She and her father would have predominantly African and Indian features, and her mother's features, although mostly non-white, would show evidence of her Portuguese ancestry. Caribbean culture is a braiding of many histories.
I'm still developing my thoughts on what themes I was working through with Midnight Robber, but among other things, I was talking about exile. It's a big theme when you come from a diasporic culture. Where is home? Can you go back there? Or do you have to go forward and make yourself a home elsewhere? Does home reside within you or outside of you?
Antonio's penchant for abuse is foreshadowed early in the novel, but then he's living in a society which is structured to make it difficult to do much harm. When he goes to New Half Way Tree, he never quite recovers from the loss of access and power and he's now in a place where it's easier for him to give himself some sense of mastery by abusing others. Being exiled can take you away from existing support systems (which themselves were likely not perfect, but were at least established) and give you nothing in their place.
Midnight Robber is more science-fictional than your first novel in the sense that technology is more central to the plot. The field could be divided into pro- and anti-technology camps, though you seem to fall into both—for example, the crudely manufactured automobile is used to hunt down Tan-Tan, but more sophisticated technology ultimately comes to her aid.
Hopkinson: I'm more used to writing fantasy, but I wanted to write at least one science-fiction novel, and I've done that with Midnight Robber. I wouldn't, though, "essentialize" science fiction and fantasy as being respectively pro- or anti-technology. Seems to me that both genres are about how humans manipulate their environments, whether those manipulations are focused in science or focused in social systems. And when I remember that even a clay pot represents a fairly sophisticated technological discovery and invention, the technology-based distinctions between science fiction and fantasy blur.
I also want to address the difference between levels of technology on my two worlds in Midnight Robber. The human inhabitants of New Half Way Tree come from the technologically advanced world of Toussaint; they have the knowledge of those levels of technology. All they lack is the infrastructure and some of the specific expertise with which to recreate them. And they're making up those lacks as fast as they can. The tank in which Janisette hunts Tan-Tan down is a very sophisticated device. They have rubber and metal. They've had to come up with alternatives for fuel and lubrication of the engine, and they have no access to the labs which would produce the kind of paint we're accustomed to seeing on vehicles, but they don't have to rediscover automobile technology. If they can get socially organized and develop the infrastructures to do the resource extraction, processing and distribution on New Half Way Tree, they can catch up to Toussaint, and fast.
What's your take on humankind's use—and abuse—of technology such as the Internet and gene manipulation that only a few years ago would be discounted as science-fictional? Hopeful signs or horrific for the continuation of the human race?
Hopkinson: A species that has developed high levels of intelligence, sociability and an astounding ability to alter its environment, but in which the instincts of curiosity, greed and power-mongering still frequently override good sense? The whole thing feels like one big, unstable experiment which could blow sky-high through any combination of factors. The fascination is that it hasn't yet, that we as a species have managed to learn some few things.
With the possible exception of the premier of the Province of Canada (who literally has a change of heart with a transplant from Mami, a wise Afro-Trinidadian woman) and minor roles for her aides in your first novel, there are no white characters in your fiction. Do you think authors can write "out" of their ethnicity? Are you tempted to try? Could a white SF writer create a fictional world built in the African-Caribbean traditions as you have done?
Hopkinson: Well, I don't know if Mami is so completely wise, or perhaps she wouldn't have alienated her own daughter so badly. But, to answer your question, with short stories of mine such as "Riding the Red" and "Precious," I guess you could say that I've already written outside my "ethnicity," but I think that you and I use the word "ethnicity" differently. Words such as aboriginal, black or white are descriptors of a large thing we call race. "Race" is a catch-all word for people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds who share certain genetically inherited physiognomies. A Scottish person and a Greek person might well both be white, but Scottish and Greek are different ethnic backgrounds. A Hutu person and a Tutsi person are both black, but their ethnic differences have significance at this time when war between the two groups has left more than 800,000 people dead, most identified as Tutsi.
The trick is, human beings are genetically 99% similar to each other; more than any other living thing on Earth; and we will interbreed, so race was a muddy concept from the start. I identify as black, with full awareness of my mixed African, East Indian, Aboriginal, Jewish, Scottish and English backgrounds. But if I were to write from certain of those races, cultures or ethnicities, I'd have to do a lot of research to find out about them. As I did with the "folk tale" in Midnight Robber that is a riff on a Taino tale. I even have to do research when I write from a culture I inhabit; namely, a Caribbean diasporic one (that is, a Caribbean culture outside the Caribbean). I don't know what John Updike's ethnic background (backgrounds?) is (are?), but I do know that he's a good writer and would probably do well with whatever he turned his hand to.
The other thing that struck me is your description of my mixed race (i.e. Caribbean) characters as "no(t) white." I'd say that many of them are part white. To describe them in a binary fashion as "non-white" would be to artificially separate people into two camps: white and everyone else. Race, muddy a concept as it is, is important because it's been the justification for a lot of human behavior that has given us humans a very checkered history of creating race-based hatred and power inequities. In science fiction and fantasy, we often try to address race and other contentious subjects such as gender, age, ability, class, money and sexual orientation by making them disappear. I've been dissatisfied with that approach.
Most of the white characters in my fiction have minor roles, but not all of them. The characters in both "Precious" and "Riding the Red" are all white. Their race is not specifically marked. Now that you ask the question, I realize that I was unconsciously writing the way that a white writer would; with the understanding that, in North American literature, whiteness is usually signaled by the literary device of race not being addressed because it's not seen to be a factor in the identities of the characters or the way the world interacts with them. I'd had a fellow writer say to me, "I assume that characters in a science-fiction story are white until I'm told differently."
It gave me quite a chuckle, then, when Samuel Delany read "Riding the Red," and, knowing me to be Caribbean, assumed that the protagonist was, too. Thinking of that, I later did a Jamaican version of the story and called it "Red Rider." Protagonist placed by class in a similar place—country woman—but a different geography and history gave her a kerosene lamp instead of a fire, different language use, a house near the "forest" (which she called the bush) instead of in it, work as a small farmer's wife instead of the wife of a woodcutter, and the wolf of the tale became Brer Tiger. But for all anyone knows, those characters could be Asian Jamaicans; I never mention their physiognomies. Though, as in the earlier version of the story, I do signal race and class through occupation and through the metaphors the characters use.
Before I put fingers to keyboard, I must first figure out how to express the race of my characters, if they are non-white, because I have to think about how I'm going to perform that task of wrenching the center over to the margins. I've had white writers tell me that they don't feel they have to think in those terms when they are creating white characters. Often they don't think about the fact that the characters are white. I suspect that most writers of color in this part of the world are quite aware of the ethnicities of their characters of color.
When white writers write almost exclusively white characters, that usually passes without comment. When writers of color create mostly characters of color, it's seen as something remarkable. I try to write from my center. In order to do that in a literary milieu that presumes ground zero to be white middle-class experience, I have to shift the reader's vision over to the margins. Even if that reader is from a marginalized community, the worldview they will have been used to seeing reified in literature, in popular culture, in the media, is for the most part the "normalized" one. By performing that shift, I'm not moving and I'm not taking over the privileged position; I'm wrenching the focus over to my context. I just tell my story.
For a white writer who is from a position of relative privilege (obviously, they aren't all) to write from the center of a person of color is a different vector of movement; they have to abandon their center and move bodily to the margins. They have to inhabit a new set of social signifiers, tell someone else's story. Can it be done? It'd be better, I think, to ask white writers what the experience feels like for them. I can only witness its results from the outside. From the evidence, though, I'd say that it can be done, respectfully and with attention to detail. Fantasy writer Delia Sherman has written an excellent novel from the point of view of a young slave girl in New Orleans. Barbara Hambly's novel A Free Man of Colour is also eminently worth the read; both non-black writers writing about black people and cultures.
I can experience the movement from center to margin if I'm trying for instance to write working-class characters, or children, or queer characters, or aged people; people who tend to get devalued or disempowered in our societies. And I experience a move from margin to center when I try to write male characters or white ones, people who tend to be relatively empowered. Oh; and note that whenever I talk about power, I can only speak relatively. Does a white working-class queer man have more or less power than an Asian upper-class straight woman? Depends on the situation.
As far as I'm concerned, anybody can write whatever they want, from whatever perspective they want. What's more important to me in this discussion of appropriation of voice is not whether a white man can or should write in a black woman's voice, it's what responsibility writers, publishers and other artists and producers have. One thing I hear writers and other artists say is that no one else was telling the stories of a particular community or subculture, so they felt free to use those stories as material. You can do that as a way of respectfully giving voice to what's there in the way that the creators of those cultures envision it, or you can steal it and reconfigure it into window dressing for your career.
One way of giving voice to what's there is that you can use your greater penetration of the field to broker access for people in those communities and/or subcultures who have less access than you do, who could perhaps tell the stories you're telling from a more evident center of lived experience. Introduce your publisher to the work of struggling writers from that community; when you're contacted by people looking for knowledgeable speakers, put forward the names of experts from that community; when someone from that community has done a particular type of work before you did it and got known for it, credit them by name, in writing wherever possible. Give writing workshops in that community, at prices they can afford.
Do you develop your storylines based on tales you've heard as a child, or do you research them? Anything surprising that you came across in the course of either researching or contemplating your ethnicity as the basis for a novel?
Hopkinson: I don't recall having folktales related to me much as a child. I did read many of them in books because I was a voracious reader. I have to do research all the time. And the research constantly gives me gifts of facts or connections that I wouldn't have made otherwise. Before I began to do the research for Brown Girl in the Ring, I'd been led to believe that the forms of worship I knew as Voudun and Pukumina were a form of charismatic Christianity. It was a wondrous surprise learning otherwise, and an education to learn the history of how West African belief systems came to be masked with Christianity in the Caribbean so that their believers could still adhere to their outlawed faiths.
Now for the obligatory "who has influenced you, and what authors do you read" question. What writers have influenced you? And who are you a fan of?
Hopkinson: Among way too many writers to name, I have enjoyed writing by Kim Stanley Robinson, Kelly Link, Maureen McHugh, Elizabeth Lynn, Ursula Le Guin, Tim Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Tanith Lee, Brian Aldiss, Pat Murphy, Storm Constantine, Jennifer Stevenson, Alfred Bester, Suzy McKee Charnas, Harlan Ellison, Delia Sherman, Isaac Asimov, Severna Park, Ellen Kuschner, Mervyn Morris, Robert Munsch, Candas Jane Dorsey, Guy Gavriel Kay, Louise Bennett Coverly, Robert Charles Wilson, Thomas King, Octavia Butler, Slade Hopkinson, Tom Spanbauer, Spider Robinson, Theodore Sturgeon, Derek Walcott, Judy Merril, Terri Windling, Rafael Carter, Trina Stuart Hyman, Frank Herbert, John Steptoe, Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, L. Timmel Duchamp, marina ama omowale maxwell, Dennis Scott, Keri Hulme, Emma Bull, Pamela Dean, Fay Weldon, Ray Bradbury, Susie Bright, Samuel R. Delany, Joan Vinge, Patricia Powell, Marcia Douglas, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Sheldon, Dionne Brand, Cordwainer Smith, Kate Wilhelm, Dorothea Smartt, Phyllis Gotlieb, Marge Piercy, Ishmael Reed, Robert Farris Thompson, Djanet Sears, Dorothy Sayer, Ian McDonald (the Guyanese one and the Irish one), Starhawk, Charles De Lint, Opal Palmer Adisa and Gene Wolfe, to name a few.
So much writing has made my jaw drop in wonder and admiration that I'd be hard put to it to pick my favorites out of that partial list.
Any works in progress, ideas about what directions your next book will take? Is it your intent to continue to extrapolate SF settings from Afro-American folktales?
Hopkinson: I may start to use Afro-American folktales at some point, I don't know. My third novel may have an African American point-of-view character in it, so perhaps I'll soon be researching tales from that part of the world. I'm currently working on the third novel, but it's so raw at this stage that I don't want to talk too much about it. I do know that its title is Griffonne. I probably will continue to reference folklore. Among my first two short story sales were pieces built around "Little Red Riding Hood" and the young woman who has jewels and flowers fall from her mouth when she speaks. Coming from a colonial education, I learned those tales too as a child. I believe I'm only doing an intensified version of what we do all the time when we tell stories; we always use folklore and myth as ways of referring to our histories, whether we name a spaceship Apollo or a coral reef the Dragon's Mouth. Human beings are animals who remember their pasts; I don't think it's possible for SF&F to be devoid of history.
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Also in this issue: Hearts in Atlantis' Anthony Hopkins and Scott Hicks
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