Spaceship Creole Nalo Hopkinson, Canadian-Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Linguistic/Cultural Syncretism

GORDON COLLIER ] Spaceship Creole Nalo Hopkinson, Canadian-Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Linguistic/Cultural Syncretism ALO HOPKINSON is the daughter of the Guyanese poet, play- wright and actor Abdur–Rahman Slade Hopkinson (1934–1993), N whose lasting influence on her ideas of craft and the Caribbean is everywhere discernible in her work. She has harvested numerous awards and prestigious nominations in the field of science fiction and the category of most promising young writer, and is becoming something of a cult figure in North America.1 Hopkinson has produced an impressive body of work, including Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber – the two novels I wish to discuss here – a collection of short stories, published at the end of 2001 under the title Skin Folk, and two edited anthologies – one of Caribbean 1 She has received the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus First Novel Award, the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, the Philip K. Dick Award for science fiction in paperback original and the Ontario Arts Council Foun- dation Award, and has been a juror for the James Tiptree Memorial Award for specu- lative fiction exploring gender and for the William Crawford Award (first fantasy novel). Hopkinson is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (1995), and of the Masters programme in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University (2002), at which she is currently a student mentor. © A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. Gordon Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27–28; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2003). 444 GORDON COLLIER ] fabulist fiction called Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root (2000), and another of hoodoo or magic tales from the African diaspora entitled Conjure Stories (2003). A third novel, The Salt Roads, is due for publication late in 2003.2 Born in Jamaica in 1960, she spent her formative first sixteen years there as well as in Trinidad, Guyana, and the USA, before settling in Toronto. After the death of her father, she started writing stories with a Toronto setting but in an essentially Caribbean-Canadian milieu. At the University of Toronto, she was influenced by the works and teaching of the Canadian science-fiction writer Judith Merrill. Branching out into fabulist experimentation, she began to attend workshops in science-fiction writing to improve her skills in this genre. She was drawn increasingly to the work of black American sci-fi authors as a means to fix her cultural identity and her literary vocation. Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), is set in a Toronto of the future whose economic infrastructure, along with that of Ontario, has collapsed as a result of litigation by native peoples and an embargo on their forest products. The core of the city (including Cabbage Town, 106), called “the Burn,” has become a “doughnut” of dereliction, decay, poverty and criminality, chiefly among denizens of Afro-Caribbean and East Indian origin. This is, however, not a zone of constriction but of multicultural trans- action.3 Essentially a survival narrative, the book is a racy generic amalgam of dystopia, futuristic technology, supernatural horror and witchcraft, genera- tional romance, mythic quest story, and trickster tale. Typically for this author – and understandably and triumphantly so – the central character is female, as is the central interpersonal complex of the narrative, which, once again typically for this author and for many other women writers of Caribbean origin, involves events that impinge on, threaten and unravel the nuclear and 2 I have omitted this third novel from consideration here. Although The Salt Roads (which originally had the working title “Griffonne,” suggesting ‘mulata’) shares some of the Caribbean focus of the first two novels and the short fiction, it moves away from the science-fiction substratum with which she syncretizes folk- ways (though Hopkinson has not relinquished this cross-over approach, to judge from her plans for further novels) and towards the genre of historical fantasy or time- travel. In eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (shortly to erupt into the revolutionary chaos that gave birth to Haiti), the burial of a stillborn baby girl by three slave women gives rise to a divine revenant whose spirit wanders through the ages, encountering Baudelaire’s black mistress Jeanne Duval, St Mary of Egypt, Queen Nzingha of Matamba in Angola, and other exemplars of female fortitude. 3 It is a “freezone” or free-trade haven, as, too, in Hopkinson’s second novel – which recalls the way in which William Gibson imports Rastafarian and voodoo belief systems into the cyberspace station of Neuromancer (1984). .

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