Report From Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson

Author:Nalo Hopkinson [Hopkinson, Nalo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781604866827
Google: G8b6OR2AUFUC
Amazon: 1604864974
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2012-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

“CORRECTING THE BALANCE”

NALO HOPKINSON INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

Your work is often described, even by yourself, as “subverting the genre.” Isn’t that against the rules? Or at least rude?

Science fiction’s supposed to be polite? Dang, maybe I’ll take up poetry instead. To tell the truth, I kinda rue the day I ever let that quotation out into the world. I used it in a Canadian grant application fifteen years ago. In that context, when not a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers were getting grants from the arts councils because many of the jurors thought science fiction and fantasy were inherently immature, it worked. It allowed me to come out swinging and get the jury’s attention. But as something said to science fiction people, it just sounds presumptuous. I don’t remember how it got out of my confidential grant application and into the larger world. It was probably my own doing, and my own folly. Now the dang thing keeps coming back to haunt me. People quote it all over the place, and I can feel my face heating up with embarrassment. Science fiction and fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It’s something I love about them.

And yet, if I’m being honest, there is some truth to that piece of braggadociousness. No one can make me give up the writing I love that’s by straight, white, Western male (and female) writers, but at a certain point, I began to long to see other cultures, other aesthetics, other histories, realities, and bodies represented in force as well. There was some. I wanted more. I wanted lots more. I wanted to write some of it. I think I am doing so.

Does the title of your debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, come from the game, the song, or a wish to connect with Tolkien?

Tolkien? Ah, I get it! One brown girl to rule them all! Well, no. The song comes from the game. (“There is a brown girl in the ring, tra-la-la-la-la/and she look like a little sugar plum”) It’s an Anglo-Caribbean ring game, mostly played by girls. I used to play it as a little girl. All the girls hold hands to form a ring, and one girl is in the middle. When the other girls sing, “Show me your motion, tra-la-la-la-la,” the girl in the centre does some kind of dance or athletic move that she figures will be difficult to copy. The rest try to copy it. She picks the one whose version she likes the best, and they switch places. And so on.

In my first novel, Ti-Jeanne the protagonist is surrounded by her life dilemmas and challenges, and things are getting worse. She’s the brown girl in the ring, and she is young and untried. She herself doesn’t know what she’s capable of, but she needs to figure her skills out and employ them, quickly, before she loses everything she cares about. Tra-la-la-la-la.

Who is Derek Walcott and why is he important?

Derek is a St. Lucia—born poet, a playwright, a Nobel Prize winner, and a master wordsmith.

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