Report From Planet Midnight

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• Publisher: Pm Press E Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781604864977
• eBook ISBN: 9781604866827
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

A fascinating fictive polemic from the award-winning Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson address the crowd during a Guest of Honour address to the 2012 conference of Interational Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, in the voice of an alien. The alien evaluates Earth's strange customs, including the marginalisation of works by non white and women authors. A dramatic mix of humour, anger and shrewd analysis pervades this discussion of the unconcious and unacknowledged racism of white colleagues and points the way to a more diverse and inclusive future.

“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. These words are his, from his poem “The Schooner Flight”:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation …

Doesn’t that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn. Much respect. Derek started and for many years was the Artistic Director of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. My father was one of the actors and playwrights in the company. He and Walcott eventually fell out and stopped speaking to each other. But in a way, that’s beside the point. Walcott and my father are two of many talented Caribbean wordsmiths whose work I was absorbing as a child.

One of Walcott’s early plays was a fantastical piece called “Ti-Jean and His Brothers.” I believe it was modelled on a St. Lucian folk tale. Ti-Jean (“young John”) is the youngest of three brothers who set out to beat the Devil, who appears in the play as that archetypical monster, the white plantation owner. The two elder brothers fail, and it’s left to Ti-Jean to save the day. At some point during the writing of my first novel, I realised that since I was writing about three generations of women who were all facing the same central evils in their lives, there were parallels with the basic framework of “Ti-Jean and His Brothers,” so I used the parallels to inform my plot. I wanted to make Walcott’s influence evident, so I gave my three characters feminised versions of the brothers’ names, and I embedded brief quotations from the play into my story. Walcott generously gave me his permission to do so.

Folktales are great for learning dynamic storytelling and how to structure the resonant echoes that give a plot forward motion. It wouldn’t be the last time that I modelled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I’ve discovered that it doesn’t matter whether your readers recognise the folktale. It may not even matter whether the folktale is real, or one you invented. What matters is that it has structure, echoes, trajectory, and style.

Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award, and there was talk of a movie. What’s up with that?

The movie project isn’t mine. The director who optioned it is the visionary Asli Dukan, of Mizan Productions. I believe the project is currently in the development stage, which means raising the money to make the film. That is the stage at which most film projects die stillborn, so if anyone who wants to see the final product is of a mind to support Asli with some hard cash, I know she’ll appreciate it. Particularly when I speak at schools, people in the audience want to know whether there are going to be films of my books. Myself, I’m more jaundiced. I’ve seen what can happen when text-based science fiction gets zombified by Hollywood. Look at what happened to Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic.”

I know. I wrote the novelization of that unfortunate script.

My condolences! I’ve also seen what can happen when mainstream American film and television try to depict black Caribbean people. You get the likes of Kendra the vampire slayer, Sebastian the crab from “The Little Mermaid,” and the eternal disgrace that is Jar-Jar Binks. Seriously, would it be so hard to hire actors who can do accurate Caribbean accents? Though that wouldn’t solve the depiction problem; mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simple-minded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say “de” instead of “the.” In any case, my work isn’t going to make it to the big screen any time soon, given the types of characters that are in it. It’d be a lot of money for producers to invest in a project when they’re not sure there’s a big enough audience out there for it.

And because people are always quick to jump down my throat whenever I talk about institutionalised discrimination, let me acknowledge that there have been a few SF/ fantasy films and television programs with Caribbean characters that weren’t stereotyped. Actor Sullivan Walker as Yale in the short-lived series Earth 2, for example. Geoffrey Holder’s voice as the narrator for the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are probably one or two more, but not many at all.

Some people hear me talking like this and get pissed off at me. They don’t tolerate critique of the things they love. They miss the fact that I may love those things, too. I just don’t think love should be blind.

Anyway, we were talking film. When directors option my stories, I’m more confident if they are independent artists with some personal connection to some of my communities (science fiction, black, Caribbean, Canadian, queer, women, etc.). There are two other novels of mine in development: Brown Girl in the Ring, by Toronto’s Sharon Lewis, and The New Moon’s Arms, by Frances Anne Solomon of Toronto’s Leda Serene productions. Both women, like Asli Dukan, have roots in the Caribbean.

You once identified the central question of utopia as “who’s going to do the dirty work?” (Ursula Le Guin would agree.) So how would you describe Midnight Robber’s planet Toussaint, where work is a sacrament (to some)?

A sacrament? Did I do that? Not trying to dodge the question. Just that my memory is poor, and it’s been a long, busy, often stressful few years since the time it was published. I’m trying to remember back to when I finished the novel, perhaps sometime in 1999. I suspect I hadn’t yet come up with the notion that the big dilemma of science fiction is who’s going to do the dirty work. I may have just begun asking myself that very question … ah.

I do remember this: the people of Toussaint have a maxim that backbreaking labour isn’t fit for them as sentient beings. They’ve come from a legacy of slavery, of having been forced to do hard labour, and they’re not about to forget it. But manual labour still needs to be done. So they mechanise it as much as possible. The machines that do that labour are unaware extensions of the self-aware planetary artificial intelligence that sustains their various support systems. So how you gonna keep your machine overseer down on the farm, once she’s crossed the Turing threshold? They programme her not to mind doing all that work. They make her like her servitude. When you think of it, our brains are also wired to respond in certain ways to certain situations. But do we get to make that decision for other creatures? You could argue that we do so all the time, through domestication and by breeding other living things for specific traits. You could argue that that doesn’t count, since other animals aren’t self-aware. But anyone who’s ever lived in close quarters with another animal for an extended period of time can present convincing evidence that many animals are indeed self-aware. You could argue that it’s okay to mess with creatures who are less intelligent than we are. But as someone with a couple of cognitive variances and as someone black and female, I have reason to be suspicious of intelligence tests. I’m not sure that we understand enough about cognition to be able to measure cognition effectively. For one thing, we’re measuring it against human markers of intelligence. I wonder whether those are the only markers.

So, in Midnight Robber, there is a powerful human-manufactured sentience that we have programmed to love us and to want to take care of us. Was it wrong of us to do that to her? Ethically, it’s a conundrum. That was deliberate on my part. The planet of Toussaint isn’t exactly Utopia. I didn’t solve the problem of who does the menial work. I just put it into the hands of a being that’s been designed to accept those tasks. I may have had some of the human citizens voluntarily take on forms of manual labour as part of a practice of ethical mindfulness.

These are the people I meant, who see labour as a sacrament.

It’s their way of acknowledging that work that looks after oneself and others isn’t really beneath them. You know, something like the old proverb attributed to Buddhism: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

I still haven’t answered the question of who does the work in a Utopia. I have an alternative history fantasy novel in progress in which I’m exploring the idea that everyone in a municipality is assigned menial tasks in a rotating schedule. But in practice, my characters have all kinds of ways of slipping out of their turn taking out the town’s nightsoil or working on the building site of that new community centre. In the novel, it’s a cooperative system, but not politically Socialist; I’m trying to build something a bit different than our current political paradigms. I’m not quite happy with it yet as a world-building element.

My partner tells me I need to wrestle with systems of exchange in return for labour, money being the primary one that we use in this world. I need to look at effective alternatives to money. I’m daunted by that, but he’s right.

You have a lot of uncollected short stories. Any plans for them?

Uncollected, yes, but all but one of them have been published. I’ve actually collected them up into a manuscript, which I plan to submit to a publisher soon. Honestly, it’s the formatting that’s slowing me down, and the thought of writing intros to each story. Maybe I don’t have to do that last bit.

You often speak of putting the “threads” of a story into a “weave.“ Not uncommon, yet from you it seems something more than metaphor. How did you get into fabric design?

On a lark, thanks to a company called Spoonflower which came along to take advantage of new technologies of printing with ink on fabric. Spoonflower’s website democratises the process and makes it easy for someone with basic image editing skills to dabble in fabric design. They’ve built an online community of people interested in cool fabric. We range from hobbyists to professionals. We talk to one another, vote on one another’s designs, and buy fabric to sew. It’s like print-on-demand for fabric.

I sew as a hobby; have done since I was a teenager. When I hit the fashion-conscious teen years and my desire for new clothes outstripped my parents’ income, they bought me a sewing machine. My mother taught me how to use it. It was an extraordinarily frustrating learning curve for someone with undiagnosed ADHD. Once, I glued the seams of a blouse because I was too impatient to stitch them. My mother was horrified. But I did learn how to sew, and how to get to a place of patience around it (plus some time-saving tricks that kept me from going supernova). Since then, I’ve always had a sewing machine. I have an ever-growing collection of clothing patterns, some dating back to the 1930s. I’m a big girl, almost always have been. There was a time when attractive clothing at reasonable prices just wasn’t available for larger women. Being able to sew meant that I could make my own. It’s easier now to find nonhideous off-the-rack clothing in my size, but when you make it yourself, the fit can be better, the clothing more unique.

Now that I can design my own fabric and have the designs printed, I can create and use iconography I don’t find on store-bought fabric. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hesitant to wear images of non-black people on my body. Not because I hate white people, or some rubbish like that, but because I wanted to be able to love black people and my own blackness. Nowadays, you can find fabric with images of black people on it that doesn’t make you want to go postal, but good lord, does it ever tend toward the twee! I prefer images with a bit more bite, a bit more perversity, and a bit less saccharin.

I can make science fiction and fantasy imagery, too, that isn’t all unicorns with flowing manes on a background of rainbow-coloured stars. I adapt a lot of historical imagery, and my own photographs as well, and sometimes I draw. I know nothing about design, and I haven’t conjured up the patience to learn. I make fabric designs by trial and error. Some of them are hideous. Some of them are just okay, and some of them are successful. I’m always a bit surprised when someone who doesn’t know me buys fabric from my online Spoonflower store: (http://www.spoonflower.c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Message in a Bottle
• Report From Planet Midnight
• Shift
• “Correcting the Balance” Outspoken Interview with Nalo Hopkinson
• Bibliography
• About the Author