A traveling female spirit: Nalo Hopkinson takes her inspiration from the magic of the Caribbean and the strength of women

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2004 by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Charm, technology and Caribbean-seasoned magic are the vehicles Nalo Hopkinson uses to smoothly travel from one category of writing to another.

"At its mot, practicing magic is the effort of imposing your will upon things in the world," Hopkinson says. "In that sense, magic and science were once die same thing. So when I write, I don't fret too much about whether I'm writing science fiction or fantasy."

Hopkinson doesn't fret about hopping into other categories either. Be it through fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and now historical fiction, Hopkinson moves from one to another fluidly, dismissing all detour signs. In doing so, she takes characters of color--particularly black women, young and old--to places few of them have had the chance to explore.

It's no surprise then that Ezili, the sensual voodoo goddess of love, plays a central role in Hopkinson's latest novel, The Salt Roads. Like Ezili, no boundaries limit Hopinson's step.

Since she was a child, Hopkinson has been crossing borders. Born in Jamaica, Hopkinson then lived in Guyana, the United States and Trinidad before settling in Toronto, Canada, when she was 16 years old. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, and her second novel, Midnight Robber, each took place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Both novels have black female protagonists, a rarity ha speculative fiction.

Hopkinson has also edited two category-jumping anthologies, Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and Mojo: Conjure Stories and written a book of short stories called Skin Folk.

The daughter of Slade Hopkinson, a well-known Caribbean poet/playwright and a library technician, Nalo Hopkinson was well exposed to the world of imagination growing up. Hopkinson received her bachelor's degree in Russian and French from Toronto's York University. Hopkinson didn't start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She signed up for a class with Judy Merril, a science fiction editor and writer who eventually led her into a writer's group. Hopkinson went on to earn her master's degree in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University.

In her must recent novel, The Salt Roads, Hopkinson tells her story through the eyes of three women of African descent: one enslaved in French-colonial Haiti; another, the black mistress of Charles Baudelaire, and finally, a Nubian prostitute in 400 A.D. Alexandria. The women are possessed and thus linked to the goddess Ezili, who travels across time and water.

Not only does Hopkinson bring strong black female characters to the world of speculative fiction, but she also brings her Caribbean culture. "The world could stand to have more stories in it told from female, black and Caribbean contexts, and I know what it's like to live inside a skin that is marked as such" she says.

Hopkinson again takes women of color across borders in The Salt Roads. Erotic, funny and moving, The Salt Roads is more magical realism than fantasy ... maybe. It's also full of well-researched history. The novel is really whatever the reader wants it to be.

Hopkinson believes that people of African descent need to be the ones to put themselves into that space suit, to step into that enchanted forest, to look behind the looking glass, to go on that mission. Unfortunately, Hopkinson says, there are not yet enough speculative fiction storytellers of African de scent to lead the expedition.

"In the English-speaking world, I know of fewer than ten commercially published black science fiction, fantasy and horror novelists," Hopkinson says.

Among them, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Ben Okri, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Walter Mosley, Sheree R. Thomas and a select others regularly take us into the unknown, still, among the millions of speculative fiction novels in existence, their novels create only a drop in a deep bucket.

Speculative fiction is the most political category of science fiction, and as Hopkinson notes that, because there are so few black storytellers in the genre, African people are missing from the future as if "a terrible race war has happened that has wiped out the majority of Homo sapiens."

Hopkinson points out that despite few black writers, the field of speculative fiction has had its own feminist awakening. Even with the current mainstream backlash against being politically and socially responsible, much of that committed vision has stuck. Still, there is plenty of room for improvement. Aging women protagonists, for example, have yet to pioneer a significant member of literary journeys.

"It's as through women cease to matter once we're old" she says. "That's alarming. And given the paucity of representations of black women in science fiction in general, old black women are not going to be high on the lists."

Hopkinson says that this particular problem is not only because authors simply do not write about such women but that publishers will not buy their stories.