Midnight Robber, Nalo Hopkinson

North America Project 2022

My objective in undertaking this project was to discover who were the North American Alexis Wrights and Marie Munkaras. Ok, Toni Morrison is probably the Alexis Wright equivalent (I don’t think I’ve discovered a Kim Scott yet, and I don’t think Australia has an Octavia Butler or Zora Neale Hurston), but who are all those edgy, angry writers, mostly women in Australia at least, at the boundaries of literature and race and gender relations?

Well one of them is clearly Nalo Hopkinson (1960- ).

Hopkinson “was born in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. I lived for years in Guyana as well, and in Trinidad/Tobago. But the bulk of my life so far has been spent in Toronto, Canada. After about 35 years of that, I moved to the USA for a professorship in Creative Writing.” Nalohopkinson.com/About (in a section titled ‘Powered by ADHD’).

Midnight Robber (2000) is Science Fiction but as with much Women’s SF the SF is just a frame for a story about people. Men’s SF, straight SF, is generally about the SF – a universe is established and it is explored by stick figures. Women’s SF quite often follows the conventions of straight SF, a universe is established and its rules are adhered to, but the purpose is to provide an environment in which the behaviours of one or a few people may be interrogated.

Hopkinson has fun with Midnight Robber‘s environment, making her whole universe one giant Jamaican carnival. I of course missed most of the references but they’re here on Wikipedia if you want them. In brief, Earth is uninhabitable; Jamaicans have established themselves on a new planet, Toussaint; prisoners are exiled to another planet, New Half-Way Tree, in a parallel universe from which there is no return (it has a very 1788 New South Wales feel). The Indigenous people of New Half-Way Tree, the Douen, are smallish, I guess around 1.5m, with lizard-ish and bird-ish characteristics, and they live in trees – very reminiscent of Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest.

At the start of the book, Tan-Tan is a young girl, her father is Mayor and her mother finds ways to fill in her time while Tan-Tan is cared for by AIs – the house, her nurse, the cook and so on – via an implant in her ear. So a lot of the first part of the book is establishing how that works, and how the family dynamics work.

Then Antonio, the father, comes home early to catch his wife and her lover on the sofa; challenges the lover to a duel; in cheating, accidentally kills him; and to forestall being hanged he ‘jumps’ to New Half-Way Tree, accidentally taking Tan-Tan with him.

But wait, you mean you never hear of New Half-Way Tree, the planet of the lost people? You never wonder where them all does go, the drifters, the ragimuffins-them, the ones who think the world must be have something better for them, if them could only find which part it is? You never wonder is where we send the thieves-them, and the murderers? Well master, the Nation Worlds does ship them all to New Half-Way Tree, the mirror planet of Toussaint. Yes man, on the next side of a dimension veil.

Sorry, I forgot to say the whole novel is in patois, hours of poetry that I occasionally lost track of when the thread of the novel was interrupted for a side story.

On New Half-Way Tree Antonio and Tan-Tan slowly build a new life in a rough settlement in which a couple of strong-minded convicts maintain a reasonably fair order. You might think at this point Hopkinson could be making points about the treatment of Douen as inferiors – in fact, the way they are made to work, the way they look down and mumble when addressed is a direct metaphor for slave behaviour around whites – or about survivalism; but her central purpose is to discuss the treatment of young women by men they trust; and all the SF which follows, the “alien contact” as Tan-Tan goes to live with the Douen, is secondary to this central purpose.

This is a powerful and disturbing work written by a woman who is angry about men, about family men. And we should honour her anger by not skirting around the core of this work, as some of the summaries I read, do –

Over a number of years, from say age 9 to 16, with no one to protect her, Tan-Tan is raped.

Eventually she is driven to kill her rapist. In plunging down on her, he plunges down on her knife and dies. For this Tan-Tan knows the town ‘authorities’ will hang her, so she escapes into the forest with a male Douen, Chichibud, on the back of Benta, a Douen who can fly.

For the remainder of the novel Tan-Tan lives in the forest, with a Douen family, and then after her own “tall people” begin seeking her out, with an outcast Douen her own age; sometimes righting wrongs in isolated “tall people” communities, giving rise to the legend of Tan-Tan, Robber Queen. But she does not, cannot, forget that she was raped and neither can we.

This is a great book, a celebration of Jamaican culture and a masterpiece of Women’s SF, exactly the book I was looking for, hoping for with this project.

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Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber, Warner Aspect, 2000. Audible version read by Robin Miles, 13 hrs

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I said I would publish this review at the end of March, but I’m away working for a second or third consecutive week and I’ve run out of draft posts and the time to write new ones. I’ve been reading and listening to  some interesting books so hopefully I’ll knock out a couple of reviews over the weekend.  I’ll name next month’s (April ’22) North American book soon: Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves