Nalo Hopkinson
b. 1960

I grew up in a milieu of Caribbean writers and writing. I bring that sensibility to my own work, but I write within a particularly northern tradition of speculative and fantastical fiction. There, plot and content are equally important, and the speculative or fantastical elements of the story must be 'real': Duppies and jumbies [spirits of the dead] must exist outside the imaginations of the characters; any scientific extrapolation should seem convincingly based in the possible. It's an approach designed to ease or force the suspension of disbelief, to block flight back into the familiar world, to shake up the reader into thinking in new tracks.

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root

Biography / Criticism

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960, to a poet father (Slade Hopkinson) and a library technician mother. Hopkinson spent much of her youth in various parts of the Caribbean, including Guyana and Trinidad and in 1977 she moved with her family to Toronto, Canada. As a young woman growing up she was an “avid reader who barely dared dream of becoming a writer” (Mohanraj). But, as it were, in 1993, the same year that her father died, Hopkinson began to write fiction. She wrote out of necessity, as she hoped to be submitted into a course at Ryerson University which required samples of each prospective student’s work. Ultimately, the class never ran, but Nalo continued to write.

In 1994, Hopkinson received her first positive public recognition for her fictional writing when “her short story "Midnight Robber" tied for second place in the Short Prose Competition for unpublished writers, sponsored by the Writers' Union of Canada” (“Nalo Hopkinson Subverts Science Fiction”). Then in 1995, after returning from a writer’s workshop, Nalo heard about the Warner Aspect first novel contest. She submitted what she termed “an incomplete 10,000 word manuscript” assuming that it would be turned down, only to discover two weeks later that Warner wanted a final draft to be considered for the second round of the competition. This “incomplete manuscript” was to become Nalo’s first published work and the winner of Warner’s contest. These 10,000 words turned into a novel: Brown Girl in the Ring. The author has since written two more critically acclaimed novels including Midnight Robber, and, most recently, The Salt Roads. Hopkinson has also had a number of her short stories published, some of which can be found in her collections Skin Folk and Under Glass, and is the editor of two anthologies: Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and Mojo: Conjure Stories.

Hopkinson’s educational background is dense: she has a Combined Honors Bachelor of Arts in Russian and French from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and a diploma in Recreation Management from Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is also a graduate of the Clarion East Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, USA, and earned a Master's Degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, USA. With so much schooling under her belt, one might assume, and justly so, that Miss Hopkinson is a disciplined and avid student, but, in fact, she is perhaps the opposite; she claims to “have really bad work and study habits, [and to] always find school difficult”. Despite this, she continues to return to education and says, with a bit of implied jest, that “perhaps someday [she will] get it right”.

Presently the author makes her home in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and spends much of her time writing and, inevitably, learning.

Many critical responses to Nalo Hopkinson’s work suggest that she portrays the black woman’s experience through a revolutionary literary genre. One common element of Hopkinson’s work critics point to is her ability to mix genres and cultures to create interesting critiques of modern society.

Hopkinson mixes fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, and realism to create her works. Generally she writes about characters who are living in the modern world but they believe in and interact with the spirits of West African and Afro-Caribbean cultures (Jonas 21). This mixing of myth and reality creates a world that nobody has ever seen before. However, readers are still able to relate to Hopkinson’s characters and communities. Jonas writes, “She [Nalo Hopkinson] writes about characters who exist in the modern world but for whom the spirits and deities of West African and Afro-Caribbean cultures are alive and palpable” (Jonas 21). Her characters hold onto a culture and tradition that has been rooted out. Hopkinson’s approach to tradition in modern societies is explained by David Soyka: “One of Hopkinson’s purposes in basing speculative fiction in Afro-Caribbean culture is to ‘subvert the genre, which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves’” (Soyka 1). Hopkinson’s “subversion” of the genre allows her to point out the relevance of alienated cultures and the way they may interact with modern culture and scientific advances (Clemente 23). She presents situations in which Afro-Caribbean culture and gods interact with the modern world to the advantage of the latter.

Many critics also point to Hopkinson’s novels as feminist critiques of society. Donna Bailey Nurse says:

Hopkinson’s literary preoccupations echo those of the most prominent black women writers. Her impulse to illuminate the West Indian woman’s tenacious African roots is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid, while her attention to female sexual expression and reproductive cycles mirrors the womanist concerns of Alice Walker. (Bailey Nurse D12)

This idea is illustrated in many of the characters of Hopkinson’s work. In most of her novels there is a strong central female character who must save society and a group of male characters who jeopardize society. It is frequently up to the woman to save the community, just as Ti-Jeanne does in Brown Girl in the Ring. Some critics view this as a positive aspect of Hopkinson’s work; others view it as negative because it gives a stereotypical view of men. David Soyka illustrates Hopkinson’s responses to accusations that her novels depict men as “shiftless sexual predators” that serve only to “reinforce racial stereotypes” (Soyka 2). Soyka says:

Hopkinson adds that the type of character she’s most interested in developing isn’t clearly good or evil, but a more complex mixture. ‘I’ve been a little better at doing that with female characters than with male ones, so in short stories on which I’m currently working, I’ve been turning my hand to ‘complexifying’ the male characters’. (Soyka 2)

It will be interesting for readers to find out how Hopkinson chooses to improve her portrayals of men in her novels and give a more complete picture in that sense. Hopkinson is changing the way science fiction is written by having a strong feminist strain in her novels.

Like many writers before her, Hopkinson has a concern about hierarchies of color and is ultimately interested in exploring and subverting the ideals of society. In her novel The Salt Roads, many critics point to Hopkinson’s critique of the hierarchy. Barry Brunhuber writes, “The Salt Roads addresses the hierarchy of colour that began in Mer’s times and persists to this day. If you’re black, step back. If you’re light, you’re all right. The racial metaphors are as colourful as the characters…The disparate elements are drawn together by the goddess Ezili, who inhabits the three characters and interprets their experiences” (Barry Brunhuber C11). As Barry Brunhuber points out, Hopkinson uses magic realism to bring readers through history into other people’s experiences to see how color continues to be an issue in society.

Many critics refer to Hopkinson’s novels as social critiques on race, but also on capitalism and the government. Her novels were compared to novels written by Dickens, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald etc. However, she adds concerns of racial and ethnic identity to the social critique which those authors never did (Rutledge 35). Rutledge writes, “Considering the potent message contained within its pages, Brown Girl moves well beyond normative fictional discourse to grapple with issues sociologists, political scientists, and economists study” (Rutledge 23). Because of Hopkinson’s attention to many social concerns, she succeeds in creating a genre of novel which appeals to many.

Critics do not always agree on Nalo Hopkinson’s message or what it is that makes her writing unique. However, they do all agree that her work is an important step into a new genre of fantasy/science fiction type writing and that she would continue to “subvert” the genre while pushing readers to think of new and fantastic possibilities.

Nalo Hopkinson has just recently come onto the literary scene and it seems that she is, and will continue to be, an important addition to the broad community of contemporary writers, and more specifically, the community of contemporary women writers of color.

Much of her work, including her novels and many of her short stories, is permeated with feminist themes and ideas. The author has said about her writing, and the genre in which she writes, “Because of the work that many people did before me to bring women's voices to the field, I'm able to inhabit a science fiction community of my choice, where women are well represented in the writing, amongst the writers and in the discourse.” Hopkinson portrays her female characters as strong, liberated women who have minds and agendas of their own and perhaps more importantly, minds and agendas that are independent of the men in their lives. For example, the characters of Ti-Jeanne, Mi-Jeanne, and Gros-Jeanne in her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, overcome the evil forces of the men in their lives and endure much resistance along the way. In fact the men in these women’s lives seem to fall into one of following categories: malevolent and immoral, or unintelligent. No matter their category, the male characters in Brown Girl in the Ring are portrayed simply as hindrances to the success and happiness of the female characters; they are simply forces that the strong women of the story must deal with or conquer in order to achieve their goals. Similarly, the female characters in Hopkinson’s novel The Salt Roads also reign supreme as strong-willed and intelligent women who struggle against seemingly impossible odds but somehow come out conquerors.

Not only are many of the themes in Hopkinson’s work feminist, they are particular to the African and Caribbean woman’s experience. Her work is saturated with references to Caribbean folklore and African history. In her novels and many of her short stories she talks about the religion of vodun and the practice of obeah. Hopkinson, with her insertion of these themes into her works, acts as a much-needed representative for the cultures and women of whom she writes.

Also important to note is the genre in which Nalo Hopkinson works. The author herself refers to her writing as “speculative fiction” which for her, apparently, “encompasses all the genres of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and magic realism” (“Nalo Hopkinson Subverts Science Fiction”). Hopkinson says that “[she] was drawn to [this particular literary] field because she’s always read in it.” In many of her short stories and all three of her published novels, Hopkinson implements the use of magic realism: she inserts magical and supernatural occurrences into a realistic setting. For example, in Brown Girl in the Ring there is a scene in which Ti-Jeanne and her boyfriend Tony are trying to escape the Burn (the area of Toronto in which they live). They become invisible by asking the spirits to hide them for safety. Similarly, in Hopkinson’s more recently published The Salt Roads, the reader finds that one of the main characters in the stories is none other than the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sex and love, Ezili. Ezili plays a major role in the novel and is an insertion of a supernatural idea/being into a realistic setting. Despite the fact that Hopkinson herself writes in the genre of speculative fiction and represents a range of cultures and heritages in her writing, she is concerned that her genre does not express enough diversity:

[A] challenge I see is that of the diversity of expression in speculative fiction. The readers seem to come from all over the place, but the writing that gets published (or that gets marketed as SF) still comes from a fairly narrow range of experience. The imaginative worlds that we're creating still draw heavily on Greek and Roman mythology and on Euro-Celtic folktales, and the futures we imagine still feel pretty Western middle class. And that's fair enough, because it's the primary cultural context in which many of the writers are situated. Some excellent writing has come and is coming out of those experiences. However, I also want to see more writing from the vast range of cultural contexts which make up the world. (Mohanraj)

Fortunately, it seems that Hopkinson is, in a way, blazing the proverbial trail, or at least helping to make way for new writers whose backgrounds are not perhaps “western middle class” and giving a voice to these writers and thus to different ethnic heritages and traditions in the world of science and speculative fiction.

Nalo Hopkinson’s work is a refreshing new step in the genre of speculative fiction and acts as a way for readers to both escape from that which they know as well as to ponder existing society in new and interesting ways. Hopkinson’s voice, that is undeniably female and saturated with African and Caribbean tones, is most certainly a much needed addition to the world of science fiction and, its fairly new relative, “speculative fiction”.

Selected Bibliography

Works by the Author

• Novels
  • Brown Girl in the Ring, (1998)
  • The Salt Roads, (2003)
  • Midnight Robber, (2000)
  • Short Story Collections
  • Skin Folk, (2001)
• Short Stories
  • “Delicious Monster.” Queer Fear. Ed. Michael Rowe. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000.
  • “Shift.” Conjunctions: the New Wave Fabulists. NY: Bard College.
  • “Herbal.” The Bakka Anthology Ed. Kristen Pederson Chew. Toronto: Bakka Books & Stone Fox Publishing, 2002.
  • “The Glass Bottle Trick.” Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson. Montpelier: Invisible Cities Press, 2000.
  • “Greedy Choke Puppy.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
  • “Ganger: Ball Lightning.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
  • “Slow Cold Chick.” Northern Frights 5. Ed. Don Hutchison. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1999.
  • “A Habit of Waste.” Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through science fiction and feminism. Eds. Helen Merrick & Tess Williams. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1999.
  • “A Habit of Waste.” Northern Suns. Eds. David Hartwell & Glenn Grant. New York: Tor, 1999.
  • “Precious.” Silver Birch, Blood Moon. Eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. New York: Avon Books, 1999.
• Anthologies
  • So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future. Eds. Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.
  • Mojo: Conjure Stories. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson. New York: Warner Books, 2003.
  • Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson. Montpelier: Invisible Cities Press, 2000.
• Other Works
  • “Terence M. Green.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 251. Ed. Douglas Ivison. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002.
  • "Science Fiction and the World." Nebula Awards Showcase. Ed. Kim Stanley Robinson. New York: Harcourt, 2002.
  • "Indicator Species." Outlook. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio. Producer Glen Sinclair.
  • “Red Rider.” Tellin' it like it is : a compendium of African Canadian monologues for actors. Ed. Djanet Sears. Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 2000.
  • “Bitter.” a monologue commissioned for the stage by the Toronto World Stage Festival, read at event Kabaret Erotica by actor Sandi Ross.

Works about the Author

• Bailey Nurse, Donna. “A True Original.” The Toronto Star. 29 Feb. 2004, Ontario ed., sec. D12.
• Barry Brunhuber, Kim. “Oh, Black New World: Racial Metaphors are as Colorful as Characters in the Work of Nalo Hopkinson.” Ottawa Citizen. 16 May. 2004, Sunday final ed., sec. C11.
• Burwell, Jennifer and Nancy Johnston. “A Dialogue on SF and Utopian Fiction, between Nalo Hopkinson and Elisabeth Vonarburg.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 30, no. 81 (2001): 40-47.
• Clemente, Bill. “Tan-Tan’s Exile and Odyssey in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 33, no. 91 (2004): 10-24.
• Collier, Gordon. “Spaceship Creole: Nalo Hopkinson, Canadian-Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Linguistic/Cultural Syncretism.” A Pepper Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, Ed. Gordon Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann. New York: Rodopi, 2003.
• Jonas, Gerald, “Science Fiction.” The New York Times 30 Apr. 2000, late ed., sec. 7: 28.
• -----. “Science Fiction.” The New York Times 13 Jan. 2002, late ed., sec. 7: 21.
• Mohanraj, Mary Anne. Interview: Nalo Hopkinson. 2000. 1 Nov. 2004. .
• Morehouse, Lyda. “Nalo Hopkinson.” Science Fiction Chronicle: The Monthly Science Fiction and Fantasy Newsmagazine 21 no. 2 (2000): 8, 35-37.
• Nalo Hopkinson, A Brief Biography. 2004. 1 Nov. 2004. .
• Nalo Hopkinson Subverts Science Fiction. 1999. 1 Nov. 2004. .
• Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text 20.2 (2002): 1-15.
• Rutledge, Gregory. “Futurist Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment.” Callaloo 24.1 (2001): 236-252.
• -----. “Nalo Hopkinson’s Urban Jungle and the Cosmology of Freedom: How Capitalism Underdeveloped the Black Americas and Left a Brown Girl in the Ring.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 30, no. 81 (2001): 22-39.
• Soyka, David. “Literature Without a Country.” iUniverse. 20 Oct. 2004 .

Related Links

Strange Horizons: Interview with Nalo Hopkins
This website offers an insightful interview with Hopkinson about her life and her works.

Fantastic Fiction's Nalo Hopkinson Page
This site lists Nalo Hopkinson’s published works, awards received, and recommended reading by the author.

Fan Page for Hopkinson
Offers a brief biography, descriptions of her books, and links to interview with Hopkinson.

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This page was researched and submitted by Robyn Haugan and Kelly Hanson on 12/16/04