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Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo
Hopkinson's Midnight robber
Elizabeth Boyle
a
a
University of Chester , Chester, UK
Published online: 21 May 2009.
To cite this article: Elizabeth Boyle (2009) Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight robber ,
African Identities, 7:2, 177-191, DOI: 10.1080/14725840902808868
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808868
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African Identities
Vol. 7, No. 2, May 2009, 177–191
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo Hopkinson’s
Midnight robber
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Elizabeth Boyle*
University of Chester, Chester, UK
(Received 29 July 2008; final version received 16 January 2009)
In her novel, Midnight robber, Nalo Hopkinson uses Afro-Caribbean folklore and
magic in a futuristic setting to re-imagine stock science fiction spaces in a black
Atlantic context. Hopkinson is among a small but growing group of Afro-Caribbean
women writers of speculative fiction engaged in the political act of rewriting science
fiction from the perspective of the marginal subject. This article will address
Hopkinson’s treatment of cyberspace, the spaceship and the penal colony, which
become, when placed in the context of Middle Passage narratives, liminal sites in
which the ‘black’ body disappears and language and memory are dislocated from their
historical and cultural context. In the light of work by Paul Gilroy, it will show how
Hopkinson projects the black Atlantic into cyberspace, where expanded discourses of
technology allow metaphors of the black Atlantic to become deterritorialised and a
more fluid model of racial and gendered identity to emerge.
Keywords: Hopkinson; Gates; cyberspace; race; body; liminal
I
Near the beginning of Midnight robber (2000), in what is perhaps the supreme
demonstration of Nalo Hopkinson’s belief in the essential fluidity of identity and
metaphor, the futuristic Afro-Caribbean heroine Tan-Tan describes a journey with her
father from the planet Toussaint to the prison colony of New Half-Way Tree. Entering a
transportation pod and passing through a series of ‘dimension veils’, Tan-Tan’s body
disappears, leaving her a vague amalgam of animal and human parts:
The first shift wave hit them. For Tan-Tan it was as though her belly was turning inside out,
like wearing all her insides on the outside. The air smelt wrong. She clutched Antonio’s hand.
A curtain of fog was passing through the pod, rearranging sight, sound . . . A next veil swept
through them, slow like molasses. Tan-Tan felt as though her tailbone could elongate into a
tail, long and bald like a manicou rat’s. Her cries of distress came out like hyena giggles. The
tail-tip twitched. She could feel how unfamiliar muscles would move the unfamiliar limb . . .
They were trapped in a confining space, being taken away from home like the long time ago
Africans. Tan-Tan’s nightmare has come to life. (Hopkinson 2000, pp. 73 – 75)
The act of decorporealisation of the ‘black’ body in a futuristic setting identifies,
critiques and resists dominant representations of race and gender constructed within
generic science fiction spaces. Traditionally, the science fiction genre has seldom
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1472-5843 print/ISSN 1472-5851 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14725840902808868
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E. Boyle
employed ‘non-stereotypical’ ‘characters’ ‘from the African diaspora’ (see Govan 1984,
p. 83), preferring instead to repeat the racial conventions and formulaic spaces of
plantation literature (Ray Bradbury’s ‘Way up in the middle of the air’ [1950] and Robert
Heinlein’s Franham’s freehold [1964] are particular examples). The agency of the ‘black’
body within stock science fiction motifs like cyberspace, the spaceship and the penal
colony has been the subject of little or no attention. However, the appearance of novels
like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) in the latter
half of the twentieth century heralded a growth of interest in the depiction of racial and
gendered themes within speculative writing, and Butler’s groundbreaking novel in
particular begins to engage with ideas of the vanishing ‘black’ body as a vehicle with
which to explore troublesome erasures of slave history and identity. For example, Dana,
Kindred’s heroine, is a twentieth-century African American who involuntarily and
repeatedly disappears back in time to the antebellum South, where she unexpectedly
confronts her white, slave-owning ancestor. In the final pages of the novel, Dana finds
herself trapped between both worlds, her body ‘melting [and] meshing’ with a dark hole in
the wall of her living room (Butler 1979, p. 261).
Yet, elements of speculative fiction have been visible even in early writing from the
African diaspora. Sandra Govan argues that supernatural elements can be found in early
African American literature: for example Martin Delany’s Blake (1859 –1862), Sutton
Griggs’s Imperium in imperio (1899), Charles Chesnutt’s The conjure woman (1899) and
Edward Johnson’s Light ahead for the negro (1904) (Govan 1997). Paul Youngquist
identifies Amiri Baraka’s short stories ‘Answers in progress’ (1967) and ‘Rhythm travel’
(a speculative fiction piece anthologised in Dark matter [Thomas 2000], about the ability
of the ‘black’ body to disappear to wherever and whenever a given piece of music is
played) as ‘forerunners’ to Delany and Butler (Youngquist 2003, p. 334). Today, writers
like Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, Walter Mosley and Andrea Hairston have joined
what amounts to a rebirth of diasporic African science fiction. Jewell Gomez suggests a
reason for this in a commentary that appears in Dark matter:
the idea of speculative fiction, which I use as a phrase to put everything together, is that
speculative implies possibilities. A lot of people think of fantasy fiction or specifically science
fiction as apocalyptic, a kind of doomsday, end-of-the-world narrative. For me, spec fic always
implied possibilities. Meaning we can imagine the world to be a very very different place.
As African-Americans [and writers of colour], this seems to be at the core of our getting from
day to day. Speculating that there are other possibilities other than doom. (Gomez 2000, p. 358)
Aside from explicit science fiction motifs, moreover, scenes of decorporealisation
have occurred frequently throughout wider African American and Afro-Caribbean
literature. For example, the motif of the vanishing body appears variously in Harriet
Jacobs’s Incidents in the life of a slave girl (1861), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),
Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘My mother’, from At the bottom of the river (1983) and Toni
Morrison’s Paradise (1998), which features a massacre at a convent where the bodies of
the murdered nuns disappear into thin air at the end of the novel, only to return in ghostly
form to haunt those that hurt them. These vanishing acts dramatise racial oppression (in
many cases gendered and class oppressions too) by exploiting magic realist conventions.
The uncanny disintegration of the ‘black’ body re-enacts specific dislocations from family,
homeland or racial heritage that occur in the plot, and at a deeper level often recalls the
symbolic separation from Africa through the Middle Passage, where the very real
possibilities of disease, maltreatment and suicide confronted the slave body just as the
extreme psychological impact of the Atlantic separation hit home. However,
decorporealisation can also signal a symbolic reclamation of agency within these magic
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realist narratives, involving the protagonist’s healing return to a ‘folk’ self governed by
tropes of tricksterism and storytelling. The protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man
(1952), for example, dissolves into a ‘wet blast of black emptiness’ following the
explosion at the paint factory, reappearing to ‘climb, swim, fly’ through the Harlem streets,
whose underground cellars ‘illuminate the blackness of [his] invisibility’ (Ellison 1952,
pp. 230, 249, 13). The basketball court at the heart of John Edgar Wideman’s novel
Philadelphia fire (1990) is a symbolic ‘black lap you’d sink into forever’, whose ‘contours
. . . rise and fall in unfamiliar rhythms’ and from where the troubled Cudjoe emerges
energised, ‘swimming or flying or crawling’ (Wideman 1990, pp. 40, 23).
Born in Jamaica in 1960 and living in Canada since the age of 17, Nalo Hopkinson’s
writing draws heavily on similar motifs of tricksterism and storytelling from AfroCaribbean folklore. However, Hopkinson’s innovation is to re-imagine agency as a
function of bodily and linguistic disintegration within a technological context. In doing so,
Midnight robber engages with tropes of decorporealisation in ways that complicate the
magic realist approach by suggesting that technology, rather than magic, offers a more
sustainable model for the uncanny disappearing body. Rather than the fragile, temporary
vanishings that resist explanation and often occur at the end of a novel, like Milkman
Dead’s flight from the cliff edge in the final pages of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
(1977), the construction of an Afro-Caribbean-inspired cyberspace network in Midnight
robber offers a sustainable model for bodiless-ness, allowing the novel’s heroine Tan-Tan
to vanish from almost the first page. And, unlike the involuntary and ultimately crippling
dematerialisations endured by Dana in Butler’s Kindred, these vanishings are
performances, re-inscribing agency and continually resisting dominant conceptualisations
of race and gender.
Thus, returning to Tan-Tan’s journey to the penal colony of New Half-Way Tree, as
her ‘black’ body dissolves into the ‘hyena giggles’ and the ‘manicou rat’ tail that invoke
both African and Caribbean fauna, her own identity as an Afro-Caribbean arches back to
connect with the Middle Passage experience of enslaved ‘long time ago Africans’ and
reaches out towards the shape-shifting, ‘twitch[ing]’, ‘giggl[ing]’ tricksters of African
and Afro-Caribbean folklore. More than this, however, the novel emphasises the
mixed heritage of the African diaspora by deterritorialising the Du Boisian metaphor of
the ‘veil’, representative of African American ‘double-consciousness’. It accumulates
Afro-Caribbean attributes (it softens like ‘molasses’, recalling West Indian sugar
plantations), and in a science fiction context the veil becomes a wormhole, multiplying
into numerous ‘shift waves’ that move and ‘rearrange’ identity rather than restrict and
define it.
Moreover, Midnight robber’s multicultural character and its extensive use of
Caribbean vocabulary and language rhythms, together with African and African American
imagery, also challenge essentialist constructions of ‘race’. As the distinctions between
separate ‘black’ linguistic styles disintegrate within the novel’s science fiction spaces, so
Hopkinson begins to mimic, signify on and finally complicate the project set out by Paul
Gilroy in The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (1993). Borrowing
Du Bois’s concept of ‘double-consciousness’, Gilroy asserts that the literature and culture
of the black Atlantic has been defined by a preoccupation with a ‘striking doubleness’ that
characterises its position ‘in an expanded West but not completely of it’ (Gilroy 1993,
p. 58). Yet while he argues for the black Atlantic as ‘one single complex unit of analysis’
through which racial identity may be produced – a conceptual model of exchange and
revision, enacted by a series of Atlantic crossings and re-crossings of people and ideas –
his framework largely sidesteps the participation of women and engagement with
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other African diasporic communities outside the parameters of the ‘black Atlantic’
(Gilroy 1993, p. 58). In contrast, Midnight robber’s projection of the Afro-Caribbean
female body into cyberspace complicates and finally gestures beyond Gilroy’s triangular,
male-centric model.
II
Tan-Tan’s initial dramatic journey from the planet Toussaint has in fact temporarily
separated her from the novel’s most important liminal figure, the Afro-Caribbeaninspired cyberspace network. Known as the ‘Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface’, the
‘Nansi Web’ or ‘Granny Nanny’, this vast intelligent network has been moderating
behaviour on Toussaint and its neighbouring ‘Nation Worlds’ for over two centuries,
following their colonisation by the Marryshow Corporation. The Marryshevites,
although primarily Caribbean, live in a vibrant, multicultural society overseen by the
Nansi Web:
The Nation Worlds were one enormous data-gathering system that exchanged information
constantly through the Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface: Granny Nansi’s Web. They kept
the Nation Worlds protected, guided and guarded its people . . . The tools, the machines, the
buildings; even the earth itself on Toussaint and all the Nation Worlds had been seeded with
nanomites – Granny Nanny’s hands and her body. Nanomites had run the nation ships.
(Hopkinson 2000, p. 10)
The stock motif of the computer network becomes less stock in Midnight robber because
Hopkinson re-imagines it through the lens of the marginal subject. In an effort to expose
and re-imagine the hidden racist transcripts behind traditional science fiction narratives of
artificial intelligence (for example, ‘HAL-9000’ in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film,
2001: A Space Odyssey [co-written with Arthur C. Clarke], the supercomputer AM from
Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘I have no mouth, and i must scream’ [1967], the Master
Control Program from the motion picture Tron [1982] and SkyNet from The Terminator
[1984] and its sequels), Hopkinson teases out the figurative link between the futuristic
‘Web’ and Gilroy’s positive model of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic dialogue
by emphasising the allusion to the West African trickster god, Anansi. Unlike the hyperdominant Master Control Program (the initial creation of a megalomaniac computer
programmer), for example, the ‘Nansi Web’ sustains routes of contact between the various
colonised planets in ways that mirror the historical exchange and revision of tropes
between black Atlantic narratives. Identifying the link between science fiction networks
and the dramatisation of racial oppressions is not new, however. Sandra Govan argues that
within her Patternmaster series (1976 – 1984), Octavia Butler constructs the idea of
telepathic and blood-related networks through which she explores issues of race and
power. Midnight robber seeks to re-imagine agency as a function of cooperation and
caring within the science fiction network.
With her comforting moniker, the emphasis on her ‘enormous . . . body’ and her
maternal instinct to ‘protect’ and ‘guard’ her planetary children, the Nansi Web, or
‘Granny Nanny’ at once evokes the corpulent caricature of the slave mammy, prominent
throughout antebellum Southern literature. Yet, in an event that parallels Tan-Tan’s
vanishing experience in the transportation pod, Granny Nanny is also decorporealised,
severed from the solid image of the ‘black’ body constructed in the dominant literature.
The novel suggests that ‘Granny Nanny’s hands and her body’ are better imagined as
‘nanomites’, as small and numerous as ‘seed[s]’ when scattered among the planets of the
Nation Worlds. In such a dematerialised state, the racialised computer network is able to
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inscribe itself more effectively upon the territory of outer-space since it can now ‘run’
the Nation ships and ‘guard its people’. Moreover, it displays both female and male
biological attributes:
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The Marryshow Corporation did sink them Earth Engine Number 127 down into [Toussaint]
like God entering he woman; plunging into the womb of soil to impregnate the planet with the
seed of Granny Nanny. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 2)
It is both the ‘seed’ which fertilises ‘the earth itself on Toussaint and all the Nation
Worlds’, and the protective womb in which they can develop. The space of the female
body has thus been defamiliarised but its attributes – bonds of maternal love and
cooperative behaviour – remain intact and resist the hyper-masculine, imperialist
structures which dominate The Terminator and Tron, for example.
The Nansi Web, moreover, has originally come into existence as a computer
programme written by a community of Afro-Caribbean programmers immediately before
their escape from Earth. Midnight robber re-imagines this programming language
specifically with Afro-Caribbean calypso in mind:
When Nanny get create, she come in like a newborn adult; all the intelligence there, but no
knowledge. You follow me? . . . She had was to learn, she had was to come to consciousness
. . . It get to where the programmers would ask Nanny a question, and she would spew back
mako blocks of pure gibberish . . . You know [the programmer] was a calypsonian, yes? Just
trying a thing, he run the Nanny messages through a sound filter; tonal instead of text-based,
understand? The day them was set to wipe she memory, Nanny start to sing [calypso] . . . She
brain didn’t spoil, it just get too complex for [them] to translate the concepts she was
understanding . . . So she develop she own language. (Hopkinson 2000, pp. 51 – 52)
If the Nansi Web has its origin in language rather than space, this points to the novel’s
ultimate suggestion for a community governed by bonds of language and orality rather
than body and colour. Although initially a ‘written’ programme, its ability to learn and to
create its ‘own language’ by converting ‘text-based’ information into ‘tonal’ varieties in
turn acknowledges, engages with and signifies upon the trope of the ‘talking book’, which
Henry Louis Gates, Jr argues virtually defines the tradition of black American letters
(Gates 1988, p. xxv). First appearing in early slave narratives, the ‘talking book’ trope
involves an encounter between a text and a non-literate observer and recurs variously in
subsequent African American texts, leading to a plethora of interesting revisions on
encounters between textuality and orality, European and African culture, and master and
slave. Its appearance in Midnight robber at once follows Gates’s own rhetorical principle
of ‘double-voiced texts that talk to other texts’ (1988, p. xxv), and also dislocates his
African American vernacular trope from its geographical and generic context. In the
object of the Nansi Web, the ‘Calypsonian’ programmer in Hopkinson’s speculative
universe is confronted with a ‘text’ he cannot interpret, even though he himself wrote it.
However, the impasse is resolved by the sentient ‘text’ itself learning how to talk – or in
this case, ‘sing’ – to its author. By re-imagining Afro-Caribbean vernacular literary
practices within the context of science fiction, Midnight robber is able to dissolve the
tensions between textual and oral culture and between creator and creature, ‘master’ and
‘slave’.
That the novel responds to and develops African American metaphors is no surprise;
Hopkinson is a graduate of creative writing programmes at Michigan State University
and Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and has acknowledged the
influence of seminal African American science fiction writers, Delany and Butler. But
more than this, the act of deterritorialising metaphor enacts the deconstruction of socially
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constructed ideas of ‘race’ within Midnight robber. As Gates argues in his essay, Figures
in black:
‘Blackness’ is not a material object, an absolute, or an event, but a trope; it does not have an
‘essence’ as such but is defined by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity.
(Gates 1987, p. 40)
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Hopkinson is at pains to make the same point as she stresses mixed race heritage of the
communities in Midnight robber:
In Midnight robber, the reasons that Caribbean peoples have banded together, all the races of
them (remember that the characters are mixed race, as most Caribbean people are) have
everything to do with the history of exploitation that has made the Caribbean what it was. Ben
tells Tan-Tan that when she wears the ship hat on her head (which was an ancient Carnival
tradition), this time it represents a ship in which people made the crossing to the new land as
free people this time, and of their own will [as opposed to the Middle Passage which was
forced] . . . They’ve done so deliberately in opposition to the history of forced labor that
decimated the native peoples of the Caribbean and press-ganged millions from Africa, India,
China and poor people from Europe. Even centuries later, those people on the new planet,
even if they’ve managed to create a more equitable set of societies, won’t have forgotten all
their histories. Some of it will remain in stories, in sayings, in the names for things. It will
inform the way that they see the world. Change will happen, but it will be slow. (Glave and
Hopkinson 2003, pp. 153– 154)
The universe of Midnight robber is one in which ‘race’ is understood in terms of multiple
identities: ‘Taino Carib and Arawak; Africa; Asian; Indian; even the Euro . . . All the
bloods flow[ed] into one river, making a new home on a planet’ (2000, p. 18).
The metaphor that articulates the deterritorialisation of ‘race’ most profoundly
within the text is the metaphor of the ‘eshu’. As Robert Farris Thompson reminds us in
his study of the influence of West African culture, Flash of the spirit, Esu-Elegbara, the
potent deity or orisha figure of Fon and Yoruba culture, is well known throughout the
African diaspora as a crafty messenger to the gods with the ‘force to make all things
happen and multiply (àshe)’ (Thompson 1983, p. 18). Closely associated with the
crossroads and with speaking in riddles, Esu-Elegbara’s indeterminacy and linguistic
tricksterism has always been a feature across African diasporic culture, as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr points out:
This curious figure is called Esu-Elegbara in Nigeria and Legba among the Fon in Benin. His
New World figurations include Exú in Brazil, Echu-Elegua in Cuba, Papa Legba in the
pantheon of the loa of Vaudou in Haiti, and Papa La Bas in the loa of Hoodoo in the United
States . . . Esu is the guardian of the crossroads, master of style and of stylus, the phallic god
of generation and fecundity, master of that elusive, mystical barrier that separates the divine
world from the profane. (Gates 1988, pp. 5 – 6)
Interpreting Esu-Elegbara in the context of African American literary theory, Gates traces
these qualities of interpretation and linguistic revision through the trope of the Signifying
Monkey (signifying itself on monkey tricksters common in West African culture), towards
that of the literary critic, whose job it is to signify on the literary tradition through
‘repetition and revision’ (Gates 1988, p. xxiv) – translating and interpreting meanings,
rediscovering, collecting, comparing and distributing literary products in a continuous
process of transmission.
Hopkinson performs her own subjective intervention in this myth by re-imagining
Esu-Elegbara within the text as the stock science fiction motif of the artificially intelligent
robot. Acting as an interface between the Nansi Web and the people of Toussaint are robot
holograms called ‘eshu’ (2000, p. 5), which both linguistically and metaphorically signify
upon the African diasporic figure and Gates’s trope. The ‘eshu’ figure is presented as
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a cadaverous composite of advanced technology and vibrant Afro-Caribbean Dia de los
muertos tradition:
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Today the a.i. had chosen to show itself as a dancing skeleton. Its bones clicked together as it
jigged, an image the eshu was writing onto Antonio’s optic nerve. It sweated robustly, drops
the size of fists rolling down its body to splash praps! on the ‘ground’ then disappear. ‘What
I could do for you?’ The eshu made a ridiculously huge black lace fan appear in one hand and
waved it at its own death’s head face. (2000, p. 5)
By invoking this trope, Midnight robber is not simply re-imagining the science fiction robot
or artificial intelligence in terms of African American vernacular tradition in order to re-write
a hidden ‘black’ transcript of racial oppression back into a traditional science fiction motif.
The ‘eshu’ is not there to represent the objectified or inscrutable slave body, but in fact
becomes, like its parent computer the Nansi Web, an endlessly dissolving figure that claims
its own agency by ‘writing onto Antonio’s optic nerve’. By signifying upon Esu in the AfroCaribbean context of her novel, Hopkinson successfully deterritorialises liminal metaphors
in order to embrace an increasingly dynamic model of contemporary racial identity.
III
Once on the penal colony of New Half-Way Tree following her journey through the
‘dimension veils’, the novel’s Afro-Caribbean heroine Tan-Tan confronts a second moment
of decorporealisation, but this time it offers none of the fluidity of metaphor and multiplicity
of identity of the ‘Granny Nanny’ network; here, the experience of vanishing may only refer
the ‘black’ body backwards through the metaphor of the ship towards the Middle Passage.
This is because, we discover, New Half-Way Tree exists in a low-tech, ‘head-blind’ territory
beyond the scope of the Nansi Web (Hopkinson 2000, p. 10). Tan-Tan has been brought here
against her will by her father who is fleeing a murder charge on Toussaint. The concept of
remote and inhospitable prison planets has been employed by many science fiction writers
and directors: for example ‘Salusa Secundus‘ in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, the lunar
prison of Roger McBride Allen’s The ring of Charon (1990), and ‘Fiorina Fury 161’, the
foundry facility and penal colony on which Ellen Ripley’s spaceship crashes at the start of
Alien 3 (1992). New Half-Way Tree, too, hosts murderers and thieves, but it is also the
‘planet of lost people . . . the drifters, the ragamuffins-them, the ones who think the world
must be have something better for them, if them could only find which part it is?’
(Hopkinson 2000, p. 2). The novel closely follows the conventions of the science fiction
penal colony, mixing them with Afro-Caribbean imagery and language:
You know how a thing and the shadow of a thing could be in almost the same place together?
You know the way a shadow is a dark version of the real thing, the dub side? Well, New HalfWay Tree is a dub version of Toussaint, hanging like a ripe maami apple in one fold of a
dimension veil. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 2)
Not only is New Half-Way Tree ‘a shadow of a thing’, ‘dark’ and somehow unreal in the
universe of Midnight robber, Hopkinson also chooses to describe it using Du Bois’s
metaphor of ‘doubleness’, which he uses to describe the sensation felt by African
Americans of ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (Du Bois 1903,
p. iv.) Du Bois’s ‘doubleness’ is signified upon and shortened by the Afro-Caribbean
patois into the word ‘dub’ but the sense remains intact; the multiple veils that accompanied
Tan-Tan’s initial journey to New Half-Way Tree have shrunk to just ‘one fold of a
dimension veil’. In fact, New Half-Way Tree is the shadowy replica of both Jamaica and
Toussaint – a space in which the processes of colonisation, discrimination and exclusion
replay themselves through a limited number of metaphors.
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With such stock spaces in mind, Midnight robber re-imagines both the narrative space
of the spaceship and that of the prison planet in terms of the Middle Passage, where the
slave body again contemplates the historical fear of disintegration. The established
punishment among the prisoner community is to be locked in a metal box for at least a day.
Tan-Tan is shown this box on her first day by the community leader, Claude:
With the truncheon, Claude pointed out a galvanised metal box on one side of the path,
suspended between four wooden posts. It looked scarcely big enough to hold a grown man. It
had a ladder leaning up against it, leading to a door in its side. Above the door, it had one little
air hole drilled in the galvanized metal, about big enough for Tan-Tan to stick her fist in.
(Hopkinson 2000, p. 125)
This box directly references other imprisoning spaces throughout African American and
Afro-Caribbean literature, for example the ‘loophole of retreat’ that Linda Brent finds in
her attic hiding-place in Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Incidents in the life of a slave girl
(1861) – a link made explicit by the care with which Hopkinson details the metal box’s
exact dimensions and includes mention of ‘one little air hole’ drilled in the side, which
recalls Brent’s own bore holes beside which she sat ‘till late into the night, to enjoy the
little whiff of air that floated in’ (Jacobs 1861, p. 115).
Moreover, the attic retreat and the metal box both talk back to another space: the
Middle Passage slave ship. Gilroy argues that the ship acts as the defining image of the
black Atlantic:
I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America,
Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise and as my
starting point. The image of the ship – a living, microcultural, micro-political system in
motion – is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons . . . Ships
immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive
return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the
movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and
choirs. (Gilroy 1993, p. 4)
On Toussaint and the Nation Worlds, the ship motif is celebrated as a symbol of
regeneration by the multicultural community. Tan-Tan is given a carnival hat made of
‘rattan, woven in the torus shape of a nation ship’, but is reminded:
Long time, that hat woulda be make in the shape of a sea ship, not a rocket ship, and them
black people inside woulda been lying pack-up head to toe in they own shit, with chains round
them ankles. Let the child remember how black people make this crossing as free people this
time. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 21)
Yet rather than being a conduit for cultural memory and collective hope, Tan-Tan’s
experience of the metal box on New Half-Way Tree is as a fast-track to the physical and
psychological disintegration felt by slaves on the Atlantic trade routes. The slaver acts as a
sign for the multiple experiences of slavery: separation from homeland, incarceration,
physical pain, mental endurance; a simultaneously collective yet profoundly isolating
experience for the ‘black’ body and soul. As Tan-Tan makes the connection between the
metal box and the stories she has heard about slave ships, her body undergoes its second
act of vanishing:
Tan-Tan imagined being shut inside the dark box, no choice to leave, no room to move,
drowning in your own sweat. Skin burning with from [sic] your own stinking piss, from the
flux of shit running down your leg. Like crèche teacher had told them. Like her nightmares.
(Hopkinson 2000, p. 125)
In order to involve the textual structure in the collaboration between form and
meaning, Hopkinson uses several recursive linguistic signals here, which dramatise
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racial oppressions. The most apparent is the metaphor of the Middle Passage slave ship.
This is invoked by the references to the ‘dark box’ that represents the interior hold of the
ship, where slaves were corralled during the Atlantic voyage. The effect of this metaphor
in dramatising the oppressions of the Middle Passage is amplified by the reference to TanTan’s ‘crèche teacher’ in the penultimate sentence, which may prompt the reader to
re-imagine the Middle Passage as a grotesque parody of a nursery enclosure where African
slaves are forced by their captors to become untrained infants again, enduring the
humiliation of ‘the flux of shit running down [their] leg[s]’ because of the dire sanitary
conditions onboard ship. Narrative repetition is also used to dramatise racial oppressions.
The first sentence ends in three clauses, the first two of which begin with a repetition of
‘no’ and this anaphoric element is taken up again by the final two sentences. The use of
anaphora not only recalls the oral strategies common in African American preacher
rhetoric, but the repeated ‘no’s and ‘like’s work together to construct a linguistic cage-like
prison around Tan-Tan to mirror the physical one she imagines.
Separated from the bonds of maternal love and cooperative behaviour that structure
patterns of memory and identity in the Nansi Web, the ‘black’ body on the prison colony of
New Half-Way Tree seems to be eviscerated of all agency. However, an act of linguistic
vanishing may offer a possible way out. The ‘no’s of the first sentence are immediately
superseded by the elongated syllables of ‘drowning’ in the third clause, so collapsing the
anaphora as the sentence closes. By dissolving the series of ‘no’s in a watery ending, the text
signals a way out of Tan-Tan’s linguistic cage. Just as the challenge to figurations of
enslavement is fixed into the linguistic structures of the text, so the reappearance of the Nansi
Web in the final section of the novel signals the emergence of a space in which the enslaved
body can dissolve its relationship to conservative constructions of race and gender.
IV
Hopkinson claims that ‘[s]peculative fiction is a great place to warp the mirror and thus
impel the reader to view differently things that they’ve taken for granted’ (Glave 2003,
p. 149). In offering to ‘warp the mirror’, Hopkinson dramatically conflates science fiction
terminology with African American literary metaphor and signals her desire to unsettle the
traditional spatial constructions of race that Du Bois and, later, Gilroy have proposed:
namely Du Bois’s concept of the ‘color-line’, which he characterised as ‘the problem of
the Twentieth Century’ (Du Bois 1903, p. i) since it fundamentally shaped African
Americans’ self-consciousness; and Gilroy’s construction of the ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy
1993, p. 58), wherein African diasporic culture is continuously circulated within the
triangular space between Africa, Europe and the Americas. For example, the
technologised mirror in Midnight robber provides a space of decorporealisation that
challenges boundaries of racial and gender definitions. No longer does it resemble the rigid
object which Du Bois argued gave the black American the sensation of ‘doubleconsciousness’ – of ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (Du Bois
1903, p. iv). Even in the first pages of the novel, Hopkinson has signalled that the mirror
functions within her novel as a liminal gateway into an alternative space in which Tan-Tan
can assume the identity of the mysterious carnival character, the Robber Queen:
‘Eshu,’ she whispered.
The a.i. clicked on in her ear. In her mind’s eye it showed itself as a little skeleton girl,
dressed just like her. ‘Yes, young Mistress?’
‘Make a mirror for me.’
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Eshu disappeared. The wall silvered to show her reflection. Aces, she looked aces. Her lips
wavered into a smile. She pulled one of the cap guns from its holster: ‘Plai! Plai! Thus the
Robber Queen does be avenged! Allyou make you eye pass me? Take that! Plai!’ She swirled
round to shoot at the pretend badjack sneaking up behind her. The cape flared out round her
shoulders . . . It was too sweet. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 28)
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The mirror gives agency to Tan-Tan by offering the possibility of vanishing – her ‘black’
body dissolves again into animal imagery on her Robber Queen hat:
Ione laid out a costume on the bed, a little Robber Queen costume, just the right size for TanTan . . . [T]he hat was the best part. A wide black sombrero, nearly as big as Tan-Tan herself,
with pom-poms in different colours all round the brim, to hide her face in the best Robber
Queen style. Inside the brim, it had little monkeys marching all round the crown of the hat,
chasing tiny birds. The monkeys lept, snatching at the swooping birds, but they always
returned to the brim of the hat. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 27)
By referencing again the African diasporic figure of the monkey trickster and Gates’s
rhetorical trope of the Signifying Monkey in the ‘little monkeys marching’ on the brim of
the hat, Hopkinson emphasises the Robber Queen’s trickster role within Tan-Tan’s
society. The Robber Queen is a liminal figure and her sombrero, wide enough to ‘hide her
face in the best Robber Queen style’ allows Tan-Tan to assume the powerful anonymity
that goes along with the title. The liminality offered by the costume allows an unexpected
confluence of violence and femininity, human and animal imagery, movement (the leaping
and ‘swooping’) and containment (the monkeys ‘always returned to the brim of the hat’).
Tan-Tan’s third and final moment of deocorporealisation occurs in the final section of
Midnight robber. Reprising the role of the trickster Robber Queen, the performance,
surprisingly, occurs on New Half-Way Tree, a site of previously crippling acts of
vanishing as we have seen. Now, many years have passed since Tan-Tan dissolved into the
‘hyena giggles’ and ‘manicou rat’ limbs on her way through the ‘dimension veils’ to New
Half-Way Tree. Tan-Tan has been repeatedly sexually abused by her father Antonio, and,
having killed him in self-defence, now finds she is pregnant with his child. However,
unlike the terrifying experience she imagines having in the ‘punishment box’ when she
first arrives, the disappearance of Tan-Tan’s body in the final section of the novel signals
the heroine’s reconnection to the Nansi Web and to other West African and Caribbean
ancestor/goddess figures, as well as to the deconstructed models of racial identity and
linguistic playfulness that underpin such figures, investing the site of the penal colony with
singular agency.
The exiled prisoners have decided to recreate the Carnival spaces they remember from
Toussaint in ‘this shadow land of New Half-Way Tree’ (Hopkinson 2000, p. 314) and
during the celebration a crowd gathers around the now-adult Tan-Tan, who performs a
ritual speech in the spirit of the occasion:
Time to try to earn her coppers this Carnival day. She moved to the outskirts of the square,
chipped along until she spied a likely target for her first speech; an old man dancing at the edge
of the crowd . . . Her voice swelled with power as the Robber Queen persona came upon her.
She spun [a] tale, about being born a princess among men . . . She went on a little farther
[towards] music so loud it danced in her blood like her very own heartbeat. Yes, like so. She
put her hands on the stage, her behind in the air, and gyrated to the rhythm. ‘Put your hands in
the air!’ she shouted with the chorus. Yes, allyou; watch the Robber Queen dance. (Hopkinson
2000, p. 317– 318)
These central acts of performance, of ‘spinning’ a tale of survival to a receptive crowd and
jubilantly ‘gyrating’ her rounded, pregnant body on a public stage, reconstruct an
imaginative remembrance of an aspect of West African and Caribbean spirituality that
celebrates the relationship between words, power and the female body. Tan-Tan’s joyous,
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187
‘gyrating’ body mimics the measured movement of the metaphorical shuttle with which
her verbal performance is ‘spun’ and ‘woven’, transforming traditionally ‘female’
manufacturing processes (i.e. cloth weaving) into a powerful public statement of authority.
Karla Holloway has said ‘the creative, spoken word, concretized within the text, is the
source of women’s power’ (Holloway 1992, p. 35) and words remain central to Tan-Tan’s
own recovery of power:
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Power coursed through Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen’s power – the power of words: ‘I you will
never catch, for I is more than a match; I will duck your base canards; I will flee and fly to flee
again.’ Nanny, sweet Nanny, yes. Tan-Tan bad inna Robber Queen stylee. (2000, p. 319)1
But Tan-Tan’s words are cut short by the appearance of Janisette, her father’s jealous
lover, intent on revenge. Confronted with living memories of her abuse at the hands of her
father, Tan-Tan’s verbal performance falters. In fact, Tan-Tan’s exile to New Half-Way Tree
has threatened what Karla Holloway has called the ‘ancient spiritual unity between soul and
gender’ that she argues characterises African and African American women’s imaginative
and cultural experience (Holloway 1992, p. 2). Antonio’s abuse of his daughter has severed
Tan-Tan’s relationship with her own body (‘Tan-Tan cocked her hips to one side, then the
other. They felt rusty. How could she have forgotten how to dance?’ [Hopkinson 2000,
p. 316]), and with the ancestor/goddess figures that represent her connection with ancient,
African sources of female spiritual power and collective identity, made manifest in the figure
of Granny Nanny, the Nansi Web itself. The ‘spiritual place’ of this fracture is fixed into the
structures of the text’s language. Revealing the secret of her abuse publicly for the first time,
the text of Tan-Tan’s carnival performance dissolves into italics:
Could the Robber tell the rest? Rough with emotion, her cracked voice came out in two
registers simultaneously. Tan-Tan the Robber Queen, the good and the bad, regarded Janisette
with a regal gaze and spoke:
That plan for love never come to transaction. When Antonio find out, he rape she, beat
she, nearly kill she. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 325)
Just as the testimony to abuse and violence that appears in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is
not left to a single discourse but shared amongst Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid and
the readers themselves in a collective act of telling, so Tan-Tan’s abuse narrative is shared
or ‘cracked’ between two discourses anchored in the dense structure of Tan-Tan’s speech,
where the voice of her alter-ego, the Robber Queen, is marked out in italics. Moreover, as
Tan-Tan’s personality splits between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Tan-Tans, so the register shifts
from first to third person. These rifts in the textual fabric mark Tan-Tan’s spiritual
dislocation from herself and from the unity of soul and gender as a result of the abuse, but
they also become a collective telling of her story. Holloway has pointed out that the use of
italics and other dissolvings of dialogue, form and grammar occur frequently in black
women’s writing – notably Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, cypress and indigo (1982) and
Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our sister killjoy (1966) – in order to signal ‘a cooperative dissolution
of the narrative voice, the character’s voice, and the textual structure’ (Holloway 1992,
p. 80). She explains,
Black women writers seem to understand, predict, and speak to the presence of an audience,
returning their audience to the community of tellers for whom the oral text was originally
prepared. In other words, in noting narrative shift, we must also be prepared to give
interpretive significance to this linguistic diversion of the text. (Holloway 1992, pp. 80 –81)
The italicised diversions of Hopkinson’s text allow us to interpret the presence of a
healing ancestral/goddess in the voice of the Robber Queen, which, together with the
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voices of Granny Nanny and other mother/earth figures that appear throughout the novel,
allows Tan-Tan to return to a community of powerful, female ‘tellers’ in order to tell her
story. Of course, as interpreters of the story ourselves, readers are also asked to join this
chorus of ‘tellers’, adopting what Morrison terms ‘active complicity’ with the text
(Morrison 1997, p. 9). These textual diversions also allows the novel to reflect its
community – to remember ‘women’s ways of knowing, as well as ways of framing that
knowledge in language’ within the traditions of African, Caribbean and African American
culture (Holloway 1992, p. 2).
Bolstered by the figurative ancestral presence of the Robber Queen, Tan-Tan now
performs her last, and most powerful, act of decorporealisation in the face of Janisette’s
violent anger:
‘You’re going to come with me, woman!’ Janisette lunged for her, caught the brim of
her hat. Tan-Tan zigzagged out of reach.
‘Not wo - man; I name Tan-Tan, a ‘T’ and an ‘AN’; I is the AN-acaona, Taino redeemer;
the AN-nie Christmas, keel boat steamer; the Yaa As-AN-tewa; Ashanti warrior queen; the NAN-ny, Maroon Granny; meaning Nanna, mother, caretaker to a nation. You won’t confound
these people with your massive fib-ulation!’ And Tan-Tan the Midnight Robber stood tall,
guns crossed at her chest. Let her opponent match that. (Hopkinson 2000, p. 320)
In what Holloway terms a ‘plurisignant’ moment (Holloway 1992, p. 55), Tan-Tan
dissolves into an array of historical figures, all of whom were women revolutionaries
fighting oppression. As the crowd ‘pull in closer to hear’, they create a space in which
the Robber Queen is able to signify on these historical agents in order to elaborate on
Tan-Tan’s own revolutionary actions. Linguistic structures are now destabilised in order
to reflect the productive disintegration of Tan-Tan’s own gendered identity. Tan-Tan is
no longer ‘wo - man’, for example, anchored by a hyphen to the masculine signifier, but
the singular ‘Tan-Tan’, where the ‘AN’ becomes both an oral and a scripted echo,
bridging the gap between Tan-Tan and other ancestor/goddess figures from African,
Caribbean and African American culture. For example, Tan-Tan likens herself to the
celebrated historical figure of ‘AN-acaona’, a Taı́no queen who attained legendary status
in narratives of anti-colonial resistance in Hispaniola during the early years of Spanish
conquest. Anacaona, known as ‘Golden Flower’, is claimed by both Haitians and people
of the Dominican Republic, since she was both the widow of Caonabo, chieftain of the
cacique of Maguana (in present-day Dominican Republic) and sister to Bohechio,
chieftain of the cacique of Xaraguá (in the southern part of present-day Haiti) (Wilson
1990, pp. 116, 128). The Taı́no were a complex and largely matrilineal society and
Samuel Wilson has argued that, according to historical accounts and anthropological
research, Anacaona is likely to have been equal, if not superior, in power and status to
her brother (Wilson 1990, p. 117).
Tan-Tan also finds an echo in the African ancestor figure of ‘Yaa As-AN-tewa’. The
story of Yaa Asantewa, Queen Mother of Ejisu (a state in the Asante confederacy) is one of
inspirational female leadership (McCaskie 2007, Edgerton 1995). Facing the British
attempt to colonize the Gold Coast, now present-day Ghana, Asantewa is said to have
made a stirring speech to the tribal elders in which she urged the Asante to resist the
British, following which she led her people in the subsequent Anglo-Asante war, known as
the War of the Golden Stool (1900 – 1901).
Perhaps the most persistent ancestor figure in the text, however, is that of Granny
Nanny, the African-born maroon leader of Nanny-town in slavery-era Jamaica. Although
Nanny appears only three times in contemporary official records and is typically described
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by white men in contemporary historical accounts as ‘ferocious and bloodthirsty’ (Thomas
1890, 36), her significance has become tightly bound up with Jamaican national
independence. Moreover, as Jenny Sharpe argues, as both historical agent and female folk
icon, Nanny is emblematic of ‘a hybrid and heterogeneous domestic authority’, a kind of
‘wild femininity’ as distinguished from the domesticated models of womanhood
promulgated by the Christian missionaries in Jamaica and enforced by white patriarchal
rule (Sharpe 2003, pp. xv, 13). Many stories that have built up around Nanny’s feats as a
maroon leader – from growing magic pumpkins overnight to catching bullets between her
buttocks – and figurations of this ‘wild’ Nanny multiply into a community of
ancestor/goddess figures within Hopkinson’s text. While the Grande Nanotech Sentient
Interface (or ‘Gran – Nan – S – I’) has the clearest linguistic invocation of the historical
Nanny, Tan-Tan also works hard to construct an image of herself as a mythical figure of
defiant sexuality (she ‘put her hands on the stage, her behind in the air and gyrated’ (2000,
p. 318)) and heterogeneous domestic authority. Schooled in physical labour and selfreliance on New Half-Way Tree, she frequently steals from oppressors to give to the
oppressed:
In Corbeau she traded her mother’s ring for three lanterns, oil, matches, grain alcohol, an axe,
five kilos of flour and two chickens. She watched the last evidence of Ione’s existence
disappear into the shopkeeper’s apron. She gave half the flour and one of the chickens to a
wizened family living in a shanty beside the trash heap; it was too much to carry, anyway.
‘Make soup and dumplings,’ she told them. ‘It will stretch for all six of you.’ The father asked
her name. ‘Robber Queen,’ she told him, before heading back into the bush. (Hopkinson 2000,
p. 286)
As Anacoana, Asantewa and Nanny viewed their own communities, so Tan-Tan views
the impoverished population of New Half-Way Tree as her own people and therefore her
own responsibility to feed. She naturally assumes a leadership role in regard to her fellow
exiles, although the text deftly balances this with an appreciation of the complex
negotiations Tan-Tan must make with her own femininity. For example, Tan-Tan’s freelygiven maternal advice on cooking – ‘“Make soup and dumplings,” she told them’ – is
given at the expense of her own mother’s ring, which she recognises as ‘the last evidence
of Ione’s existence’. With its disappearance, however, Tan-Tan can finally shrug off the
legacy of her parents Ione and Antonio, and also her role as kidnapped/abused daughter.
She is free now to name herself when asked to by the father of the family she has helped,
and by claiming the mythical title ‘Robber Queen’ in place of her mother’s ring, Tan-Tan
consciously constructs herself as an ancestor/goddess figure in the tradition of Anacoana
and Asantewa. By invoking and then joining this protective and inspirational community
of ancestor/goddess figures at the moment of her own crisis, when she is confronted by her
father’s lover, Tan-Tan is setting out her own heritage as both a masculine warrior, ‘guns
crossed at her chest’, and ‘mother, caretaker to a nation’ (Hopkinson 2000, p. 320).
Agency is re-imagined within Tan-Tan’s ‘black’ body as the slippage between a
variety of vanishing personae because these personae comprise, in parallel to the
ancestor/goddess figures that populate Hopkinson’s novel, a community of ‘tellers’ who
are able to share the responsibility for Tan-Tan’s story of abuse and survival in a collective
act of telling. The symbolic network of Tan-Tan’s successive vanishings articulates the
practice of a ‘woman-centred ideology’ within African diasporic culture that is both
intimate and feminine, privileging the symbolic over the literal (Holloway 1992, p. 128).
This startling act of bodily and linguistic dissolution is matched finally by the appearance
of the Nansi Web on New Half-Way Tree through the person of Tan-Tan’s new-born son.
The Nansi Web has been systematically searching for Tan-Tan through the dimension
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veils since her journey from Toussaint many years previously, and has now been able to
reconnect to her through her child. Named Tubman, he is described as ‘the human bridge
from slavery to freedom’ (Hopkinson 2000, p. 329). Even here in the final pages of the
novel, in its attempt to recover a social past governed by the terror and atrocity of slavery,
the novel arches back through the figure of Harriet Tubman to signify upon the historical
network of the Underground Railroad and re-imagine it as a precursor to the Nansi Web.
By way of the bonds of maternal love between Tan-Tan and her child Tubman, the Nansi
Web has been able to re-establish contact with New Half-Way Tree and with Tan-Tan. The
expanded discourses of technology offered by the Nansi Web have allowed the ‘black’
body to engage in a series of vanishings throughout Midnight robber, matched by the
deterritorialisation of black Atlantic metaphors. The result is a more fluid but ultimately
sustainable model of racial and gendered identity that can sustain itself in spaces of
technology, while remaining connected to material and narrative spaces of production.
As the eshu, a part of ‘Granny Nanny’s hands and her body’, suggests:
Well, maybe I find a way to come through the one-way veil to bring you a story, nuh? Maybe
I is a master weaver. I spin the threads. I twist warp ‘cross weft. I move my shuttle in and out,
and smooth smooth, I weaving you my story, oui? And when I done, I shake it out and turn it
over swips! and maybe you see it have a next side to the tale. Maybe is same way so I weave
my way through the dimensions to land up here. No, don’t ask me how. (2000, pp. 2 –3)
Note
1.
The example of this song where ‘Tan-Tan bad in a Robber Queen stylee’ draws on Bob Marley
and the Wailers’s ‘rub-a-dub style’ in the song ‘Bad Card’. To ‘draw a bad card’, Hugh Hodges
explains, is to ‘make a bad move or run into some bad luck’ (Hodges 2005, p. 48), and Marley
humorously suggests in the song that the residents of the well-heeled Hope Road area of
Kingston have drawn a bad card with his decision to move to the area.
Like Marley, ‘bad’ Tan-Tan humorously signifies upon the metaphor of the ‘bad card’,
suggesting that she too has successfully tricked those who wish to put her down. She puns,
‘I will duck you base canards; I will flee and fly to flee again’. In fact, ‘bad Tan-Tan’, like the
‘bad card’, is a revision of the well-known Esu-Elegbara trickster of West African culture and
as such signals that Tan-Tan’s performance is empowering, as she slips between masculinity
and femininity, the human and the animal.
Notes on contributor
Elizabeth Boyle is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Chester. She is the
co-editor of Reading America: new perspectives on the American novel (2008) and is currently
developing a monograph, ‘Vanishing bodies: race, liminality and gender in African American
literature’.
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