Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Toussaint Runners, so-called for their occupation as pedicab runners, live in Headblind homes that are inaccessible to Granny Nanny’s neural networked ears and eyes. Others view them as a 50-year-old Luddite sect that has reverted to “break-back” labor in order to survive without Nanny (Midnight Robber 4–12). Ironically, their preference for work in the fresh air and for homes that do not lock out other community members is mistaken for primitivist escapism. In fact, they actually are more technologically savvy than other inhabitants of the planet. One history nearly buried in oblivion is Nanny’s own near-dismantling. It was the Runners who had saved her by tapping into her operating language, her argot, creole, and Nannysong, a fusion of computer language and protocols in Eleggua, Marryshow, and Calypsonian tongue, a song so complex it had been mistaken for “fuzzy logic” garble (50–52).

  Herbal science is another measure of their knowledge. Maka, with “the massive chest and tree branch arms” of a Runner, carefully conducts scientific experiments on mice with woorari, a toxin later disseminated in battle. This weighing of scientific literacies of biological mutualism, distinguishing the biomedical usage of poisons, and understanding the balance of medicinal and toxic qualities of flora, is a pronounced characteristic of both the Runner society of Toussaint and the douen and hinte society of New Half-Way Tree. One of Chichibud’s first lessons to Tan-Tan focuses on distinguishing between look-alike edible and poisonous plants, between, for instance, the water vine and the more dangerous jumbie dumb cane. Devil bush can poison and blister, but one who knows how to smoke it properly can acquire visions in which the plants “heal tallpeople and [they] see the voices of our own dreams” (98–99). Both the Runners who are exiled from Toussaint to New-Half Way Tree and the indigenous douen engage in what Carolyn Cooper calls “resistance science” in discussing griots and “break-aways,” famous Maroon men and women, “walk-bouts” who were “slave piknis” and resorted to poisons in battle (109–112).

  Indigenous and embedded knowledge of biological mutualism and the strong connection to Maroon societies grounded in Midnight Robber are even more transparent in The Salt Roads, a novel that portrays the interactions among diasporic African communities enslaved on a plantation and the Maroon freedom fighters who seek their liberation. Enslaved on the plantation owners’ soil, Patrice makes his way to “the bush [that] the maroon runaways had made” (95). Going on a “marronage” is the “best way to get freedom in this wicked new world” (107), but he comes back to help his people in their struggle for freedom. Even the common-place rendering of the grinding out and eating of cassava takes on potency when noting that the cassava tuber, a crop often specific to Africa, but found also in the Caribbean, has high levels of cyanide and produces lethal effects if not properly processed. Understandably, the loss of indigenous knowledge of how to process the cassava has led contemporary scientists to wield agricultural biotechnology in an effort to eradicate its toxic effects (Makinde 120). Makandal, a powerful bokor who is “wise with herbs” (Salt Roads 107), comes up with a revolutionary plan: a spread of “physickes” slipped into the bakra’s food, wine, and water through sharpened straws that are normally reserved for injecting remedies into the bloodstream (206). This narrative element reminds one that African communities had perfected the technology necessary to perform inoculations well before the usage was documented elsewhere (Brooks 157–161) but also conveys the ambiguity of a scientific literacy whose weapons “sometimes can slip and cut one’s own people” (Salt Roads 201).

  Brown Girl in the Ring depicts a pseudo-apocalyptic futuristic Toronto that has been abandoned by those wealthy enough to escape it; left without the comforts of western technologies, the remnants return to traditional indigenous farming and husbandry in order to survive. Grandmothers reclaim old memory and dispense “bush medicine” because federal, provincial, and city aid no longer exists. The state-influenced media blame the lack of civilized social services on the sovereignty efforts and land claims of the nearby Temi-Agami Anishinaabe Indians (Brown Girl in the Ring 11–13). The alternative urban Indian and diasporic Caribbean landscape imagined here depends for survival on adaptive fit and the oral transmission of knowledge to younger generations. Historical precedent is established particularly in the assiduous gathering and transmission of homemade medicines. “Among Caribbean people, bush medicine used to be something private, but living in the Burn changed all the rules” (14). The secrecy needed to ensure that those enslaved still acquired access to medical comforts is stripped under these fatalistic conditions. Secrecy is a means of survival; in the slavery days, one could get in trouble from the stories told (50). Ultimately, however, adaptive fit might not succeed. It is one thing to replace pharmaceutical products with homemade cures, but Mami’s bush doctor herbs suffer and lose their potency over the course of Toronto’s long, bitter winters, and healers can only speculate about dosages and possible side effects. Willowbark, for example, is a good painkiller, but too much quickly causes internal bleeding. Mami’s daughter Ti-Jeanne desires the commercial drugs and views her mother’s remedies as “old-time nonsense” (25–37).

  The need for adaptation and the disharmony created by neocolonial globalization practices is one subject of Hopkinson’s recent novel, The New Moon’s Arms, whose plot revolves around the menopausal magic wielded by Calamity, a middle-aged but newly made “orphan” who discovers her ability to find lost things, suggesting a metaphoric take on the self-reflection that accompanies aging. The novel’s setting (Calamity’s home) evokes the theme of globalization: Cayaba island is hypercommodifed environmentalism. Ecotourist enterprises intermingle signs such as “Welcome to Cayaba: Home of the Rare Seal Monk” with mermaid images “exotically brown but not too dark,” expensive “boo-teeks,” and a “Tourist Entrapment Zone” where imported reggae contends with the island’s indigenous tumpa music and tourists put on their best Hollywood Jamaican accent (222–223). Hidden away from this zone are the struggles of the local salt farmers and fishermen. The US-based Gilmor Saline Company has operated a salt production factory on Cayaba since 1955, along with a second factory at Dolorosse, creating artificial salt ponds next to the natural salt areas on the local coasts. The promise is extra waterbuses, a boosting of cell phone reception in the area, and increases in service on the ferry route (245). Oppositional leaders such as Caroline Sookdeo-Grant warn about accepting more financial aid from foreign multinationals when local fisherman already are in debt to the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development: “The FFWD demands that we reduce trade restrictions as a condition of lending us money. This allows foreign multinationals [. . .] to grow unchecked [. . .] forcing small farmers out of business” (246). Independent salt farms, she further states, will go under, and farmers will be forced to seek minimum wage work in the Gilmor Saline factory (246). The recognition that the FFWD along with China and other creditor banks will help Cayaba repay their past due loans, whose escalating interest charges already exceed $150 million, brings no comfort (273). The very real international globalization policies scrutinized here recall Brown Girl in the Ring, where the Ontario premier uses Anishinaabe nation-state sovereignty and land claims as a pretext for not funding inner-city needs (38–40), as do the intergalactic reshapings of Midnight Robber, where one questions how “humane” it is for “the Nation Worlds to exile their undesirables to a low tech world where they are stripped of the sixth sense that was Granny Nanny” (247).

  “Lizards in trees feed me and teach me how to be invisible”

  The Hopkinson canon strongly engages with a second component of Aboriginal scientific literacy: reciprocal altruism, a facet of learning and modeling sustainable behavior after, or along with, animal species. J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson’s recent study is an exemplary form of scholarship that intertwines a philosophical and interdisciplinary analysis of what is sometimes referred to currently as the ethnometaphysics of Aboriginal thinking of animal-people and the scientific literacy to be gleaned from careful attentivene
ss to Ojibwa narratives. Animal-people form strong attachments to human-people in Hopkinson’s stories; they range from douen/hinte as Lizard people/Packbirds to manicou rats to mermaids and mer-people to tree-frog creatures of the almond tree to monk seals. Notably, this form of ethnometaphysics can also be linked to Taino myths in a primordial world where rocks, plants, and animals can “speak” to each other, actors “can suffer transformations from one state (for example, “human”) to another (for example, plants, rocks, or animals), usually after a specific behavorial act that changes their role” (Oliver 142). In some cases in Hopkinson’s ceremonial worlds, the main characters may shape-shift into animals, such as Tan-Tan’s metamorphosis into a manicou rat (Midnight Robber 74). Similarly, at the age of 53 Calamity finds herself to be a creature of the almond tree and very much “like a tree-frog” (The New Moon’s Arms 105–106). But this is not mere simile. Calamity experiences many moments as a tree-frog throughout the novel, recalling Taino mythology that associates the feminine/women with water and that genders aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures, including frogs, as female (Oliver 153). And Makandal’s ability to be a gaulin bird while speaking in human tongue to his friends or changing into a dog is described as the Yoruban “ouanga” or changing into other beasts (Salt Roads 111). Sometimes, in moments of deep distress, the need for this shapeshifting appears to produce more permanent effects. The dada-hair lady has the power to change humans’ arms into flippers and their bodies into seals (The New Moon’s Arms 317). Her gift is diaspora. The shackled peoples about to be marketed as slaves or cannibalized by the boss-men are thus transformed and dive into the sea where they can live freely as bahari (318).

  The animal-people become strongly linked to selective methods of hunting, ones that sustain and balance the ecosystem, and to methods that preserve knowledge of migratory patterns and relocations. These features can include successful and sustainable hunting of animals, reciprocal gifts, right attitudes, genuine need, and the proper disposal of bones. In the Ojibwa tales, the animals are literally gifted with elements such as utensils, clothing, and body ornaments. Bones are respectfully returned to the element they are taken from while the animals, much like the douen and hinte in Midnight Robber, are understood to be “other-than-human-persons.” Animals receive the genuine status of personhood in the traditional Ojibwa worldview; they are capable of reason, reciprocity, revenge, and even speech (Callicott and Nelson 112–119). In Midnight Robber, the bright-green-frilled douen or Lizard-people are “jokey-looking beasts” to the tallpeople, but through the experience of Tan-Tan, we come to respect their personhood. She is taught to survive in the bush by Chichibud, whose Taino name signifies honey, sweetness, medicine, and cure (Oliver 152). Through Chichibud’s tutelage, Tan-Tan acquires the prowess necessary to kill a rolling calf, a fierce creature that only master hunters have the courage to confront (Midnight Robber 229). Tan-Tan’s adventure with the fantastical rolling calf recalls the historical cimaroon, another Spanish naming of the Maroons and Arawaks. The Arawak-Maroon Amerindians became known as expert hog-hunters, not of tame pigs but of wild boars or “hogs of the wilderness” (Mackie 28–49). Moreover, Tan-Tan’s suffering in the “The Tale of Dry Bones” incorporates the Taino/Arawak association of consuming of bones with the source of life itself and the power to create ordered life in the universe out of the deads’ bones (Oliver 147–150). The impregnation or swallowing of bones recycles eventually into renewed life and hope for guilt-burdened Tan-Tan. Dry Bones swallows greedily the food that burdened Tan-Tan must bring him, gleefully stating: “You ain’t go shake me loose until I suck out all your substance. Feed me, Tan-Tan” (Midnight Robber 201). But this “skin-and-bone man” in turn is swallowed by Master Johncrow, corbeau bird and buzzard (211) and Tan-Tan is free to journey out of Dead Duppy Town “where people go when life boof them, when hope left them and happiness cut she eye ’pon them and strut away” (198).

  The fine line between analogy (such as colonists’ analogizing of Amerindians and animals) and genuine animal-person cross-overs in these ceremonial worlds also separates rigorous “scientific” taxonomies. Monk-seals, phocids in the tropics that should not exist, “balanced on an evolutionary knife edge,” are Cayaba seals, Monarchus manachus, Mediterranean monk seals that mysteriously appear in Caribbean waters (as witnessed in The New Moon’s Arms 111–112). Evelyn cannot resist the challenge to imagine the scientific possibilities of actual mer-people. In adapting and living in the sea, one would need body fat to protect the body from cold, broad rib cages to make room for much larger lungs, hyper-developed lats and delts to help with swimming, relatively short limbs or arms, webbing between fingers and toes, and nictating membranes in the eyes (134–135).

  Her description aptly fits a young child, Agway, whose appearance begs the question: Is this a human or an animal? But a stronger thread of mystery for Calamity is the relationship between her own parents. Her mother was in the habit of disappearing into the sea for a night or two at a time until on one occasion she did not return. Years later, Calamity discovers seal fur buried in the crevasse of a particularly twisted cashew tree and must question whether her mother had always been a seal or a mermaid who finally decided to go home. The interrelatedness of the evolutionary mutant monk seals, the appearance of mermaids and mer-people on shore, and the animal-human connections echo a theme of Ojibwa stories, “cross-species sexual intercourse” or human-animal marriage (a motif also found, of course, in folklore from many parts of the world). Notably, the sex is incidental. Strengthening of communal and societal bonds between animals and humans is the main reason for their marriages, which unite families, clans, tribes, and, at a royal level, nations. A human groom often takes an animal wife, clothed in fur as in The New Moon’s Arms hybridization of human/monk seal (Ojibwa tradition often marries the human/beaver worlds). Reciprocity, respect for and proper treatment of the slain, giving goods as gifts, and exchanging horticultural and manufactured artifacts for flesh and fur ensures compliancy and happiness (Callicott and Nelson 119–121).

  “Take one, give back two”

  Consistently voiced throughout Midnight Robber, this mantra partially pertains to the restoration of a nation in danger of extermination. As in the reciprocal gift-giving exchange between animals and humans—or, more accurately, between nonhuman persons and humans—taking one and giving back two pertains to a replenishing of resources used on the trail or in the hinterland. Even the etiquette of sharing names forthrightly creates the courtesy of “trail debt” for the douen. Their world closely aligns with the Taino and Arawak Cosmos as Latin American archeologist José R. Oliver describes. Those of Taino and Arawak descent must learn how to steal, wrestle secrets through trial and error, and “learn how to make use of [cultivation, weaving, hunting, and fishing] for the benefit of mankind” (142–143). Taino tales such as the culture hero Deminán whose transgression (and yet eventual release of specific forms of knowledge of agriculture, fire and cooking) “lies in the act of stealing (food) from Yaya,” both man and the supreme being or Creator (144 and 150) parallels the Midnight Robber Queen of the Taino griot fantastical tale of Tan-Tan and her father Antonio’s exile to Kabo Tano’s world. These tales establish the expectation that Tainos “upon reaching adulthood” must be able to prepare and harvest “their own conuco (garden plot)” (Oliver 150). Thus, traditional storytelling both encourages new generations to derive “sustenance from their own efforts” and gives them instructions about how to do so (150). Kabo Tano’s eerie, surreal bush in “Tan-Tan Learns to Thief” consists of knotted up trees with twisted uproots, dangerously cold temperatures, the funny aroma of bones in the air, bark more purple than brown, and light coming through trees not yellow but red. A magic tree with cassava roots suggests the blurring into another dimension (Midnight Robber 76–82). Tan-Tan observes the manicou rat’s tactics, uses a cutlass to steal Brother Rat’s life and Brother Wild Pig’s too. In the wattle and daub of huts, learning how to hunt and trap, she must also plant and
leave portions of her hard labor to nourish the beasts of the land (89). These tactics restore this planet, Earth, which “was in a bad way”:

  All she waters brown and foul. It ain’t have no people living there, only dead fish floating on the surface of the oceans and rivers, stinking up the place. The land barren too; dry and parched. Tan-Tan and Antonio watch the sun hot up a patch of Earth so much it burst into flames. The air above Earth full with grey, oily smoke. The only thing growing was a thin, sharp grass that would cut up them feet if them not careful. The beasts of the Earth gaunt and hungry, for the grass wasn’t giving them nourishment enough. (81–82)

  Tan-Tan’s wrenching decision to chop down the Kabo Tano tree, the source of all food, and her sharing and reciprocity, giving back two for one with the beasts of this planet, transform ruined earth into the land of the New Half-Way Tree (90). She must fight instincts that belie generosity (in a desperate time of survival, who has the will to share with others?), but her acquisition of a spirit of sharing quiets the chaos of the four dimensions of the Taino/Arawak world that were unbalanced by the arid and parched Earth.

  Tests and struggles remain, however. The douen and hinte, like many Aboriginals, assume no one to be strangers but graciously lodge “guests” within the territory and typically assign them to a local family or clan for education. This thinking reflects many Native ways of articulating “communitism,” as Jace Weaver terms it, indigenous community values with the exchange and movement of “diaspora (reservation, rural village, urban, tribal, pan-Indian, traditional, Christian)” (qtd. in Pulitano 73). It underpins First Nations sovereignty struggles, both intellectual and material, as voiced by leading Native scholars such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Craig S. Womack, Gerald Vizenor, and Robert Warrior (Pulitano 59–70, 168–180). Those who give most generously and freely enjoy the strongest claims. In the branch of international law and treaty claims, the First Nations perspective simultaneously is both one of sharing and one of self-determination; it is the will, not the birthright, of Aboriginal peoples to ally with alien nations as a means of protecting Aboriginal values (Battiste and Semaganis 96–103). For example, the Tegami-Indians or Anishinaabe of Brown Girl in the Ring establish a shared territory of trust, promise, and protection; treaty federalism does not mean that the Aboriginal nation is a subject of the Crown remaining “alien” within its own land. Rather, it “walks side by side” with other established communities in the area. When the douen are thoughtlessly displaced by the Toussaint colonists who mistake them for monkeys or wasps, they must chop down their own daddy tree, their nation’s sovereign home, and disappear further into the bush. Chichibud sums up douen relations with these colonists by wondering, “Maybe your people and mine not meant to walk together, oui” (283).