Re-Imagining the Storyteller in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber

The forced coalescing of European scribal traditions with the oral traditions of displaced Africans has led to a creolized cultural space that is a shifting terrain of contested cultural expression. This terrain has yielded moments where writers textually experiment with orality in both form and content and so challenge the boundaries that might distinguish the two spaces. Discussions of the relationship between oral and written aesthetics have an extensive history in Caribbean cultural criticism, and a survey of Caribbean writers in history reveals several instances where their works have incorporated, with varying success, elements of oral folk traditions. More recently, science and speculative fiction (SF) writer Nalo Hopkinson has engaged in textual experimentation with oral forms, borrowing from the thematic repertoire of Caribbean oral traditions and integrating these elements with the features of SF. In this essay, I focus on the storyteller and the ways in which Hopkinson textually experiments with this prominent figure from Caribbean oral traditions. Using the deterritorialization/reterritorialization and rhizome formulations, proffered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I demonstrate how Hopkinson challenges the traditional representation of the storyteller and so extends and adds dimension to both the figure and the practice of storytelling. I pair Deleuzeo-Guattarian concepts with discussions offered by Caribbean critics who have written extensively about Caribbean oral folk traditions. Further, I argue that through her reimagination of important aspects of the Caribbean literary and folk traditions, Hopkinson ensures the survival of these traditions in Caribbean literary discourse while introducing general audiences to key folk figures.

Oral versus Scribal in an Afro-Caribbean Context

European dominance in the Caribbean colonial experience has resulted in the written text becoming more prominent and “acceptable” within the public sphere. This reserved the communal village gathering for the expressions of the enslaved and, later, former slaves. This dichotomy is suggested by Brathwaite’s elaboration on the oral qualities of “nation language”¹ in History of the Voice. Brathwaite’s description of nation language suggests that a great loss occurs in the writing of the nation language and highlights the relationship between the audience of an oral performance and the performer or griot:

The other thing about nation language is that it is part of what may be called total expression … Reading is an isolated, individualistic expression. The oral tradition on the other hand demands not only the griot but the audience to complete the community; the noise and the sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where meaning truly resides. And this total expression comes about because people live in conditions of poverty (“unhoused”) because they come from a historical experience where they had to rely on their very breath rather than on paraphernalia like books and museums and machines. They had to depend on an immanence, the power within themselves, rather than the technology outside themselves.²

If Brathwaite’s description here resonates with an antagonism toward the technology of the West – the paraphernalia of the book and the museums – it is largely because he is aware of the colonial devaluing of Afro-oral aesthetics. He writes at a time when a burgeoning Caribbean literature and its criticism are trying to find a balance between these two contesting forms of expression. Brathwaite stresses the importance of audience and griot interaction to complete the experience of an oral performance of nation language. In the Caribbean, the storyteller shares a similar interactive relationship with the audience, and storytelling settings have featured a call-and-response scenario where the storyteller shouts to their audience “Crick?” as though asking for permission to begin, and the audience responds in the affirmative “Crack!” Olive Senior describes this tradition as a “formulaic opening which can be perceived as forming a contract between teller and audience, a contract which has to be initiated before the story can begin,”³ and there are many variations of this call-and-response motif across the Caribbean.

An example of an oral performance that illustrates Brathwaite’s central thesis of total expression can be found in the following scenario MacEdward Leach describes during a visit to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica:

Men, women, and children were crowded into the small room and overflowed onto the narrow porch. Some squatted on the floor; some stood around the walls; children, black eyes wide, sat at their parents’ feet; the bed in the corner was loaded with women and babies All were silent, intent on the storyteller, Arthur Wyles. Mr Wyles was sixty-one, his hair white and kinky like sheep’s wool. His eyes were unforgettable – very large, very black, and remote, expressionless. He stood throughout the story, constantly moving about. First, he would be at one side of the room taking the part of Anansi; then he would jump quickly to the other and face back as he took the role of Tiger. His voice was whining and ingratiating as Anansi; his face took on a smirk; his words were given a wheedling twist. But when he became Tiger, he drew himself up stern and dignified and majestic; his voice was deep and powerful and his walk stately. This story ends with a fight between Tiger and Death. Mr Wyles, voice full of excitement, arms flailing, staged the fight, blow by blow, taking the parts alternately of Tiger and of Death. When the climax was reached and Tiger delivered the knock-out blow conquering death, the narrator over-reached himself and his clenched fists hit the door jamb a cruel blow that bloodied his knuckles. He seemed to feel nothing but went into the very realistic death throes of Brother Death. Though the audience had heard this story many times, they sat enthralled, eyes shining, audibly satisfied with the ending.⁴

This quotation capture Wyles’s energy, which exemplifies most Caribbean storytelling scenarios. A notable feature of Wyles’s performance is that his is the sole voice in the narration, and his impressions of the characters are the only ones delivered to his eager audience. He immerses himself in the roles, as Leach’s account of his fist-pounding suggests, and delivers a riveting performance which eludes a simple retelling in print. This elusion lends credence to Brathwaite’s discussion, which underscores the importance of the delivery of oral literature. Further, it highlights how much is lost when oral forms are translated to text, and that the reader of such a translation is not as engaged as if they were witnessing a performance. Brathwaite’s observations present a challenge to writers whose inheritance is both oral and scribal.

If Brathwaite’s earlier discussions of the oral and the scribal present them as contentious dichotomies, Carolyn Cooper’s critique of orality in Jamaican popular culture describes the relationship as simultaneously antagonistic and complementary. Cooper asserts that the “Jamaican [nation language], the preferred language of orality, assumes the burdens of social stigma to which practitioners of afrocentric ideology in Jamaica are continually subjected. Upward social mobility in Jamaica requires the shedding of the old skin of early socialization: mother tongue, mother culture, mother wit – the feminised discourse of voice, identity and native knowledge.”⁵ However, Cooper sees the terrain as contested, and points to twentieth-century novels by Jamaican authors (Herbert DeLisser’s Jane’s Career, Claude Mckay’s Banana Bottom, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal, and Vic Reid’s Nanny Town) which represent “experiments in form [which] inscribe the Jamaican attempt to ‘colonise’ a western literary form, adapting the conventions of the genre to accommodate orality.”⁶

Cooper’s insights offer a fluid middle ground from which to explore Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber. Cooper uses the term “scribalised oral forms”⁷ to describe texts that venture into this space. What, then, are the dynamics of this contested terrain? Useful for exploring this fluid ground is the rhizomatic principle of deterritorialization offered by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari suggest the rhizome as their alternative to what they describe as an arborescent structuring of knowledge: a tuber that can randomly sprout shoots along an even plane, creating unlikely linkages and associations, and breaking free of strictures and striations through lines of flight. The rhizome represents a heterogeneity that connects random points of knowledge and contrasts with the tree or root that plots points and fixes order.⁸ A rhizome may be broken at a given spot, but it will start up again on either old lines or new, and:

Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad.⁹

“Deterritorialization” here refers to the shattering of the boundaries of established order, the abandonment of rules which govern behavior, territory, and mores which restrict thinking. It is facilitated by lines of flight that exit territorial domains, are random, and establish unlikely connections between thought.

These ideas of unlikely linkages of thought and deterritorialization, represented in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, connect the arguments offered by Brathwaite and Cooper, and clears space for a discussion of the specific kind of scribalized orality in Midnight Robber. Brathwaite’s argument suggests that scribal and oral forms of cultural expression are at variance; Cooper suggests the relationship is more complementary. In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s narrative deterritorializes the scribal and the oral when she engages in textual and thematic experimentation. Hopkinson uses more tropes and characters from Caribbean oral traditions, as well as historical and cultural icons, the figure of the storyteller in particular, and delves deeply into the thematic repertoire of the oral aesthetic. Further, Hopkinson’s chosen genre of SF sees her experimentation taking a more radical turn than her Caribbean literary predecessors in her treatment of traditional oral forms. Her work can be read for the ways in which it forges collaboration between what Brathwaite describes as “immanence,” or the power from within (oral creativity), and a “technology” from without.

Technology from Without

In addition to the Caribbean oral folk traditions, Hopkinson also borrows elements from another literary tradition that could be considered the “technology from without” in this instance. This tradition is also fraught with discursive tensions that are comparable to the contested terrain between oral and scribal forms. John J. Pierce points to the fact that critics “have argued for decades about a definition of sf [sic], or whether it can be defined.”¹⁰ He states that critics:

even argue about its origins: One can trace detective fiction to a single story, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), but the roots of science fiction are lost in the confusion of the classical travel tale, the utopia, the satire, the gothic novel, the scientific hoax and other ur-genres, most of which survive as subgenres of sf [sic] to this very day: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ interplanetary romances, for example, are direct descendants of the classical travel tale.¹¹

Pierce goes on to describe the way in which SF has developed differing characteristics, according to the respective continental homes of its authors. In the United States he points to the influence of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, first published by the oft-described father of science fiction Hugo Gernsback, in shaping the genre’s reception. In Europe, Pierce points to the fact that SF “appeared in general adventure, travel and popular science magazines, such as Sciences et Voyages and Voyages et Aventures in France, and Worldwide Pathfinder and Adventure World in the Soviet Union.”¹² In Japan, Pierce notes, SF was “published primarily in detective magazines.”⁶

Pierce’s account of SF points to its variegated origins, locations, and nature. Carl D. Malmgren’s Worlds Apart: Narratology and Science Fiction takes the bold step of mapping a narrative structure of texts that fall within the realm of this famously nebulous genre. Malmgren states that discourse on SF rests upon a number of fundamental assumptions. The first assumption is rooted in scientific epistemology about the external world. It assumes that the world is both real and phenomenal, and that it is accessible to us through our senses.¹³ The second assumption is that SF “‘naturalizes’ or ‘domesticates’ its displacements or discontinuities” and that doing so is not simply a literary device or stylistic marker but “built into the narrative ontology of the genre,” without which SF “metamorphoses into adjacent narrative forms.”¹⁴ Further:

Working inductively, we can say that a fictional universe invariably consists of two major components or systems, roughly equivalent to the lexicon and syntax of a language – a world and a story. The former included the total repertoire of possible fictional entities, that is, the characters, settings, and objects (in SF these would have included gadgets, inventions, discoveries and so forth) that occupy the imagined space of fiction. The story connects and combines the various entities that make up the world. At an abstract level it consists of a systematic set of rules, a combinatoire, governing the order and arrangement of those entities and concatenating their interaction.⁶

Malmgren goes on to list various categories critical scholarship has used to classify SF works. He observes that there has been a tendency in critical analysis to define SF as based on story, thus, the categories used to discuss SF or to organize SF anthologies include “the voyage extraordinaire, the time travel story, the post-holocaust story, the alien encounter story, the space opera, the gadget story.”¹² Though these categories are useful in ordering the shifting boundaries of the genre, Malmgren highlights the fact that they derive more from content, while in fact the distinguishing generic feature of SF lies more with the worlds it creates. SF writers have described it, as Malmgren points out, as a “thought experiment” (Ursula LeGuin), “representational discontinuity” (Robert Scholes), and “novum: novelty, innovation” (Darko Suvin). He also quotes Samuel R. Delaney’s “has not happened”¹⁵ as identifying the mood of SF, distinguishing it from the “could have happened” and “could not have happened” associated with realism and fantasy respectively.

Elaborating on Suvin’s “novum,” Malmgren states that:

An SF world contains at least one novum, or factor of deviation from the basic narrative world, a factor which informs that world and its unfolding events. We must now examine the creation of this novum as a mental degree of “newness” or alterity of the novum, is as some critics suggest, dependent upon the kind of mental operation the author employs in generating it. The author may, for example, proceed by extrapolation, creating a fictional novum by logical projection or extension from existing actualities. Or the author may rely on the term speculation in the generation of a novum. A speculative discontinuity involves a kind of quantum leap of the imagination, itself the product of poetic vision or paralogic, toward an entirely other state of affairs.¹⁶

Malmgren’s discussion of the structure of SF texts provides us with a comprehensive method of approaching Midnight Robber as a distinct work of SF, and also as a text to be read against the grain of the Caribbean folk traditions that Hopkinson employs. It enables an understanding of how her work presents us with a quantum leap of imagination and deterritorializes the disparate elements (traditional/futurist, scribal/oral) that inform her worlds. As stated, I will concentrate on Hopkinson’s treatment of the figure of the storyteller and storytelling for her novelty innovation (novum).

Hopkinson’s Novum

In weaving her vision of the utopic/dystopic worlds of Toussaint and New Half-Way-Tree, Hopkinson relies heavily on the oral tradition of Caribbean storytelling, its associated practices, and its general thematic repertoire. She establishes and domesticates the discontinuities of the dystopian/utopian worlds and the traditional Caribbean folk elements that shape and populate her text. First, the structure of Midnight Robber follows the call-and-response motif of traditional storytelling. The narrator is in direct communication with a young, silent listener whom she addresses throughout. In the opening sequence, both the reader and the silent listener are informed about the dichotomous worlds of Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree. The former is a civilized, terraformed planet that has been populated by Caribbean descendants and which makes use of the names of iconic Black heroes and intellectuals – Garvey, Douglass, Marryshow, and Toussaint Louverture. The latter is the planet home of those who have been exiled from Toussaint for serious crimes, such as murder. The storyteller notes that Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree are similar in their geography: New Half-Way Tree remains the dub version of Toussaint, the place of the restless people, where the mongoose still runs wild, the diable bush still has poison thorns, and the mako jumbie bird still stalks the bush so tall that its head towers above houses.¹⁷ Further, Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree are separated from each other through the folds of a dimension veil, and journeying to New Half-Way Tree is a one-way trip as the prospect of return to the home planet is nonexistent.

The storyteller effectively establishes, for the reader and the silent listener, the dichotomous relationship between Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree, a duality in the personalities of the two planets which will play a significant role in the development of Tan-Tan, the protagonist. The storyteller ends her introduction of these two worlds with the sentence “New Half-Way Tree is where Tan-Tan end up, and crick-crack, this she story.”¹⁸ This action, coupled with the consistent use of nation language by the storyteller, signals Midnight Robber‘s use of oral forms through the traditional introductory call-and-response motif. It is also the first indication of Hopkinson’s novum, which deterritorializes the unfamiliar technology from without, and the familiar traditional oral element.

Another feature of the oral tradition is repeated at the end of the novel where the storyteller says, once more to her silent listener, “Call that George, the story done. Jack Mandora me nah choose none!”¹⁹ This ending is consistent with the oral practices of Jamaican storytellers, and several explanations have been offered for its meaning. Often associated with the trickster tales of Anansi, which detail his dubious methods of outsmarting his gullible friends and enemies, the expression has been used by storytellers to signal that while the storyteller is conveying the events to their audience, telling the story is not an endorsement of the trickery Anansi uses in getting his way. Laura Tanna records veteran Jamaican storyteller Louise Bennett’s explanation that “Jack Mandora” reflects a moralistic undercurrent. There is an assumption that it is necessary to check Anansi’s “wicked” influence: “At the end of the story we used to say ‘Jack Mandora me no choose none’ because Anancy sometimes did wicked things in his stories and we had to let Jack Mandora, the doorman at heaven’s door, know that we were not in favor of Anancy’s wicked ways: ‘Me no chose none’ means ‘I don’t chose to behave in any of these ways.'”²⁰ In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s use of the expression serves a similar purpose in that the storyteller remains neutral in telling her tale, but it also serves to tie Hopkinson’s SF text to Caribbean oral traditions, two categories or genres that are ontologically opposed, especially if we agree with Brathwaite’s delineation of the power within and the technology without.

Who, then, is the storyteller? Hopkinson fashions her storyteller after the historical figure of Granny Nanny, leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons. A Jamaican national hero, Granny Nanny, or sometimes “Grandy Nanny” or “Queen Nanny,” is known for her wise and strong leadership of the Windward Maroons in their campaign against the British. Laura Tanna’s record of oral accounts of Nanny’s elevated status is evidenced in this interview with Colonel C.L.G Harris, native and leader of Moore Town maroons in Portland Jamaica:

Nanny was our greatest leader. In fact, the Maroons of Moore Town speak of her endearingly as “Grandy Nanny.” Of course that “Grandy” there is just a corruption of the word Granny, Grandmother, and I say that’s a term of endearment.

I want to say that no dissertation can be given on the Maroons without mention of Nanny because I feel that she was greatest of all our heroes and perhaps that’s why the women of Mooretown are regarded as leaders in their own right, because Nanny was a woman and was one of the greatest people in our history … so many places in Portland Valley Nanny made her presence felt to the British army. One of the great things with her was that she was not only a military leader but was also a priestess. She had powers science couldn’t explain.²¹

Brathwaite’s works on Nanny as hero support the reference Harris makes to Nanny’s status as a priestess and, more importantly, as a woman leader. Citing the research of Eva Mayerowitz on ohemaas (female kings) of the Akan and Ashanti cultures from which the Maroons are descended, Brathwaite notes that, “like the Ashanti ohemaas Juaben Sewa and Yaa Asantewa, Nanny exercised her right to take over the full power of the state at a time of crisis and like the Ashanti queen mothers, actually according to Maroon tradition, led troops into battle.”²² Further:

Nanny both physically as priestess and metaphorically as queen mother, not only contributed important inputs of personal leadership to her embattled group but by miraculously keeping alive and adapting to the new conditions the survival rhythms of her past homeland, helped make it possible for her own group to survive with dignity and some respect from the other; but, by her victorious presence in and through the groups, helped to make it possible for African culture itself to survive in a hostile slave and materialist culture, instead of being eradicated, was able to survive in the complex and unique “creole” culture of our time.²³

A priestess, a warrior, a leader, and queen mother, Nanny is a complex symbolic figure in written and oral Jamaican history. Nanny has also served as muse for writers such as Louise Bennett, who references her capacity to “teck her body and bounce bullet back pon man”²⁴ in the poem “Jamaica Oman,” signaling her mythic qualities and the rumors of the supernatural that were associated with her ability to avert the guns and cannons of the British, and for Lorna Goodison in “We are the Women,”²⁵ where Nanny becomes a metaphor for feminine wisdom.

Hopkinson, in electing to use Nanny as inspiration for her storyteller, joins with other Caribbean writers and historians who revere Nanny as a historical persona. Where Hopkinson diverges, however, is in the execution of her novum, her fusion of the recognizable figure of Granny Nanny, Queen of the Maroons, with the alien constructs of the SF tradition. She does this first by creating, in the image and likeness of Nanny, an artificial intelligence based on nanotechnology which she names the Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface: Granny Nanny Web. The Marryshow corporation seeded Toussaint by plunging the nanomites into the Earth “like God entering the woman; plunging into the womb of the soil to impregnate the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny,”²⁶ “her hands and her body.”²⁷ The nanomite system of Granny Nanny Web pervades every inch of the Nation Worlds, converting them into one enormous data-gathering system that constantly exchanges information and monitors, guards, and protects its people. The inhabitants are connected to the system via nanomite bugs, which are implanted in the ear of each newborn in liquid form, and which congeal and harden over time. The link between the inhabitants of Toussaint and the Granny Nanny Web is the artificial intelligent messenger, or eshu, whose tasks are multiform, and who travels between the inhabitants of Toussaint and the Granny Nanny Web.

One important role the Granny Nanny Web assumes is that of repository for ancestral knowledge of the inhabitants of Toussaint, descendants of Earth. Each year during Jonkanoo Season “all of Toussaint would celebrate the landing of the Marryshow corporation nation ships that had brought their ancestors to this planet two centuries before.”²⁸ The festival was a time to “give thanks to Granny Nanny for the Leaving Times, for her care, for life in this land, free from downpression and botheration” and where “tout monde would find themselves home with family to drink red sorrel and eat black cake and read from Marryshow’s Mythic Revelations of a New Garveyite: Sing Freedom Come.”⁶

The description of the festival, and the fact that even two centuries after settlement the inhabitants of Toussaint still revere and celebrate their ancestry, demonstrates the strong cultural link that the Granny Nanny Web maintains, through her database, between her inhabitants and their cultural past. Another example of this occurs when young Tan-Tan, unhappy with the rift between her mother Ione and her father Antonio, finds solace in playing Midnight Robber and receives from her eshu lessons and images about past Carnivals on Earth:

The mirrored wall opaqued into a viewing screen. The room went dark. Tan-Tan sat on the floor to watch. A huge stage appeared on the screen, with hundreds of people in the audience. Some old-time soca was playing. A masque King costume came out on stage; one mako big construction, supported by one man dancing in its traces. It looked like a spider, or a machine with claws for grasping. It had a sheet of white cotton suspended above its eight wicked-looking pincers. It towered a good three metres above the man who was wearing it, but he danced and pranced as though it weighed next to nothing.

“The Minshall Mancrab,” eshu told Tan-Tan. “Minshall made to be king of his band ‘The River’ on Earth, Terran calendar 1983.”²⁹

In this scene, the eshu gives Tan-Tan with information about her ancestry, which captures the work of the world-renowned band designer Peter Minshall, strengthening Tan-Tan’s cultural identity through this history lesson. This Granny Nanny Web-provided link to the cultural past on Earth will prove crucial to Tan-Tan’s survival after she transitions to the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree.

In addition to being the source of life for the Nation Worlds and providing information for its inhabitants, Granny Nanny Web also protects her people. Her nanomite-based technology allows her to be omnipresent, monitoring every movement within the society, the only exception being the pedicab runner communities, who have declared that it is their religious right to use only headblind or nannite-free items. While this all-seeing-eye quality leads to a considerable loss of privacy – as Hopkinson describes it, “a Marryshevite couldn’t even take a piss without the toilet analyzing the chemical composition of the urine and logging the data in health records”²⁷ – the Granny Nanny Web, much like the real Granny of the Maroons in her status as Ashanti ohemaa, protects and guards her inhabitants. She intervenes to prevent crimes but remains flexible enough to allow the pedicab runners their religious autonomy.

Much as the original Nanny’s capability of “miraculously keeping alive and adapting to the new conditions the survival rhythms of her past homeland, which helped make it possible for her own group to survive with dignity and some respect,”³⁰ the Granny Nanny Web is also able to evolve for the protection of her charges. When Tan-Tan is abducted and taken to New Half-Way Tree, the Granny Nanny Web, temporarily disconnected from Tan-Tan as she passes through the dimension veil, is able, after some time, to “figure out the calibration” and instruct the nanites in Tan-Tan’s blood to migrate to the growing tissue of Tan-Tan’s unborn child. Consequently, the unborn child is able to “feel nannysong” as her “whole body becomes one living connection with the Grande Anansi Nanotech Interface.”³¹ As it turns out, the unborn child is the silent listener who receives the story of Tan-Tan along with the reader. This miraculous technological adjustment made by the Granny Nanny Web is comparable to the supernatural exploits associated with Nanny of the Maroons as she fought to protect the livelihood of her people. By altering the biology of the unborn child through her nanites, the Granny Nanny Web is able to ensure a strong sense of identity in the unborn child, through knowledge of her mother’s life story of struggles and triumphs as well as stories of her ancestors on Earth. The child’s entire being is now one with the knowledge of Granny Nanny Web’s database and, as such, is much more connected with Granny Nanny Web than the inhabitants of Toussaint. She is also consequently much more connected with her people’s cultural identity. This rewrite calls to mind Donna J. Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in which Haraway’s interest in “holding incompatible things together” posits the image of the cyborg, “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as creature of fiction,”³² as an alternative to the dualisms which restrict feminine subjectivity in the late twentieth century, an age of unprecedented technological growth. It also demonstrates Hopkinson’s novum in the way she borrows elements from Caribbean oral folk traditions and SF literary traditions and integrates them in her texts, deterritorializing these two discreet categories in her presentation of the storyteller.

Conclusion

Through this feat, Midnight Robber blurs the boundaries between the traditional figure of the storyteller and the SF elements evident in Hopkinson’s novum. Hopkinson’s alien construct of an artificial intelligence system based on extremely advanced nanotechnology (with its cold, nonhuman, robotic qualities) and the organic resonance of Granny Nanny of the Maroons deterritorializes both the traditional oral form of storytelling and the storyteller and the SF technology from without. Brathwaite presents a strong case for the loss that occurs when oral texts are translated to the page. I acknowledge this loss, but I agree with Cooper’s observation of the contested terrain between oral forms and written texts and link her observation of a “contested terrain” to Deleuze and Guattari’s construct of deterritorialization. Oral forms are immortalized in the text, and the technology of the text is transformed by folk imagination.

Hopkinson thus accomplishes what Olive Senior predicts in her response to Marlene Glaiser’s question as to the longevity of Anansi stories: “I think there is an evolution taking place. Maybe Anancy stories are no longer told to children, but they won’t die out, because they are now being recorded in books, they are on tapes, they are on videos … they are being preserved in book form – they are no longer part of the oral tradition as such. But I don’t think they will be totally lost.”³³

The discussion of Hopkinson’s novum and use of the storyteller highlights the ways in which she is able to experiment with the oral forms of her literary inheritance, ensuring the evolution of which Senior speaks. Hopkinson extends the dimensions of the storyteller, providing a twenty-first-century upgrade to this traditional figure.

1. “Nation language” is a term Brathwaite uses to describe the form of English language spoken in the Caribbean that is not the officially sanctioned English language but is rather the African influenced language spoken by descendants of the enslaved. [↩]
2. Kamau Brathwaite, A History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984), 18–19. [↩]
3. Olive Senior, “Lessons from the Fruit Stand: or Writing for the Listener,” Journal of Modern Literature 20 (1996): 39–40. [↩]
4. MacEdward Leach, “Problems of Collecting Oral Literature,” PMLA 77, no. 3 (June 1962): 336, http://www.jstor.org /stable/460494. [↩]
5. Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Education, 1993), 3. [↩]
6. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
7. Ibid., 4. [↩]
8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2007), 7. [↩]
9. Ibid., 9. [↩]
10. John J. Pierce, Odd Genre: A Story in Imagination and Evolution (London: Greenwood, 1994), 4–5. [↩]
11. Ibid., 5. [↩]
12. Ibid., 7. [↩] [↩]
13. Carl D. Malmgren, Worlds Apart: Narratology and Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4–5. [↩]
14. Ibid., 6. [↩]
15. Ibid., 8. [↩]
16. Ibid., 11–12. [↩]
17. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (New York: Aspect, 2000), 2. [↩]
18. Ibid., 3. [↩]
19. Ibid., 329. [↩]
20. Laura Tanna, Jamaican Folktales and Oral Narratives (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1984), 31. [↩]
21. Ibid., 19. [↩]
22. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wars of Respect: Nanny and Sam Sharpe (Kingston: Agency for Public Information, 1977), 15. [↩]
23. Ibid., 17–18. [↩]
24. Louise Bennett, “Jamaica Oman,” in Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, eds. Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62–5.
    Lorna Goodison, “We Are the Women,” in I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon, 1986), 12–13. [↩]
25. Lorna Goodison, “We Are the Women,” in I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon, 1986), 12–13. [↩]
26. Hopkinson, Midnight Robber, 2. [↩]
27. Ibid., 10. [↩] [↩]
28. Ibid., 18. [↩]
29. Ibid., 29. [↩]
30. Brathwaite, Wars of Respect, 17. [↩]
31. Hopkinson, Midnight Robber, 328. [↩]
32. Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Fiona Hovenden et al. (London: Routledge, 2000), 50–7. [↩]
33. Marlise Glaiser, “A Shared Culture: An Interview with Olive Senior,” Matatu 12, Caribbean Writers between Orality and Writing, eds. Marlies Glaser and Marion Pausch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 77–84. [↩]