A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson

Speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson was born in 1960 in Jamaica, spent much of her youth in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and has lived in Toronto since the mid-1970s. She had early exposure to Afro-Caribbean lore and European classical literature, partly due to her being the daughter of Guyanese writer and actor Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson.

Hopkinson made her literary debut when she won the Warner Aspect First Novel competition in 1998 for Brown Girl in the Ring, a work that has now been translated into French under the title La Ronde des Esprits. Her second novel Midnight Robber, a futuristic tale that delves deeply into Caribbean legend and folklore, showcases her gift for blending various creoles with conventional English. Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction is an anthology of fiction that features the work of acclaimed and emerging writers in addition to one of Hopkinson's own tales. Skin Folk, a collection of Hopkinson's short fiction, was released in 2001, and recently won the World Fantasy Award. Her forthcoming novel, Griffonne, will be available in August 2003.

The following interview was conducted during the spring and summer of 2001 by telephone and e-mail; it mainly focuses on Hopkinson's creative community, her writing process and her artistic awakening.

WATSON-AIFAH: What made your parents choose to leave the Caribbean to move to Canada?

HOPKINSON: My father had chronic kidney failure, and he was on dialysis. Daddy was working for the Guyanese government at the time, and they recognized that the kidney failure was killing him. Whenever he got ill, they would have to airlift him to Trinidad for treatment, and a couple of times he nearly didn't make it. What happened was that the Guyanese government made my father a diplomat and sent him here, because Canada has excellent treatment for this condition. I'm very aware of what a privilege that was for him, and so was he. He came to their attention because of the work he had done as an actor, poet, and playwright on an international stage. Other people in Guyana with his condition were dying of it, because there was no treatment available there.

WATSON-AIFAH: What lessons did your father teach you about craft?

HOPKINSON: He taught me to keep working at it. I still haven't learned that lesson completely. On his deathbed he was working on a poem, so he taught me obsession, I would think. He would do things like take the family to a city in Ontario called Stratford, named after the Stratford in the UK. It is a place that runs plays all through the year. It specializes in Shakespearean plays, but it produces others as well. My father would take us up to Stratford in the summer, and as we were driving he'd have his copy of whatever Shakespearean production we were going to see. He'd re-read the lines in the car on the way up while my mother drove. He already knew many of them by heart, because he'd acted in them, but he would still crib when we were on the way to the performances.

He taught me to have reverence for words and story, how the two flow together. And both my parents gave me a love of books. Between my father the playwright, poet and actor, and my mother who still works in libraries, we had a house full of books and more entering all the time. Neither of them censored what I read. I could take anything off the shelves.

WATSON-AIFAH: Is your mother a librarian?

HOPKINSON: She's a semi-retired library technician. She catalogues books. I'm very careful about the distinction, since a lot of my friends are librarians, and they tend to be touchy about the difference. Librarians have master's degrees, while library technicians don't have to.

WATSON-AIFAH: What dreams did you have for yourself and the...