Mikanhana: We are
joined today by Nalo Hopkinson, science fiction author and editor. Welcome,
Nalo.
Nalo Hopkinson:
Hi.
M: Thank you so much
for joining us today. You grew up in the Caribbean and moved to Toronto, Canada
when you were a teenager and recently relocated to California. Can you talk
about what the biggest challenge was adapting to those cultural shifts?
NH: Well, I was
born in Jamaica, lived in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana, a little bit in the
West when my dad was going to Yale, in Connecticut, then moved to Canada when I
was 16 and I think, in the interim, I had forgotten winter.
M: (laughs)
NH: Because when
you’re 5, it’s…
M: “Ooh, fun, snow!”
NH: Sort of…snow
and cold but 11 years later, you forget just how profoundly cold…I had prepared
for winter, I thought. The first Toronto winter…I sew, so I went out and bought
some wool and made a pair of pants.
M: Sure.
NH: I thought
“Wool is warm!” I bought wool jersey, which is the equivalent of making a pair
of pants out of t-shirt material…
M: (laughs)
NH: …and went
outdoors the first time the weather hit freezing and my bones froze. I just
could not believe it could get *that* cold. So that was a big shift, but then I
did 35 years in Toronto, moved to southern California just about 4 years ago
and now it’s full-on desert.
M: Sure.
NH: Which means
it sort of looks like where I came from, but the palm trees have the wrong
fruit on them, the lizards are the wrong color, and yes, there’s sand, but
where I come from, if you’re near the beach and sand and there’s holes in the
sand…there’s crabs in there, not snakes or gophers. (laughs) So, you keep
having these moments of dissonance…”Wait, there’s not a beach around the corner”
because sand means ‘beach’ to me. “We’re in the desert”. That’s different.
“Don’t poke anything down that hole. Dinner’s not coming out of there.”
M: (laughs) You’ve
been teaching at the University of California-Riverside since 2011…how has
teaching affected your own work?
NH: Well, I’ve
been teaching from the beginning, since I started being published. This is a
regular teaching gig, which has its own effects. Because I was lucky enough to
be given tenure just off the bat, it means that my teaching load is reasonable,
quite reasonable, so I find it additive more than anything else because I know
where my next meal is coming from and I’ve spent a few years not doing that.
So, it’s all good.
M: (laughs)
NH: Students are
amazing and UC-Riverside students are particularly amazing and I don’t think a
lot of them realize it. It’s a university that’s one of the more diverse
universities in the country. For instance, a couple of years ago, I wanted to
teach the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky
which is made up of words which Carroll invented. I was talking about how to
make words up so I wanted to show it to them in different languages and at first
I tried picking languages I knew I could muddle through. But then I thought,
“Wait a minute; a 72 person class…I can just pick any language I want and
somebody in the class will be able to read it!”
M: (laughs)
NH: So, I took in
a stack and said, “Who speaks German? Who speaks Korean? Who speaks Urdu?” and
had them read it out and explain how the made up words were working. It’s
glorious.
M: That’s got to be
kind of freeing, too, to be able to have all that different cultural
background…
NH: Yes.
M: …and just a great
learning experience for everyone.
NH: It is
wonderful.
M: You’ve spoken
about how you have Non-verbal Learning Disorder as well as Attention Deficit
Disorder…how has that helped or hindered your work?
NH: On top of
that, I have Fibromyalgia, which is why I’m moving a little slowly today…you
get moments with all three of brain fog or things you knew five seconds ago are
gone forever. But along with Non-verbal Learning Disorder comes high verbal
ability…
M: Right.
NH: …so words and
story make a lot of sense to me in ways that it’s hard to explain. There’s that
advantage: I can turn the hell out of a phrase.
M: (laughs)
NH: The
disadvantage with something like ADD is, of course, I don’t like to do anything
twice. So the sitting down and making yourself write once it becomes a job is
very difficult to do and I’ve had to find ways to convince my brain that this
is still fun, to tell it that “you don’t have to sit here for 17 hours, you can
write a sentence and then get up and walk away”. In science fiction, we like to
boast about what our daily word count is so I like to go the other way. “I
wrote a sentence. It was a good sentence.” (laughs)
M: Sometimes I feel
like when you’re given fewer things to work with it makes it more challenging
but it also makes it more creative.
NH: Yeah. My
brain isn’t balking as much; it’s not saying “Oh, my God, I can’t deal. There’s
too much!” I write a sentence…I can write another sentence!
M: (laughs) Right!
NH: Woo-hoo!
M: Small victories!
NH: Exactly!
M: (laughs) A lot of
your work is inspired by poetry and song…could you talk about how you take an
idea from an established work and create your own out of that?
NH: Come to think
of it…I do use poetry and song a bit…I use folklore a lot…
M: Yes.
NH: My last
novel, there were a couple of songs in there that were actually songs that I
dreamt. Every so often I dream 3 or 4 lines of a song complete with a tune.
M: And you’re able to
recall that when you wake up?
NH: I’m singing
it when I wake up.
M: That’s amazing!
NH: So a couple
of them are mine, but with pre-existing material like folklore and ballads, the
trick is to not retell the story but to tell your own story and find the piece
of folklore or ballad that has reflections of it, that resonates, or to tell it
in a new way. One of the first times I did that, it was a writing assignment by
Pat Murphy when I was still at Clarion studying and it was to write “The Beast
with the Heart of Gold”. I thought, “Who’s a ‘beast’ that we think of as evil?”
and I came up with Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf
and I ended up writing the Little Red Riding Hood story not from the point of
view of the Wolf so much but from the point of view of the grandmother. Because
the grandmother’s story never gets told and I thought there were hidden depths
there. I ended up making this weird sort of almost…I don’t want to say *love*
relationship because it is abusive, but the Wolf comes to represent a sexual
coming of age. That’s a difficult thing but it’s a thing that happens to
everybody. So the grandmother and the Wolf have this relationship where he was
her sexual coming of age; he’s sort of an archetype.
M: Right.
NH: So you tell
the story or you take the story apart and you find the things in it that are
the most disturbing…
M: (laughs) Or the
most interesting!
NH: …writing a
sexy story about a grandmother and a wolf who tried to kill her. (laughs)
M: According to your
bio in the Nerdcon: Stories program, you’re currently working on Nancy Jack, a graphic novel. Can you
give us a brief synopsis of that and also, are you a comic book fan in general?
NH: Yes; I do
like comic books. I don’t much read the Big Two anymore; I like graphic novels
more than comic books, but I don’t make a difference between them. I do read a
fair number of them. Nancy Jack has
been percolating in my head for about 15 years now…and my synopsis hasn’t…
M: (laughs)
NH: …but,
basically, I have a creature working on the railroad in the US between the two
wars as a porter, because he looks like a black man. What he *is* is a creature
from West African folklore called an adze who looks like a ball of fire in his
natural form. He can become something that looks human to come into villages
and towns and feed on blood. His village, the village he thought of as his
flock (in the most disturbing way you can think of), was taken in slavery 500
years ago. So he followed them because they’re “his”. So now, you have a ball
of fire travelling on the ocean to follow these human beings…he’s kept track of
them and of people with the same bloodline (because he can read blood) by
becoming a porter on the railroad. So that’s how he keeps track of the
descendants of his flock and he’s starting to kind of lose it. Imagine a
creature that we would already think of as over-the-top, because he’s a
predator…now, he’s going a little crazy.
M: That sounds really
fascinating. I have to check that out.
Kaliban: What’s your
favorite graphic novel or something good that you read lately?
NH: There are a
couple I like…Le Chat du
Rabbin (The Rabbi’s Cat) by Joann Sfar. He’s a Moroccan-French artist and
he has four books about the cat of a rabbi living in Morocco at a time when’s
there’s lots of pogroms against the Jews. There’s a cat and a parrot living in
the house with the rabbi (the cat’s telling the story) and the cat says “the parrot
is stupid but it can speak; I have brains but I can’t talk” and it goes on from
there. That’s one of my favorites. Also, Bayou
by Jeremy Love, he started by winning an award, I believe through DC, to have
his comic made as an online comic and later to be published. It’s got two in
the series, based on the folklore of the American South. It’s a story of a
little black girl whose father has been arrested and is probably going to be
lynched and she’s trying to save him. But it’s infused with all these
humanized…Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear, creatures from the American South and
it’s beautiful and it’s terrible and it’s gorgeous…it’s just lovely,
lovely…he’s got two stories in the series and people who love it are waiting
for the third.
M: I
briefly looked at a blog post that you wrote about the first two Blade films…I, too, am a Blade fan…
NH:
(laughs) Excellent!
M:
(laughs) Do you want to discuss that at all? Would you like to see another
Wesley Snipes Blade film?
NH:
It would be hard, because what they did with the third one was to make him into
a mythical creature…
M:
Right.
NH:
So he zooms off on his motorbike…he barely speaks through the whole thing…I
gather there might have been contractual problems…
K:
Online, there’s a very interesting…the comedian Patton Oswalt worked on the
movie and…I don’t know if it’s tweets or a blog post, but it’s his story about
what it was like to make that film, because at that point Wesley was having a
lot of trouble with the government and just not taking it seriously and it’s a
hilarious story about how they basically pieced this film together *around* the
absence of Wesley Snipes because he wasn’t really into it.
NH:
Yeah, you can tell and when the director said “I’ve made him mythical”, that’s
exactly what happened but when you realize *why* that is…no, I think the series
is over…
M: OK.
NH:
…as that particular vehicle for Wesley Snipes. I think it became a vehicle
potentially for the other actors in the third, Ryan Reynolds and Jessica whose
surname I never get right…
K:
Jessica Biel. (ed. note: HUGE
surprise Kal got that one)
NH:
…Jessica Biel and Parker Posey. I mean that third movie was all hotness, all
the time. (laughs) (ed. note: nevermind,
Kal; you’re in good company)
M:
(laughs)
NH:
And then there’s *another* beautiful person on the screen not wearing very
much! But the character of Blade as he gets characterized in the movies has
always interested me because what you’ve got is a biracial vampire…he’s black
and he’s a vampire, he hates the vampire side so it becomes almost a metaphor
for hating his blackness. The way he gets over it is basically to become a drug
addict…and so you have these metaphors working their way through and in each
movie, it seemed to me, defining evil as a different thing. In the first movie,
evil was young club kids; that’s how they characterized the vampires. In the
second movie, the vampires have their own cultural consciousness and Blade’s
problem is that he’s not down with the program. He’s got this internalized
racism going on that he can’t see the power of vampires as a community. You can
keep mapping it onto blackness. So, Blade’s not a good black man…(laughs) He
just doesn’t seem to like himself…and all the reasons why that happens are
playing, at least in my mind, to that. He meets the perfect vampire girl and he
has to kill her…like, how horrible is that?
M:
Yeah…
NH:
...and the vampires become this metaphor for vagina dentata in the second one, there’s teeth and teeth and
teeth…
M:
(laughs)
NH:
In the third one, even the Pomeranian is a vampire! That line where Ryan
Reynolds says “You made a vampire Pomeranian!?” (laughs) I find when I go to
that kind of stuff, which is pop culture as a funhouse mirror on what we think
about things we really should be thinking about more deeply, I find it
fascinating for that, just what it reveals about us or about the larger
culture, what we think are acceptable themes and stories or how our own
conscious fears get worked through…how you take this vampire creature, who is
part black, and you completely disappear him for reasons that have to do with
contracts…
M:
Right.
NH:
…but the way you deal with it in the story is to make him actually go away
after having killed half his race.
K: And
then white heroes and a white Dracula jump in and…
NH:
Yeah and…y’know…hot (laughs) but…I’m not hatin’.
K: If
they were to do a reboot and I’m sure they will pretty soon…would you have a
pick for someone to play Blade or a direction you’d like the series to go?
NH:
It’s hard to say, because I don’t read the comics much…I discovered the comics
after the film; I went back and read one of the early comics and thought “eh…”
(laughs)
K:
They’re definitely rooted in a…I mean, the whole character is rooted in that
70’s blacksploitationesque kind of thing…
NH:
Yeah.
K:
…and there’s never really been a really good run on Blade, I don’t think, just
because he exists as that sort of token character and that’s something that…now
I’m getting on my Comics Soapbox™…
NH:
(laughs)
K:
…that’s something that I would like to see. They made him so popular; it’s
really one of the first real Marvel movies. I’d like to see them do a serious
take on it. They tried to take on Luke Cage and did him pretty well; I’d like
to see someone really get behind Blade.
NH:
Yeah yeah yeah! They’ve done it with the Hulk; they kept rebooting him until
they got it right…
K:
(laughs)
NH:
…and because I don’t any longer read Marvel and DC stuff, I don’t have a
problem with them breaking the way the story worked. A lot of times those
stories were made by people that were younger artists, the medium was younger,
the stories weren’t very well told!
K:
There was the pressure to do them every month, continually…
NH:
Yeah, exactly, and so there’s lots of richness there that can be explored by
breaking away from the kinds of stuff that fans often complain about, “it’s not
authentic”…well, I kind of like when they remake the stories. “Authentic” is
what the director wants to make it. So, I see a Blade that thinks about himself
more.
K:
(laughs) That’s not a characteristic that he has! He’s not gonna ice-skate
uphill…
NH:
(laughs) No; I love him kicking butt and taking no prisoners. As the CGI got
better, staking vampires just became more and more fun! But I’d also like him
to every so often stop and take a minute.
M:
(laughs)
NH:
“I just killed off my whole race…what else…” There’s gotta be something more
than just messing up every vampire…
M:
(laughs)
NH:
…just because a vampire ate your momma once.
M: Thank
you so much for joining us today, Nalo. It’s been such a pleasure. Where can
people find you online?
NH: I am
nominally at nalohopkinson.com. I am more often on Twitter @nalo_hopkinson.
That would be the best place to find me.
M: Thank you so much!
NH: Thank you!
(ed. note: we went on
for another 10 minutes after the mics shut off talking more Blade, his adoption
of Eastern philosophy and practices and the idea of the Daywalker’s ‘passing privilege’
among humans. If Marvel is looking for a comics or screenwriter for a new Blade
project, I know who I’d send them to!)
Nalo can be found at http://www.nalohopkinson.com
on the web and @Nalo_Hopkinson on Twitter. Nancy
Jack is currently in development; check out nalohopkinson.com for updates.
Nalo’s latest books, The Salt Roads and Falling in Love with Hominids
can be found on Amazon.com.
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