Novelists From Jamaica

"When you talk about women writers in the Caribbean, I would say she would be up on top, and second to nobody...An exceptional woman."

"I think what happens is as with any form of oppression the people most concerned with or think about it the most deeply are the people most negatively affected by it."

"Science fiction and fantasy are about looking at the world through a different lens. So whatever I write, including sex scenes, I may first think, how can I cause myself, and the reader, to see this differently? What can I do to challenge, delight, surprise, unsettle?"

"When I write, I want to present as wide a spectrum as I can of the ways in which people can choose to behave sexually and in relationships, and I like representing those where possible as visible, acceptable behaviors. Because they should be, and because science fiction is about conceiving new possibilities. So yes, I find I'm constantly resisting both monoliths and binaries because I find them limiting for myself. It took a while for me even to be able to understand myself as queer, because monoliths and binaries obscured me from seeing it. Gay/straight/bisexual are all important to represent, but they aren't the only possible axes along which to sort human sexual attraction."

"Science fiction is and has been ripe to discuss other possibilities for sex and relationships: multiple marriages, communal structures, different genders. Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Lynn, Nicola Griffith, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Candas Jane Dorsey, Eleanor Arnason, Storm Constantine have been my touchstones."

"Sexuality gets binarized too often. Not only do I resist the idea of one form of sexuality, but the assumption that there are only two forms, and you do one, the other, or both, and those are the only possible behaviors. It sometimes seems to me-and perhaps whimsically so-that the people who are courageously non-normative in their sexualities are doing in the real world some of the work that speculative fiction can do in the world of the imagination, that is, exploring a wider range of possibilities for living."

"I hope that my vanilla and het sex scenes are graphic and explicit, too! I write. It's an art form. Why would I make the effort to describe a meal or a sunset in a way that's detailed and responds to all the senses, but not do so for a sex scene? Why are "graphic" and "explicit" good in descriptions of walking through a field of lavender in full bloom, but not for a character coming so hard that his eyes roll back in his head?"

"Every time I put my work out into the public, I risk putting something out there based in my unexamined and unrecognized assumptions. That's part of the game."

"people will love each other, no matter what circumstances they are in."

"Science fiction as a literature probably helped to save my life. I suspect I would have self-destructed without it, and without the people I have met because of it. So even when I'm critical of it, I'm very happy that it's here."

"Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn't endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed."

"When I hear a (usually white and usually male) writer trying to shut down a discussion about representation by bellowing that no one should tell him what to write, it sounds very much as though he's trying to change the topic, to make it all about him. To him I'd say: Why not try to further the discussion, rather than trying to, um, censor it? What do you think needs to be done in order to make publishing more representative? Nothing, you say? The doors are already open but we just won't come in? Women, Black people (and purple polka-dotted meerkats) actually "just don't write much science fiction"? Or their books are "only relevant to their communities" (which is often code for "those people are incapable of producing anything of real literary merit")? Funny, how every one of those statements boils down to not being willing to change the status quo. You do realize that you're even drowning out the white voices amongst you that are trying to make some changes along with the rest of us? You do realize that a more representative literary field would be representative of all of us, yourself included?"

"To certain white male writers, I'd like to say, "When those around you try to wrestle with issues of entitlement and marginalization, please don't give us the tired trumpeting of 'Censorship! No one can tell me what to write!" True, people shouldn't tell you what to write, but people will try to, for bad reasons and better ones. Your mother will try to tell you what to write or not write. Your husband will. Your editor, your government, your church, your readers, your nosy neighbor. Humans are an argumentative lot. Dealing with that as a writer comes with the territory."

"Science fiction and fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It's something I love about them."

"Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you'll find stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them once they get under their own skins-they can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively."

"Folktales are great for learning dynamic storytelling and how to structure the resonant echoes that give a plot forward motion. It wouldn't be the last time that I modeled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I've discovered that it doesn't matter whether your readers recognize the folktale. It may not even matter whether the folktale is real, or one you invented. What matters is that it has structure, echoes, trajectory, and style."

"The title's sort of the distilled version of what the story wants to be. Before I quite know what the story is, the title whispers hints to me."

"(You once said, "Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress." OK, then what is it?) NH: It's what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction."

"mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simpleminded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say "de" instead of "the.""

"Particularly when I speak at schools, people in the audience want to know whether there are going to be films of my books. Myself, I'm more jaundiced. I've seen what can happen when text-based science fiction gets zombified by Hollywood. Look at what happened to Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic""

"There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favorite writers. Some of them think this means that they're not prejudiced. I don't know anyone who isn't, myself included. But let's just say for argument's sake that those particular readers in fact are not prejudiced. How many books by writers of color do you think you'll find on their bookshelves? I'd lay odds that if there are any at all, they will be far outnumbered by the books by white authors. Not necessarily because those readers are deliberately choosing mostly white/male authors. They don't have to. The status quo does it for them. So those readers' self-satisfied "I don't know" is really an "I don't care enough to look beyond my nose." And that's cool. So many causes, so little time. But don't pretend that indifference and an unwillingness to make positive change constitute enlightenment. If you truly want to be a colorblind, unprejudiced reader, you can't do so from a place of being racism-blind, or you'll never have the diverse selection of authors you say you'd like. Why get pissed off at people who are fighting for the very thing you say you want? Yet I don't think there's some conspiracy of evil racist editors. There doesn't have to be. The system has its own momentum. In order to be antiracist, you actually have to choose to do something different than the status quo. People who're trying to make positive change (editors and publishers included) have a hell of a battle. Fighting it requires a grasp of how the complex juggernaut of institutionalized marginalization works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down."

"A lot of the time, all I'm trying to do is put some of my specific ethnocultural touchstones into science fiction and fantasy. When white writers do that, it's barely remarked-upon. And sometimes it should be, because it's often wonderful."

"There are those who fear that if books get published according to some kind of identity-based quota system, literary excellence will suffer. What seems to be buried in the shallow grave of that concept is the assumption that there are no good writers in marginalized communities."

"I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he's forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S. P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me."

"Indigenous scientific literacies play key roles throughout Nalo Hopkinson's works. The excerpt from Midnight Robber introduces the practice in its simplest guise: a child comes under the tutelage of an Indigenous mentor who begins teaching her the science of survival, emphasizing the practical, day-to-day transmission of generational knowledge."

"What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean."

"When Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson burst on to the science fiction scene with Brown Girl in the Ring in 1998, she seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated interest in Black science fiction (SF). Afrofuturism had not caught fire at this point, but Hopkinson did. She grabbed the attention of the SF community with her Caribbean-inspired science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Hopkinson represents the obvious first link in Octavia Butler's legacy."

"No one can make me give up the writing I love that's by straight, white, Western male (and female) writers, but at a certain point, I began to long to see other cultures, other aesthetics, other histories, realities, and bodies represented in force as well. There was some. I wanted more. I wanted lots more. I wanted to write some of it. I think I am doing so."

"I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have! The shock woke me right up: It was my original, the body I had replaced two years before, same full, tarty-looking lips; same fat thighs, rubbing together with every step; same outsize ass; same narrow torso that seemed grafted onto a lower body a good three sizes bigger, as though God had glued leftover parts together."

"I've learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often the direst opposite, in fact. But we're all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can."

"“Mami,” Ti-Jeanne said, “I should go and get Baby. He ain’t take to Tony.” “Hmph. Child got some sense, then. More than some I could name. But leave he there. He have to learn that he can’t always have what he want.”"

"“I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her."

"She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive."

"Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness."

"This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it."

"Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship."

"She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food."

"She curled up on the pallet and stared into the dark, praying for a peaceful sleep. Prayers didn’t do no good, oui. Antonio chased her all night. (In the book Antonio, her father, beats and sexually abuses her long-term; she eventually kills him)"

"She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!"

"Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else."

"Lasirèn, pray you a quick death for Hopping John. Pray you no more of this life for him. Even though no gods answer black people’s prayers here in this place."

"All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?"

"Desire makes us all babies again."

"It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white."

"I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar."

"It was time to be honest with myself. To survive all the shame this world will throw at you, you have to hold yourself tall, look your accuser straight in the eye. Even if it’s your own face looking back at you."

"Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down."

"“Children,” I said to her. “For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”"

"Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)"

"Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)"