this book has been vaguely on my agenda for some time, although now I can’t remember what prompted me to pick it up just now. possibly just the fact that I was thinking about Hopkinson, since I was looking forward (at the time) to reading Blackheart Man (which very much lived up to my expectations). in any case, whatever it was, I’m very glad I did, because there are some bangers in here.
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root collects a mix of reprinted and original-for-the-anthology short fiction by Caribbean writers that Hopkinson characterizes as “fabulist”, a term which here overlaps with but is not necessarily coextensive with fantasy and/or science fiction (or even “speculative fiction”). her introduction is striking in and of itself, both for how it sets up the anthology and for how she positions her own work:
Very quickly the stories started to show up in my mailbox, and the process of mutual education began. I am the daughter of a Caribbean writer; I grew up in a milieu of Caribbean writers and writing. I bring that sensibility to my own work, but I write within a particularly northern tradition of speculative and fantastical fiction. There, plot and content are equally important and the speculative or fantastical elements of a story must be “real”: Duppies and jumbies must exist outside the imaginations of the characters; any scientific extrapolation should seem convincingly based in the possible. It’s an approach designed to ease or force the suspension of disbelief, to block flight back into the familiar world, to shake up the reader into thinking in new tracks.
But for this anthology I was hearing from experienced writers who were telling me they really didn’t understand what I was looking for, but here’s a story, hope it suits. I was getting stories that were dreams (a no-no in the science fiction world) and stories that seemed to be poems and surreal stories that seemed to have nothing fantastical about them at all, though they were highly improbable.
I have been thinking lately about the ways speculative fiction by racialized (and perhaps especially Black) writers is sometimes presented as either entirely sui generis or else constructed purely in opposition to the work of (especially white) “classic” speculative fiction writers. as Jalondra A. Davis observes:
we must be wary of how institutional groups of Black, Inidgenous, and people of color artists and thinkers also can stymy needed disruptions of established fields by siphoning marginalized scholars off from other conversations. (2021, 183)
there’s definitely a noticeable divide here between the writers working in the “particularly northern tradition” that Hopkinson situates herself in — perhaps especially Tobias S. Buckell, Roger McTair, and Hopkinson’s own story — and writers who are unaffiliated with that tradition but responsed to Hopkinson’s call to “[b]ring out your duppie and jumbie tales; skin folk flights of fancy; rapso-futurist fables; your most dread of dread talks”. the table of contents is star-studded, and I’ve just remembered what made me pick up the collection, which was actually the discovery that Jamaica Kincaid, of all people, had a story in here. in addition to Kincaid, there are also pieces by Kamau Brathwaite, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Wilson Harris. it’s perhaps unsurprising that the stories I liked most tended to be the ones that were most clearly positioned as “science fiction” or “fantasy” (including Buckell’s, Hopkinson’s, and McTair’s, but also Pamela Mordecai’s, apparently her first attempt at writing science fiction — and a formidable one). there were also a few stories whose speculative element was barely liminal — Ian McDonald’s “Pot o’ Rice Horowitz’s House of Solace” is unrealistic, but no more fantastic than Epeli Hauʻofa’s Tales of the Tikongs or Kisses in the Nederends (aside from their fictional settings). to briefly run through the highlights from within (or adjacent to) the northern speculative tradition:
there were also some really impressive stories from outside the northern speculative tradition. I was particularly impressed with Opal Palmer Adisa’s “Widows’ Walk”, about a woman waiting for her husband, a fisherman, to return home and fearing that he’s been taken by Yemoja. Adisa really effectively captures the anxiety and uncertainty, and there are some interesting moments of queer possibility. Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Mother” is a brief but very cool mythic narrative of transformation and evolution, focused on the relationship between a mother(-goddess?) and daughter(-goddess?). and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “Buried Statues” (translated from Spanish by Lee H. Williams, jr.) is a about a dysfunctional family implicitly in years-long hiding from the reality of the Cuban Revolution behind the fortress walls of their estate, bound by rules and rituals — it reminded me interestingly of some of Patricia McKillip’s work, especially The Bell at Sealey Head.
the juxtaposition of stories by so many different writers also really draws your attention to the ways different writers have chosen to handle the various languages of the Caribbean: some stories are entirely in standard English, some incorporate creole dialogue but are narrated in standard English, and some are narrated entirely in a much more heavily creole-marked English (though I suspect many of these are still closer to standard English than to full-on nation language). this foregrounding of variations in language use also made me particularly aware of the absence of French, Dutch, or Papiamento (and the limiting of Spanish to one story by Benítez-Rojo) from the collection — certainly there’s plenty of fabulist writing done in the francophone Caribbean and at the very least in Suriname (I suspect also in the former Netherlands Antilles). this is probably partly a function of how Hopkinson was able to circulate the call for submissions — as she notes in the introduction: “The bulk of the stories are from people from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. [...] Those are the countries with whose writers I’m most familiar; a different anthologist would have produced a different collection.”
the collection’s main flaw, I would say, is a certain class bias. many of the contributers were academics, and others seemed to be writing from a particular class background — Robert Antoni’s “My Grandmother’s Tale of the Buried Treasure and How She Defeated the King of Chacachacari and the Entire American Army with Her Venus-Flytraps”, for example, as well as being weirdly Orientalist, was also about a former plantation owner lamenting the seizure of her plantation for a U.S. army base during World War II. a bit of a strange choice, I thought. I found myself wondering whether working-class writers (and/or a greater variety of writers who had not left, or had to leave, the Caribbean — many, perhaps most, of the contributors are, or were at the time of publication, based in Canada) might have responded to the call.
some of the stories do also get a bit raza cósmica (marina ama omowale maxwell’s “Devil Beads” gets quite explicit about this); this was particularly striking in light of the inclusion of Kincaid, whose work has elsewhere foregrounded Caribbean Indigenous history (though it’s not the focus of her story here). Wilson Harris’s “Yurokon” is about a Guyanese Amerindian community, but it’s also...extremely weird about it, in a way that strengthened my urge to reread Shona Jackson’s Creole Indigeneity.
overall, however, it’s still very much worth a read — I can’t overstate how cool Buckell’s story, in particular, is. and I intend to trace the follow-through on Hopkinson’s hope for the future in the introduction: “I hope there will be more anthologies of this type, bringing together works of these and other writers in other combinations.”
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