Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

for me to exist in this world I have to have a radical agenda because the world has got to change in order for people like me to be able to exist...I need to have a radical agenda. I need to make a world where it is perfectly okay that I'm attracted to people who live inbetween genders. I think that should not be a problem. I can't change. The world has to change.

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?

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.

(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.

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.

We live in a racist world, and there’s no less racism [in the science fiction community] than anywhere else. But the nice thing about the science fiction community is that it’s very accepting of a challenge, of something new. We’re all a community of eggheads. We like knowing stuff. For the most part, [sci-fi readers] open the book and...get very interested in the language and the world and culture I’m talking about.

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

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.

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.

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