bibliogramma | Nalo Hopkinson: Sister Mine (Reply)

Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine is a marvellous story, full of magic, and music, and mystery, and focuses on formerly conjoined half-celestial twins Makeda and Abby and their relationships with each other, their family (a pantheon of unusual deities drawn from Afro-Caribbean roots), and their mojo, or magical power. The root of the dysfunctional relationship between the sisters is that when Makeda and Abby were separated as infants, neither child came through the experience whole - Abby is lame, and Makeda has no mojo, a serious disability for the child of a god. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the question of Makeda's missing mojo is both complicated and potentially dangerous for several members of her immortal family - and what threatens the gods, may threaten humans as well.

The novel, like several other books by Hopkinson, is set in Toronto, which makes me happy, because, hometown. And how can you resist a story in which one of the characters was once Jimi Hendrix's guitar?

Some readers may find certain aspects of the relationship between the sisters (and some of their relatives, for that matter) a bit difficult, but it's important to remember that these women are not only twins who were born physically joined, but they are partly divine, and in most pantheons around the world, one thing that the gods and their children rarely do is follow the sexual mores of mere mortals.

One aspect of Hopkinson's work that has always been a gift to me is the way that her novels all, in one way or another, broaden my understanding of race - as identity, as construct, as one if the grounds in which we perceive sine people as Other. This book is no exception. As Jessica Langer, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, notes:

Finally, it is important to note, I think, the treatment of race in Sister Mine, because it is so matter-of-fact and so powerful in its matter-of-factness. Race is not the point of the novel; it is important, rather, because of its effect on the characters and their relationships with the world around them. In Anansi Boys, Gaiman dealt with race by very deliberately never mentioning it; Hopkinson takes a different and more effective tack here. Nearly all of the characters are black, and they live in the world as black men and women; their experiences are informed by their relationships with their own blackness and with others’ reactions to it.

The ubiquitous background racism of Toronto simmers constantly, occasionally bubbling up into the foreground, as when a woman with her daughter sees Makeda’s battle with her haint and says with disdain, “Those people are always brawling in the street, liks dogs. It’s a disgrace,” or when an argument between Makeda and Lars (the aforementioned guitar) causes others to avoid them, because “nothing cleared a room faster than a black man and woman arguing.” When Makeda and Abby are making their way in the dark to the shore of Lake Ontario late in the novel, Makeda shouts at her sister to turn off the flashlight; her primary concern is not that she will trip and fall, but rather that the flashlight is “like a beacon to the cops.” For all Toronto’s reputation on the world stage as a happily multicultural metropolis, and for all the Canadian government’s lip service to the value of diversity, Sister Mine speaks truth, real truth, about the quotidian prejudice with which black Torontonians live. (Aunt Suze’s excoriation of what is often called “hipster racism,” the semi-ironic appropriation by others of black slang, makes one want to stand up and cheer.) (http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/dysfunctional-fabulist-families-nalo-hopkinsons-sister-mine)

Addendum: I wandered across this interview with Hopkinson at Strange Horizons, in which the author talks about Sister Mine, Toronto, and other interesting things: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130225/SamatarNH-a.shtml.