Nalo Hopkinson: The Salt Roads

Hopkinson is a brilliant and original writer, and The Salt Roads is, I think, her best work yet. Her work transcends categories - science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and in The Salt Roads she's added historical fiction to the mix. Part of what makes her voice so valuable is that she writes from her sense of self as a black woman, and in so doing, gives us stories about people who we hear far too little about, not just in mainstream literature, but also in genre fiction.

The Salt Roads takes place in three different historical periods, telling the lives of three different women, and also in the space beyond time and place, where we find the divine sense of being - here named Ezili, an African-Caribbean goddess - that links the experience of all three women, and perhaps all women - in the process of discovering herself through the lives of the women who live in time and space, who are bound to earth and water by salt, the salt of their sweat and blood and tears, the salt of the ocean across which so many black women have unwillingly crossed.

The three women of time and space are:

Mer, a healer, midwife and slave on a plantation in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) circa 1750 - the time of one of the early slave revolts leading up to the 1791 revolt that freed the peoples of Haiti;

Jeane Duval, dancer, entertainer and mistress of 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire;

Meritet, 4th century Egyptian courtesan who in Hopkinson's book becomes the African anchoress and saint, Mary of Egypt.

Each woman's story in itself is fascinating; taken all together, the book is an examination of love and sexual desire, of oppression and roads to freedom, of the interaction between mortality and divinity that exists in us all. It's a sometimes challenging book to read, not always linear, either in storytelling or in typography, but well worth it.

And then, go read Hopkinson's other books:
Brown Girl in the Ring
Midnight Robber
Skin Folk - a collection of short stories

And the anthologies she's edited:
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction
Mojo: Conjure Stories
So Long Been Dreaming:Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

Rethinking the Canadian Left

Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History by Ian MacKay.

This is actually an introductory volume to a planned multi-volume history of the Left in Canada, and as a good introductory volume to any scholarly work of considerable scope, it's part discussion of the author's intended methodology, and part overview of what he plans to explore in greater detail in the volumes to come.

What makes me look forward with considerable anticipation to the planned history is the author's broad and hopeful definition of what the Left is:

To be a leftist - a,k,a, socialist, anarchist, radical, global justice activist, communist, socialist-feminist, Marxist, Green, revolutionary - means believing, at a gut level, "It doesn't have to be this way." Vivre autremont - Live otherwise! Live in another way! - was a slogan used by one Quebec radical group in the 1970s. Reasoning Otherwise was the slogan of William Irvine, the legendary Prairie socialist. Words like this are inscribed on the heart of every leftist.

Taking as his range, then, the history of Canadians who have looked at poverty, injustice, oppression, inequity throughout our history and said "It doesn't have to be this way." MacKay has identified what he refers to as "five major left formations, " some of which overlap in time to some extent, that make up the history of the Canadian left movement:

1. 1890-1919, a period of focus on social evolution, where not only Marx but Bellamy and Spencer and the Christian socialists were the major theorists and socialism "was defined as the applied science of social evolution"

2. 1917-1939, the period where the Comintern had its greatest influence on the Left in Canada and socialism became "more tightly defined as revolutionary seizure of power by a working class under the leadership of a vanguard party" - a Marxist-Leninist party

3. 1935-1970, a time of radical planners, parliamentary politics, the establishment of the leftist political parties (the CCF, then the NDP), in which socialism was defined as a movement "aiming at national economic and social management executed by a bureaucratic planning state answerable to parliament"

4. 1965-1980, the infusion of the New Left into Canadian social movements, which resulted in varied grassroots liberation movements focused around not only class but race and gender, which brought about the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and which brought the concept of individual liberation to the socialist message

5. 1967-1990, a feminist-socialist movement that addressed women's liberation from oppression as a primary, if not the primary oppression and developed social critiques of the family and gender roles

According to MacKay, development of a sixth formation is underway, consisting of "Canadian participation in a global social justice movement the resists the planetary hegemony of capitalism and argues for locally controlled societies and economies consistent with the survival of humanity on Earth."

Despite the heavy dose of theory in this volume, it is in itself a good overview of the story of the left in Canada, and it's a good read if you enjoy political history and theory. There are nuggets of interesting information and pertinent quotations scattered throughout, to enliven the theory, for instance, this comment concerning the Regina Manifesto, presented at the founding convention of the CFF: "It may well be the only manifesto in the world socialist tradition that demands both the eradication of capitalism and the provision of railway level crossings."

One of the quotations I found most pertinent to today's situation, especially as regards the muscle-bound Christianity we are seeing more and more of in the U.S., is a comment by Eugene Forsey:

Until Christians learn to understand and apply the lessons of Marxism they cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven - nor, probably, can any one else.

Perfect vision

Dressing Up for the Carnival - a collection of short stories by Carol Shields

I'm not sure why I've never read Shields before. It was a mistake, one I shal have to rectify, now that I've actually read something she's written.

Shields writes prose stories the way Mary Pratt paints. Perfectly rendered visions of everyday life, so clear and realistic that they become magical in their realism.

Shields uses her words, first to give us the outer image of her subjects, and then to let us have a further, perfect vision of their souls, who they are when they are not dressed up for the show.

I will be reading more of Carol Shields's work now. That's the good thing about books - if you miss them the first time, they're still there waiting for you to discover them when the time is right.

The persistence of memoirs

Years and years ago, when I was but a child on the verge of adolescence, I read a book called Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison. I remember the library I borrowed it from. the room where it was shelved, the afternoon sunlight coming in the window over the shelves of science fiction. I remember the plastic cover taped over the hardbound book's dust jacket. I remember thinking, more or less, - spacewoman? This I have to read.

I was a bit young, some might say, to be reading adult science fiction, but this was one of the handful of parenting things my mother did well - she let me read whatever I wanted to. I had her library card in hand when I went to the adult section of the libaray, and I could read anything that struck my fancy. Most of that was science fiction.

What I did not remember, or realise, until re-reading the book, was how deeply it burrowed into my imaginative subconscious, with its examinations of various kinds of human and non-human reproduction and its revelation that some acts of reproduction are desired and joyful and others are inconvenient and even dangerous and need not be allowed to follow their natural course.

There is an underlying idea, only once or twice stated openly, but pervasive nonetheless, in Memoirs of a Spacewoman that reproduction should be consensual, and that a woman need not stay pregnant just because she is pregnant now - but that a woman who wants to be pregnant has every right to be so, and her needs and those of her child should be accommodated by her society.

In rereading the book, I was astonished to find images I'd forgotten were there, images that had surfaced in my dreams at a particularly crucial point in my life. I was 19, pregnant, and had decided to have an abortion. It was the only decision that was right for me at the time, but this was in the 70s and there were some elements of social conditioning for me to get through. I had a series of dreams at that time that comforted me, made me feel somehow what I knew in my mind, that I had done the right thing. It wasn't until recently, rereading Mitchison, that I realised that the images, the situations, the "stuff" that most of those dreams were made of had come right out of the pages of Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

So a very belated thank you, Naomi Mitchison, for writing the book I would need to help me resolve my emotional issues about abortion.

Oh, and in addition to all the personal stuff, it's an interesting read. Mitchison's protagonist is a career space explorer, a communications specialist, someone trained to use everything - her mind, her words, her body, her empathy - to find ways to communicate with other species. Communication at such an intense and intimate level is, at least for humans and for some other species of varying levels of sentience she encounters, can overlap with sex, which can overlap with reproduction. The events of the protagonist's life, as a spacewoman and as a parent or potential parent in some rather unorthodox circumstances, explores the conections between communication and reproduction, both biologically and culturally

In many ways ahead of its time, it deserves to be remembered as a classic of science fiction.

Smoke gets in your mind

Smoke and Shadows by Tanya Huff

I've been a Tanya Huff fan for longer than she's been published. See, I used to know a guy who knew her well, and had been granted the great honour of reading her first novel prior to publication. He raved about it. And I knew him to be a man of good and discerning taste, so when that first novel was published, I went out and bought it right away. And the next one, and the one after that.

Huff may be best known for her "Victory Nelson" series - five novels about a former Toronto cop, now private detective with night blindness, a helpful ex-partner from the force, and a complicated relationship with the vampire bastard son of Henry VIII, who now writes bodice-rippers for a living.

Smoke and Shadows is the first novel in a stand-alone spin-off series from the Victory Nelson novels. Vicky's vampire, Henry Fitzroy, is now living in Vancouver, as is Tony Foster, a friend and sometime lover of Henry's who was once a street kid. Of course, you just know that folks who could find weird adventures with demons and wizards and werewolves and the like in toronto are going to have no problem running into the same kind of thing in Vancouver.

It's a good urban fantasy (which is definitely Huff's specialty), and it's also, in its setting, a hilarious send-up of the made-in-Canada action/supernatural TV syndication series industry. If you're a fan of Forever Knight or any of its more recent kin, you'll enjoy the goings-on from that perspective as well.

Reading Tanya Huff's novels makes me happy. I'm so glad she's already written two more novels in this new series for me to read.