Free Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson Page B

she likes the best, and they switch places. And so on.
    In my first novel, Ti-Jeanne the protagonist is surrounded by her life dilemmas and challenges, and things are getting worse. She’s the brown girl in the ring, and she is young and untried. She herself doesn’t know what she’s capable of, but she needs to figure her skills out andemploy them, quickly, before she loses everything she cares about. Tra-la-la-la-la.
    Who is Derek Walcott and why is he important?
    Derek is a St. Lucia—born poet, a playwright, a Nobel Prize winner, and a master wordsmith. These words are his, from his poem “The Schooner
Flight”:
    I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
    I had a sound colonial education,
    I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
    and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation …
    Doesn’t that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn.
Much
respect. Derek started and for many years was the Artistic Director of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. My father was one of the actors and playwrights in the company. He and Walcott eventually fell out and stopped speaking to each other. But in a way, that’s beside the point. Walcott and my father are two of many talented Caribbean wordsmiths whose work I was absorbing as a child.
    One of Walcott’s early plays was a fantastical piece called “Ti-Jean and His Brothers.” I believe it was modelled on a St. Lucian folk tale. Ti-Jean (“young John”) is the youngest of three brothers who set out to beat the Devil, who appears in the play as that archetypical monster, the white plantation owner. The two elder brothers fail, and it’s left to Ti-Jean to save the day. At some point during the writing of my first novel, I realised that since I was writing about three generations of women who were all facing thesame central evils in their lives, there were parallels with the basic framework of “Ti-Jean and His Brothers,” so I used the parallels to inform my plot. I wanted to make Walcott’s influence evident, so I gave my three characters feminised versions of the brothers’ names, and I embedded brief quotations from the play into my story. Walcott generously gave me his permission to do so.
    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 modelled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I’ve discovered that it doesn’t matter whether your readers recognise 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.
    Skin Folk
won a World Fantasy Award, and there was talk of a movie. What’s up with that?
    The movie project isn’t mine. The director who optioned it is the visionary Asli Dukan, of Mizan Productions. I believe the project is currently in the development stage, which means raising the money to make the film. That is the stage at which most film projects die stillborn, so if anyone who wants to see the final product is of a mind to support Asli with some hard cash, I know she’ll appreciate it. 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.”
    I know. I wrote the novelization of that unfortunate script.
    My condolences! I’ve also seen what can happen when mainstream American film and television try to depict black Caribbean people. You get the likes of Kendra the vampire slayer, Sebastian the crab from “The Little Mermaid,” and the eternal disgrace that is Jar-Jar Binks. Seriously, would it be so hard to hire actors who can do accurate Caribbean accents? Though that wouldn’t solve the depiction problem; mainstream American media