#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007
Jillana Enteen
“On the Receiving End of the Colonization”:1 Nalo Hopkinson’s ’Nansi WebScience fiction and its relatives ... have been a main artery for recasting our imagination. There are few concepts or inventions of the 20th century—from submarine to newspeak─that were not first fictional flights to fancy.—Walter Mosley, “Black to the Future,” 405
Culture jammers, guerrilla media, cyberpunk culture, warez or software pirates, hackers, and phone freaks all provide rich material for examining the creative possibilities that already exist for resisting, redesigning, and critiquing digital culture. —David Rodowick, Reading the Figural, 234
In the 1980s, cyberpunk helped to revitalize interest in sf among academic as well as popular audiences. Typically, cyberpunk depicts a doomed and desperate world that reiterates globalization: multinational corporate domination, powerless and pliable masses, and environmental degradation. It offers a consensus vision of the imminent deployment of technology in the service of capitalism writ large. Initially, the conflict between the individual and a technologically advanced global capitalist machine followed a fairly standard pattern. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., complained nearly twenty years ago,
how many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a self-destructive but sensitive young protagonist with an (implant/prosthesis/telechtronic talent) that makes the evil (megacorporations/police states/criminal underworlds) pursue him through (wasted urban landscapes/elite luxury enclaves/eccentric space stations) full of grotesque (haircuts/clothes/self-mutilations/rock music/sexual hobbies/ designer drugs/telechtronic gadgets/nasty new weapons/exteriorized hallucin-ations) representing the (mores/fashions) of modern civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with rebellious and tough-talking (youth/artificial intelligence/rock cults) who offer the alternative, not of (community/socialism/ traditional values/transcendental vision), but of supreme, life-affirming hipness, going with the flow which now flows in the machine, against the specter of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence/multinational corporate web/evil genius)? (184)
One might question the extent to which this memorable delineation captures the variety of the cyberpunk that emerged in the mid-1980s. It describes John Shirley’s Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1988, 1990) and Lewis Shiner’s Frontera (1984), but does not even vaguely resemble Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) or Rudy Rucker’s Software (1982) and its sequels. One might also question how many narrow variants upon this formula had actually appeared between its first full flowering in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Csicsery-Ronay’s article. Yet add into the mix a tough, sexy, independent, perhaps smitten female sidekick, and the recurrence of this formula in major cyberpunk fictions is self-evident, from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) to the Matrix film trilogy (Wachowski brothers 1999, 2003, 2003). This rather limited notion of cyberpunk has been justly critiqued2 and countered by alternative fictional portrayals by authors such as Pat Cadigan, Richard Calder, K.W. Jeter, Maureen F. McHugh, Misha, Jeff Noon, Justina Robson, Melissa Scott, Tricia Sullivan, and Jack Womack, as well as by Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson themselves. Such sublations are not erasures, though, and this narrative formula and its problematic implications continue to lurk within the cyberpunk genome and circulate in popular culture. See, for example, despite their added-on gender-role reversals, interstellar wars, and ancient Mayan artifacts, the Perfect Dark computer games (2000, 2005). Furthermore, even these revisions imagine a future of unending globalized capital, with all its dazzle and depredation. This essay considers authors situated “on the receiving end of the colonization,” particularly Nalo Hopkinson, whose novels revise cyberpunk to render visible current socioeconomic inequities, suggest alternative formulations of the relationships between humans and technology, and increase the cultural repository of ideas that inspire technological and social development.
\\Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) portrays a world controlled by the Marryshow Corporation and run by a web-based Artificial Intelligence. Human habitation on a remote planet is made possible through radical environmental destruction and an individual rebel becomes a hero by manipulating technology and confronting the inequities she perceives in her society. Through this depiction, Midnight Robber models technologies premised on the histories and beliefs of New World subjects. Contrary to the Jamaican Rastafarians or Voudon figures that are either fetishized by William Gibson3 or voiceless in the majority of cyberpunk, Hopkinson renders the complexities of multiple cultures in contact, the cross-fertilizations of histories, languages, and cultures, and diasporic dislocations. Building on Gibson’s and other cyberpunk authors’ flair for forecasting digital futures, Hopkinson, like other Afrofuturist visionaries, fashions unconventional scenarios premised on technological development; she correspondingly provides unorthodox versions of yet-to-come societies.4 She explains thatscience fiction has always been a subversive literature. It’s been used to critique social systems well before the marketing label of [sf] got stuck on it.... I think that a speculative literature from a culture that has been on the receiving end of the colonization glorified in some [sf] could be a compelling body of writing. (Rutledge 591)
To create such a text, Hopkinson combines English with Trinidadian and Jamaican creole, “hacking” a language that recalls the histories of the middle passage, slavery, and imperialism. Furthermore, her characters break and create code, “hacking” in speech as well as through their conceptions of community, “hacking” the genre of science fiction through the blending of cyberpunk and planetary romance,5 creating fiction reminiscent of the corpus of Bruce Sterling’s “global tourism” sf (Jameson, Archaeologies 384-85), but seen from the other side. Centered on a feminine Artificial Intelligence commanding the planet and its inhabitants, Midnight Robber challenges the conventions of cyberpunk, revealing its ideological underpinnings, and complicates popular accounts of the intersections of gender, technology, and corporate presence.
Sf exerts a powerful effect on the scientific community. Cyberpunk not only revitalized popular interest in sf, but also supplied the template for technological innovations.6 Hopkinson notes that even at the level of nomenclature, technology reflects certain histories that determine future development:
So many of our stories about technology and our paradigms for it refer to Greek and Roman myth and language: we name rocket ships ‘Apollo’ and communication devices “telephone,” a human-machine interface a “cyborg.” It shapes not only the names for the technology we create, but the type of technology we create. (“Conversation”)
Since this literature inspires technological transformation, these popular accounts of a digitally enhanced world shape both the development of computer technology and conventional expectations about how it will function in our lives.
In the introduction to their edited collection Technicolor, Nelson, Hines, and Tu resignify the term “digital divide” to refer not only to the inequities pertaining to access but also to hegemonic cultural assumptions about who understands and can influence developing technologies. They suggest that
solutions to the digital divide often fail to address problems that we can’t solve by simply placing a computer in every home or classroom, problems that include social barriers.... Moreover, the digital divide has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, confirming that people of color can’t keep pace in a high-tech world that threatens to outstrip them. (1-2)
There is a growing sentiment expressed by authors and academics concerned with race that new media only serve to reproduce and reify current disparities. Patrick Chamoiseau dismisses the potential for an African Digital Diaspora: “the electronic world, the Internet, and all the communication networks transmit Western values in a concentrated form, and we absorb them in the name of modernity, liberty, and progress” (Taylor 127). Recognizing that these social and ideological obstacles span the digital divide, Hopkinson renders visible the master codes that lie at the foundation of current strategies for technological development that continue to exclude, disregard, or exploit marginalized peoples. Her rewriting of cyberpunk bridges the chasm by centering Caribbean descendants and their creolized cultures in her version of a technology-laden future.
Hailing from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Canada, Hopkinson posits a community no longer in direct dialogue with the nation-states on earth, yet aware of their intricate connections. This is evident from Midnight Robber’s opening lines, in which the voice of a possibly unreliable narrator introduces what will follow as folktale and myth. This teller of tales conjures a world run by a sentient entity, Granny Nanny, who manages her society through an electronic web that incorporates ideologies and myths from traditional African, Caribbean, and both North and South American cultures. The plot is then conveyed through conflicting accounts by several characters. The novel chronicles the adventures and mythologizing actions of the protagonist Tan-Tan’s youth. Her family and the other inhabitants of the planet Toussaint (named for Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose revolution made Haiti, if only briefly, the first free black republic in the New World) descend from ancestors who joined Granny Nanny’s Marryshow Corporation to leave Earth and forge a new society not founded on the racist premises inextricably bound up in terrestrial communities. She spends her childhood with her volatile but loving parents in Cockpit County, until her father poisons his wife’s lover during Toussaint’s annual Jonkanoo Carnival. Knowing he will be punished by the electronic, all-seeing Granny Nanny and eventually expelled from the planet, he escapes with Tan-Tan to Toussaint’s alternative dimension, New Half-Way Tree, where Granny Nanny ultimately deposits all her outlaws. As a child on Toussaint, Tan-Tan identified with the Midnight Robber, a central figure in both the Trinidadian Carnival and Toussaint’s Jonkanoo festivities.7 While residing in a succession of New Half-Way Tree villages, she dubs herself the Robber Queen and people in both dimensions begin to tell tall tales about her deeds.
Hopkinson does not project fantasies that extend current systems or employ technology to drive the narrative. Instead, she envisions alternative societal configurations that are embedded in different relationships to power, knowledge, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. These are reflected by and responsive to technology. Even though Granny Nanny and her Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface are not explicitly described, Granny Nanny’s role within the society is explained at length. She is intricately entwined with the planet and its inhabitants, functioning most prominently as a guide and information source for humans who strive for a world that eliminates previous forms of inequity. A technological fighter, protector, and magician, Granny Nanny enhances the role of her namesake, a seventeenth-century Jamaican who fought slavery. Hopkinson portrays Granny Nanny’s position as a weave of strength, magic, and stewardship, basing it not only on history and legend, but also on the values of the Taino, “the indigenous people who were living in the Caribbean when Columbus stumbled on that part of the world” (“Code Sliding”). Consequently, the depiction of Granny Nanny’s Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface, her ’Nansi Web, reveals the priorities of her community rather than providing a trajectory of technological development and its accompanying values.8 Technology in Midnight Robber responds continually to the location and population it surrounds. The Marryshow Corporation and Granny Nanny constitute and are constituted by their community. They cannot evolve into machines that no longer respond to the populations with whom they intersect. Communication and play, rather than corporate capitalism and accumulation, are their aims.
Hacking a New Poetics. The ability to hack is a prerequisite for the cyberpunk protagonist. According to the Jargon File, an online dictionary developed and maintained by hackers, this activity, premised as counter-cultural, is conducted by those “who enjoy exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.” Neuromancer and Snow Crash both portray electronic systems whose codes must be broken, demanding that their hacker-identified protagonists “crack” or “break security on a system.”9 Gibson’s Case surmounts every technological and physical obstacle, keeping barely one step ahead of those around him, despite his recent hiatus from cyberspace and his addiction to the machine. Stephenson’s Hiro Protagonist, the best hacker in the Metaverse, likewise triumphs simultaneously in electronic and conventional universes. The highly respected hacker ethic insists that “almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers ... [and] they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom’s most valuable intangible asset”; but the hackers/crackers of cyberpunk go it alone.10 Without the intervention of the code-savvy hacker/cracker, world domination might be achieved by Neuromancer’s incestuous upper-class clan of cyborg executives or Snow Crash’s malicious, power-hungry tyrant, but in both novels a lone cyberjockey crashes the system, upsetting the convergence of corporations and nations in a capitalist frenzy where humans would be consumed by codes gone awry. In contrast, Hopkinson invokes a hacker community that calls on the reader to decipher codes and create meaning.
Cyberpunk novels typically throw the reader immediately into an unfamiliar world and recount events at a frantically high velocity; yet they unfold in a chronological and teleological manner. Midnight Robber also disorients from the outset, but it does not spin a straightforward or reliable tale. Instead of drawing upon the privileged histories and hierarchies of Western culture, Hopkinson weaves together memories, beliefs, and customs deriving from Caribbean folk culture, Voudon spirits, African-American slave stories, and separatist movements. Detailing numerous accounts of the Robber Queen’s origins and the myths surrounding her, Midnight Robber contains narrative breaks, non-linear digressions, and multiple voices that preclude the determination of an authoritative account and compete for the reader’s attention, mimicking through language and form the structure of Granny Nanny’s electronic web. Storytelling served as the primary means for the transmission of knowledge for Hopkinson’s characters’ precursors, and factual “accuracy” is only one criterion for a good story; others are delivery, style, audience response, and relevance to current conditions. The often overlooked or ignored oral transmissions produced by non-western populations are defining features of both Hopkinson’s rendering of Toussaint and its inhabitants’ conventions of expression. Through her explorations of programmable systems and her stretching of cyberpunk’s capabilities, Hopkinson amplifies the performance of the cyberpunk novel, pushing its formal elements past chronological, hyper-paced narrative arcs in favor of plot interruptions and asides. Her linguistic deviations reach beyond the introduction of new terms for technology and human enhancements, providing a distinct dialect that her characters enunciate. Her fiction incorporates oral practices as they converge on future figurations of technologically-mediated communication.
Hopkinson “hacks” first and foremost at the level of language. Mixing standard British and American English with two Caribbean creoles, she assumes that language enacts Derridean différance, performing sense by the effacement of other possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred. Words do not simply represent, they also possess a range of indeterminate significations that embody her characters and their world. Every word employed signifies a choice; Hopkinson reveals what she perceives to be the cultural circumstances embedded in their meanings deferred. Yet Hopkinson also cracks calcified significations, recalling alternative connotations in the construction of her unique creole. She enjoys “breaking … language apart and remixing it,” in what Pamela Mordecai has termed a “code-slide.”11 By placing these languages in dialogue, she fashions a unique language, one that illustrates the potential of hacking simultaneously to encode and reformulate both the past and the future.
On her website, Hopkinson writes of her code-switching: “I realised after a while that I was using a Trinidadian mode of address for emphasis/irony and a Jamaican one to signal opposition” (“Code Sliding”). This explanation mirrors prevalent conceptions about these island cultures from beyond their shores. On one hand, Trinidad, the self-proclaimed “home of Carnival,” is often portrayed as brimming with “heritage … from every continent.”12 On the other hand, Jamaica is distilled into Rastafarians, whose music, which circulates widely in transnational markets, espouses resistance to European control.13 Hopkinson’s linguistic choices do not simply reify these generalizations. Rather, she uses them when crafting her language as a descriptive device, adding interpretative layers to dialogues. While Antonio, the mayor of Cockpit County, might lean more towards using Trinidadian creole when talking to his citizens, and the runners/programmers, who refuse to capitulate to the cultural norms and the strict supervision of Granny Nanny’s technological web, deploy Jamaican creole to articulate dissent, the dialogue of the interaction between Antonio and a runner is heightened through code-switching. Each creole does not belong in the mouth of a single character but slides in each utterance so that reactions and emotions are revealed through language. For example, Antonio uses Trinidadian-laced English when he says: “So is what I hear allyou runners doing? When you turn off Nanny?’” (52). The runner begins his reply in what might be considered Trinidadian English—“Not turn we turning she off. Not possible.”—but continues the explanation of subterfuge using the Jamaican words “oonuh” and “seen”: “We just know more nannysong than the rest of oonuh, we more fluent, seen?’” (52).14 After the runner convinces Antonio that Nanny honors their requests for freedom from surveillance, Antonio uses the Jamaican exclamation “Rasscloth” and “breathed in amazement” (52). This exchange, with its mixture of creoles and English, suggests increasing layers of mutual comprehension—of information, of emotion, and of affect—and foreshadows Antonio’s use of runner practices. In this brief conversation, Hopkinson writes a language that exploits cultural stereotypes in order to position the characters in relation to each other and within their society as well as to suggest that intersections and interactions shape the narrative arc.
Edouard Glissant sees creole as language that inherently subverts oppression, enabling communication that defies domination, adopting and adapting in order to create a new poetics, insinuating an art form beyond mere linguistic evolution.15 Not only does Hopkinson’s creolized English-based language demonstrate potential for resisting domination, it also gives rise to a new poetics by remixing language, playing with sound and meaning in a literary context like celebrated contemporary black musicians and lyricists. Hopkinson’s dialogical switches between English and Trinidadian and Jamaican creoles within single sentences illustrate the complexity of this future civilization and of a poetics she describes as a forceful act that accounts for the past while establishing a present:
To speak in the hacked language is not just to speak in an accent or a creole; to say the words aloud is an act of referencing history and claiming space. The people … in my novel have done that, have left Earth to a place where they can make their own society. Their speech, written and spoken, reflects the reasons they’ve made that journey. (“Code Sliding”)
Recognizing the dynamic forces operating in existing creoles, Hopkinson conveys the location of her characters historically and in their present. Her characters “hack” a specific language, expressing their circumstances through a revised version of Caribbean oral practices, while she describes their environment and the route that led them to the experiences she imagines.
Although linguists such as David Crystal assert that standard English is likely to be the global language because it displays a “‘welcome’ given to foreign vocabulary” and an “absence in … grammar of a system of coding social class differences” (6), this sort of universalist assertion of equality has been rejected in more recent studies. For example, Janina Brutt-Griffler argues that English is constantly refashioned as a result of international and local conditions.16 Reflecting broad histories and circumstances while responding to specific environmental factors, English embodies the circumstances of its enunciators. Whether at the level of grammar or emphasis, Hopkinson’s linguistic mélange both exploits and resists class, caste, and race. Her language choices, anchored in North American and British English, reflect Jamaican, Trinidadian, Caribbean Creole, diasporic African, Indigineous Taino, and Asian diasporic cultures, both as an inextricable mix and reflecting each of their discrete properties. She states, “in Caribbean literature … use of creoles has been part of the literary traditions for awhile. I think I only cause raised eyebrows because I’m doing it to write science fiction” (Glave 149).
Sf, particularly cyberpunk, routinely offers up new terms, languages, and forms of speech. Samuel Delany argues that such linguistic craftwork is the defining qualification that distinguishes sf from other literary genres: “Sf has often taken new areas of conceptual space, then inflated them with language” (“Some Real Mothers” 165).17 The frequent “inflation” of “conceptual space” with neologisms has been categorized in detail by Peter Stockwell, who argues that cyberpunk is partially definable as a subgenre by its frequent coinage of neologisms, particularly ones whose sources reflect advanced techno-capitalism. Furthermore, the use of these new words is directly embedded in the sf and cyberpunk creation of advanced technologies; as Delany notes, “In science fiction, rhetoricity often allegorizes technology—and the awareness of technology; especially technology that’s perceived as being beyond ours” (“Some Real Mothers” 171).18 Hopkinson’s neologistic prose is rooted neither in Latin nor Greek nor the lexicon of corporate capital, but embedded in her creole development, representing a unique inflation of the conceptual space of a technology-laden future society. The extent of her language hacking by virtue of her creole creation pushes the practice of coining neologisms analyzed by Westfahl—almost every word might be considered novel since it is put alongside other words with which it has not previously commingled. Her language extends our conceptions of technology to all aspects of speech and renders a life inseparable, except for brief moments and particular spaces, from what Delany terms cyberpunk’s “paraspaces.” Hopkinson extends the paraspaces of previous cyberpunk that exist in relation to the “narrative’s ‘real’ or ordinary space” (“Some Real Mothers” 168) into all of Toussaint’s spaces and ways of living—except, of course, for New Half Way Tree, where life is nonetheless always shadowed by the fact that it is for those cast out of Toussaint. The knowledge of an advanced technological way of living is never absent, nor are the neologisms of Hopkinson’s creolization. By forming a novel form of creole, she uses stylistic distinctions to extend her world, leaving no shell of a bombed-out dystopian sprawl in her wake. Instead, cyberspace extends in all directions.
The Jargon File defines a hacker as “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.” We have seen how Hopkinson “hacks” at the level of language; by extension, the society she describes has overcome previous social imbalances and “hacked” a new community. Toussaint’s runners, for instance, encourage Tan-Tan and her father’s hacking. In his conversation with Antonio, the runner explains, “If you sing the right songs, so long as Nanny don’t see no harm to life nor limb, she will lock out all but she overruling protocols for a little space” (52). Antonio is thus challenged to find ways to do what he desires by stretching the operating system. Here Hopkinson upsets the foundational individualism of cyberpunk by portraying not only programmers and/or her protagonist, but an entire society of hackers. By leaving Earth, her characters have, in fact, chosen their outsider status, forging a new community by breaking and redeploying linguistic codes, previous laws, and technological functions. On Toussaint, hacking not only transpires in every conversation, but as a community practice is the standard ethical norm. Having already overturned a repressive system, these hackers are more than circumventing a fixed set of controls. They are adjusting their surroundings. While the Jargon File constitutes hackers in response to limitations, Toussaint residents exploit language, extending the premise of hacking to the creation and play of systems and code. These oral practices allow the characters to hack as a way of being, one that accounts for past oppression with meanings accrued in the history yet to come.19
Form is also hacked as Midnight Robber diverges from the chronological third-person narration of canonical cyberpunk, inviting the reader to participate in hacker community. Anansi stories, traditional West African and Caribbean folk tales, are presumed unreliable, eschewing narrative closure and changing with every delivery. The storyteller that begins the novel (in bold font) addresses the reader directly. She croons: “Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anansi story” (1). Anansi the spider is the trickster-hero of West African and Caribbean folktales who persuades humans to violate prohibitions enforced by the gods and then reveals the price of their defiance. Carole Boyce Davies applies the conceptual model of the spider web to describe the connections she finds in writing by black women to speech, storytelling, and performance: “This approach to storytelling has paradigmatic and cosmological affinity with the ‘web’ as a sign in Caribbean and African mythologies. Meaning is constructed out of multiplicity of voices and positions” (162). Not only are the words of the storyteller hacked, reflecting Hopkinson’s participation in the practices of her foremothers through her linguistic practices, but also the plot is a creative intervention, calling upon Anansi to signal a multifaceted weave rather than a tale progressing to a resolution. The spider manufactures an array of filaments, not a linear account of Tan-Tan’s quest to conquer the technology in her world. “Like it starting, oui?” insinuates that the story will not follow a well-worn path; instead, something larger than a singular strand is now underway. Illustrating what Davies describes as the multiplicity employed by Caribbean women to make meaning, Hopkinson’s web provides the structure not only for storytelling but also for language. This use of Anansi’s story web prefigures Hopkinson’s Grande ’Nansi Web, the electronic technology that controls Toussaint.
By invoking this trickster and his web, Hopkinson’s storyteller informs the reader that meaning will be multiple, competing, and contradictory. Hopkinson’s hacking further implicates the reader by requiring her to interpret this new poetics, summoned from the first moment to navigate conflicting voices and imagine future technologies, as well as life on another planet. As an enticement, the storyteller offers guidance and companionship: “I go be with you the whole time” (1). She lures the reader with an affectionate nickname, “sweetness,” and later, the more intimate “doux-doux” (16), staging her tale-telling as a sweet seduction. The reader is thus teased, like the prey of Anansi, to proceed into Hopkinson’s non-European, historically-based yet future-figuring world, where multiple speakers will present conflicting details in a new language and in a form that endorses and revises the traditions of its speakers. This conforms to the hacker ethic of community involvement and the sharing of information, rewriting traditional individualist sf by creating characters who share tricks and knowledge.
The Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface: The Technology of Granny Nanny. Hopkinson employs hacking to denaturalize cyberpunk conventions; she also delineates technologies that expose biases inherent in its present formulation. Sylvia Wynter suggests that a counter-exertion occurs in work that not only “voice[es] the ‘native’ woman’s hitherto silenced voice” but asks “What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as ‘native’ women?” (363). The Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface provides such a counter-exertion, revealing forces assumed to be objective. Hopkinson’s technology seeks to retrieve native women of the Caribbean from the margins of individualistic discourse, to complicate conventional assumptions about femininity, and to eschew hierarchies of knowledge production that privilege written over oral transmissions and singular truth over dynamic interpretations. Granny Nanny embodies Toussaint’s remodeled and relocated society. She is intertwined with the Nation Worlds she controls: “The tools, the machines, the buildings; even the earth itself on Toussaint and all the Nation Worlds had been seeded with nanomites —Granny Nanny’s hands and her body” (10). Her vast involvement through her “enormous data-gathering system that exchanged information constantly through the Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface [the Grande ’Nansi Web]” (10) assures that she not be construed as simply a technological tool divorced from her environment. Granny Nanny provides a repository for the past, an aid for interpretation, and the essence of the foundations of dwelling and community spaces.
While technologies are usually construed as genderless and rendered masculine, Hopkinson envisions a feminine force controlling the web. Granny Nanny is named after the Jamaican revolutionary leader who led escaped slaves to independence during the First Maroon War from 1720-1739. The loyalty she inspired in her troops, her exceptional fighting skills, and her well-coordinated guerilla tactics are a combination of military prowess and potent Voudoun power; in some accounts, she caught cannon balls fired by the British, placed them in her vagina, and exploded them back on the British. The Marryshow Corporation’s Granny Nanny extends the role of her namesake: she exercises unconventional yet unquestionably feminine processes for control; her strength inspires an almost universal devotion. Like the legendary fighter, Nanny uses her knowledge to ensure harmony, security, health, and freedom from outside oppression for the planet’s occupants; she “kept the Nation Worlds protected, guided and guarded its people” (10). In addition, she possesses inconceivably large amounts of data, but releases it strategically, protecting her charges: “Granny Nanny would have the images in her data banks, but no-one could override Nanny’s privacy protection. Nanny only chose to reveal information that she judged would infringe on public safety” (50). Hopkinson carves out the space for female creation, enlarging the scope of feminized attributes by recognizing that the conditions of slavery rendered implausible and irrelevant the possibility of conformity to conventions of gender by Caribbean women, Toussaint’s inhabitants’ foremothers. Hopkinson’s use of gender thereby interrupts or dismantles the cultural mythologies that place women as secondary, subordinate, or altogether silent. By situating Nanny’s Web as one of the many intersecting constructs woven into this tale, she channels black female heroes, black female storytellers, and West African and Caribbean histories. Incorporating these pasts fortifies the webbed nexus of technology and the citizens of planet Toussaint.
This uniquely gendered position enables Granny Nanny to revise some western-based gender stereotypes in her role as Supreme Being. Her upward career trajectory from advanced computer program/artificial intelligence to code innovator, society builder, and corporate Chief Executive Officer realizes the contemporary masculine American dream writ large. Granny Nanny, who assembles a human community and transports it through space to another planet, embodies and is embodied by the Marryshow Corporation. When she and her human subjects arrive in a spaceship, she destroys the planet’s indigenous nature to facilitate the colonization of her subjects. The reader learns that “New Half-Way Tree is how Toussaint planet did look before the Marryshow Corporation sink them Earth Engine Number 127 down into it like God entering he woman; plunging into the womb of the soil to impregnate the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny” (2). Here Granny Nanny appears as a violent, sexual conqueror who sows her seed in order to dominate the object of her pleasure, nature. Killing the indigenous flora and fauna spawns a domesticated environment solely controlled by Granny Nanny. So while Granny Nanny is a decidedly female entity who recalls her revolutionary namesake, her colonial penetration illustrates her disregard for gender conventions created and enforced by non-native colonizers. Through these complex portrayals, Hopkinson reveals both the assumed masculinity of the majority of depictions of technology and the inconsistencies demanded by western gender conventions that were incompatible with the Caribbean’s legacy of slavery and colonialism.
Depicting Granny Nanny as prominent fundamentally dislodges the “secularizing behaviour-regulatory narrative schema” (Wynter 361) that originated in the first phase of Western Europe’s expansion into the Americas. Within this schema, the native female of the Caribbean is doubly silenced by patriarchal discourse and the colonial project, functioning as an “ontological absence.” By understanding Granny Nanny to be the central processing intelligence on the planet, intricately connected to both the land and its inhabitants, Hopkinson conjectures an alternative system to create meaning: she imagines “how Caribbean culture might metonymize technological progress if it was in our hands: in other words, what stories we’d tell ourselves about our technology—what our paradigms for it might be” (Glave 149). Granny Nanny, created by her society, is Hopkinson’s answer. Ontologically incapable of inscribing or buttressing the notion of a unified subject, Granny Nanny will not develop in a linear fashion, accruing power and increasing her control, but will coexist with the planet and the population, sometimes surrendering control and altering her functions in response to changing conditions. Granny Nanny originates from the complexity of the history and population of the Caribbean. She is crafted from the struggles of the New World on Earth, and this resonates on the new world that follows.
Hopkinson further champions the oral performances of the Caribbean and African Diaspora, locating her artificial intelligence’s communicative capabilities in the realm of the aural. A runner recounts that, during her time on Earth, Granny Nanny became too complicated to understand until Marryshow, a calypsonian programmer, “run the Nanny messages through a sound filter; tonal instead of text-based, understand?… She brain didn’t spoil, it just get too complex … Nanny was seeing things in all dimensions—how a simple four-dimensional programming code would continue to do she? So she had develop she own language” (50-51). Once she reaches this advanced state, she is unable to communicate in written code. Those who know Nannysong, a tonal rather than written language, can speak to Granny Nanny directly. Nannysong is an argot of the nannycode operating language, which is far more complicated than humans can comprehend: “If you was to transpose nannycode to the tonal, humans couldn’t perceive more than one-tenth of the notes, seen? Them does happen at frequencies we can’t even map,” the runner/programmer explains. “Nanny create a version we could access with we own senses. Nannysong is only a hundred and twenty-seven tones, and she does only sing basic phrases to we; numbers and simple stock sentences and so” (52). By configuring oral transmissions as more intricate than written computer code, Hopkinson exposes the hierarchies that rank writing and the visual superior to the aural. Her operating language envisions an expansive system, beyond human perception, yet rooted in Caribbean music and of distinctively Caribbean invention. This communication system complements Hopkinson’s language-broadening poetics in addition to suggesting the intricacy inherent in Granny Nanny’s vast data repositories and limitless abilities.
Granny Nanny is central to her ’Nansi Web system, maintaining the strands, yet she does not act as overseer. Most information is transmitted to and from Granny Nanny via the eshus, digital entities that run each Toussaint home, functioning as local AIs that communicate with Granny Nanny and perform multiple tasks while manifesting a cacophony of voices and manifold forms. Yet knowledge possessed by Granny Nanny of Toussaint’s humans’ motivations, such as anger and jealousy, is not available to the eshus. A sizable population, they function to disperse power throughout the ’Nansi Web, diffusing the centrality of Granny Nanny. Eshus participate in a wide range of family affairs and can shape the living home. They offer simple information and explanations for their inhabitants, launch media events, appear on walls, provide comfort or, when they feel ornery, obstructions.
Also known in Caribbean and West African cultures as Esu, Elegba, Legba, or Eleggua, Eshu is the Yoruba trickster deity, the deliverer of messages to and from the spirit world in West African religions who can be in all places at once. This “mutable figure” displays such qualities as “individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption, and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture” (Gates 6).20 Sometimes Eshu is rendered feminine, the wife of Onrokore (Sanchez). Inspired by this trickster deity, Toussaint’s eshus often create misunderstandings and multiple interpretations among those they surround. Drawing from these histories, Hopkinson’s eshus correspond to Voudoun hierarchies and Taino notions of servitude, functioning further as networked computer systems where individual terminals extract information from a central server. Eshus are thus situated between Granny Nanny and the physical world, frequently consulting Nanny through the ’Nansi Web. Since eshus are only virtual presences, they need not consistently convey Granny Nanny’s data.21 While they materialize on command and, for the most part, perform the functions requested of them, they also have the ability to lie, distort, and conceal information. They converse with each human privately, appearing within, rather than in front of, a person’s eyes. Thus they are able to vary their appearance as well as the information they disseminate. Rather than revealing truth or accumulating power, the eshus disrupt the notion of objective understanding.
This vision of a central technology and operating system and its accompanying portrayals of gender, oral processes, and webbed systems of control expose the cultural framework surrounding current formulations of technology. Hopkinson broadens Davies’s model of the spider web, rendering Granny Nanny’s ’Nansi Web as the grid and glue for her community. By constructing a society that accepts misunderstandings and fractured access to information, Hopkinson affirms that technology is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. As woman-warrior and spider of her web, Granny Nanny is community-centered, responsive, and in dialogue with those she surrounds.
Cyberpunk Revisited. In much cyberpunk, those who refuse to participate in white corporate culture end by living in poverty. Situating herself “on the receiving end,” Hopkinson does not produce an identical scenario. While the cyberpunk of Gibson and Stephenson reinforces current societal configurations, foreshadowing technology’s eventual supremacy, the interaction of Granny Nanny reconfigures histories of colonization and domination. Hopkinson’s corporate dominated version of human-technology interfaces, however, is not without its own embedded fantasies. Although Midnight Robber acknowledges the increasing economic control exercised by US and multinational corporations, writing some of the conditions of the present into her vision of the future, it neverthelessrefuses to predict a future crippled by capitalist greed. Even as Toussaint inhabitants colonize their planet and express corporate allegiance, they do not strive to endlessly consume homogenous cultural artifacts. Moreover, Hopkinson’s community eliminates all evidence of the widening material gaps present in contemporary capitalism.
Despite exercising extreme control, the corporation is, for the most part, uncritically accepted by the community. Most constituents never question the pervasive presence of Granny Nanny, who controls access to collective knowledge. Rather, she is generally portrayed as benign and concerned for the general welfare of the inhabitants. In fact, most celebrations in Toussaint revolve around her perceived benevolence. The annual Carnival, for instance, names Granny Nanny as the way and means to this better life. Jonkanoo Season is the “time to give thanks to Granny Nanny for the Leaving Times, for her care, for life in this land, free from downpression and botherations. Time to remember the way their forefathers had toiled and sweated together” (18). This loyalty to Granny Nanny encompasses the corporation she embodies. The Marryshow Corporation is neither faceless nor evil. Inhabitants consider themselves Marryshevites, corporate members, thankful to Marryshow for establishing their society. For the most part, the all-powerful corporate-based electronic net has become so accepted that only when disconnected can citizens recognize her presence and what it entails.22
When Antonio and Tan-Tan escape Granny Nanny’s punishment through self-exile, Antonio tells Tan-Tan: “we is new people, not Marryshevites no more” (75). Tan-Tan thinks, “They were leaving Marryshow’s paradise, shifting to a new world” (76). While expulsion from Toussaint means freedom from corporate control, life without the Marryshow Corporation seems lonely to Tan-Tan, who finds herself surrounded by anarchic, undisciplined people who exist perilously close to nature.23 The acceptance of Granny Nanny and the Marryshow Corporation and the overwhelming consensus displayed by Marryshevites veers sharply from the histories of rebellion inherited by Toussaint’s society. In other words, this is an unlikely population to exhibit such complacent acceptance of an omniscient, omnipotent corporate body. Perhaps this is why Granny Nanny does not endeavor to control all knowledge production. She tolerates defiance by the runners/programmers, who invoke a simplified form of her code to suppress her surveillance, live in homes not connected to the ’Nansi Web, and still keep written records of select information despite the substitution of writing with different forms of knowledge collection and retention. These small rebellions and desires for disconnection are infrequently recounted in Hopkinson’s narrative, and in this community overt defiance results in immediate expulsion.
This may be seen as an ironic sensibility on Hopkinson’s part. The truth of the tale is rendered suspect, but this is to be expected, and clearly premised from the opening lines. Not only does the novel not follow narrative conventions, it does not posit the truth. Situated as a counter-exertion, the text refuses conventional literary assessment and does not endeavor to achieve consistency. Counter-exertion, Wynter writes, “will be that of a new science of human discourse, of human ‘life’ beyond the ‘master discourse’ of our governing ‘privileged text,’ and its sub/versions” (366). Midnight Robber provides a colony that occupies this terrain and, while conforming to the defining features of cyberpunk, represents life beyond the master discourse of a white male protagonist saving the world. Hopkinson’s storytelling, different from other novels in both form and language, instills the history of the African Diaspora into the genre of sf, creating a Digital Diaspora that connects the networks of diasporic myths with electronically-based webs of information, enlarging the vocabularies, images, and interpretations available for technological change. As Nelson claims of Afrofuturist texts, Midnight Robber “reflect[s] African diasporic experience and at the same time attend[s] to the transformations that are the by-product of new media and information technology. [It] excavate[s] and create[s] original narratives of identity, technology, and the future and offer[s] critiques of the promises of prevailing theories of technoculture” (9). Hopkinson’s new poetics and hacker community put new media in dialogue with New World histories, offering labyrinthine conjectures rather than conclusions about technologically-mediated development.
Hopkinson does not offer globalization as a metaphor for American imperialism and capitalism writ large, nor does she presume a locality immune to its reach. The society woven by Hopkinson produces novel versions of global effects and decenters the singular subject in its depiction of technology. She renders a planet responsive to technology by incorporating overlooked histories and strategies for resistance without blindly embedding western values or fetishizing digital creations. Furthermore, Hopkinson challenges dominant tropes about race, gender, and the intersections of past, present, and future. Her response to current trajectories thus diminishes the digital divide: “It’s not binary. The boundary lines between the haves and the have-nots are blurry.... [S]cience fiction and fantasy can be really exciting, where they can envision how change might come about” (Glave 153). Hopkinson’s future, as well as the other futures described in Afrofuturist fiction, augment the possibilities for tomorrow and facilitate broadening our understanding and development of the roles played by technology and human-machine interactions. Their inclusion in the cyberpunk canon supplies scenarios that expand cyberpunk’s seemingly unilateral vision of carnivorous corporate machines bent on annihilating humans and human practices.
NOTES
1. My title is taken from “A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson.” I would like to thank Nalo Hopkinson, whose interest in this project, including offering corrections on some of my initial readings and helping me locate specific creole constructions, has improved this essay tremendously. More importantly, her commitment to both fiction and theory, dismissing its supposed divide in her own work and in the work of those around her, has been inspirational. Anthony Alessandrini, Jennifer Devere Brody, George Enteen, Mary Finn, Michael Hanchard, Dawn Marlan, Elizabeth Meese, and Ron E. Shavers have provided valuable feedback on this essay at various stages. Alexander Weheliye has continually offered astute comments on the sprawl of ideas that have swirled around my thinking in connection with this piece. I also extend gratitude to the anonymous readers for SFS; their suggestions were generous and helpful.
2. For brief overviews of some of the range and variety of cyberpunk, see A. Butler and Bould. For critiques of cyberpunk’s limitations in terms of gender, class, and race, see Balsamo, Foster, Nixon, Ross, and Vint.
3. In Neuromancer, Gibson describes a Rasta or Dread society called Zion, created by construction workers who refuse to return from near-orbit to Earth. He uses terms pulled from Jamaican Rastafarian mythology to depict the conditions in Zion: dub is “a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship ... Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, ganga” (104). Similarly, in Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Gibson uses Voudoun Loa such as Legba and Ezili Freda, as well as Dnabala Wedo, Ougou Feray, and Baron Samedi, to create a sense of exotic strangeness and street gang syntax similar to Hollywood invocations of the religion, which he describes as “a street religion” that “came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago” (Count Zero 77). As Slusser notes, “The Voodoo religion, it would seem, has all the potential to become a media event. Indeed, it fascinates Gibson, who offers ‘livewire voodoo’ in Count Zero, in which the forces of Legba and other mysterious deities move with ease across cyberspace, avenging infractions to their natural order” (17). For more on Gibson’s use of Caribbean language and religion, see Sponsler and Stockton.
4. The globalization in cyberpunk refers to the post-industrial, postmodern flow of capital described in Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism as “late capitalism.” This moment, according to Jameson, began in the 1960s when, empowered by new technology, capitalism shifted from mass to flexible production. Anthony Giddens describes globalization as a consequence of modernity, locating its origins in the nineteenth-century European nations’ deployment of force to conquer and colonize, while Roland Robertson dates globalization’s first phase from the onset of exploration in 1400. Hopkinson’s novel recalls the traditions of the native Taino population, suggesting that for her, globalization may even predate the Caribbean colonial enterprise.
5. Although it is perhaps not unique in doing so—among the novels of the original cyberpunks, Shiner’s Frontera, Shirley’s A Splendid Chaos: An Interplanetary Fantasy (1988), and Sterling’s Involution Ocean (1978) and The Artificial Kid (1980) can all be considered as blending aspects of these subgenres—Midnight Robber does so with great attentiveness.
6. Literature has affected technological development throughout the twentieth century. Andrew Ross, for example, establishes the United States government’s reliance on sf to illustrate its innovations, citing the 1964 complaint of Edward Teller, the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb,” about sf’s dystopian turn as proof that “the military establishment was conscious of the unofficial role that science fiction generally played in the modern history of futurology by constructing the look and feel of various futures, thinkable and unthinkable” (141). Ross also recalls the Congressional Office for Technological Assessment’s use of sf in their 1978 report The Effects of Nuclear War (142), and notes that Orson Scott Card’s sf novel Ender’s Game was required reading at Quantico Marine University in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Susan Douglas illustrates that changes in technology and careers for young men were prefigured and reflected in the changing protagonists of dime-store novels, juvenile literature, and science fiction (193-94). Tim Lenoir notes the corporate influences of Stephenson’s Snow Crash, with both Disney Imagineers and the authors of Improv basing their use of avatars on its Metaverse (305). Gibson’s Neuromancer impacted the allocation of resources and research by a software designer: “Stimulated by reading Neuromancer, John Walker of Autodesk … issued a white paper calling for a major investment in cyberspace software” (Hayles, “Seduction” 79). Hayles alludes to other incidents, in this essay and in How We Became Posthuman (especially 20-24), in which cyberpunk literature stimulated technological development.
7. The Jonkanoo festival on Toussaint is a continuation of a number of similar festivals that take place in the Caribbean and in the American South (as recounted by Harriet A. Jacobs). It is called Johnkankus in Jamaica and Jukanoo in the Bahamas. Irene Smalls finds that it originated along the West Coast of Africa and spread to the West Indies and the southern coast of America.
8. For discussions of race and gendered inequities in technological development, see Norris and Green. For considerations about the “whiteness” of cyberpunk, see Dery and Ross.
9. The Jargon file states:there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life.
10. For a similar take on hacker ethics, see Wark.
11. The Mordecai terminology comes from a personal email in which Hopkinson discusses her choice of creoles. Hopkinson discusses her strategy for using them in many interviews and online conversations, including Rutledge, Hopkinson (“A Conversation”), and Soyko.
12. Tourism and Industrial Development Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited. 12 July 2005 <http://www.tidco.co.tt/>.
13. While Hopkinson recognizes and strategically deploys the Rastafarian stereotype, she does not fetishize Rastas or Rastafarianism. This might be thought of in direct contrast to Neuromancer, in which Gibson depicts Rastas as also choosing to leave Earth. In his scenario, however, they serve as cheap labor in the construction of alternative societies in space as well as happily assisting the protagonist in his quest. Gibson’s use of Voudou, complete with loas and house eshus, in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive does not reflect the histories of these practices.
14. These specific instances of creole are noted by Hopkinson. She writes of this passage: “In fact, ‘seen’ is specifically Rasta talk [as far as I know], which I guess makes it oppositional squared when I have the runners use it” (personal email, October 19, 2006).
15. See also Walcott, who echoes the cultural intersections with renamed nouns and new metaphors, as well as fragments of old, epic vocabularies.
16. The majority of contemporary dominant linguistic models that account for language spread assumes that the acquisition of English as a second language reproduces unidirectional forces of imperialism, employing “political terminology” such as “imposition, dominance, subordination, hegemony” (Brutt-Griffler 10; emphasis in original). Critical of these practices that presuppose oppression and function as a unilateral force, Brutt-Griffler argues that English both codes and reflects resistance.
17. See, also, essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw as well as a thorough discussion of the changes in Delany’s argument about the linguistic characteristics of science fiction, and responses to it, in Broderick’s Reading by Starlight, particularly chapters 2 and 5.
18. Broderick refers to a remarkable quotation by Delany: “That inmixing (or intrusion) restructures the web of signifiers that is ... the particular signifier’s signified; as well, it restructures the web of signifiers that is ... that signified below the syntagm itself taken as signifier.... [F]or science fiction such inmixing ... works in a peculiar, unique, and identifying way” (Delany, The Jewel Hinged Jaw 257; qtd. Broderick 36).
19. Like the invocation of Jamaican or Trinidadian creole to provide cultural inflections within her language, Hopkinson’s nomenclature reflects the historical memory of her community. Cockpit town shares its name with the treacherous country of “pitfalls and potholes” of limestone located in the interior of Jamaica where the Maroons, fugitive freedom fighters led by Granny Nanny, escaped the British soldiers in the seventeenth century. New Half-Way Tree recalls the busy downtown Kingston intersection and parish capital, named for a big silk cotton tree that marked the midway point between the hills and the markets in Kingston. A Trinidadian metaphor for exile and longing for home, the Midnight Robber, a prominent Carnival masquerade, refers to the Caribbean history of the African slave trade: “He would wear exaggerated robber costumes and pretend to waylay people at Carnival time. Then he’d spin them a very wordy tale about being the son of an African prince who’d been stolen into slavery … who’d escaped and become a robber in order to survive” (Hopkinson, “Conversation”). The character reflects Tan-Tan’s ambivalent feelings about her exile with her father to this web-less dimension and her inability to return to the place she believes free from oppression. The Marryshow Corporation refers to Granadian leader T. Albert Marryshow, a statesman who advocated West Indian unity and the cessation of British rule (on Marryshow, see Steele). Each reference to a practice, location, or leader is specific to Trinidad, Jamaica, the West Indies, and West Africa; moreover, Hopkinson’s citations often conjure scenes of resistance. Her invocation endows pasts to her futures and, like her implementation of creoles, enables her language to engender her vision.
20. Eshus are masters of figurative language: “Esu, god of indeterminacy, rules the interpretative process; he is god of interpretation because he embodies the ambiguity of figurative language” (Gates 21). See Gates’s chapter, “A Myth of Origins: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey,” for an extended discussion of Eshu mythology and scholarship that explores its past.
21. For example, Antonio’s eshu conceals from him his wife’s extramarital affairs, and, upon discovery, Antonio senses that his eshu enjoys the spectacle (14).
22. Her presence brings about a complete lack of privacy: “a Marryshevite couldn’t even self take a piss without the toilet analyzing the chemical composition of the urine and logging the data in the health records” (10).
23. This acceptance of the corporation contrasts sharply with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1994), in which the corporation Olivar is seen as the last safe haven, but one that is racist, overcharges its members, and provides only small apartments for those who used to own houses (117, 129). "Lauren’s dream corresponds to Hopkinson's Toussant─where the corporation polices advocate non-violence, racial equality, and respect for the corporately controlled environment."WORKS CITED
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ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, cyberpunk helped to revitalize interest in science fiction among academic and popular audiences. The genre offers a singular vision of the imminent production and deployment of technology in the service of capitalism writ large. In this essay, I argue for a broader vision of cyberpunk, including the novels of authors situated “on the receiving end of the colonization,” particularly Nalo Hopkinson, whose future visions render visible current socio-economic inequities and increase the cultural repository of ideas that inspire technological development. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) fashions unconventional scenarios premised on technological development and provides unorthodox versions of future societies. Hopkinson combines English with Trinidadian and Jamaican creole, “hacking” a language that recalls the histories of the middle passage, slavery, and imperialism. Her characters break and create code, “hacking” in speech as well as through their conceptions of community. Centered on a feminine Artificial Intelligence commanding a planet and its inhabitants, Midnight Robber challenges the genre conventions of cyberpunk, revealing its ideological underpinnings, and complicates popular accounts of the intersections of gender, technology, and corporate presence.
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