Midnight Robber

Midnight Robber

Book Cover for Midnight Robber
Author	Nalo Hopkinson
Original title	Midnight Robber
Language	English
Genre	Science Fiction, Horror
Publisher	Warner Aspect
Publication place	United States
Published in English	2000
Media type	Print (paperback)
Pages	336 pp
ISBN	0-446-67560-1
OCLC	42397150
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PR9199.3.H5927 M53 2000

Midnight Robber is a science fiction/horror/coming of age novel by Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson.

Plot

The novel is set in the far future, where interplanetary and alternate-dimension travel is possible. In addition, an Internet-like information system, known as “Granny Nanny”, dominates daily life, with each person being injected with nanomites that allow mental access to Granny Nanny at birth. This access takes the form of an eshu, a mental voice within the head that provides information upon request and operates as a sort of sixth sense. The use of Granny Nanny is so widespread that the word has somewhat of a religious overtone (characters will often swear to Granny Nanny, for example). The story is eventually revealed to be narrated by Granny Nanny, speaking to Tan Tan’s child as he is being born.

Its protagonist is Tan Tan Habib, a seven-year-old girl living in Cockpit County on the Carib-colonized planet of Toussaint, with her father Antonio and mother Ione. The story begins during Carnival season, of which the highlight for Tan Tan is the Robber Kings: performers who dress up as the mythical figure of the Robber King and tell exaggerated, boastful tales of their adventures. Antonio (an adulterer himself) discovers that Ione has been having an affair. After driving out the lover and separating from Ione and Tan Tan (who becomes distraught over the incident, blaming herself for Antonio’s abandonment), he then challenges his wife’s lover to a duel for her honor during Jour Ouvert. During the duel Antonio ends up killing the lover with a poisoned machete blade, causing him to escape Toussaint with Tan Tan.

The two take a shift portal to New Halfway Tree, an alternate universe version of Toussaint that serves as a place of exile for convicts. They are met by Chichibud, a douen (one of several alien species on New Halfway Tree), who takes them to the nearest human settlement, Junjuh Village, run harshly by One Eye the sheriff and his deputy Claude through a system of punishment (being locked in a tin box for several hours at a time) and death (hanging).

Tan Tan eventually adjusts to life in New Halfway Tree, growing familiar with the other locals of the town such as, Michael and Gladys the local blacksmiths, and Janisette her father’s new wife. She even befriends the local boy Melonhead, and together the two plan to move to Sweet Pone together, a better settlement on New Halfway Tree. As Tan Tan grows older, her father slowly slides into alcoholism and depression until he takes to raping Tan Tan on a regular basis.

On her sixteenth birthday, Tan Tan kills him in self-defense and, pregnant with his child, flees into the forbidding bush that surrounds their small settlement with the help of Chichibud, who takes her to live among the Douen in his village tree. The Douen, concerned about letting a human into their home tree and learning their secrets, reluctantly allow her to live with them.

Tan Tan struggles and fails to adopt to the Douen lifestyle, although she does end up likewise befriending Abitefa, Chichibud’s daughter. She eventually hears of and visits a human village, looking for a doctor to abort her baby. While there, she defends a man being abused by his mother, assuming the persona of the Robber Queen as she does so. Over time, she returns to the village night after night in the persona of the Robber Queen, seeking to right wrongs and make up for the guilt she feels over killing her father.

She is finally found by Janisette who, with a car and rifle built by Michael and Gladys, has been looking for her and seeking vengeance for Antonio’s death. In the process of running away she inadvertently leads Janisette and the other two to the Douen tree, forcing them to destroy it and move on to other trees. Tan Tan and Abetifa are left behind to fend for themselves.

The two take to wandering through the bush, looking for a town for Tan Tan to live in, still being hunted by Janisette. Tan Tan visits the villages they pass in the night under the guise of the Robber Queen, seeking to do good for others. As the two travel on she hears stories being told about her exploits, both real and imagined.

After some traveling she arrives in Sweet Pone. She runs into Melonhead, who is now the local tailor, and the two strike up their friendship once again. Tan Tan becomes torn between her desire to stay with Melonhead and her fears of Janisette, all the while still feeling guilt over her father's death and disgust at her still-unborn child. She ultimately stays for Sweet Pone’s carnival, dressing up in the Robber Queen costume Melonhead made for her, until Janisette arrives in a tank, demanding Tan Tan’s return to Junjuh village and her revenge. Tan Tan finally confronts her face to face, accusing her of knowing that Antoine was raping her all those years and admitting to both herself and to Janisette that she killed Antoine out of self defense. Janisette, ashamed, leaves while Tan Tan, relieved from her guilt and sensing the oncoming delivery, returns to the bush. There, accompanied by Melonhead and Abitefa, she gives birth, accepting her son as her own and naming him Tubman.

Analysis

Midnight Robber draws a great deal of its imagery and themes from Afro-Caribbean folklore, particularly when it comes to naming new species and technologies. Hopkinson explained her naming decisions as a response to how “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. I wondered what technologies a largely African diasporic culture might build, what stories its people might tell itself about technology.

Hopkinson's concern about the racialization of names for technology reflects an Afrofuturism idea that Mark Dery expresses:

"Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers - white to a man - who have engineered our collective fantasies?"

Dery asserts that most science fiction imagines a future technology that preserves the current digital racial divide, propogating the idea that white people invent and utilize technology better than black people can. Hopkinson uses language to fight against this tradition.

Hopkinson further focuses on the importance of language by telling the story using a variant of Caribbean Creole, rather than standard English.

When you grow up speaking a vernacular people are very quick to tell you that it’s incorrect, it’s wrong. But Caribbean language has its own roots, its own linguistic integrity, its own modes of speech. Part of it is that writing in vernacular helped me to understand what speech does and to see what has happened to English, having been imposed on the Caribbean people and then the Caribbean people taking it and making it their own. Hence the quote inside the front cover, which was written by my partner: “I stole the torturer’s tongue.”

Code-switching and creole languages therefore become an important part of the novel, forcing readers to pay attention, ask what is being identified and re-signify the words.

Hopkinson also says this "code-sliding" "...infuses meaning into the language that goes beyond its content." In Midnight Robber, all human characters speak the same language, Anglopatwa, which they seem to consider a formally correct language—its speakers do not perceive it to be a creole or patois. There is no creole of this creole; instead the aliens on New Halfway Tree, the douens, have learned to speak this language fluently in addition to their own. The douens' screeching, warbling language at first appears impossible for humans to learn, but Tan-Tan manages to grasp it in order to speak with her companion Abitefa. Hopkinson's use of language recalls Kodwo Eshun's comments on Afrofuturism: “It is difficult to conceive of Afrofuturism without a place for sonic process in its vernacular, speculative, and syncopated modes. The daily lifeworld of black vernacular expression may be anathema to contemporary art practice. Nonetheless, these histories of futures passed must be positioned as a valuable resource.” A New York Times review urges readers not to be put-off by the unusual narrative language, echoing Eshun's insistence that vernaculars of black art and speech deserve the respect of consumers of art.

Another major element of the novel is storytelling, particularly oral storytelling. The relationship between Granny Nanny and “her” recipients, for example, is primarily aural, with Granny Nanny singing and talking in the ear of the hearer. “Nannysong” is the code by which Granny Nanny operates, the story being told by an eshun to Tan Tan’s child as he is being born, since due to the unique circumstances of Tan Tan’s exile he has been born with nanites in his ears instead of needing them to be implanted. The eshun interrupts its narrative at times to tell some of the fictional stories made up about Tan Tan as the Robber Queen, each of which have some basis in her true life. Tan Tan herself is enamored with the figure of the Robber King, who defines himself through his exaggerated and wild stories. As the story goes on, she assumes the mantle of the Robber Queen herself, using the wild, exaggerated speech of the robber to tell her own story and in the process redefine herself.

Major Themes

Otherness: The douen, marginalized non-humans, are the “others” within New Halfway Tree. Their society acts a mirror for the gender inequalities and abuses within Tan-Tan’s world. First, the female douen are considered superior to the males. Not only do they have different speech patterns that are bolded and starred, they also can fly - a skill the males lose with age. The douen also cannot understand Tan-Tan’s rape, nor her desire to have an abortion, because their society does not have a framework for understanding these abuses. In addition, the douen’s otherness is constructed through their ability to either access human spaces or exclude human beings. Because the male douen can speak Tan-Tan’s language and can’t fly, they are able to access the human towns, while the females stay above in the nests. At the same time, both the female and male douen are able to reject Tan-Tan because she cannot learn their language nor understand their rituals. These layers of access and exclusion speak to the douen’s complicated status as the “others.”

Rape/Violation:

Marginalization:

Mythology: Hopkinson presents a few myths throughout Midnight Robber, separated from the rest of the text, set in boldfaced text and told in a different kind of voice than that of the novel’s usual narration. The voice of the mythology is more direct, and gives the impression of oral storytelling. The first myth is under the heading “How Tan-Tan Learn to Thief” and overall, tells the story of how Tan-Tan and her father, Antonio, come to Earth, discover New Half-Way Tree, and become stuck there. Eventually, the storyteller reveals, “is Tan-Tan who give birth to the race of people on Earth, for it never had none there before”. This myth has similarities to, but is also very different from, both the biblical creation myth in the Book of Genesis and the narrative of Midnight Robber. Just like in the story of Adam and Eve, there is a man and a woman, who are the first people on Earth, there is a tree that offers food but causes trouble later, and some great problem becomes the fault of the female in the story: in the myth in Midnight Robber, Tan-Tan lies to the god figure, Kabo Tano, and he punishes both her and Antonio by refusing to allow them to return to their native planet. The myth is similar to the plot of the rest of Midnight Robber because Tan-Tan and Antonio do become stuck in a place called New Half-Way Tree, though in the novel’s narrative, New Half-Way Tree is not necessarily on Earth. The myth also foreshadows Tan-Tan’s relationship with her father, who sexually abuses her and eventually makes her pregnant.

With the use of these myths, Hopkinson suggests that myths are both based in some truth and in other myths, but also contain added or changed details and fail to convey reality.

The Robber King is a mythological character that the protagonist Tan-Tan empathizes with. She eventually embodies this spirit and becomes the robber queen in order to cope with the distress she feels due to the rape and incest she combats with her father, the tumultuous world of New Halfway Tree and her station in life. In this way she is able to reinvent herself as a strong figure who is better able to navigate the world she is living in.

Reception

Gary K. Wolfe praised Midnight Robber, characterizing it as "an inventive amalgam of rural folklore and advanced tehnology" and commending Hopkinson's distinctive narrative voice, which "reminds us that most of the world does not speak contemporary American middle-class vernacular, . . . raises questions about the highly conventionalized way that SF has always treated language, [and] mak[es] us question the hegemony of American culture in SF worlds."

Locus reviewer Faren Miller praised the novel, saying "Hopkinson take[s] potentially downbeat material and compel[s] the reader's attention with vigorous narrative, vividly eloquent prose, and forms of magic which may actually be SF."

Reviews

• SF Site Featured Review by David Soyka (2000)