Midnight Robber - Analysis

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.