Morrison And Nalo Hopkinson Essay

What do Nalo Hopkinson and Toni Morrison have in common so as to be studied alongside each other and analysed as part of the contemporary canon? Of African descent and both residing in the Northern part of the American continent, these writers have made it their duty to come to terms with events of their history that still haunt the unconscious of the Black community. This haunting will not be appeased unless the truth is told about all the affected members of that community. History had forgotten about what women had to say. Toni Morrison and Nalo Hopkinson seek to regain the voice of those marginalised women in history through their novels Beloved and The Salt Roads.
Speculative Fiction is a narrative technique within literatures of the
By fusing different speculative genres- science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism- with traditional African and Caribbean folk tales, historical narratives, ancient Greco-Roman myths and Christian fables, Hopkinson’s writing relates to a multiplicity that cannot be circumscribed within a coherent generic paradigm.
The key word on Marinkova’s explanation is “multiplicity”, because it is the technique that Hopkinson and also Morrison use to deal with those events that have never been rendered in historical accounts. An erasure of the boundaries of genre categories is needed by the struggle to name and resignify experiences that have been left outside the central dominating centres of codification. Speculative Fiction combines, in a creative fashion, elements from different genres. This is why it can be said that Speculative Fiction, just like hybridized identities, is in a state of constant becoming. In Hopkinson`s
Lorna Burns explains the concept of “becoming”, according to Deleuze, making reference to The Salt Roads, and says that the novel is one such ensemble of affects and becomings, and as such it “fights” not by means of structuralised oppositions, but by fracturing; following lines of flight and becomings that disrupt the majoritarian order.
The process of regaining voice and re-writing the past in The Salt Roads and in Beloved does not address reality in terms of the binary oppositions: master/slave, free/ bound, white/ black. On the contrary, both narratives, in a constant flow across genres, disrupt traditional assumptions of power and assertion of identity. In fact, these novels demonstrate that the exercise of self-definition can result in healing the great symbolical wound, which still bleeds in the unconscious of black communities, the myth of the Middle Passage.
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