Brown Girl in the Ring

This novel, first one by Nalo Hopkinson, surprised me very much, and very pleasantly at that. It tells the story of Ti-Jeane, a woman in (presumably) her early twenties, who lives with her grandmother. Mami, the grandmother, is both a well-trained professional nurse and the local herbalist who treats diseases and aches in both modern and not-so-modern ways. She summons and talks to the spirits, and generally takes care of the populace of central Toronto after its economic and social downfall. In the novel, a lot of instability has led to riots and to the abandonment of central Toronto some years ago, which forms the setting and the premise for the plot. Governmental structures have moved out to the suburbs; no one guarantees the security and the welfare of the city-centre population any more.

In this world of insecurity, Ti-Jeane is looking after her young baby whose father is Ti-Jeane’s ex-boyfriend Tony, a member of the local gang who also uses buff, a rather powerful drug. Trouble walks in when Rudy, the boss of the gang, receives a contract to “find”, as soon as possible, a human heart for transplantation into no other body than that of Canada’s Prime Minister at the time. Rudy gives that task to Tony who has dipped a finger or two in the gang’s buff and has to repay his transgressions, this time in blood.

What follows is an indescribable adventure that involves murder, spirits, the return of people thought long lost, and a fight for life amidst the threat of eternal death and imprisonment and pain. Hopkinson manages to implicate all possible levels of society into her story. I was amazed at the way she renders the consequences of a decision both strictly local, then regional, then almost global, and also extant on several levels in between. From a very formal, academic point of view, this novel interweaves concepts and strategies from the three thickest branches of the tree of speculative fiction: fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. This results in a story one literally cannot put down. The stakes for all characters are very high at all times: they all fear things more sinister than death; they all experience both true horror before the unknown, and true stomach-churning disgust at the evil deeds of others; they all hope and fight for the best, and put every last piece of energy they have into that.

To cut to the chase, Hopkinson engages her readers with a story that is both very tough and very optimistic. She boldly goes beyond genre cliches and delivers a narrative about the power of the spirit and the enormity of change. After I read the final pages of Brown Girl in the Ring, I walked around stunned, with a smile on my face that didn’t disappear for hours. Such is the strength that this story gives its readers: I found that the transformative potential of the social decisions Hopkinson elaborates upon is not only immense, but also inescapable. It is in our hands and minds to take those decisions for the good of absolutely everyone, and not only of those hungry for more and more money and power. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring clearly shows what the fruit of such careful, suffered-for decisions tastes like. Please believe me, for I tell you true: it is delicious.

Dell Sells Computers to Women

The latest ludicrous insanity by a big multinational? Dell selling gender-specifically. They opened up a website to spread the word about how women can best employ laptops. The answer to this hugely difficult, almost unsolvable riddle, Dell thinks, lies in the following: recipes, weight control, cooking. Oops, should have actually combined “recipes” and “cooking” into one since… wait… it’s all about one thing, actually. Ah, these people kill me! When will they stop attempting these differentiations that go way beyond the smallest grain? We all need computers.

To return to the problem: dear Dell, I suggest the following. You invent a time machine. A big one. You put your whole marketing department in there. Then you stuff the CEO and the other C’s on top. Then you send them to nineteenth-century Victorian England. I have a hunch that they will find some suitable partners for conversation there. Or possibly not, since marketing and the C’s probably know nothing about looking after small children, and knitting, and weaving, and playing the piano, and singing in church, and dressing properly for different occasions, and… Aaaarrrgh, I’m too tired for this. You get my drift; now git! Q. W3ary out. (via /.)

Slumdog Millionaire

I finally managed to see the much-hyped Slumdog Millionaire. To be honest, this was both a shocking and a pleasing experience, mainly because one cannot be prepared for some of the things that happen in this film. All other things set aside, I couldn’t explain to myself how this film got awarded a total of 8 Oscars (if memory serves me right); but then, on the one hand, some possibilities for storytelling are apparently unknown to Hollywood, and on the other, awards do not matter at all if a work of art cannot speak to the reader/listener/viewer in any way.

Slumdog Millionaire did speak to me a lot, however. The poverty depicted in the film is not unreal, as any and all people who have observed it will confirm. Neither is the ethnic/religious violence something devised for the film or invented for purposes of plot and character; unfortunately, such episodes of blood and death are well known in Indian history under the name of communalism, something Mahatma Gandhi spoke of very often. One could accuse the film’s team of showing only one side of communalist violence, but that is the farthest any historically well-informed critic could get. Of course, any production of such proportions will stir trouble and cause controversy, but I will not go into further details here: I find that the points I just mentioned are the farthest-reaching ones. These items should be on the agendas of local, state and international decision-making entities because action is needed, not words — as always.

The film tells its story in several threads which are woven into one toward the end. I was at times shocked and at times deeply moved by the events unfolding on my screen. The most profound of these was perhaps Jamal and Latika’s undying love which, to my mind, is one of the deepest, most affirmative statements about the human spirit I’ve seen recently. I think this is a central motif everyone can relate to. Naturally, this type of story is not new; the film sets it in a location rather vaguely known to Western Europe and North America, and I would venture that that is what spelt the movie’s success in huge capital letters all across NA and European cinemas. Slumdog Millionaire does not tell a brand new story, but does so with power, beauty, and belief in our strength to overcome barriers of money, hatred, violence, and — most importantly — time in the name of love. That makes it a highly recommendable experience.

The Calcutta Chromosome

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome won him the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and rightfully so. It is a novel about knowledge, about people who want to find truth and understanding, about the secret of a chromosome that can travel from person to person. The plot unfolds in several time-lines, and in different places and narratives. The beautiful thing about the story is that all these threads coalesce into a peaceful but profoundly transforming climax in the end.

Along the way, Ghosh has some quite perceptive things to say about the world today. He introduces us to a young man who works in the virtual world of computers, networks, and information reconstruction for the veiled purposes of big corporations; he follows a young journalist in India as she tries hard to pursue her professional goals; he tells the story of an ageing man seeking knowledge, a man who himself becomes the narrator in the novel very often, lifting the shrouds from the past; he places us under the gaze of a woman whose origins and powers are unknown and seemingly unknowable. Ghosh also ironically returns to the colonial past to recreate the discovery of the malaria virus which plays a major role in the history of the Calcutta chromosome. The novel, divided into two parts and 40+ chapters, somewhat deliberately confuses the reader by interweaving all these stories and several more, only to resolve the confusion at the end. This strategy allows Ghosh to hold the reader on a very tight leash as well as increase and maintain the suspense until the grand finale.

Finally, while reading and thinking about the novel, I deeply appreciated two general features of Ghosh’s writing. First, he is not afraid of transformation and change; he cannot be intimidated and forced back into circularity and rigidness by concepts of intentional “high-brow” literariness. His stories lead somewhere, his characters change, and that can only be good because it is such a heavy, substantial, material process. Second, Ghosh proves, and indeed not only in this novel, that there is more to be found out there, that the world still holds riddles and enigmas and wonders — all those things we can marvel at, and invest our passion in. The universe we live in possesses enormous breadth and depth, and we are the privileged ones who were given the chance to explore it. Let us do so, says Amitav Ghosh, and fear not, for the journey to understanding will change us forever.