First impression review: Skin Folk, by Nalo Hopkinson
This is a terrific collection of short stories inspired by Caribbean folklore, the West Indian immigrant experience, women’s experiences and fears, or all three. I only wish it was longer.
Some stories are re-interpretations of western fairytales. ‘Riding the Red’, for instance, takes ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ back to its roots:
But it’s the old wives who best tell those tales, oh yes…We’ve been there, and we lived to tell them. And don’t I remember being young once, and toothsome, and drunk on the smell of my own young blood flowing through my veins…I could make wolfie slaver, I could…He caught me, of course; some say he even tricked me into it, and it may be they’re right, but that’s not the way this old wife remembers it.
In ‘Under Glass’ the idea of a world where the wind is full of glass shards that can rip you to shreds is scary…and the last lines point out the similarities to Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Ice Queen’. And ‘Precious’ is a dark take on the story where a peasant girl is “blessed” to have flowers and jewels tumble from her mouth when she speaks – because how could the prince she marries NOT be tempted to treat her like the golden goose? But when she starts spitting truth, she finds that words can be weapons.
Several, of course, feature the trickster Anansi, or Anansi-like characters, including ‘Something To Hitch Meat To’, in which a man whose job is digitally altering porn is gifted the power to instead show things as they are. ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ seems to refer to a character from another Hopkinson book, but has the structure of an African folktale, with Tan-Tan having to find a way to trick the duppy man that is draining her dry, eating all her food and whispering in her ear that she is stupid and worthless. ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’ combines the West African tales of the Lagahoo (a donkey man that serves as a herald of death, like a banshee) and the soucouyant (a fiery vampire woman that sucks the life-force from babies). The name of the story refers to how being too greedy for what you want will choke you. ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ marries the concept of duppies (malevolent spirits of the dead) to…well, see if you can tell:
“’Is just superstitiousness, darlin,’ he’d told her. ‘You never heard the old people say that if someone dies, you must put a bottle in a tree to hold their spirit…A blue bottle. To keep the duppy cool’…Maybe the bottles gave him some comfort, made him feel that he’d kept some essence of his poor wives near him.”
“Once, gazing up at him as he loomed above her…she had seen the moonlight playing glints of deepest blue in his trim beard”
And then, of course, there are the 100% Hopkinson originals. ‘Snake’ will make your skin crawl from the moment the main character starts describing how he watches children in the park. But not to worry: the bird references all over the story are there for a reason! ‘Ganger (Ball Lightning)’ is a very weird tale that includes an electrified figure conjured up by not turning off one’s futuristic “sex skins” properly but is really about communication and how a couple can be together and talk endlessly without really touching each other. ‘Whose Upward Flight I Love’ is a bit sillier, imagining that cities like NY tie down their street trees in winter so they don’t migrate.
Blackness, and the way societal prejudice can lead someone to reject their own blackness, is a theme in several stories, including ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, ‘Something To Hitch Meat To’, and ‘A Habit of Waste’. In that one, a young woman who had exchanged her plump black body for a slim white one sees her old body on a bus, looking surprisingly happy and attractive, and then encounters an old Trinidadian man who makes a whole Thanksgiving feast out of seemingly nothing…and slowly finds herself valuing her roots more. Queerness doesn’t show up that much, but when it does it is done well. In ‘Slow Cold Chick’ there’s a “you are what you eat” theme, and the initially timid main character gets some unexpected advice from her neighbors about what to do with the cockatrice she hatched…with some cheeky implications:
Sharon leaned over Johnny and blew cool, aloe-scented breath on his blisters. Blaise admired the way the position emphasized the fullness of her body. Johnny’s burns healed as Blaise watched. “I enjoyed your company this afternoon,” she said to them both. Simple, risky words to say with this new-found warmth in her voice…She reached a hand to either of them, feeling the blood heat of her palms flexing against theirs.
‘Fisherman’ is a non-fantastical story featuring…well, I think a trans man main character, based on the fact that KC has chosen a gender-neutral set of initials and prefers to be called a fisherman. But they have an encounter with a very friendly and encouraging madam that leaves them feeling much more confident about both their outward presentation and the body underneath. There’s a bit of unpleasantness with a colleague, but it gets sorted out.
Overall recommendation: If you enjoy Neil Gaiman’s creepy stories and fairytale retellings and want to try something similar but from a different cultural/gender perspective, definitely give this book a try. It definitely got me excited to sample more of Hopkinson’s work.
