Blog 2 - Text

Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican speculative fiction author who currently lives and teaches in Riverside, California. She was born in Jamaica and lived throughout Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. As a child she was raised in an environment where both of her parents were associated with literature. Her mother was a library technician and her was a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who also taught Latin and English. You can say that he was her personal William Shakespeare.

Hopkinson grew up around her family and was heavily influenced by her culture and traditions as it is portrayed in her novels that she has written. Her writing in the novel "Brown Girl in the Ring" is influenced by Afro-Caribbean culture and stories, some of which revolve around the theme of folk tales and black magic. These themes that are present in the book which are directly influenced by her personal life experiences. She uses her knowledge from growing up in the Caribbeans in her writing to also showcase major subjects like race, class and sexuality. Which is clearly evident in the text as she draws focus to the theme of feminism if a women of color as she has the power to take control of her fate through mystical powers. Female characters are flooded throughout this novel, as it shows the struggles women face as single mothers who have different cultural beliefs from society.

Hopkinson lived in Toronto for quite sometime of her life (1977-2011) as well as in the novel, the setting takes place in the same city. So the way downtown Toronto is portrayed in this novel is directly impacted by Nalo's experiences in the city.

Nalo's Hopkinson is known to be a queer writer although her novel "Brown Girl in the Ring" didn't have a main character that was queer, so this was a new approach for Hopkinson as she wanted to take a different route and try something new. However there is a a side character who is a self-serving lesbian politicians so the there are queer characters but they just aren't the focus of this story. The fact that she changed the sexuality of her main character comparing to her previous novel captivates the readers attention to the text as he or she will be able to experience something different.

Bibliography 

Casey the Canadian Lesbrarianhttps://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/caribbean-canadian-science-fiction-a-review-of-nalo-hopkinsons-brown-girl-in-the-ring/

Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalo_Hopkinson

Anatol, Giselle Liza. "A feminist reading of soucouyants in Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring and Skin Folk." Mosaic [Winnipeg] 37.3 (2004): 33+. Academic OneFile. Web. 2 May 2016.http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA123408621&v=2.1&u=peel_dsb&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=99ccdc7540216d882d09e5280d369190