Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions comes with a spectacular jacket image of a silhouetted woman who, at once, catches your eye. Perhaps you’ve collected this book because you already feel an affinity with the author and you want to read her. Commendations and over a page of praise both tell you how the stories will dazzle (NPR Books). These all precede an insightful introduction, and a prelude titled “Quenching Our Story Thirst.” Nisi Shawl, co-author of the titular story and the author of the preface, invites you with these words:
What truths do you long to hear? What stories do you want to be told? You’ll find at least one of them in this book.
Maybe more.
How do you approach this reading? Maybe blind. It may be best not to anticipate anything. But Nalo Hopkinson’s authorly introduction whispers: “Anticipate.” It touches you in a personal way that summons you to listen:
Readers often ask me questions which presume I write with some kind of overarching plan. That I know what my themes, metaphors, and outcomes will be. There are writers who do write that way. Whereas my brain frequently resists linearity … Writing is hard!
You anticipate but are a little anxious about expectations—what if your readerly reception is subjective in its own way and tangles with all those things you’re meant to expect?
In his book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), literary theorist Gérard Genette explores the liminal devices and conventions, within and without a book, that form part of the complex mediation between the book, its author, its publisher, and its reader. He discusses titles, forewords, epigraphs, and the publisher’s jacket as part of the book’s private and public history (pp. 2-3). Genette determines that a literary work consists of text that has been endowed with significance by its core players (p. 1).
Distinguished scholar Wench Ommundsen in her book Metafictions? (1993) also speaks about the narrative act and its actors:
Unlike “normal” face-to-face conversation, literature does not involve the simultaneous presence of both sender and addressee; and the context, so important to the meaning of most verbal acts, is unstable. The reader is absent from the scene of writing, thus unable to provide feedback, and at the time of reading, the author is not there to ensure that we get the ‘correct’ message. The author cannot truly legislate for the reception of her/his text: we can only guess at how Shakespeare intended us to understand his work but must assume that the passing of time and the multiplication of readers have affected its intelligibility in important ways. (p. 57)
As a reader, you think you are absent from the writing. But Hopkinson gives you the privilege of her presence, to inform you about the text’s meaning at the time of the writing. And she does this before each story. This means that you, the reader, approach the text with some knowledge of the author’s intentions, capabilities, or psyche, their reality, view, or concept at the time of writing. It is but a peek, not full access to hand-scribbled notes, drafts, or proof corrections for the accurate interpretation of the authorly transition from story concept to publication. And you, the reader, have a choice, as Ommundsen writes in Metafictions?:
[…] like most human relationships, literary communication mediates a precarious balance of power: power to narrate, power to interpret, power, finally, to accept or decline the roles offered by one’s partners in the literary act. (p. 68)
Ommundsen recognizes unique roles, from the real author to the implied author, the narrator, the narratee, the implied reader, the real reader … and the power of each role in the literary act. Conditioning factors in the author/reader relationship (such as the tacit pact between the implied author and the implied reader) determine how the reader interacts with the text, and this is more to do with expectation, history, and reviews than the tacit author-reader contract.
The preconceptions and the specificity that accompanied the stories in this book influenced your entry into and perceptions of the individual text. The text has already been endowed with significance by its players.
But don’t all books arrive thus endorsed?
This one is different. There’s an underlying intimacy. It’s as if you’re in a candlelit parlor, just you and the author in conversation—Nalo leaning forward and holding your gaze, or perhaps sitting back and at ease, sometimes in silences.
This profound approach to storytelling works well for open-minded readers who try not to resist the author or the text. Readers thirsty to know where the author’s mind goes, how the story gets there. Book lovers soaking in authorly titbits about the anthology in which this or that story appears, the spur and research that happened …
Some readers prefer behind-the-story to come after the story. You may find, after each reading, that you go back to re-read the story’s intro, and newly reconnect with both the behind-the-story and the narrative that unfolds.
There’s also an implicit invitation—intended or otherwise—for the reader to gauge whether each story lives up to everything that talks it up. Which is, of course, a personal and subjective experience.
As in any collection, some stories talk to you more than others.
“And More Slow” is alluring for its concept and inspiration—a science fiction story to accompany a visual art installation. It is a solid story, yet has a degree of abstraction in the personification of a translation, female to be precise, and lunar-inspired. It is a story that is finished in its unfinishedness.
“Can’t Beat ’Em” is captivating as a smorgasbord of snippets, a creation birthed from oddities to form something cohesive, ominous and suspenseful, wrapping up with Marisella’s choice on what to do with the “glup” in the drainage of her bathtub.
“Child Moon” is the uncanny offspring of a fundraiser anthology, and I like Hopkinson’s words on it: “The story ended where it ended.” This one borrows from the familiar concept of changelings and reimagines it differently. It is somewhat modern in its offering of a new wine in old skins.
“Covenant,” solicited for an art-based project on planet cities, lures the reader with a proverb and has parallel tales—italicized sections from an omniscient narrator. It unveils a surrealist story on what happens to the eye of a potato when it is soiled and watered.
What you garner from Hopkinson’s writing is unusual takes on the “ordinary,” for example in “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story,” a futuristic water-world story with Caribbean-hued dialogue, in which the reader cannot help but find curiosity in a pig character named Lickchop—who, in a story-within-a-story, just might save the day.
In her elucidations, Hopkinson is earnest. She shares how “Ally” didn’t make it into the anthology for which it was written (“The editor declined it”)—a moment of connection with the writerly reader who’s had their own share of rejections—and tells how resurrections can sometimes happen whereby the story finds a better home (“Ally” was published in Nightmare Magazine before making it into Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions).
These stories come in ranging lengths, from novelettes like “Clap Back”—a near-future story speckled with news-bite vignettes—to flash fictions like “Pocket Universe”—another commissioned story in response to an artwork, and with taut dialogue to efficaciously convey a “make-a-wish” narrative that hugs a deathbed.
What you might respect even more about Hopkinson’s stories is a deliberate act of engaging with “difference,” integrating queer characters. This rare collection is an indulgence, too, for readers who esteem or are curious about Afrocentric stories in the Caribbean tradition. It’s also for those who find fascination in surrealist stories, such as “Inselberg,” an almost theme-park-like water odyssey with king tides, twinkling cities and tide beaches.
Yeah, nah, as Aussies would say. The best approach to reading these stories is not blindness—anticipate everything. Let Nalo Hopkinson’s words touch you in that intimate way that says, “Come, welcome to my worlds.”
You’ll be riding shotgun with the best view. Take in the book jacket, the collection’s naming, the foreword and preface, then the exposures and epigraphs, then … let the stories.