Report from Planet Midnight (11 page)

Why do cops routinely brutalise people? Why do bumblebees fly? Why do humans make art?

In the postscript to your ICFA speech, you took someone to task for separating Art and Labour. True, both are work. But isn’t there an important difference or two?

Both are work, and both can be art. Hopefully, you’re being paid for both. (And thanks for granting me that “u” in “Labour.”)

Are you a Marxist?

No.

Three favorite movies?

Quilombo,
by Carlos Diegues

Pumzi,
by Wanuri Kahiu

Lilies,
by John Greyson

You seem to have stolen from Shakespeare (literature’s master thief) in “Shift.” What does a reader who hasn’t read
The Tempest
need to know?

Let’s see … in the play, Prospero is a rich white duke who’s been exiled to a small island with his beautiful daughter Miranda. There he finds an ethereal fairy named Ariel who’s been trapped inside a split tree by a white Algerian (African) witch named Sycorax. Sycorax had been exiled to the island earlier, while pregnant with her son Caliban. Sycorax has died, leaving Ariel imprisoned and Caliban abandoned. Prospero frees Ariel and requires her servitude in return, but promises to release her eventually. Prospero takes Caliban in and teaches him to read, but when Caliban attempts to rape Miranda, Prospero makes him a slave (as in, no promise of release). Ariel gets all the flitting-about jobs and Caliban gets all the hard labour. Prospero repeatedly ridicules Caliban. Ariel helps Prospero and Miranda get off the island, and thus wins freedom. I think we’re supposed to identify with Prospero and Miranda, but I was disturbed by Ariel’s servitude and Caliban’s slavery, and even though Prospero eventually pardons Caliban, I had trouble with the play’s relentless mockery of Caliban as a “savage.”

A few years ago I was visiting Kamau Brathwaite’s literature class at NYU, and they were discussing Caliban. I had the insight that Ariel and Caliban could be seen as the house Negro and the field Negro, and I proceeded to mess with the story from there.

Someone once defined a language as a dialect with a navy. Would you agree?

I don’t know if I agree, but it’s hilarious! Whoever it was has a point.

Do you read poetry for fun? How about science? History?

Although my father was a poet and I know much of his work, I used to think that I didn’t read a lot of poetry. But then I had occasion to check my bookshelves and discovered that I owned more poetry than I thought, and had read most of it.

I’d forgotten about children’s poetry (“The more it snows, tiddly pom …”), not to mention Louise Bennett and Kamau Brathwaite, and Marge Piercy and Homer, and Lillian Allen and Dennis Scott, and, and, and …

There are poems I can recite by heart, and as a kid I read
The Odyssey, The Iliad,
and Dante’s
Inferno
for pleasure; read them over and over, in fact. I don’t think I could struggle through Homer nowadays, but I was more persistent as a child.

I do end up hearing a fair bit of poetry, as readings or spoken word or dub poetry performances, and as music. It’s rare that I’ll read a whole book of poetry from end to end as fun, but in sips and nibbles, I do read it. And
I read science and history for fun as well as for research. Michio Kaku.
African Fractals. Death in the Queen City.
I also read critical theory for fun, and to find out what the hell it is that we writers are doing when we write. When it comes to fiction, I mostly read science fiction, fantasy and comics, plus the occasional mystery or erotica/porn piece. But my nonfiction reading is more catholic.

Do you think the World Fantasy Award should be a bust of someone other than H.P. Lovecraft?

I have one of those. In appreciation for the merit of my work, the World Fantasy Award committee has given me a bust of a man who publicly reviled people of my primary racial background and who believed that we are by nature inferior to other humans. It is way creepy having racist old H.P. Lovecraft in my home looking at me.

I don’t like the fact that the bust is of him, but I love having the award. So I console myself in a number of ways: it was designed by Gahan Wilson, and how freaking cool is that? Lovecraft’s own (part-Jewish) wife and his friends thought his racism was over the top. I gather his wife frequently called him to heel when he made anti-Semitic remarks; and I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he’s forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S.P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me.

I think the award should represent a fantastical creature, perhaps a different one every year. (I know that’s probably too expensive, but since I’m fantasizing here …) A kitsune. A troll. A chupacabra. Anansi. A fat, happy mermaid with fish in her hair.

Do you outline plots, or just wing it? Ever write in longhand?

Nowadays, I have to write proposals for unwritten novels in order to sell them. I don’t outline, at least not whole novels at a time. I tend to do it when I get stuck. I rarely write longhand. I type much more quickly. Plus I lose paper, whereas I rarely lose my computer or laptop.

Do you have trouble with copy editors, or rely on them?

Both. Being copyedited is an occasion for taking a lot of calming breaths when I encounter wrongheaded or ignorant suggestions, but also for gasps of relief when the copy editor catches something unfortunate in my text, or makes a suggestion that lends a clumsy line grace. It also gives me an early insight into how my story is being understood, which means I still have time to make small adjustments. In my new young adult novel,
The Chaos,
I invented (I thought) the name of a pop star. The copy editor thought to Google the name, and discovered that it’s the performance name of a porn star. Not an issue for me, except that she was not the character in my novel. I came up with another name.

You once described a first draft as clay. I like that. Can you describe your general procedure in writing fiction? Do you try to always sit in the same chair?

I don’t. Sometimes I don’t even have a desk at which to sit. I write and edit on my computer or laptop. I try to write in the early part of the day, since my mental energy peters out towards night-time. I try to start with a
solid meal before I take the ADHD meds which help my concentration. If I don’t eat that first meal, the meds take away my appetite (but not my hunger), and by early afternoon my brain is so overclocked it’s like bees buzzing in my head and I’m so ravenous I’m dizzy, but food tastes like ashes in my mouth. I usually need my surroundings to be relatively quiet. I generally can only go for short bursts, between fifteen minutes and an hour. I spend way more time trying to make myself sit and write than I do actually writing. It’s pretty painful, but I give myself less grief now that I know it’s how my brain is wired. The meds do help me to stop procrastinating and to focus. I’ve heard lots of people say that they fear that ADHD meds will ruin their creativity, but for me, they are creativity aids. They help me to slow my thoughts down enough to register new ideas, and they give me enough concentration to write those ideas down.

I write scenes more or less in sequential order, but if I get stuck, I’ll jump ahead to a scene that feels more tasty. If required, I’ll backfill the rest in later. It’s interesting, how often I find I don’t need to backfill.

Another thing I do when I get stuck is to step away from the laptop and go do something physical that I don’t have to think about: wash dishes, go for a walk. My mind goes musing and I often come up with solutions that way. Or I’ll try to describe the problem to someone. Sometimes the very act of doing so helps me solve the problem before I can finish articulating it to the other person, who’s then left frustrated as I waft back to my computer in a creative trance. I use manuscript organizing software such as Scrivener. That allows me to see all the scenes at a glance, and to map out, shape, and move elements of the story
around until they click into place. When I’m in Toronto, I’ll often meet my friend, writer Emily Pohl-Weary, at a local library. She’s the granddaughter of Judy Merrill and Fred Pohl, and a bitchin’ writer in her own right. We’ll take our laptops and each work on our own stuff for about three hours. We do goof off, but I get a fair bit of writing done in her company. I miss Emily.

Clute? Delany? Steampunk? Butler? Le Guin? Each in one sentence please.

Clute’s critical writing makes terrifyingly astute art.

Delany: All hail the King.

Butler: I wish more people would talk about the ways in which she messes with normative sexualities, and I miss her very much and I don’t care that that’s really two sentences masquerading as one.

Steampunk: Cool gadgets, cool clothes, but whose hands assemble the materials?

Le Guin can make me cry with the simplest, seemingly inconsequential sentence.

You once said, “Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress.” Okay. Then what is it?

It’s what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction.

You claim to have grown up in a culture without strict boundaries between literatures. Really? Not even between “high” and “low” art?

Yup. You can absolutely find that kind of snobbery in Afro-Caribbean culture, but it feels mostly toothless. The borders aren’t as strictly policed. It’s possible to have a literary conference in which both Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and dancehall singer-songwriter Lady Saw are headliners, plus bell hooks. In North America, there’s no way that what I write would be considered in the same breath as, say, Michael Ondaatje’s work. In the Caribbean, genre distinctions seem less important. Part of it might be that we don’t have “alternative” culture in the way that it manifests in Eurocentric cultures. As far as I know, there is no Caribbean equivalent of the hipster, or the science fiction fan, or the zinester. Perhaps that’s because we’re already marginalised from dominant Western culture, so we don’t need or don’t have the luxury of subdividing along minute genre fractures. There aren’t enough publishers to have that kind of specialisation. The focus tends to be more on what each work is trying to achieve than on what genre it’s in.

Your SF background seems heavily post—New Wave (1960s). Did you ever read the “Golden Age” all-guy crew like Heinlein, Clarke, Simak, Bradbury?

Absolutely, and still do. One of the proudest days of my life was when I got my mother to read Bradbury’s
R Is for Rocket.
Her verdict? “But it’s not about rockets and robots, it’s about people!” I agreed.

You could easily (well, maybe not easily, but brilliantly) teach modern literature as well as writing. Given the choice, which would you prefer?

Thanks for the compliment. I couldn’t, though. Geoff Ryman, now, he’s brilliant at both.

In New York, I worked with some taxi mechanics from Guyana. Saturdays, they drank Teacher’s and played cricket in the parking lot. What’s the deal with cricket anyway?

Lord alone knows. My dad was a big cricket fan. Cricket to me is golf as a team sport, with better outfits, that goes on for what seems weeks. Just give me the Teacher’s. Lots of it, if you’re going to make me watch cricket. Yes, I am a bad West Indian.

FORTHCOMING, 2013

Novel
Sister Mine,
Grand Central Books, USA.

FORTHCOMING, 2012

Novel
The Chaos,
Simon and Schuster, USA.

Short story “The Easthound” in anthology
After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia,
eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Hyperion, USA.

2011

Novelette “Ours Is the Prettiest” in anthology
Welcome to Bordertown,
eds. Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, Random House, USA.

Short story, “Old Habits” in anthology
Eclipse Four,
ed. Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade, USA.

Untitled micro-fiction, in high school textbook and online educator’s resource
iLit Remix: A Revolution of Text Forms,
ed. Emily Pohl-Weary, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Canada.

Chinese translation of novel
Brown Girl in the Ring,
Muses/jiaxi Books, China.

Chinese translation of novel
Midnight Robber,
Muses/ jiaxi Books, China.

Finnish translation of short story “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” in “Tähtivaeltaja,” Finland.

Finnish translation of short story “Riding the Red” in “Spin,” Finland.

Reprint of short story “Emily Breakfast” in programme book of Readercon 2011.

Reprint of short story “Herbal” in high school textbook
iLit Remix: A Revolution of Text Forms,
ed. Emily Pohl-Weary, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Canada.

Reprint of short story “A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” in
Apex Magazine,
issue 21, USA.

2010

“Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” address to the 2010 International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts on the theme of race in the literature of the fantastic, in the
Journal of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts,
USA

Short story “Emily Breakfast” in anthology
TOK 5; Writing the New Toronto,
ed. Helen Walsh, Zephyr Press, Canada.

2009

Short story “Blushing” in anthology
Gothic Toronto,
by Diaspora Dialogues, Canada.

2008

“Soul Case” (excerpt from novel
Blackheart Man)
in
Year’s Best Fantasy 8,
eds. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Tachyon Publications, USA.

2007

Novel
The New Moon’s Arms,
Warner Books, USA.