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language: English
country: Jamaica/Canada
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 8.10.24-25.10.24
Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man is a roller coaster of a book. it’s set in the island country of Chynchin, modeled after the anglophone Caribbean, where a successful slave uprising two hundred years ago used magic to defeat the enslaving power, Ymisen, and has lived a seemingly-charmed ever existence since. now, however, Ymisen is back, seeking to reassert its hegemony over the island.
against this backdrop, the novel follows a man named Veycosi, a student at the “Colloquium of Fellows”. Veycosi is engaged — to a woman and another man, the standard arrangement in Chynchin — and determined to prove to his betrothed that he is capable of following through on a task. unfortunately, he kind of isn’t, and the novel’s narrative emerges from Veycosi’s experiments, failures, irresponsibility, and generally ill-conceived schemes as he attempts to navigate Chynchin’s precarious political situation.
but strange things are afoot: an army has been excavated from the island’s piche/pitch, and they may be moving. pickens/children are disappearing and reappearing in an unshakable trance. the oral narratives Veycosi is tasked with collecting contradict each other — and observable facts about the island. and bad luck seems to be following his every move.
the narrative itself feels strangely scattered, I think intentionally so, mirroring Veycosi’s self-absorbed disconnect from his surroundings and the surreality-unreality of Chynchin as it hurtles towards a collision with the real world. the bulk of the narration is a close third-person view through Veycosi, but this is interspersed with excerpts from the oral narratives he’s collecting, divine interludes, an Ymisen spy, the piche army’s leader, and occasionally others.
in a very different way from Le Guin’s The Beginning Place, this might be called an “anti-fantasy”, in that its climax is a demystification as Chynchin emerges from the gap in history it entered two hundred years before. much of the novel is, indeed, concerned with the distance between the stories Chynchin tells itself and the realities of its society, with its own forms of oppressive hierarchy and its continued reliance on race as an organizing principle. conversely, I was glad to see Hopkinson acknowledge the continued presence of Indigenous people in the Caribbean — Chynchin is a mixed society with a shared, common culture, but which still retains a sense of the diverse cultures that created it, including the Indigenous Cibonn’. (I’m comparing it for example to the complete folding of Indigeneity into Blackness in Kacen Callender’s Islands of Blood and Storm.)
in this respect, I think one might look at the novel as an exploration of the hopes and realities of postcolonial states in the Caribbean. if I was skeptical of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky as “Indigenous epic fantasy” as such, I think Blackheart Man is much more successful at creating a narrative that feels grounded in Caribbean histories and cultures, rather than simply offering an aesthetic that takes up signifiers of Caribbeanness.
it’s also, though, a book about a person: Veycosi. he’s a lovable, bisexual rascal (there is very much an explicit gay sex scene, and it is the only sex scene in the book!), and also he is desperate for the attention he feels he deserves. this leads him to make mistakes, to hurt people, to destroy things and places he cares about. this aspect of the novel asks, how do we come to terms with our flaws and our capacity to cause harm in spite of our best intentions? what do we do when our best intentions aren’t good enough? this aspect of the novel was one of the things that brought to mind Laurie Marks’s Elemental Logic series, which is also very much about whether and how it is possible to make reparations. I don’t know that Hopkinson intended to invite that particular comparison, but certainly there are other aspects of the novel that I think point intentionally to “classics” of the fantasy genre — Le Guin in particular, but also McKillip.
the narration makes extensive use of anglo-Caribbean creole words, though grammatically it is in mostly standard English. the dialogue, however, is like the much more heavily creole-marked narration of Midnight Robber, except for the Mirmeki — clearly modeled on the Polish Haitians — who speak an archaized English. it’s not quite as infectious as Midnight Robber, which I found invited me to read it aloud, but it’s stylistically engaging nonetheless.
I have two main hesitations, both of which are mainly about the very end of the book (spoilers follow).
at the end of the book, a child previously identified as a girl is revealed to be a) intersex and b) undergoing “male” puberty, and so transitions to male. hopefully obviously, I don’t object to this in principle, and I don’t think it was bad here, as such, but I do think it was clunkily handled, particularly the intersex aspect. there’s some other Gender Stuff going on in the way the third gender — which seems to also exist in Ymisen, unexpectedly — is handled that made me go. hmmmm. in light of some recent writing on third-gendering as a core mechanism of transmisogyny. I think that Hopkinson mainly intended it to be genuinely a third gender, but also there’s a passing reference to, for example, the fact that only women and members of the third gender can be ship captains, which…
in this respect, then, I don’t think it was as thoroughgoingly successful as it meant to be, though I would still definitely recommend it.
secondarily, the very end of the book: Veycosi, now disgraced and missing part of a leg, takes up the mantle of community trickster that his would-have-been stepchild was meant to bear (but never wanted to). I don’t hate this in and of itself, but the way it was narrated felt strangely childish — the book ends, for example, with an exclamation point, in a way that just felt like it had suddenly swerved into being a children’s book. very odd and honestly a bit jarring.
nevertheless, despite these flaws, I think it’s a really good book and very much worth a read. I would love to see Hopkinson return to this setting in the future — certainly the end of the book seems open to a sequel tracing the changes in this new Chynchin. hopefully we’ll get to see it someday.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, mysterious