THE DEEP ONES: "Shift" by Nalo Hopkinson

"Shift" by Nalo Hopkinson

Discussion begins June 8, 2022.

First published in Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?842201

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Year's Best Fantasy 3
Report from Planet Midnight
Falling in Love with Hominids

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://aescifi.ca/nalo-hopkinson/
https://www.nalohopkinson.com/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-nalo-hopkinson/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalo_Hopkinson
https://tinyurl.com/42nasp92

I have a dead trees copy of that Conjunctions volume, so I'll be reading the original publication!

For much of the story I was thinking that I'd probably enjoy it more if I'd been more familiar with The Tempest.*

It picked up more independent interest towards the end, though, or so I thought. I liked that the mortal woman was allowed her agency in the denoument.

* My exposure to Shakespeare is, I suspect, above average for a Swede, but perhaps slight by native anglophone standards. I've seen or read versions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, and Macbeth.

Yes, I think this story would be pretty thin without prior exposure to The Tempest. It was interesting to me that Ariel was female, since the one production of The Tempest in which I performed (ca. 1990) had a cross-cast Ariel. Also, Shakespeare's principal character Prospero is almost entirely absent from Hopkinson's tale, persisting only as "that white man" who is equally or more the playwright than the character--although Prospero of course has strong "Mary Sue" features along with drawing on the image of the Bard's contemporary John Dee.

All of the racial elements are already present in Shakespeare, except for the extra detail regarding Sycorax and her mysterious mate.

The prose was very ... experimental. Notably: Second-person address to make the reader identify with Caliban and first-person perspective from Ariel with strong dialect and bits of creole. In Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists these latter passages are not italicized, but in a completely different font. I thought it worked fine; it wasn't inaccessible. But these choices were obtrusive, and I wasn't wowed by the artistry.

The title is still enigmatic to me. Does it refer to the change in nature from the culpable tease Miranda to the new self-possessed "golden girl"?

The use of the classical elements to structure this story is even more overt than in The Tempest. Even there, Caliban is Earth and Ariel is Air. But having Sycorax so strongly identified with Water makes me look around for the Fire. Golden Girl?

I did wonder if the racial issues had any basis in the play. I guess I'm unsurprised to learn they do, as someone once told me the play is "really" about colonialism (which does strike me as somewhat unlikely in itself, England not having much in the way of colonies in Shakespeare's day).

I had a look at the introduction in the Oxford edition of The Tempest and it confirmed what I'd half-remembered about the play. It wasn't about colonialism as such - that early, England was still in its exploration stage (Ireland, of course being the exception to this statement). But later audiences of course found plenty that spoke to the history of colonialism and slavery in the New World (Prospero's island is in an indeterminate space that both Old World - the Classical AND the Renaissance Mediterranean - and the New - Bermuda and the West Indies as understood by Englishmen and the dawn of the 19th Century.

Curiously just after reading this story a couple of photos from 1950s Royal Shakespeare Company productions of The Tempest appeared on my Facebook Newsfeed. They were of the actors playing Caliban and they were made up as sea monsters with scales and so on - not unlike a Sea Bishop or indeed a Deep One.

The introduction to the Oxford Tempest points to a French author and psychoanalyst named Octave Mannoni who wrote about the colonial experience on the island of Madagascar (which revolted from French rule just after WWII). He used the characters of Caliban and Ariel as metaphors of (according to Jonathan Miller) "different forms of black response to white paternalism"; while Prospero stand for the coloniser as one in regressive flight from a father complex, using splitting and the scapegoating of the colonised to evade personal problems (to quote Mannoni's Wikipeida entry). The book was published in 1956.

It's worth pointing out that Mannoni's views have been criticised by e.g. Franz Fanon but they wwre taken up by Jonathan Miller when he was a bit of an enfant terrible of '60s British theatre, and by other directors of his generation.

Caliban and Ariel are not siblings in Shakespeare's play (but that "compare-and-contrast" dynamic is there - making them brothers is almost like a Hollywood screenwriter "tightening up" their source material: "William would have loved this; I'm sure this is what he would have done if he had more time"). As for Sycorax, I can't remember either if it was Scylla or Charibdis whose lower half was transformed into monsters or sea creatures.

I appreciated Nalo Hopkinson's comments in the interviews linked in the miscellany, that she is a writer who uses symbolism but doesn't know what it means, necessarily (whether or not this was said disingenuously to ward off High School students looking for help with their homework, or anyone trying to pin her stories down. Stories aren't puzzles to be solved, in the main, and live in the ambiguities between possible readings.

That said, I see the cultural and racial ideas being examined here. Caliban, Ariel, and Sycorax are sort of a cliche of a West Indian family writ large - strong women and feckless men. Looking at it in that way I was surprised at "golden girl" coming off more together and mature than the immortals. Because I was reading it primarily as black/white, not as immortal/mortal.

And looking at it that way, and taking on board the last half-century's interpretation of Caliban/Ariel, I was looking for the anti-colonial reading of the story. Is Caliban's unstable sense of self, of becoming what people perceive him as, a comment on the African-American experience and not just - say - a comment on the fragile male ego generally (I don't think it's just about one man/immortal with no greater resonance).

"Shift" could refer to Caliban's instability (it feels quite like the New Wave science fiction of the '60s and '70s, interpreted that way) or the dynamics of the relations between the characters through the course of the story. Possibly there's a meaning in Carribbean English that I'm missing?