Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson's most recent book is a collection os short fiction, Skin Folk. She is also the author of the novels Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber and editor of the antholgy Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction.

Hopkinson recently took a trip to Europe to attend a couple of writing conventions. The first was Utopiales in Paris, France, and the second, Novacon, in England. Here, she reports back on the difficulty of identifying streetlights abroad, all the fun(!) of getting lost, and returning home still discombobulated by travel across many time zones.

Waiting to board the plane out of Toronto, I heard someone call my name. It was someone I used to work with at the North York Central Library, over a decade ago. He was going to Paris, too, and gave me a map, and a ton of information about cheap hotels and Internet access.

Seven hours later I was at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. I think. The clocks had gone back that day, and with that, the time difference between Paris and Toronto, and me not wearing a watch, I was pretty much lost in time for the next two weeks -- and for the rest of the month after my return.

I had three hours to wait before my connection to Nantes. Plenty of time, right? Ha. It took me an hour just to figure out what to do next, and to find the right desk to ask for help from, and the right gates to go through, and to decipher the directions to the next terminal. Whoever designed the Charles de Gaulle airport doesn't believe in signage. Of course, it probably doesn't help that I insisted on asking directions in French. I'd get a flurry of French in response, and I'd listen hard for directional words like gauche and droite. One of the most disconcerting things were the gendarmes everywhere, with machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. I'm a Canadian; I rarely see guns, and certainly never machine guns. At first I thought they were rifles -- that was alarming enough. Then I realized, no...those babies are to rifles as a wrecking ball is to a flyswatter.

I found a café, took a deep breath, and ordered (in French) a baguette with ham and a glass of fresh orange juice. I handed over the money, and got back change, which included two American nickels. Huh? France is in the process of changing their currency from francs to the Euro, but I don't know if that had anything to do with it, and I was too discombobulated to care. I sat and ate, grateful I'd been able to figure out how to order a meal.

In Nantes, it was on to the next challenge; I had no idea how I was supposed to get from the airport to my hotel. The Festival staff had omitted that little detail, and hadn't answered my e-mailed query about it. I found an information desk, asked my question in timid French, and was told, "Il y a une navette, Madame. " Navette! Shuttle. Great how the brain remembers words I'd forgotten I'd learned. I waited about an hour for the shuttle, double-checked that I'd understood correctly, and waited some more. The airport staff assured me that the shuttle would arrive in a few minutes. I lugged my suitcase over to a bench and sat down, then an announcement came on over the airport P.A. At first I wasn't sure I'd understood it correctly. The voice seemed to be saying that everyone needed to evacuate the airport, stat, because they'd found "suspicious luggage." Did we really have to evacuate? Sure enough, everyone was quite calmly leaving. In fact, the voice that announced the evacuation had sounded more than a little bored.

Off we trooped to stand behind a big, blocky car rental building. The car rental staff kept on doing their stuff, and the airport staff chatted amongst themselves and occasionally herded the curious amongst us back behind the building. Finally, the bomb crews left and I asked about the shuttle -- only to be told that it had come and gone during the security check. By then I was so fatigued that I was weepy, so I took a cab to my hotel.

Nantes is a beautiful town, with lots of old buildings, and the river Erdre, a tributary of the Loire, running through it. It wonderful to see the huge, city-sponsored banners and posters advertising the festival. I tried to imagine any North American city spending money to publicize a science fiction event. Of course, Nantes is where Jules Verne was born, so they are a little less bashful about science fiction.

My hotel was literally 10 steps away from the Festival convention center. That night I began meeting some of my fellow guests and the Festival staff. Over the course of the next few days I was to encounter writers, journalists, artists, editors, publishers, and translators from Switzerland, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, the U.K., Russia, Guadeloupe, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Poland, the U.S., Belgium -- I'm sure I've left some countries out. One walkway into the convention center was lined with flags representing the various countries in attendance. I was a little amused to see that they'd put up a Jamaican flag to represent me, but not a Canadian one. They could have put up both and gotten more multiculturalism for their money. People from the festival told me that they're only slowly getting used to recognizing that some people have multiple backgrounds.

It was humbling to discover that many of the people at the festival from non-Anglophone countries were quite familiar with the English language canon of science fiction and fantasy, and that, furthermore, many of them were reading the work in the original English. Most of them spoke two languages or more. I find it really difficult to read in French, but I've come away with a resolution to at least try to read more of the French authors. Don't know how long my resolve will last here in Anglo Toronto, but I have all this tempting fiction from my trip....

Panels were a blast; because the people on them would be from different countries, we had simultaneous translators for them, in three or four languages. Everyone on the panel and in the audience would pick up a headset at the beginning of each panel, and you would set it to receive transmissions from the translator working in a language you understood. It was like the United

Nations of science fiction, with all the attendant ironies. One poor translator was translating simultaneously from French to English and from Spanish to English, and I think that English wasn't even his mother tongue! As I understand it, a simultaneous translator should only be translating into her or his mother tongue. He did a pretty fine job, though. I took to wearing my headset only on one ear, so that I could hear English and French simultaneously. Interesting to feel your attention sort of splitting in two like that.

I gave three interviews while I was there, and took part in two signings, and was told by a local science fiction magazine that they wanted to buy one of my short stories and translate it into French. I also listened to a bunch of writers strategize about how they could get an anthology together of non-English SF in English translation. That's the type of connection that is the most exciting about a festival like this. I want to know what my colleagues in other countries are up to with their writing!

Language was part of the fun of this Festival for me. Though I'm not fluent in any of them, I majored in Russian and French in university, and took a year of German. I loved hearing all the languages all about me, and sometimes attempting to communicate in them. Less fun was venturing out alone into Nantes and trying to manage solely in French. It wasn't so much the language; it was also the myriad tiny details of navigating one's daily life in an unfamiliar culture. Three times I tried to get to places I wanted to visit in order to do research for my novel-in-progress, only to get very lost and have to try to find my way back. I found myself on the verge of tears a lot of times, trying to figure out something simple like how to make a vending machine give me a ticket for the tramway, or how to find the door into a chateau the size of a village, or how to read a map. I couldn't even figure out the bloody streetlights at first, though they work the same as streetlights with which I'm familiar. But they're smaller and lower and the housing for them looks different, so I simply wouldn't see them the first few times I looked. Three days in a row I went out to do the research I'd come there for, only to spend a lot of time wandering around the city, following the flow of the river, because at least that way I knew what direction I was going in. It was the final day of the festival before I got anything like some of the work done that I'd come to do. I found some excellent books on the French slave trade in Africa and on the effect it had in Nantes, which was the final stop for French slave ships. Excellent stuff, since my character is a black woman born to the daughter of an enslaved African prostitute in 19th-century Nantes.

I was in such wonderful company that conversations went on well into the night. I got to see the Festival art exhibit and the book room -- which had me itching to buy books and graphic novels. Octavia Butler pointed out the cover for the French translation of her novel Kindred. It showed a naked, nubile, and horrified-looking black woman whose head and midsection had been separated from her body. Well, I'd be horrified, too. Octavia shook her head and said, "You know, in this whole book, my protagonist never gets naked." I replied, "Okay, but does she lose her head?" Apparently not. Made me feel even happier about the cover for the translation of Brown Girl in the Ring (called La Ronde des Esprits in French, from J'ai Lu Books).

The phrase "American cultural imperialism" came up a lot. A lot of the writers complained about American sensibilities and trends predominating. They talked about writers trying to make their stories and settings sound American, and about the difficulty of developing one's own cultural voice and aesthetic. I could see it elsewhere; in the German and French music videos on the television in my hotel room. There was a lot of imitating of hip-hop going on, for instance. Some of that felt valid, in terms of a call-and-response across a diaspora, but some of it felt like this is what the bands are going to do because this is what the record companies perceive as hot and will buy.

Then it was time for me to go on to Paris. A two-hour train ride, another hour and a half lost in the train station on the Paris end (I was beginning to get used to it, and just kept stopping every few steps and asking directions). When I told the taxi driver that my hotel was "near the Louvre, " I understood it was a slightly ludicrous thing to say, but I didn't really comprehend it until he turned down a street, pointed to a massive edifice that seemed to cover a third of the horizon, and said, "Voila le Louvre. " It's over a mile long! Saying "near the Louvre" is like saying "near Toronto." Apparently it takes at least a week to see everything in the Louvre -- and that was before they re-opened the catacombs.

I knew I wouldn't have the time to see any of it. It was already evening; I really only had one full day in Paris. No time to waste; I sat down and started making lists of the things I wanted to accomplish the next day. Every so often I would glance out the window, not paying much attention, because the view was so familiar. Familiar? But I'd never been to Paris before. That's when I realized that the structure dominating the view was the real Eiffel Tower (Tour Eiffel), not a pencil sharpener replica or a postcard. I think I literally threw my notebook into the air in my hurry to rush to the window and take pictures. I could get better postcards, but a photo would prove that I'd been there. The hotel was right on the Rue de Rivoli, tourist central: the Tour Eiffel was on the right, the Jardins des Tuileries in the middle, and the Louvre on the left. All those years of French class in Jamaica and Toronto, and finally it was real!

Next day was, as I figured it would be, a tragi-comedy of being lost. The library I wanted to visit was closed on Tuesdays. I got hopelessly lost in the subway trying to get back, and got rescued by a very helpful brother. When he heard I was from Canada, he said he'd been planning to come to Montreal to take some courses in artificial intelligence, but that was the year of the ice storm that closed down Montreal for a few weeks. I tried to explain in my utilitarian French that it really isn't like that usually, but I don't think he believed me. I wish I could have figured out how to say "freak weather." He was thrilled to discover I am a writer. We talked about some of his favorite black American authors. I told him about Ralph Ellison's "new" posthumous novel, Juneteenth. Once he'd set me on the right path, he said he was off to the bookstore to find the French translation of my novel. Wish I'd had a copy to give to him.

My day in Paris wasn't turning out as I'd planned, but I did do the one thing I really needed -- I took a two-hour bus tour of the city. The tour took us around many of the monuments and locales, and gave details about their history and their construction. I took pictures and made notes -- it gave me a much stronger sense of what Paris looked like when my characters were living there. Later, I found a map of 16th-century Paris, which confirmed that the essential layout of Paris hasn't changed much in 400 years.

The next morning, exhausted and unable to speak coherently in any language, I was on a train for London. Leaving France, the French Customs officers surprised me: they were friendly! Canadian and American customs officers seem to be trained to make one feel guilty, and to single out certain types of people to treat with extra suspicion. Near as I can guess: people with funky haircuts, scruffy beards, piercings or tattoos, and people who are self-employed -- which means they're more likely to hassle artists and performers than criminals. This is what happens when you watch too many bad Sly Stallone movies; you get a really weird idea of what bad guys look like. I dread crossing the Canadian-American border -- though the Canadians are marginally more human because my passport is Canadian.

The train ride was only two hours, and I barely noticed the 15 minutes we spent going under the English Channel. That part of it was kind of like being in a subway.

London made me giggle. As with the Tour Eiffel, my connection with these places is through replicas; specifically, those big three-dimensional puzzles of castles and churches. They are very accurate, those puzzles. As a result, the actual buildings looked like cardboard puzzles to me. I knew I was being silly, but I was punchdrunk and it took a while to shake the impression.

I holed up at a friend's place for the next two nights. I was on my own during the days and the most I managed was a quick swing around the block to the grocery store. When I had to pay for things, I would hold out a handful of change and ask for help. I grew up in what used to be the colonies, so I'm familiar with a lot of English vocabulary, but there was still a lot I didn't know. Things aren't "on sale," they're "on offer." It's not pantyhose, but tights. And I was back in weather that felt like Toronto is at this time of year -- cold, damp and dark. Brr.

I really enjoyed one of those nights when I finally got to meet the writer China Mieville over dinner. Then the next day I got on a train for Walsall, just outside of Birmingham, to attend Novacon.

Novacon was great. It's a small convention, about 250 people in attendance, and it's been going for 31 years. There's one track of programming, with room to add another panel or two on the spot if it seems appropriate. They're a friendly, hospitable lot. Panelists get a free drink (alcoholic or not) during their panels. There was a sausage, mash, and beer-tasting one night -- I discovered a great dark beer called a Double Chocolate -- and lots of hanging around and chatting. I met more wonderful writers and readers, swam in the hotel's warmed pool, watched bad TV, took part in a few panels, and attended Gwyneth Jones' intriguing guest-of-honor speech.

The news on all the U.K. TV stations was about a car bomb that had been discovered in Birmingham a few days earlier. It was set to go off outside a heavily peopled shopping area, but something went wrong with the detonator. I found that I couldn't even be very alarmed. Partly it felt distant, and partly it was my developing sense that, in much of the world, precautions against violence are business as usual. Then it was time to come home, and I was more than ready. I flew from Birmingham back through the Charles de Gaulle airport, and onward to Toronto.

I think I've been back for three weeks now. I'm not sure. I went through three time zones in a fortnight, and I'm still a little lost in time. The tough parts of the trip have faded into the background, and what I'm recalling most strongly was the fun I had, and the hospitality of the festival, and the wonderful people I met, and the cool stuff I saw.

Now I have to figure out how to get some of it into the novel.

Author photo by David Findlay.