“Old Habits”
Why does “Old Habits” meet the criteria for a Dark Fantasy? First, the setting of “Old Habits” is in a “ghost mall” and the dominant characters are ghosts. In real life, the actuality of ghosts in malls cannot be made certain because the ghosts, if at all they are real, are obscure and imperceptible. The question about the existence of ghosts is contentious, petrifying and idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, Nalo Hopkinson portrays the ghosts as living beings who dominate an obscure habitat.
The ghosts converse with each other; the exchanges are fantastical. For example, the narrator asserts, “Now Black Anchor’s face is being crushed down onto the hard tile floor, her features compressed. She’s told me that the security guard knelt on her head to hold her down.” The banters between the ghosts revolve principally on how they lost their lives and practices that they yearn for. The dialogs that the ghosts hold are corresponding to those that the living people reckon concerning the departed people. The ghosts’ interchanges are parallel to the corporeal deliberations.
The ghosts display grotesque human-like comportments. To illuminate, the narrator explicates, “Kitty must have heard us talking. She wanders over, coos at Baby Boo. He gives her a brief baby grin; the kind that always looks accidental, the baby more surprised than anyone else at what its face has just done. Kitty says: I can smell stuff. Again, I mean. Like when I was alive.” Chuckling and smirking at babies are human conducts. The Baby Boo’s astonishment is humanistic as well. The human behaviours depicted by the ghosts denote that the ghosts are almost comparable to extant human beings. The discrepancy between the human beings and ghost stems from their statuses; the humans possess fleshly bodies whereas the ghost does not.
“The Glass Bottle Trick”
Beatrice’s encounter with the snake is analogous to Eve’s acquaintance with the astute serpent in the Bible. The snake’s deed of pilfering the birds’ eggs entices Beatrice. As a result of the temptation, “Beatrice grabbed up the pole, started jooking it at the branches as close to the bird and nest as she dared. ‘Leave them, you brute! Leave!’ The pole connected with some of the boughs. The two bottles in the tree fell to the ground and shattered with a crash.” The snake’s lure culminates in the disruption of the Samuel’s bottles.
Samuel exemplifies unfathomable internalized racism. When Beatrice compliments him with the phrase: “Black beauty,” he responds: “You don’t have to draw attention to my colour. I’m not a handsome man, and I know it. Black and ugly as my mother made me.” Undoubtedly, Samuel is not thrilled by his darkness. For Samuel, blackness is one and the same with unsightliness. He adopts internalized racism to the degree that he postulates that Beatrice’s accolade is a derision. Additionally, Beatrice discerns, “For all his love of creamy white skin, Samuel probably couldn’t have brought himself to approach a white woman the way he’d courted her.” Samuel believes that he is second-rate, unpleasant man that cannot woo a white woman; thus he settles for Beatrice whose skin is pale. Samuel’s inferiority complex encumbers him from adoring himself and almost certainly the unborn progeny whom he does not want to have a glimpse of.
The story expends the perspective of fantasy when, “The duppy wives held their bellies and glared at her, anger flaring hot behind their eyes. Beatrice backed away from the beds.” The wives’ activities of scowling and projecting antagonism project them as live human beings, but in actual sense they are ghosts whose spirits have been unconfined from the bottles. Nevertheless, Samuel restrained them in inertia since they died so that he would dominate their spirits. The aspect of fantasy illuminates the sublime quality of death which makes it infeasible for human beings to subjugate it.
