Visceral
Hopkinson is a particularly visceral user of metaphor. Rarely content with a simple comparison, she tends to dive in deep and explore the full potential, such as this dense example from “Money Tree.”
“She was afraid that if she hadn’t woken up, the sea would have changed her, rotting the flesh of her dream hands and feet into corrupt parodies of flukes, while eels snapped at her melting flesh. Her mamadjo mother could live in the sea like a mermaid, but she could not.”
Opening Lines
Metaphorical imagery is often used to open stories, especially those where setting is an essential component. The opening lines that introduce the reader to “The Glass Bottle Trick” exemplifies this ability to instantly bring a place to life through imagery:
“The air was full of storms, but they refused to break.
In the wicker rocking chair on the front verandah, Beatrice flexed her bare feet against the wooden slat floor, rocking slowly back and forth. Another sweltering rainy season afternoon. The arid heat felt as though all the oxygen had boiled out of the parched air to hang as looming rainclouds, waiting.”
The Unexpected
One should probably expect the unexpected when reading speculative fiction, but in the case of language, there are always those examples when the author goes to metaphor and pull something out of the hat that turns out to be as perfectly applicable as it is unanticipated:
“She pulled her clothing away until she was banana-peeled, standing juddering on the jetty, wearing only the crusted socks in their sole-thin boots with missing laces.”
Just Joking
“A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” features a narrator with spiky green hair, nose ring and tattoos. Thus, the immediate disclaimer “That’s a joke” after a funny metaphor too potentially macabre for some to make:
“The other night, I put two blue orchid petals right on my pillow, with a petal from one of them under my tongue for good measure. It tasted like baby powder, or babies.”
Unification
What we are dealing with here is a writer steeped in the cultural traditions of Jamaica and its storytelling tradition who writes fiction speculating about the future of mankind. A common bond here is the confrontation with the mystery of the irrational and inexplicable. Language is a way of unification:
“I start to reply, and she lean she face in close to mine, frowning at me the whole while like if I is a grouper with a freak hand.”
