“Prince of Cemetery!” Mami hissed, her eyes wide. Her lips skinned back from her teeth in a death’s-head grin. Her voice was deep, too deep for her woman’s body. Shadows clung to the hollows of her eyes and cheekbones, turning her face into a cruel mask. She rose smoothly to her feet and began to dance with an eerie, stalking motion that made her legs seem longer than they were, thin and bony. "Beside him, Ti-Jeanne giggled, a manic, breathy sound that made Tony’s scalp prickle. I loved learning about all of the spirits, and I was particularly struck by the ceremony where Ti-Jeanne gets possessed by a god/spirit known as Prince of Cemetery: The jumbies that featured in the former story are also present in the latter, from La Diablesse to the Soucouyants, and the fascinating and vivid lore is certainly one of the book's greatest strengths. I'm so glad that I read Baptiste's The Jumbies before reading Brown Girl In the Ring, because it actually served as a great primer and introduction for a lot of the Afro-Carribean mythology that characterize this story as well. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends." With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.
But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. "The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. Spoilers follow, and a discussion of abuse. This is a review of Nalo Hopkinson's 1998 fantasy Brown Girl in the Ring. A hybrid of sci-fi, fantasy, eye-popping horror and Afro-Caribbean lore, the eloquent Brown Girl in the Ring is a true original-and the savior at its center is a beacon of strength in the body of a young single mother."I can't keep giving my will into other people's hands no more, ain't? I have to decide what I want to do for myself." Torn between the drug-addicted father of her newborn child and the brusque grandmother who raised her, Ti-Jeanne is forced to take on the city’s sadistic mob-boss overlord in a battle to end her family’s suffering. Set in a blighted Toronto where basic healthcare, working vehicles and even running water are unaffordable luxuries, enjoyed only by wealthy people who have relocated to the suburbs, it follows Ti-Jeanne, a young woman of West Indian origin who possesses the unsettling ability to foresee strangers’ deaths.
“Particularly for peoples who are surviving the effects of colonialism and globalization, the apocalypse done happened already.” That might explain why the dystopian future depicted in Hopkinson’s award-winning first novel looks so much like many poor people’s lives in the present. “Dystopia is everywhere,” the Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson once said.
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