‘All stories comprise within them the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to suppress’1
Alan Sinfield.

1Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2001)2 is a recent collection of short fiction that ‘ranges from Trinidad to Toronto, from fantastic folklore to frightening futures, from houses of deadly haunts to realms of dark sexuality’, to quote the purple prose of the alliterative blurb. In keeping with the author’s life-long interest in fantasy, several of these stories are inspired by famous tales that have become part of the fairy tale canon.3 This essay focuses on Hopkinson’s ‘Riding the Red’ and ‘Precious’, two brief and innovative retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Fairies’ (also known as ‘Toads and Diamonds’ in the English-speaking world) that frame the collection. I will also consider ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, a longer narrative based on the story of ‘Bluebeard’.

2I wish to argue that when ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘The Fairies’ travel to the Caribbean, they resonate with memories of a past that significantly differs from Perrault’s notion of the temps passé, insofar as it is marked by the experience of colonization and the trauma of slavery. Drawing on her own background as a site of literary experiment and social comment,4 Hopkinson submits the familiar stories to a process of cultural translation that renews their significance and reconfigures their ‘moral’ or message,5 as they are (re)made to explore themes that are inseparable from the colonial legacy, such as exploitation, racial identity, gender relations and cultural memory.6 As she uses the fairy tale to tackle questions that are at the heart of the postcolonial experience, the writer affirms a distinct creative voice through a confrontation with the ghosts of a past that won’t be laid to rest, and in some cases even return with a vengeance. Hopkinson’s tropicalised tales thus convey a complex heritage through hybrid, creolized literary strategies that reflect the multicultural makeup of Caribbean society and uncover the ‘dark secrets’ that still haunt its present.7 The author’s appropriation of the European fairy tale tradition thus becomes a deeply ambivalent, creative and critical gesture which serves to conjure up the colonial heritage the better to exorcise it. While this dialogue takes the form of a lively argument about the meaning of the tale in the frame narratives, the Bluebeard story serves to confront a repressed history of violence that opens up onto the chilling discovery of the consequences of racism.

3According to Stephen Slemon, a key feature of postcolonial writing is ‘the figuration of a reiterative quotation, or intertextual citation, in relation to colonialist “textuality”’ (‘Modernism’s Last Post’ in Past the Last Post, 3). When Perrault’s uncanny presence becomes manifest in Hopkinson’s stories set in the West Indies, the French academician ceases to be merely ‘le bon Perrault’ beloved of children to embody a European tradition that has become an integral part of the multilayered makeup of Caribbean culture through colonialism; as such, Perrault’s ambivalent status is inseparable from imperial power and cultural dominance, and the memory of his misleadingly simple and ‘innocent’ stories comes back to haunt Hopkinson’s fiction in darker, stranger, and more transgressive forms.8

4But when Perrault is invoked in the tropics, he also returns as an enabling presence that bounds the volume as it inspires its opening and closing stories, as well as the more elaborate ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, based on ‘La Barbe bleue’. Perrault’s central place in the collection therefore suggests that he returns as a ‘Papa Legba’ of sorts who helps articulate that which resists boundaries and definitions by linking humans and spirits, present and past, the living and the dead, the West Indies and Europe.9 Significantly, Obeah, a religion practiced by black slaves in the British West Indies (usually referred to as voodoo in North America and the West), plays a crucial role in ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’. Seen by the colonial authorities as primitive superstitions and, in times of trouble (e.g. during slaves’ rebellions), as an evil and dangerous form of witchcraft, Obeah is a set of rituals and beliefs that ‘has permeated the popular imagination and West Indian literature and culture, despite constant efforts by colonial authorities to repress its manifestations and persecute its practitioners’ (Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 7).10 To make Perrault’s tales speak in meaningful ways, then, Hopkinson uses a potent conjuring practice that can be seen as the West Indian, demonic, dark double of European, white ‘magic’. But the ethnocentric opposition of black against white magic is radically destabilised when she transposes Perrault’s realm of the literary ‘merveilleux’ into the Caribbean folklore of old wives’ tales (‘Riding the Red’, ‘Precious’) and creepy zombie stories (‘The Glass Bottle Trick’). When his Histoires ou contes du temps passé are revived and reenacted in the tropics, they are indeed transformed in the process as (counter-) discursive practices with retributive but also healing properties, just like voodoo itself.11

5In a preliminary note to the first story, an earthy and lustful (but also somewhat melancholic) retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ entitled ‘Riding the Red’, the author explains the significance of the title Skin Folk as referring to a body of stories of transformation:

Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you’ll find stories about people who aren’t what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them—once they get under their own skins—they can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively. (1)

6Hopkinson defines her collection in relation to a genre seen as characteristic of Caribbean culture, and centrally concerned with self-alienation, transformation and liberation. The stress on skin in the process of metamorphosis raises the spectre of race and through it the traumatic memory of slavery and its underpinning ideology of racism. Hopkinson’s choice of words further strengthens the focus on race, as ‘burden of skin’ echoes Kipling’s infamous ‘white man’s burden’, but also modifies it radically by adopting the ‘other’ perspective and evoking the psychopathology of racism analysed by Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1968).12 This classic of black liberationist writing, which analyses the alienation of people of colour under colonialism, was written by a man from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, to whom ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ is a direct tribute insofar as it rewrites Bluebeard as an allegory of racial self-hatred and explores the long-deferred consequences of slavery.

7In Skin Folk, the duppies, soucouyants, Dry Bones, and other living dead that keep coming back to haunt the characters express a general concern with the return of a violent past that needs to be exorcised. Many of the stories included in the volume express a desire to come to terms with a historical legacy of oppression and exploitation that has shaped body politics in the Caribbean, a concern encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘skin’ that runs through the volume. But the vengeful or malevolent dead who return among the living, as Hopkinson suggests, also metaphorically designate the stories themselves, which have to shed their white skin and reveal what for Hopkinson is their ‘true’ selves in order to be free and ‘fly’.

‘Riding the Red, ’ or making Little Red Riding Hood funky

8Hopkinson opens her collection with a bawdy, creolized version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ set as a paradigmatic scene of fireside storytelling. Mainly based on Perrault’s ‘Le Petit chaperon rouge’ (1697), as it centrally plays on the image of the lover as a wolf (following up on the allegorical interpretation proposed in the ‘Moralité’), the tale also reflects the pressure of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s subsequent (and less dramatic) ‘Rotkäppchen’ (1812-1857). As a result, the whole story is ambiguously poised between the association of the ‘wolf’ with gore and death in keeping with the tragic ending of Perrault’s tale, and the happy denouement of Grimm’s version where both the girl and her grandmother are rescued by hunters in the nick of time, and collaborate to outwit another wolf in the sequel to the main plot. Exemplifying a poetics of hybridity, plurality and open-endedness characteristic of postcolonial fiction, the storyteller refuses to ascribe a simple and single meaning to her encounter with ‘wolfie’. Told from the standpoint of an old lady who recollects her youth (so that the ‘girl’ and the ‘grandmother’ of the classic versions are here conflated), ‘Riding the Red’ is a coming-of-age tale set in a Caribbean setting and reinterpreted as a story of liberation from social constraints and generic conventions. The phrase ‘riding the red’ is used as a metaphor for a woman’s sexual life, and in hindsight the I-narrator represents her initiation by a wolf-like lover as its painful but pleasurable climax. ‘Grandma’ nostalgically remembers her affair with ‘wolfie’ who deflowered her (the scene of the gathering of flowers strongly suggests that the pun is intended in the text) and even threatened to ruin her reputation, but with whom she experienced a passion so intense as to redeem all the pain and trouble.13 Seen from the perspective of old age, ‘Grandma’ no longer perceives the loss of her virginity and innocence as a disaster but as a gift of life: ‘That’s what my granddaughter has to know: It comes all right again’ (3). She meditates on her failure to transmit this bitter-sweet knowledge to her own daughter, and would like to pass it on to her adolescent granddaughter but can only deplore the latter’s lack of interest, even though she claims that ‘it’s the old wives who best tell those tales’ (2). Beside reflecting on the ambivalent nature of desire and pleasure, the story-teller challenges conventional morality and goes against socially approved roles and attitudes for women by celebrating transgressive female sexuality over marital life and maternity. Similarly, she contradicts the traditional (repressive) moral usually attributed to the tale by subverting the stereotypes of the wolf as an evil, manipulative predator and the girl as his helpless victim; instead of repeating or reinforcing the warning addressed to young women in Perrault’s moral, which cautions against female naiveté and sexual promiscuity, the grandmother does not deny that ‘les loups doucereux’ are well and truly ‘dangereux’, but suggests that the danger that they represent is part of their appeal.14 Instead of insisting on obedience to parents and ‘the straight path’ of duty, as in Grimm’s tale, the old female narrator extols, but does not sentimentalize, female desire, sexual freedom and erotic fulfilment.15 In Grandma’s version, ‘He caught me, of course; some say he even tricked me into it, and it may be they’re right, but that’s not the way this old wife remembers it’. She even adds with equanimity that ‘Wolfie must have his turn, after all. That’s only fair’ (2). Seen from the point of view of the ‘old wife’, then, sex, life and death are inextricably entwined, and that is what funk is all about.

9As she looks back on her distant youth (another modality of the ‘conte du temps passé’), this elderly Little Red Riding Hood figure further questions the traditional opposition between the young female victim and the male predator. She remembers her deflowering as a bloody tearing of flesh, but the consummation confirms the truth value of the epithet ‘toothsome’ (2) she had previously used to describe her young self, and thus seen as part of the natural order of things. The encounter is also described as a game and a dance that redeems ‘soiled rags and squalling newborns and what little comfort you and your man can give each other, nights when sleep doesn’t spirit you away soon as you reach your bed’ (3). Against conventional expectations, the old woman goes so far as to claim that ‘it’s the woodman saves us, me and my daughter’s little girl, but it’s wolfie gives us birth, oh yes’ (4). By associating being swallowed with gestating in the wolf’s body, she argues that the discovery of sexual pleasure is a life-giving experience that she still aspires to: ‘Ah, but wouldn’t it be sweet to ride the red, just once more before I’m gone, just one time when I can look wolfie in the eye, and match him grin for grin, and show him that I know what he’s good for?’ (4). As if to answer her call, the story ends ambiguously with ‘Listen: is that a knock at the door?’ (5), which marks a return to the present of narration and may be addressed to herself or to the reader/audience; the fateful knock possibly foreshadows the devouring of the old lady as in Perrault’s tale, or her rescue, as in Grimm’s; it may announce the return of the long-awaited lover longingly evoked by ‘Grandma’, unless it is death that is coming to get her for good this time. The expectations raised by the final question are multiple, contradictory, and left unanswered.

10In this first story, then, Hopkinson goes against the cautionary (Perrault), and moralising (Grimm) aspects of the tale to revalue the girl’s dawdling and willingness to chat and play with the wolf; the adoption of a female perspective also enables her to foreground the erotic implications of the tale, and to celebrate female bodies, desires and destinies, as well as the transmission of intimate and subversive knowledge among women across generations. Couched in a gossipy, raucous, creolized mix of Trinidadian and Jamaican Creoles (Bacchilega 206), this first story thus goes against the ‘civilizing’ influence of fairy tales documented by Jack Zipes in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1985, revised 2007). While ‘Riding the Red’ stresses the thrill of dangerous lovers, ‘Precious, ’ the story which responds to it and closes the volume, presents a brutal and cynical ‘Prince Charming’ figure who is eventually overpowered when his unhappy wife turns her magical speech abilities against him. It features a central female character who, like Grandma, refuses to endorse the discourse on politeness, subservience and good manners allegedly upheld by the classic tales, thereby reclaiming rebelliousness against Western values that were notoriously complicit with colonial exploitation.

‘The Glass Bottle Trick, ’ or the revenge of the living dead (wives of Bluebeard)

The history of colonization is the process of man’s general zombification. It is also the quest for a revitalising salt capable of restoring to man the use of his imagination and his culture
(René Deprestre, Change. Paris: Seuil, 1971: 20)

11‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ offers an even more radical challenge to the ‘civilizing’ influence of fairy tales, as it mocks the heroine’s decision to marry a conventional husband ‘so proper’ (85) that he turns out to be a monster; but also because it draws on the ‘primitive beliefs’ and ‘savage cults’ of the former slaves to denounce the barbarism resulting from Europe’s so-called civilizing mission. Situated roughly in the middle of the volume, ‘The Glass Bottle Trick‘transposes the macabre story of Bluebeard onto a West Indian context and uses the powerful trope of voodoo to show how the colonial past still haunts the present. As in the Breton folktale of ‘Comorre’, the Bluebeard figure murders his wives when he learns that they are pregnant, although his motives are quite different. While Comorre tries to ward off a prophecy (that he will be killed by his son), the black husband of Hopkinson’s tale cannot bear to see in his offspring the image of himself that he has sought to hide behind a white mask of bourgeois respectability and a fair-skinned wife. Concerned with a hidden history of racial and gendered violence, the story figures the return of the past through the pregnant wives murdered by a psychopathic husband who hates the colour of his skin.16 Set in the tropics, the story is used to represent the dire effects of the ‘colonised mind’ on a man who disembowels his wives because of their capacity to bear new life and thus reveal the repressed ‘secret’ of his blackness. As such, he is made to embody the socio-cultural pathology analysed by Fanon (especially his case study of the neurotic ‘évolué’ Jean Veneuse, who is so deeply alienated that he desperately wishes to be acknowledged as white), although Hopkinson’s main interest lies in the women he has murdered, locked as they are in the closet of Caribbean culture.

12‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ adopts the point of view of the last bride who discovers that the terrible secret of her criminal husband was caused by racial self-hatred. The italicized authorial comment that introduces the narrative broaches the topic as follows:

In my anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, I introduced the following story with these words: ‘Eggs are seeds, perfectly white on the outside. Who knows what complexions their insides might reveal when they crack open to germinate and bear fruit?’ (83)17

13This self-quotation places the story under the sign of the egg, a motif borrowed from ‘Fitchers Vogel’, a Bluebeard-related story collected in Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen which has the same function of revelation as the key in Perrault’s text. Instead of emphasizing the need to keep the egg white (or the key clean), as in the old stories where a stain is a proof of guilt, Hopkinson stresses the contrast between the white shell and a mysterious inner living substance whose dark ‘complexion’ (another allusion to skin-colour) represents the living principle and productive matter of the seed-like egg. In other words, the metaphor of the egg applies to the identity of Hopkinson’s new Bluebeard, whose white mask of respectability hides a dark and gruesome secret, but also to the white tale itself which reveals a living, beating, ‘black’ heart when transported to the Caribbean. Indeed, in order to hatch, the egg needs the heat of the tropics, as if the seed of the old tale needed to travel and be planted in the rich soil of a tropical island to bear fruit (to combine the main motifs used in the narrative).

14In ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, the Bluebeard character is called Samuel, and he is the well-to-do and extremely proper husband of the much younger and fair-skinned Beatrice. Samuel displays all the symbolic signs of whiteness: he owns an ‘eggshell-white BMW’ (90) and his elegance (reminiscent of the absurdly dressed accountant in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) matches his ‘starchy behaviour’, as he wears a ‘black wool jacket and pants’ and a ‘crisp white cotton shirt’ (85) in spite of the tropical heat. This Western-educated man (‘He was cultured and well spoken. He had been abroad, talked of exotic sports: ice hockey, downhill skiing’ 91) pleases Beatrice’s mother who, impressed by his wealth, genteel ways and promise of stability, encourages her daughter to marry Samuel. But this apparently desirable match is in fact cold at heart and he tellingly insists on preserving a fridge-like atmosphere in their European-style house after their wedding. The air-conditioning has a very practical purpose, however, since it prevents the corpses of his murdered wives from rotting and giving him away, but Hopkinson also plays on the word to suggest that Samuel’s profound alienation results from his conditioning to white values. The house itself is isolated, insulated, ‘air-tight’ (95) like an egg and full of ‘heavy imported furnishings cold and stuffy, but Samuel liked them’ (95). The husband himself, Beatrice muses, had been ‘rattling about in the airless house like an egg in the bottle’ (96) after the death of his first two wives.

15In Hopkinson’s postcolonial variation on the story, the sign of the husband’s strangeness and monstrosity no longer lies in his blue beard but in his denial of his skin colour: in a nut (or egg) shell, the disgust provoked by Bluebeard’s beard has turned to self-loathing.18 Thus, when they make love and Beatrice sees ‘the moonlight playing glints of deepest blue in his trim beard’ (94), far from being repelled by it she is aroused by the blue-black colour of her husband’s body. She lovingly calls him ‘Black Beauty’, but Samuel reacts negatively to the term of endearment:

‘Never call me that, please, Beatrice, ’ he said softly. ‘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.’
‘But, Samuel...!’
‘No.’
Shadows lay between them on the bed. He wouldn’t touch her again that night. (94)

16The revelation of Samuel’s dark secret will be triggered by the only element from his native culture that he has not forsaken, and this will ironically be the cause of his undoing. In the garden of their house, Beatrice is surprised to find ‘two bottles that were jammed onto branches of the guava tree’ (86), and when she asks him about it, he explains: ‘You never heard the old people say that if someone dies, you must put a bottle in a tree to hold their spirit, otherwise it will come back as a duppy and haunt you? A blue bottle. To keep the duppy cool, so it won’t come at you in anger for being dead?’ (86). Samuel’s belief in the efficacy of voodoo rituals signals his attempt to ward off the revenge of the wives he murdered by appealing to a belief that his wife will later turn against him when she unwittingly releases their vengeful spirits.19 In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, Beatrice liberates the guppies’ spirits when she tries to save a bird’s eggs from a predatory snake and sends the bottles crashing on the ground (88).20 When the air-conditioning breaks down in its turn, the disembowelled women Samuel keeps in the locked bedroom begin to unfreeze and their ghostly selves flesh themselves out by feeding on their own blood:

One of the duppy women leaned over her own corpse. She lapped like a cat at the blood thawing on its breast. She became a little more solid for having drunk her own life blood. The other duppy stooped to do the same. The two duppy women each had a belly slightly swollen with the pregnancies for which Samuel had killed them. Beatrice had broken the bottles that had confined the duppy wives, their bodies held in stasis because their spirits were trapped. She’d freed them. (99)

17The story ends with the return of the husband, angry at his wife for letting the house get warm, and like the door itself, is once again left ambiguously open. The bride knows that she is going to be the next victim for she is pregnant with Samuel’s baby, but she is nevertheless in doubt as to the fate held in store for her, for the dead women may come to her help: ‘When they (the guppies) had fed, would they come and save her, or would they take revenge on her, their usurper, as well as on Samuel?’ (101).

18In this new version of the Bluebeard tale, Beatrice breaks the spell of colonial domination that holds her husband captive when she releases the souls of his victims enclosed in the bottles, and opens the door of the refrigerated room. But the lurid spectacle of the murdered women coming back to life (parodying sensational zombie movies) is just a lure, since the tale hides a more disturbing truth about another, and far more destructive, form of zombification.21 The folk belief in voodoo is indeed a liberating and life-giving force in the tale, while the true zombie turns out to be Samuel himself, in the sense that he has been deprived of his personality, character and self-esteem by the colonial ideology, in a sinister actualisation of the colonisation of the mind: reduced to an empty vessel filled with the white mythology of the West, he is the true inhuman monster.

19Like their murderer, then, the ‘guppies’ of Hopkinson’s story are ‘not what they seem’ either. Even though they are depicted as gruesome creatures bent on taking their revenge who disrupt the realistic surface of the narrative, the possibility arises that the zombies play the role of helpers and possibly come to the bride’s rescue in the nick of time (thereby fusing sister Anne and the brothers in Perrault’s tale), as the choice of a first-person narrator implies. It may therefore be thanks to the female ‘guppies’ that the last wife is saved from the psychopathic impulses and murderous wrath of her husband: she is not only unharmed by the creatures (unless she has become one of them...), but allowed to live and disclose the terrible secret of their brutal deaths.

20On another level, Hopkinson herself practices a form of literary voodoo when she appropriates and transforms the literary tale of Bluebeard (ambiguously poised between a ‘conte’ and an ‘histoire’ in Perrault’s collection) from a postcolonial perspective in order to give it new life—and bite. Perrault, then, does not so much return as a malevolent ghost, but rather as a sort of ‘Papa Legba of the Old Bones’, the very old guardian of the roads, paths and openings who is invoked in voodoo rituals to testify to the suffering of the slaves as the bearer of their painful memory: in this sense, Perrault provides Hopkinson with the plots (bones) to hitch her own story (meat) to and explore other narrative paths and stylistic possibilities. In the process of cultural reinscription as a literary equivalent of the voodoo ritual, Perrault also comes back to life radically transformed, furnished with a new dark skin, sensual female body and rich Creole voice that can speak meaningfully in the present and from an extra-European perspective; thus, Hopkinson’s intertextual dialogue with her predecessor simultaneously pays homage to the permanence of Perrault’s stories and gives them renewed relevance as they travel through time, space and culture. As such, the supernatural beings, greedy skeletons, bloodthirsty ghosts, and malevolent duppies haunting Hopkinson’s stories become figures of the writing, and especially rewriting process, an experience which is not unlike the raising of the dead.

21The ‘guppies’ associated with the syncretic cult of voodoo are semi-inanimate and indeterminate entities that symbolize the crossing of borders between death and life, past and present, but also between languages (French and English, Creole and standard English) and traditions (the imported literary fairy tales and native folklore and beliefs) through which West Indian culture itself emerged. In this sense, they are an apt image for Hopkinson’s rewritings of traditional fairy tales which emphasize the symbolic force of texts that depend on their retelling (and transformation) to exist. In her version of ‘The Fairies’, to which I now turn, words are notoriously materialized in a wonderful illustration of the performative power of language; this allows the author to reflect on her status as a postcolonial writer and also on another form of haunting, this time literary, in her writing. In other words, the story becomes a means to explore another, more metaphorical or abstract, aspect of possession (a voodoo of sorts?), by asking questions such as: ‘What (whose) voice speaks through me when I write? And how can I speak or write in my own voice?’

‘Precious, ’ or when the fairy gift becomes a curse

You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse.
The red plague rid you For learning me your language!
(Caliban in The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 362-4)

22In ‘Precious’, an ironic variation on ‘The Fairies’ which concludes the collection, Hopkinson imagines a sequel to the tale in which the rewarded girl calls into question the value of her gift. ‘Precious’ explores the tragic-comic consequences of the ability to spit out flowers, pearls and precious stones that the girl was granted for being good, well-behaved and generous. In Perrault’s version (first published in Contes de ma Mère l’Oye in 1695, as well as in Melle de l’Héritier’s contemporaneous ‘Les Enchantements de l’Eloquence ou les Effets de la Douceur’), the exploited victim of a cruel mother is rewarded by a fairy for her kind words, obedience and good manners, while her rude and selfish sister is condemned to spit out toads and snakes. But in Hopkinson’s ironic version of the story, told by the disillusioned ‘good girl’, the gift of the fairy turns out to be a curse. She keeps on being exploited by her relatives, and even the ‘Prince Charming’ who had at first rescued her from her family becomes increasingly greedy and brutal with her. The story is characteristically introduced by a prologue in italics, which ironically reflects on the moral of the tale as it conflates the rewarded girl of Perrault’s tale with the golden goose of Aesop’s fable:

The ending of the folktale goes that when the old woman gives the peasant girl the gift of jewels that fall out of her mouth every time she speaks, the prince decides to marry the girl because she’s so sweet and beautiful. Of course, the fact that she had just become a walking treasury can’t have hurt her prospects either. I keep mixing that tale up with the one about the goose that laid the golden eggs and that ended up as dinner. That wasn’t a happy ending either. (247)22

23Even though the authorial voice refers to the story as a folktale, her shrewd investigation of the prince’s real motives for marrying the enchanted girl are already hinted at in Perrault’s literary tale. In his version of the story, the fairy tale romance is subtly undermined by an unsentimental voice which observes that ‘Le fils du Roi en devint amoureux, et considérant qu’un tel don valait mieux que tout ce qu’on pouvait donner en mariage à une autre, l’emmena au Palais du Roi son père, où il l’épousa’ (Perrault 91). In Hopkinson’s tragic-comic sequel, told in the first person, the hint is exploited fully as the gift makes the Prince figure more and more greedy. As the young woman bitterly observes: ‘Sometimes I wonder whether that old woman wasn’t having a cruel game with both of us, my sister and I’ (249). Her ability to turn words and sounds into wealth, as she revives banal phrases and dead metaphors by literalizing them, provokes her stepmother’s envy and ‘the greedy gaze of my banker as I bring another shoebox crammed with jewelled phrases, silver sentences, and the rare pearl of laughter’ (249). When Jude takes her away, he seems to be in love with her at the beginning of their marriage but soon their love games become more and more cruel in order to elicit gold, silver and precious stones from her. As in the zombie story, Hopkinson’s concluding tale again addresses the reduction of human beings to a prized possession, and possibly criticizes the materialist values propounded in many fairy tales. Hopkinson denounces the exploitation of the young woman, who eventually manages to get rid of her vengeful husband by hitting him with ‘a ruby as big as a human heart’ (254), which breaks the spell and releases her from the accursed gift when she at last talks back to him: ‘I am not your treasure trove, and I will not run anymore, and I shall be nice if and when it pleases me, and stop calling me Precious; my name is Isobel!’ (254).

24In this last story, Hopkinson urges women to rebel against oppression and exploitation, but it also reflects on the power of words, and therefore possibly on her own success as a writer. The story indeed develops and exploits the magical transformation of words into beautiful but also valuable things, as if to enact the phrases ‘rhetorical flowers’ or ‘wealth of images’. The conceit that jewels materialize when words are spoken can thus be seen as a reflection on the performative power of language, but also its economic value. As the tale suggests, the gift of speech can soon turn into a curse, especially when (slavish) imitation is at stake. Would it then be possible to argue that this last story is also on some level about the fear of possession by Perrault’s ghost? Just like the living practitioner of voodoo becomes possessed by a ‘loa’ who becomes incarnate in the body of the ‘servitor’ (often women), Hopkinson may be dealing metaphorically with the anxiety of being merely Perrault’s voice, who would speak through her and would deprive her of her own identity. And yet, as we have seen earlier, voodoo rituals are meant to provide solutions and heal bodies and souls, so that mimicry of the master codes and the inherited genres of literary discourse is perhaps a form of possession but also part of the cure.

25Told from the perspective of the miserable ‘gifted girl’ who only wishes she could curse like a modern-day Caliban, ‘Precious’ uses the fairy tale to allegorize the predicament of the postcolonial writer who is confronted with the challenge of speaking in a borrowed language. Her challenge is indeed to turn the gift of language (English) into something that will also inscribe the famous linguistic rebellion initiated by Shakespeare’s creature as he learnt to curse his white master in The Tempest. The ‘moral’ of the story is subverted insofar as Hopkinson explores the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice, and the role of fairy tales as pedagogical tool to enforce ‘civilizing’ values, and to the former colonial subjects (often seen and treated as children, as Fanon also notes). She questions our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of cultural authority and ideological control, and the roles of fairy tales to promote obedience, good manners and selflessness, especially for girls, as well as the desire for wealth and social status.

26By way of a conclusion, it might perhaps be relevant to evoke another ghost, that of Shakespeare’s sister in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In a sense, just as Woolf calls for a woman writer to match the status of Shakespeare, who has come to personify literature itself, Hopkinson explores the possibility of being ‘Nalo Perrault’ (after ‘Judith Shakespeare’), not the silenced ghost forgotten by traditional historiography and the male canon, but a living, flesh and blood author who both mimics the model represented by Perrault and celebrates contemporary, fresh, living reinventions of his classic stories from the perspective of Europe’s former colonies whose hybrid cultures have enabled her (together with her own ‘gifts’ as a writer) to hitch meat onto the old skeletons of the European past.