Globe & Mail review, The New Moon's Arms
The woman in the moon review by NUZHAT ABBAS
The New Moon's Arms By Nalo Hopkinson
Warner Books, 323 pages, $29.99
Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci commented on the curious and beautiful phenomenon of "Earthshine," also known as "the old Moon in the new Moon's arms." In the Codex Leicester, he wrote: "Some have believed that the moon has some light of its own, but this opinion is false, for they have based it upon that glimmer visible in the middle between the horns of the new moon . . . this brightness at such a time being derived from our ocean and the other inland seas . . ."
In The New Moon's Arms, Toronto writer Nalo Hopkinson draws out the metaphoric implications of this uncanny vision of the full moon held in the arms of a waxing crescent. Reworking ancient connections between women, oceans, time and the moon, the novel tells the story of Calamity (once known as Chastity), a sensual, stubborn woman negotiating death, menopause, childhood and loss on the fictional archipelago of Cayaba in the Caribbean. Struggling to escape a difficult childhood on the small island of Blessée, scarred by her mother's mysterious disappearance, her father's subsequent imprisonment, the painful taunts of her wealthier classmates and her teenage pregnancy, Chastity renames herself Calamity to enter adulthood, punning on her propensity for inducing chaos, but also her relentless curiosity and daring.
We meet Calamity at mid-life, hiding behind the coffin at her father's funeral in what must be the funniest burial scene in literature. The bawdy humour of the opening introduces us to Calamity's complex charm, her "hot-mouth" unable to resist tearing open the fabric of decorum, her frustration at her aging but sexually hungry and lonely body, her reluctant but passionate mothering of her "hippy" daughter, Ifeoma, and her tender collegial relationship with her little grandson Stanley.
Calamity is not easy to like. She chastises her daughter and her grandson for calling her "Mum" or "Gran," and boasts of seducing younger men under her daughter's nose. Her virulent and confused homophobia makes her reject Michael, once her best friend in high school and Ifeoma's inadvertent father. As a woman who has always lived without a man, a woman without mother or motherland (the island of Blessée is destroyed in a hurricane), Calamity understands all too well what it means to be forced into the margin of a society still subject to race, class and gender hierarchies. Her fierce tongue and her charmed seductions serve well as rough and improvised techniques to survive Cayaba's petty humiliations.
This is the first of Hopkinson's novels to be set fully in the Caribbean. The islands of Blessée, Dolorosse and the big island of Cayaba occupy a fictional but recognizable space, allowing Hopkinson to ground her heroine's story within the context of a postcolonial archipelago struggling with the economic and social consequences of globalization. As Calamity's hot flashes conjure up fragments of her lost home in Blessée, Cayaba's corrupt leaders strike illegal deals with the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development in Washington, D.C. Fish disappear from shorelines polluted by mega saline-processing plants, and tourists take over beaches until small salt farmers and fishermen, supported by an ambitious opposition leader, slowly gather resistance, house by house. The island's history and its changes intersect in Calamity's heat-ridden, anxious and desiring body as she struggles to make sense of the mysterious changes taking place around her.
Calamity greets her bodily "change" like much else in her life, with great anxiety and a desire to deny or escape its processes. In giving up her virginal name, Chastity, Calamity also gave up her childhood skill at finding lost things and her memory of a strange yellow-blue brown girl she once played with in the sea. "I grew up. Eventually you stop hoping that Atlantis was real."
But now, on the cusp of transformation, her old powers and memories materialize in a rush of hot flashes, beginning with a strange yellow-blue brown child on the beach, followed by lost toys, the almond tree she hid in the day of her mother's disappearance and, eventually, her father's entire cashew orchard.
A mysterious child with an injured leg, webbed fingers and shell-tangled dreads draws out Calamity's dormant maternal instincts. Her desire for the child is primal; watching Cayaba's famous monk seals feed their young, her "nipples ache in response." The abandoned child and his urgent needs force Calamity to redraw the boundaries of family, between the biological and the chosen, between the past and the present, and between the "land" people and the hidden, vulnerable "sea" people, whose dead and broken bodies are secretly disposed of by those who work Cayaba's shores.
Although Calamity's story functions as the main narrative in The New Moon's Arms, flashbacks to her childhood, Caribbean rhymes and a lyrical and tragic story about the "dada-hair lady" on board a slave ship surface at moments, hinting at the mysteries residing in Cayaba's lands and waters.
However, unlike Hopkinson's previous novel, The Salt Roads, noted for its textual polyphony, or the verbal and speculative inventiveness of Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber, The New Moon's Arms seems less concerned with the texture of its writing and more with the layering and un-layering of Cayaba's and Calamity's histories. At moments, I wished for a tighter editorial hand to cut out the repetitiousness of certain words (butter, palaver, toddle) that weakened the novel's clear and energetic rhythm and Hopkinson's skill with dialogue.
In the eight years since the publication of her first prize-winning novel, Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption. The New Moon's Arms is unusual in that it centres on a kind of body that is too easily marked as undesirable and unimportant, within a landscape itself marked as peripheral and subject to violence and exploitation. With sly humour and great tenderness, Hopkinson draws out the hope residing in age and change, reminding us that the visible is itself subject to the complexities of reflection and light.
Nuzhat Abbas was born in Zanzibar and currently lives in Toronto. She is working on her first novel, Submerged, about lost histories and forgotten violence on a small island.
