45 pages • 1 hour read
Nalo HopkinsonMidnight Robber
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Weaving and Webs
Weaving is frequently used in relation to storytelling and technology. The house eshu describes being the narrator and storyteller as, “I spin the threads. I twist warp ‘cross weft. I move my shuttle in and out, and smooth smooth, I weaving you my story, oui?” (3). Granny Nanny, which carries the A.I. in a worldwide web—and eventually a web between worlds—is described as a “spider web” (38).
There is a distinction between an anansi or ‘nansi story and the specific story of “Brer Anansi, the spider man, the trickster” (78) in Caribbean folklore. Anyone can engage in “spinning a tale” (78), including non-humans like Benta. In the cloth on her loom, “Tan-Tan could discern the dancing black figures she was weaving into it” (190). Tan-Tan herself spins tales as the Robber Queen; during Carnival on New Half-Way Tree, she “wove her deft weave about being kidnapped and stolen away” (317).
Physical and Reproductive Labor
Labor is another motif that runs throughout the novel. On the technologically advanced planet of Toussaint, physical labor is rare and stigmatized. The runners who organize against Granny Nanny and A.I.s, work with their hands; when recalling his interaction with a runner, Antonio thinks, “Labour. Back-break” and “grimace[s] at the memory of the calluses on Beata’s palms” (50-51). Even motherhood is automated for Ione. Shortly after Tan-Tan is born, she asks to “activate the wet-nurse” and has her “midwife Babsie” take the baby (46).
When she arrives on New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan is confronted with more manual labor that she had ever seen. She still adheres to the Toussaint ideal of not physically laboring, saying “Back-break not for people,” but Antonio’s mistress Aislin replies, “We not people no more. We is exiles. Is work hard or dead” (135). Aislin flourishes in this environment; she “seemed content” to Tan-Tan, “for all that hard labour had toughened her hands and wrinkled up her face” (148).
Tan-Tan’s last act in the novel is birthing Tubman. The strenuousness of reproductive labor is a Biblical curse, explored further in the following motif. The act of birth helps Tan-Tan atone for killing Antonio, as she was cursed “to save two life for every one she take” (78).
Eden and the Tree of Knowledge
The most explicit Biblical allusion occurs in the anansi story “How Tan-Tan Learn to Thief.” Growing from the tree that Kabo Tano creates to feed Tan-Tan and Antonio are apples, and she “eat up two-three custard apple right there, sucking down the sweet white meat and spitting out the shiny black seed-them” (88). After lying about needing more food to cut down the tree, Kabo Tano exiles them permanently to Earth, not allowing them to return to their moon kingdom paradise, like the story of Eve in Genesis.
The repopulation of Earth by the mythic Antonio and Tan-Tan and Antonio’s non-consensual impregnation of Tan-Tan in the main narrative are Biblical allusions to the incestuous post-Edenic populating of Earth by Adam and Eve. Tan-Tan’s baby is also the way technology jumps between worlds, representing a new stage in humanity, like the exile from the garden.
