Something to Hitch Meat to by Nalo Hopkinson

The Itsy Bitsy Spider went up the water spout...

Card Drawn: 6 of Hearts 

Nalo Hopkinson is a refreshing and unique voice in the "speculative" fiction genre. She often incorporates a rich blend of Afro-Caribbean folklore, fantasy and sci-fi while tackling complex issues of race, gender, sexual identity and culture. Unlike some of her other more polished works, Something to Hitch Meat to is an oddity that left me feeling more perplexed than anything else.

The Anansi spider is one of the most popular trickster deities in African mythology and Hopkinson cleverly deploys it here with mixed results. As a metaphor, the Anansi represents the power of  transformation and breaking free from societal pressures to establish a more authentic self. The weaving of metaphor and Afro-Caribbean folklore is not so much a re-telling but an effective literary technique to carve out a new perspective and literary tradition dominated by Eurocentric genre conventions. 

The protagonist is a lonely digital content creator for a pornographic website, responsible for editing images to create an exotic fantasy for users. He is uncomfortable in his black skin, suffering from self-alienation. Even other people perceive him as a different race. Forced compliance to accept societal norms of superficiality creates a sense of cognitive dissonance. Going a little deeper, the story is also quite philosophical, presenting an ontological argument towards the possibilities of 'being' that can be achieved if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with others. This can be a real challenge, especially for black and marginalized folks living under the yoke of white supremacy. Survival in a hostile environment often causes people to be suspicious of others, paranoid and unwilling to open up as a defense mechanism. The protagonist is gifted an opportunity by the Anansi god to shed the fake persona and embrace his true self rooted in Afro-Caribbean culture and history although the story does come across as heavy-handed. While I appreciated the author's re-interpretation of Marvel's Spider-Man as Anansi, the story's fantastical elements are bogged down in metaphors rather than being emotionally impactful.