Charlotte Kersten

“Is love that get the Robber Queen born.”

Year published: 2000

Categories: Adult, sci-fi

Summary: it’s Carnival time, and the Carribean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance and pageantry. Masked “Midnight Robbers” waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. But to young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favourite costume to wear at the festival–until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgivable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Here Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth–and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen’s legendary powers can save her life…and set her free.

My Thoughts: I read Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring last year and thought it was really full of promise but ultimately pretty flawed. Giving Hopkinson another try, I’m pleased to say that I liked Midnight Robber much better. It’s a great story about the power of identity and recovery.

After they are outcast to the prison world, Tan-Tan’s father abuses and rapes her repeatedly and she eventually murders him when she is sixteen. Her reaction to these events, as well as her pregnancy by the rape, is the heart of the story. After his death she has incredibly complex feelings about her father and her murder of him, about having his baby – guilt and fear, loyalty and grief, all well-wrought. In addition, I really appreciate the way that she compartmentalizes her thoughts into those belonging to the Robber Queen, Good Tan-Tan and Bad Tan-Tan. That kind of division of identity into good parts and bad parts that deserve their abuse is definitely something that happens with child abuse, and it’s really telling that in the moment that she murders her father she only says that someone’s body is being hurt and someone stabs Antonio. It’s also such a joy to start to see Bad Tan-Tan’s voice of hate and shame grow quieter over the course of the book as Good Tan-Tan/the Robber Queen become more central to Tan-Tan’s identity.

The Robber Queen identity starts out as a child’s coping mechanism through the unimaginable, but it becomes something so much bigger – a way for Tan-Tan to forge her way out of the horror of her past life, a way for her to right the wrongs of the world she lives in, and a way for her to tell her story. Ultimately, it is the act of telling her true story that helps her heal the most at the end of the story instead of allowing herself to be shrouded in myths as she has been. I think that the book shows that strength can come from both kinds of stories – the ones that let us be our true selves and speak plainly about our suffering and the ones that help protect us from the horrors of the past.

I really loved the folk tales about Tan-Tan that are interspersed throughout Midnight Robber, and how they relate to the truth of her experience. It’s no coincidence that two of them focus on Tan-Tan having to suffer to feed voracious men’s appetites, firstly because one of them her father and secondly because she doesn’t think she deserves any better. And the ultimate framing device of the narration was such a lovely reveal.

Hopkinson’s excellent use of language, called Anglopatwa here and intrinsically Afro-Carribean in nature, is an essential part of the story and such a pleasure to read. I also love that poetry and folktales are so central to the story, as is the idea of story-telling as a reclamation of identity against the forces of trauma and oppression. This is probably one of my favorite examples of Afrotuturism, with its wonderful depiction of an alien world and AI/surveillance technology. The past and the future combine with the huge importance of celebrations like Carnivale and Junkanoo, traditional characters like Midnight Robber brought to new life, the AI being named after Anansi and the incorporation of black heroes and heroines through the use of names like Toussaint and Equiano. Most importantly, perhaps, is that Tan-Tan names her baby Tubman to mean the passage from slavery and darkness into freedom and hope.

My complaints are somewhat minor, finally. I think the passage of time and pacing are a little strange in this book – the narration skips over Antonio and Tan-Tan settling in Junjuh and Tan-Tan becoming friends with the douen Abitefa, both of which I think would have strengthened the story with their inclusion. And just one brief scene that takes place on Tan-Tan’s sixth birthday when her father rapes her for the first time, after which the story skips ahead again. So I think the pacing could have been better, and I also think that Janisette could have been fleshed out more as a character. Her confrontation with Tan-Tan is the final dramatic scene of the story (and somehow, inexplicably, she manages to acquire a tank?!) but I feel like I barely knew anything about who she was and what her relationship with Tan-Tan was like before Tan-Tan killed Antonio.