The difficulty of writing a Caribbean Harry Potter

And no, the above doesn’t mean what you might think.

In fact, this topic goes right back to the “images of savages“. As Geoffrey Philp observes in his comment thread,

I was just speculating on how one kind of magic can be totally evil and another can have both good and evil, when if you look at them through archetypal lens, they share similar mythological constructs.

The difficulty in our context is quite different, though. In the first place, the Caribbean has yet to integrate its mythology into something that can have both good and evil connotations, because it’s a jigsaw kind of mythology. I often think about Eliot when I think about the construction of our societies, which are literal waste lands salvaged from the residue the masters left behind when they left: these fragments I have shored against my ruins.

In this kind of context, the hope of creating something with both good and evil sides to it is virtually impossible. Our ancestors — the Calibans and the Sambos and the Coolies of our past — were the demons against whom the angels (our other ancestors, the masters, the Europeans, the messengers-of-light) stood. We were all the Voldemorts, Harry’s Xango-sign notwithstanding (and it properly should be an axe anyway; perhaps he’s more like Zeus after all); our masters, were the warriors of good, not us.

Until we can face up to this history of ours, name it, and beat it back into its proper place with our own fiery sticks, I wonder, as Philp does, whether a Potter-type story for children is yet possible for us.

Course, Nalo Hopkinson’s doing pretty well for us grown-ups. Go Nalo!