“Making the Impossible Possible”: Alienness in Nalo Hopkinson’s Short Stories

Caribbean Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson argues that her novels and stories are “full of the unreal, the futuristic, the unlikely, the impossible.” And yet, instead of conceiving “the impossible” as a discouraging hindrance to her writing and imagination, she sees it as a creative alchemy. In addition, she also argues that in the narration of colonialist enterprises, black and indigenous people have often been depicted as nonhuman, thus appearing as aliens. By focusing on issues such as the marginalized body, hybridity, and food, this article analyzes a sample of Hopkinson’s short stories taken from her collection Skin Folk (2001) to interrogate the queer postcolonial condition and express counterhegemonic visions of more just and equitable futures, eventually proving that speculative fiction is a genre bursting with possibilities.