| Popis: |
HOPKINSON: My father was a writer, actor, and an English and Latin teacher. My mother worked in libraries most of my life, and still does. So basically my parents have influenced me by surrounding me with words and story. My brother Keita does the same. Visual art is his medium; he paints his stories. So he brings a painterly analysis to my work that I find really helpful, because it's such a different mode of "seeing" than a text-based one. Being surrounded with text and story and people who make text and story was like an informal apprenticeship. I could have learned how to string sentences together without school; I only needed to pull a book down off the bookshelves at home or attend a performance by my father or his peers. I suppose, one writes about one's surroundings. Anywhere I've lived, either in the tropics or in North America, it's been primarily in urban settings. I write about urban environments a lot, but what I find is that North American understanding of my work sometimes focuses on the "tropical" part of my experience to the exclusion of the "urban" part. Though when I write, I don't think, "I'm going to reveal some significance about this urban setting." I just put the story in a cool place. For example, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) literally begins on the corner of a street near where I used to live. I was walking home one night, passed a junkie in a doorway, and he mumbled at me, "We have to get to know one another better, you know." That is one of the first lines in Brown Girl. |
