'Reunited to the vein’: Healing the Subject and the Urban Body in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

This paper aims to foreground response strategies to trauma adopted in Brown Girl in the Ring by Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson. Recent studies in the field of trauma and its representation in literature propose to supersede the notion of it as ‘unrepresentable’, integrating the model with perspectives which can account for cultural-specific conceptualisations of it as well as for its effects upon community, rather than maintaining a purely individual dimension. Brown Girl in the Ring in particular demonstrates the relevance of such a call: metaphorically juxtaposing the fractured urban tissue of a dystopian Toronto with the wounded bodies of its inhabitants, the novel also weaves a complex net of correspondences between the Canadian and the Caribbean cultural frameworks. Hopkinson’s recontextualization of the traumatic experience within speculative fiction allows her to heal the tear between spiritual and material and to subvert the role of fragmentariness in the quest for collective recovery.