Helen Oyeyemi Issue #39

About Place

By Soumeya Bendimerad
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 9:55am

In Helen Oyeyemi’s novels, a sense of place is never completely secure. One can enter a house in London, for example, and leave by the back door to Lagos, Nigeria. A character can fly across continents and show up at the door, without having ever boarded a plane. Not restricted to the earthly realm, spirits wander between worlds and even between bodies.

No stranger to distances herself, Oyeyemi moved from Nigeria to London at the age of four, and wasted no time getting to work — she published her first novel, The Icarus Girl, before her 19th birthday.

Oyeyemi wrote that “there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin, and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language.” Nevertheless, Oyeyemi’s distinctively rich, arresting, and nearly reckless use of language seems to come not from the perfection of the English language but the crunchy, deep-fried awareness of it as a unique tool to be used to draw out worlds and places which appear normal but hide bizarreness in plain sight.

Drawing on Nigerian mythology and religion, The Icarus Girl is a spooky tale of a lonely and peculiar little girl named Jess whose friendship with another girl, TillyTilly, equally strange but much unlike herself, spirals out of control. What begins as a godsend friendship for a depressed child turns into a nightmare when TillyTilly proves to be unlike any other child, drawing Jess away from her family and friends across the lines of the spirit world.

The many accolades, prizes, and smashing reviews that Oyeyemi received for her debut didn’t slow her down, quite the opposite, in fact: she switched gears to Cuba for her second novel, The Opposite House, delving into the richness of the religion of Santeria, while continuing to explore femininity, friendship, and cultural identity with three females whose lives are tied to one another. She also wrote two plays and began her third novel, White is for Witching, due out in June from Random House. Not bad for a young woman just shy of her 23rd birthday.

Furthering the idea that a sense of place is at best a location for flux, White is for Witching centers around an old house in Dover, England that doesn’t take lightly to visitors when its inhabitants, bereft over a loss, decide to turn the old family home into a bed-and-breakfast. If that sounds unlikely, consider what Jess’s father tells her at the end of The Icarus Girl: “Believe in curses, believe in miracles, believe, believe, believe in these things even if you don’t see them happen.”