A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review. Accessed 28 January 2022.A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. It is fitting to see her as a pioneer of what of Porochista Khakpour has termed the ‘multicultural’ – and I would add, gendered – ‘Uncanny frontier.’Ĭite this: Moellenberg, Tamara. “.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, . Deploying these, she returns repeatedly to themes of disruption in the 21 st century: lost homelands, fractured selves, dissolving bonds, cycling oppressions, emerging ways of thinking, feeling, being. To be sure, Oyeyemi draws as often from European folklores as from the oral traditions of West Africa. Yet it would be a mistake to see Oyeyemi’s dislocation as experienced – and examined – along cultural and racial vectors only: many of her works also give space to wounded female matrilineages and the various ways in which, as Oyeyemi puts it, ‘women disappoint one another.’ Indeed, at least two of her novels, White is for Witching (2009) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), borrow in increasingly focused ways from the Grimms brothers’ story of ‘Snow White’,’ imagining (step)mother against daughter, sister against sister, heroine against self. In essays, Oyeyemi has recounted childhood experiences of being bullied, called a ‘jungle bunny’ by her peers.
Similarly, her second novel, The Opposite House (2007), serves up a symbol of life lived ‘in between’ in its central conceit of a mythical ‘somewhereshouse’ with doors that open onto Lagos and London.
The Icarus Girl marshals Yoruba folklore and specifically the image of the twinned abiku to investigate what Brenda Cooper sees as ‘contested citizenship,’ the twoness in oneness, of the migrant person. Fox (2011), her fourth novel, ‘playful, romping around.’ Yet while Oyeyemi’s oeuvre is certainly shape shifting, metamorphosing alongside the writer in her turn from wide-eyed teenager to self-assured auteur, it reveals remarkable obduracy in the themes that it explores.
In an interview for NPR, Oyeyemi has described her works as having different personalities: The Icarus Girl is ‘startled, wide-eyed’ Mr. Helen Oyeyemi – The Exoticism of Others, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2012, Stanny Angga (CC by 2.0) via Flickr
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