‘Daring to Tilt Worlds’: The Fiction of Irenosen Okojie

Abstract

In much recent criticism and commentary, black British literature and culture has either been used to reflect and interrogate the state of the nation or, as an educational tool, to shine a light on hidden histories and the shadowy margins of the present. As a result, the work’s formal structures and particularly writers’ experiments with linguistic forms and textual or performative structures are often bypassed in favour of a realist or literalist approach to content. Focusing on Okojie’s novel, Butterfly Fish (2015) and her collection of short stories Speak Gigantular (2016), I argue that this work creates what Marie-Laure Ryan has defined as ‘impossible worlds’; fiction that demands ‘new strategies for making sense of the text’ (p. 369), and that tests habitual assumptions about black women’s fiction and the worlds their texts create. Okojie’s work produces instabilities; it settles on strangeness, reflecting what Tobias During (2017) describes as a startling ingenuity that presents the possibilities of different worlds and different geographies. Her fiction tests out new forms of contemporary prose and challenges readers to see worlds and words differently.