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Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi

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Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing ((PSCWW))

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Abstract

This chapter explores Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White is for Witching (2009a). The first section of this chapter revolves around the layered constructions of space in White is for Witching. It not only traces the literary histories of the haunted house on which Oyeyemi draws but also shows how house, home and homeland are destabilised by the peculiar unhomeliness of the novel’s postcolonial gothic engagement with space. The second section looks at how the novel performs its own textuality. White is for Witching is a text that self-consciously displays its own materiality and intertextuality. The third section concerns the novel’s constructions of love. It looks at the second gothic stock concept the novel proffers, the figure of the vampire and, closely connected, the desire for consuming the other. This section shows how the novel sets up its very own queer vampiric love story and creates a narrative that turns on its head genre conventions as the novel’s two female protagonists fall in love.

White is for Witching has a sharp personality, and I think it’s in a way an unlikeable book, because it talks about racism and eating disorders and hauntings. It’s a book that doesn’t want to be read, in some way.

—Helen Oyeyemi, “The Professionally Haunted Life of Helen Oyeyemi” (2014b, n. pag.)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With this, White is for Witching steps into a long row of postcolonial rewritings of the play, such as Frantz Fanon with Black Skin, White Masks (1952), George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry volume Islands (1969), Aimé Cesaire’s A Tempest: Adaptions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by a Negro Theatre (1969) or Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992). There is even a tiny self-conscious nod to the early modern play as it comes up in one of Miranda’s university courses (168). In fact, both girls echo Shakespearean women: Ore was originally supposed to be called Rose which, with her surname Lind (148), would have conjured As You Like It’s Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s most wilful heroines who transcends her textual confines in the play’s epilogue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Literature and British Cultural Studies, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Jennifer Leetsch

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Leetsch, J. (2021). Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi. In: Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_4

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