“Fragmenting and becoming double”: Supplementary twins and abject bodies in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl

Abstract

When critics talk about postcolonial gothic, they tend to locate it elsewhere. This article alternatively considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the former colonial centre and when the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation and alienation within Britain. Through our reading of Helen Oyeyemi's first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilised within postcolonial gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity. As well as challenging structures of alterity perpetuated in previous gothic literature, in which the Other functions as 'the purely negative image of the European Self, the obverse of the Self' (Khair, 2009: 4), postcolonial gothic literature also foregrounds revisitations of the colonial past in the present day, confounding what Procter and Smith have described as 'the Eurocentric emphasis on a chronological break that implies colonialism is over' (2007: 96) implied by the very term postcolonial. This is effected by demonstrating the impact in the present day of the physical, political and psychological traumas inflicted during the colonial period. 2 Oyeyemi's work follows in this vein insomuch as it evidences the impact of the colonial period in the present day. However, it also offers another complex negotiation of identity in which self/Other and here/there oppositions are collapsed. The protagonist of The Icarus Girl is positioned within the former colonial centre, blurring the boundaries between colonising self and colonised Other. Rather than deconstructing patterns of monstrosity and thereby liberating characters from colonial paradigms and hierarchies, Oyeyemi's protagonist is uprooted and dislocated, identifying as British yet identified by some as Other due to her skin and Nigerian heritage. The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial Bildungsroman. The interaction of these forms produces a reading focused on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily coopted into a critical discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, The Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending. 10-11). The directions here are somewhat contrary to Western gothic, with its images of subterranean burial and earthly internment. The interaction of gothic and Yoruba myth creates a final undecidable. The repetition in the last line of the novel also recalls...

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

“…3 See, for example Shear (2006) and Gaylard (2008). 4 See Illot and Buckley (2015), Cooper (2012), Cousins (2012), Mafe (2012), Wester (2012), Mabura (2008) and Stobie (2008). 5 I touch on this idea with particular reference to Holy Hill in the coda to South African Gothic (Duncan 2018b).…”