Onstage
Memory Game
In Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, The Opposite House, home isn’t always where the heart is By Andre Mayer
Helen Oyeyemi’s characters suffer from acute homesickness. Uprooted and over-travelled, they don’t yearn for a specific location so much as an answer to the question, what is home? Maja Carmen Carrera, the rudderless protagonist of Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House, is a pregnant 20-something nightclub singer based in London. Though she’s followed her family through Paris and Hamburg, the strongest emotional pull comes from Maya’s birthplace, Cuba, which she left at age five, the result of her father’s disillusionment with the Castro regime. Oyeyemi also relocated as a small child: born in Nigeria, she moved to London at age four; she’s now 24, but her lapidary prose has already garnered comparisons to such luminaries as Zadie Smith (White Teeth) and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart). Dislocation, Oyeyemi’s thematic preoccupation, isn’t always temporal: a subplot in The Opposite House involves a reluctant angel trapped in a purgatorial portal connecting London and Lagos, Nigeria. This geographical push-pull pervades The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi’s ghostly, much-lauded debut about skittish eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, whose mixed parentage—English father, Nigerian mother—contributes to her isolation and inner discord. “Roots can be very oppressive,” Oyeyemi has said. Indeed, her searching, lyrical novels show that while globalization has shrunk the distance between us, it does little to quell the dissonance within us.
Helen Oyeyemi reads at the International Festival of Authors Oct. 23. See listing on page 168.
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