An Embarrassment of Oyeyemis

A kind of critical consensus emerged around Oyeyemi’s three earliest novels, describing them variously in terms of the ‘postcolonial gothic’ (Buckley 2017), ‘postcolonial Female gothic’ (Mafe 2012), ‘Yoruba gothic’ (Cousins 2019), and ‘decolonial gothic’ (Harrison 2023). However, as Alexandra J. Sanchez (2020) argues, Oyeyemi’s formally challenging ‘maverick’ fourth novel, Mr. Fox, marks a turning point in the author’s career. With this novel, Sanchez argues, Oyeyemi self-consciously pushes back against the label of ‘minority writing,’ by not ‘overtly address[ing] blackness or racial identity’ in any way (1). Other critics note the ‘virtual erasure’ of identitarian markers of gender and for Oyeyemi’s characters, which they describe as a ‘strikingly understated category’ in Oyeyemi’s later novels, especially in comparison with most works by other similarly raced and gendered authors (Bekers and Cousins 2021: 214). Even though these later novels feature mostly non-white characters, often in European locales or against backgrounds in which race and racialisation are more apparent, race rarely features as a plot point or even a topic of discourse or narration. The political stakes of these later novels, in other words, are much less clear, so that critics often revert to general inclusionary arguments for Oyeyemi’s formal innovations, with Bekers and Cousins for example positioning Oyeyemi and other Black British women writers on the ‘vanguard’ (207) of British literary production, from where they might ‘enliven’ (207) the form of the novel and ‘broaden the canon, thematically as well as aesthetically’ (219).²

To be fair, if these and other critical essays ultimately elide more potentially radical facets of Oyeyemi’s racial politics, it is because Oyeyemi works assiduously — if also joyfully and erratically — to elide her own racial politics as a matter of course, and these critics are doing their best to describe her accurately. As a white Canadian settler scholar who writes about the field of contemporary British literature, I myself share this difficulty, and in what follows I lay no claim to having (finally) solved the problem of Oyeyemi’s elusive, and perhaps deliberately obscurantist, racial politics. As Sanchez suggests, since Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi has worked increasingly to throw us off the scent, and so I argue against any readings that would suture her aesthetics to recognizable and unambiguous identitarian or political claims.

Boy, Snow, Bird sets the Snow White tale in Civil Rights-Era² USA and turns on the iconic phrase—‘the fairest one of all’—which signifies, here as in the original tale, not just beauty but whiteness, both of which are examined in relation to notions of fairness as unbiased justice.³ On the one hand, the novel uses this backdrop to grapple with particularly American notions of race.⁴ But as the scene of ‘exquisite corpse’ storytelling instantiates, it does not for this reason turn on recognizable identitarian claims, and indeed its primary target is the way in which the normative mythos of American Blackness forecloses potential alternatives for Black authorship that Oyeyemi, as a non-American Black subject, cannot help but embody.

Boy, Snow, Bird is the story of Boy, a young blonde woman who flees an abusive father, heads to New England, and falls for Arturo Whitman and his ethereally beautiful and universally adored daughter, Snow. Arturo and Boy marry and have a daughter of their own, Bird, who is born with dark skin, revealing to Boy and to the reader that the Whitmans are Black and have been passing for white. Arturo’s mother suggests that they send Bird away to be raised by dark-skinned family members in the South, but in a fit of protective jealousy Boy sends Snow away instead, effectively stepping from the role of Snow White (as the beautiful young woman fleeing a threatening parent) and into the role of the wicked stepmother. Boy, Snow, Bird is rife with mirrors, doubles and doppelgängers, and much of the extant critical work on the novel unpacks these motifs, as well as its mix of European fairy tale and African folktale traditions, to talk about the violences of gender and racial formation in America.⁵

My focus here, though, is the American racial imaginary and Oyeyemi’s authorial relationship to it. Flax Hill, where the story is set, is a picturesque town full of artisans and craftspeople which, when we first see it, is blanketed in soft white snow—a sort of fantasy of post-industrial America in Jacqueline Rose’s sense of ‘fantasy,’ as ‘a kind of psychic glue which protects the nation/al from the horror of the ‘real’ that threatens the disintegration of the self; it keeps it whole’ (1996: 3). This dream-like version of mid-century America makes an almost-parody of whiteness: besides the references to ‘flaxen’ (or blond) hills and the Whitmans who live there (White-mans, but also Walt Whitman, lyricist to the promise of American democracy), the narrative calls attention to the place’s colonial history with conspicuous references to taking tea and to New England as opposed to anywhere more specific (as when the ticket agent tells Boy that her bus goes to New England, and refuses to name the state). The novel touches on real histories—Emmett Till’s funeral and the Vietnam War are referenced as events in the world of the novel, for example—but it inhabits a self-consciously literary-imaginative space, drawing on intertexts like Nella Larsen’s Passing, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Boy Novak is described looking very much like Kim Novak’s blonde doppelgänger in that film about disguise and deception), as well as Snow White and other European and African folk tales. It also makes conspicuous use of other emblems of American identity: a Thanksgiving dinner tableau, an (anthropomorphic) American flag, and a paint-by-number portrait of Abraham Lincoln that would be at home on the cover of any anthology of post-modern American literature. This mix of incommensurabilities and anachronisms led an Americanist colleague of mine to tell me that Oyeyemi gets mid-century USA ‘all wrong.’ But read as a critique of the epistemologies that derive from normative narrativizations of this moment, the slightly alienating fun-house-mirror quality of this work appears to be precisely the point (a metaphor which is literalized in the novel’s many untrustworthy mirrors). The novel doesn’t treat this period as if it were an autonomous ‘slice through time,’ recognizable through certain chronotopes and generic approaches, but rather, sees those tropes and chronotopes as just as available for ‘generic expansion’ as, say, the haunted house novel. Of all her novels, then, Boy, Snow, Bird does the most work to defamiliarize what Paul Gilroy describes as the ‘generic perceptions of racial identity sourced from the US’ (2019: n.p.) that are increasingly pervasive in the UK and elsewhere in the Western world.

As I have said, the best way to understand the implications of these generic perceptions for my reading of Boy, Snow, Bird is through Michelle M. Wright’s concept of ‘Middle Passage epistemology’ (2015). According to Wright, most Black Studies discourses, in North America and the USA especially, define their object of study, Blackness, through a shared ancestral connection to the slave trade. As she puts it, dominant contemporary constructions of Blackness are ‘produced through history, culture, and ancestry, which are predicated on a notion of time and space that is linear and driven by progress (with setbacks along the way)’ (14). This narrative, which moves from freedom through slavery to freedom again, helps to define and lend the ‘necessary ‘weight’ of a material Blackness,’ but importantly it can also ‘exclude… those who, in the contemporary moment, perceive and perform themselves as Black but do not share that linear timeline’ (Wright 2015: 14). The related assumption is that the collective that makes up Middle Passage Blackness is ‘always driven toward higher or more complete states of freedom and knowledge’ (2015: 23). But as Wright makes clear, it has three major limitations: it looks backwards in time for competing origin stories (about African writing systems or intellectual advancements) that are valued in the Western tradition; it reinscribes individualist and masculinist notions of leadership, in terms of Black presidents, emperors and kings; and it is dependent on ‘transatlantic enslavement as the archetypal moment of white oppressive agency, against which Black agency is defined, and against which Black agency repeatedly gathers its rebounding energy’ (Noxolo 2024: 9). As Wright makes clear, Middle Passage epistemology underwrites most of our politically-oriented and collective engagements with Blackness, from liberal rights-based discourses to histories of the Black Atlantic to Afrofuturist and Afropessimist approaches.⁶ Hence in the reading of Boy, Snow, Bird that follows, I will argue that its ‘all wrong’ mid-century USA is a strategy for engaging with the centrality but also the limits of this dominant epistemology.

The ‘embarrassment of Oyeyemis’ in this section’s title derives from a line from one of Wright’s lectures, in which she refers to the multitude of possible contradictory narratives we have for the authorial figure of Olaudah Equiano (‘Black Life’ 2019: 43:46–44:00).⁷ While once the story of Equiano’s journey — from freedom in Africa, through enslavement, to freedom and even return to Africa again — represented a paradigmatic case-study for Middle Passage Blackness, more recent archival discoveries have thrown the veracity of his Narrative into question.⁸ In Physics of Blackness, Wright says that because we don’t know whether or which parts of his autobiography are fact or falsehood, ‘the meaning of [Equiano’s] Narrative now escapes us’ and render him as a historical figure ‘unlocatable without his Narrative to provide the coordinates’ (2015: 23). As she puts it, there is no longer any satisfying answer to the question “What was Equiano’s Blackness?” but we can ask, “When/where was Equiano’s Blackness?” and receive, as she puts it, ‘not one but a revealing multitude of answers produced by the multidimensionality of Blackness in the African Diaspora at that moment as we read it in the now, with all its possibilities’ (2015: 23). Wright calls this situated approach reading for ‘epiphenomenal Blackness,’ wherein the moment of interpretation is given as much weight as the linear progress narratives that often ground our understanding, to the exclusion of other readings. As Pat Noxolo puts it, by ‘[e]schewing rigid space and time containers, Wright frees herself up to explore that which cannot conventionally be thought, the connections and entanglements between different forms of Black experience and relationship that are routinely displaced or forgotten’ (2024: 9–10).

If this method confronts critics with ‘an embarrassment of Equianos,’ Oyeyemi makes a far more self-conscious decision in her fiction to render her authorial self (or selves) multiple, and its (their) precise relation to contemporary racial politics unlocatable. That is, if Equiano is suddenly made multiple and unlocatable by virtue of archival paratextual discoveries, Oyeyemi’s writing makes a formal, metafictional argument for her own authorial multiplicity and unlocatability, and for her own epiphenomenal Blackness.⁹ She refuses to make her precise relation to the history of civil rights in America legible, and instead keeps bringing us back to the moment of our interpretation by consistently interrupting our readerly expectations. Her main strategy for doing this is the swerve — the misdirect, the feint, the deke — whether in terms of characters or motifs introduced that don’t return, patterns that suggest a reading trajectory that is soon interrupted by an alternate set of facts, or sudden and unaccountable stylistic and tonal shifts. Kimberly J. Lau describes something similar when she calls attention to Oyeyemi’s use of ‘interruption as a narrative mode’ (2016: 389), as does Sheri-Marie Harrison when she describes Oyeyemi as ‘employing familiar techniques that seem to elicit predictable paths of critical analysis but don’t actually have any pay-off’ (2023: 28–29), and even when F. Fiona Moolla describes Oyeyemi’s art as ‘an art of unpredictable wonder’ (2024: 530). It’s as if every time we discern an authorial attitude or position that might ground us in a recognizable epistemological framework, we suddenly find that the ground has shifted, the view is different, and we’re not sure how we’re meant to feel about it. As one reviewer put it, ‘Where am I? Is this science fiction or a fairy tale? Maybe satire or social commentary?’ (Ivey 2019). It seems, in other words, that not knowing is the point. The meta-logic of the swerve is precisely what we see in the ‘exquisite corpse’ scene described above, and indeed it is characteristic of Oyeyemi’s style across her body of work. In my next section, I will provide a reading of this scene as my first example, demonstrating both how the swerve works, and how aspects of this scene comment on authorship in the novel writ large.

The Sacred and Profane Authorship Machine

Here is the opening to Mia’s piece, in which both tone and modality swerve almost immediately:

You want the scoop, and I’m going to give it to you. But let’s make a deal first. How often have you read an article all the way through to the end and said to yourself: ‘I don’t know where this chump gets the nerve to show up for work in the morning!’ I’ll tell you how I get the nerve, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t have to read another word of it.

Here goes: I’m a brunette from a long line of brunettes. We’ve never really had anything to worry about. After all, gentlemen marry us. But something happened to me when I was ten years old. My hands began to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane. I watched them and made notes…. (51, italics original)

Mia’s voice when she opens parrots the trope of the fast-talking female reporter from early 20th Century American screwball comedies like His Girl Friday, which she uses to foreground the gendered problem of her authority. Focus and diction shift, though, when she turns to her strange childhood experience (‘My hands began to draw distinctions…’) in order to establish her bona fides, and suddenly we are in another kind of story, assessing a different order of truth claim that is founded on the religious or spiritual distinction between the holy and mundane. Mia goes on to tell us that her left hand was sacred and would only touch things she considered beautiful, privileging textual encounters like writing love letters and touching moving lines from books, whereas her right hand belonged to the world, opening doors and pulling up socks. This ‘theatre of her hands,’ she tells us, played out against the backdrop of her parents’ divorce (whereupon we get a brief domestic scene) and racially-inflected European fascism (she mentions Jesse Owens, the Black medalist at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, famously snubbed by Hitler, and the war against Franco in Spain). Then she circles back to her truth claim, suggesting that her hands told her to ‘see far’ and ‘remember what was said,’ which she suggests should cement her authority as a writer. Then, without having done any actual ‘reportage,’ her article comes to an abrupt end like this:

All right, if you’re still with me, thanks for staying. I write these words with a fifteen-dollar wig on my head. Wheat-sheaf blond, that’s what it said on the tag. So this is a bulletin direct from the secret world. The first thing you learn is whom to beware of. They’re exactly the same people you had to beware of as a non-blonde. The kind who think they know what you are and don’t mind telling you all about it. (53, italics original)

The results of Mia’s investigation are presented almost as an afterthought: being blonde doesn’t change anything; you still have to watch out for people who will objectify you. It effectively structures her foray into serious journalism as a shaggy dog joke, a genre which maximizes expectations and prolongs narrative suspension, only to ultimately deliver the smallest possible pay-off for humorous effect. In a number of ways, then, the text works to confound not just our genre expectations as we go along, but also our meta-expectations for how an embedded text should speak to the overarching concerns of the novel. Is this a commentary on women writers’ struggles to be taken seriously? Because despite Mia’s attested seriousness, her article is structured like a joke. Is it an analogy for passing? If so, the idea that white people, like blonds, are just like everyone else, and that there is nothing to be gained by joining their ranks, rubs uncomfortably up against the implication that white privilege isn’t a significant differentiator in a racist social order. On the other hand, it’s possible that the same allegory performs the more urgent work of undermining the primacy of white subjectivity in the first place. Or, a third possibility, perhaps the reader is meant to feel ridiculous for having tried to make the parallel at all. There is nothing in the novel, here or later, to relieve us of this indeterminacy.

At the same time, Mia’s truth claim — in which she posits that authorial legitimacy is constructed around the division of the sacred from the profane — is also a comment about boundaries between generic and rhetorical modes. In fact, this is one way to talk about what all ‘legitimate’ or ‘literary’ authors do — they can distinguish between what is authentic and meaningful and what is not, and they can understand these categories to be both ‘performative’ and ‘true,’ which is how Mia describes the theatre of her hands. But to talk about authorship in terms of the sacred and profane also touches on a more deeply structural and thus largely invisible issue, which is the way in which contemporary post-colonial and Black writers in Britain are burdened with the sacred task of performing representational authenticity and thereby revivifying the field. Sarah Brouillette (2016) writes instructively about the sacralizing process, showing how post-colonial authors are instrumentalized as commodities and stripped of autonomy even while being enshrined for something that looks a lot like autonomy, but isn’t: authorship.

Authorial attempts, within these writers’ texts, to maintain some form of autonomy that exists outside of or can withstand the market forces that circumscribe them, according to Brouillette, are almost universally doomed:

[W]hile never entirely impossible, appeals to the position of authorial autonomy are always made within conditions of strain, and then subject to near immediate stress or erasure. When they occur they are mediated by a further self-conscious awareness of the forms of scrutiny that any such position has faced. The mechanisms of literary consecration have been thoroughly demystified. (2016: 96)

The attention Oyeyemi gives in Mia’s article to the ways that truth claims and writerly anxiety are tied to fantastic, ungrounded notions of sacrality and profanity points exactly to the highly speculative nature of this cycle. According to Brouillette, it might be useless to know it — in a later essay, she goes even farther than she does here, asserting that self-referential gestures make no difference to anything, because as she puts it, ‘there is no real prize to be won in the current game’ (2016: 83).¹⁰ Nonetheless, Oyeyemi pushes back against the notion of her own abject lack of agency by resisting the sacrality of the author, as her poetics of dislocation refuses to play by the orthodoxies and clichés of identity. The profane, then, comes in the form of Oyeyemi’s ludic skepticism and radical relativity, especially with regard to the ways that she evades committing to any one identity or position, usually by committing to too many positions, and generating too many readings. Though she engages with revered canonical authors like Larsen and Morrison, for example, Oyeyemi’s authorial persona proves much more evasive than either Larsen’s or Morrison’s do. It’s not just that Oyeyemi introduces elements of the profane in her writing, as these authors certainly do; it’s that she privileges them. It’s hard to imagine a metaphor for passing devolving into a shaggy dog joke in The Bluest Eye, for example. Oyeyemi’s generic and tonal dissonance seems designed to either actively resist, or perhaps to exploit and enjoy, the machinery of consecration as Brouillette describes it, and this ludic sidestepping of the very question about whether or not escape is possible is characteristic of her strategic evasions across her body of fictional work.

If the first half of the embedded text we’ve been reading has an exquisite corpse-like jumble of genres and styles, the remainder actually is produced collaboratively, passed back and forth between Boy and Mia in an effort, ostensibly, to round out the article and finish it off. When Boy takes over, though, she abruptly breaks into the fairy tale genre: ‘Here’s a story for you,’ she writes, ‘the kind you find in an old library book with cobwebs between the pages’ (53, original italics). She and Mia then produce a story about a magician with the power to give or take beauty away. He meets his match with a woman who simply refuses to be addressed or interpellated by his words. Then a snake comes out of the woman’s throat, announces itself to be the woman’s heart, laughs at the magician and chases him away.

These two friends each claim to be remembering this tale of radical feminine agency from childhood, but we have to ask, why are they bothering to pretend, especially if they must each realize it’s impossible to get away with it? And wouldn’t they be more legible as ‘authors’ if they were to exercise creative autonomy and make the story up ex nihilo? Instead, Boy and Mia invoke the authorizing mechanisms of the archive — the dusty old library book Boy claims the story is from — and simultaneously construct it as a venue for radical feminist self-definition. They implicitly agree to this mutually constitutive performance as a way of making that history real, inventing the literary ancestors and feminist genealogy that they require in order to make writing possible and life habitable in the present. Moreover, the aleatoric and collaborative process that they engage in to get there suggests an interpersonal model of authority and therefore also of subjectivity and even autonomy — one that is not tied to the epistemic regime of Cartesian self-hood that has excluded both Black and feminine subjects from the realm of the fully human.

In other words, the two women proceed presumptuously together, without ground, except for the one that tethers them to each other. Likewise, this collaborative mode gestures to the reader of the text, who must also, alongside Oyeyemi, proceed presumptuously, without ground, trusting that each swerve will be worth it. If we were to read the folk tale allegorically or metafictionally, we might put the reader in the role of the magician who believes he has the power to make aesthetic judgments and give or take beauty away, only to find that this power has been imaginary all along, and that the story can define itself on its own shifting terms; but then again, it’s hard to know how exactly we are meant to understand this tale in relation to the many moving parts it seems attached to. And because of this instability, the epiphenomenal quality of authorship makes itself apparent here. Neither quite performing nor quite rejecting the politics of location, Oyeyemi drives home how we only come to know authorship and authority in relation to our own, perhaps also shifting, positions, which calls attention to the limits to our powers of aesthetic discernment and definitive political mapping.

Sidonie at the Window, or the Recursive Swerve

Another scene a little later similarly stages the shifting relations between reader and author figure(s) in quite different terms. Where the ‘exquisite corpse’ article about living life as a blonde presents a kaleidoscopically jumbled allegory of inauthentic authorial ‘passing,’ this scene offers a similarly unmoored and groundless allegory of authentic authorial Blackness. In it, Boy is invited to tea to meet her prospective in-laws, three patrician women perched at the top of the local social hierarchy, whom Boy and the reader understand to be white. Boy is an outsider, working class and new to town, and her understandable discomfort is exacerbated by her sense that she has been ‘summoned [before] the committee’ (76) to perform her acceptability as a potential addition to their family.

The centrepiece of the scene, though, is an obtrusive extended fantasy in which Boy imagines telling the women all about the Black teenager who skips school to read in the back of the bookstore where Boy has started a new job. She describes the girl, named Sidonie, to the reader like this:

There’s a certain type of colored girl who speaks softly and carries herself well, but when you talk to her, her eyes firmly reject every word that comes out of your mouth, just as if she’s saying: Oh come on now. Bullshit. Bull. Shit. […] If you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid. That unreadable look they give us; it’s really shocking somehow, isn’t it? Kind of like finding someone staring in at the window of your home, but not in a way that gets you scared you’ll be robbed. No, it’s a different kind of stare. A stare that says “I don’t particularly like being outside, but I don’t want to come in, either.” (79–80)

It’s a striking invocation that by metonymic chain puts an avatar of Sidonie at the window of the room. At this point in the novel, Boy has only recently been confronted by the fact of her own whiteness by Sidonie, so in the context of the performative whiteness she encounters in this scene — the tea, the twinsets, the ‘chintzy gloom’ (78) of the over-upholstered room — her summoning of this figure of Blackness is not entirely surprising, even on first reading. Boy doesn’t speak her fantasy of confrontation out loud to her prospective in-laws, so Sidonie remains Boy’s uncannily repressed secret, a complex analog for Boy’s paradoxical desire both to be deemed acceptable, or ‘white enough’ for this bourgeois milieu, but also to be outside the room, affectless, looking in—an identification that is problematic and yet sympathetic.

Once we discover, several chapters further on, that these women are in fact legally Black, a new complicated and recursive dynamic is introduced, which puts the reader once again on unstable epistemological ground. Sidonie’s presence signifies in hard-to-pin-down and unpredictable ways, and the tableau now functions as a kind of meta-commentary on the relative positionalities and the identifications and disidentifications of the figures in play, amongst whom we must include the reader, Oyeyemi herself, and any authorial surrogates or ‘author figures’ as such that she might be making use of. In short, in this scene we have a Black writer (Oyeyemi) who assumes the voice of a white narrator (Boy) to describe three other Black women who are pretending to be white, and who then conjures the figure of a Black girl for the purpose of quietly judging them all. The reader is addressed as white—’that unreadable look they give us,’ says Boy—but of course Boy’s assumptions—about the women in the room, about what Sidonie represents and what she knows, and about the identifications members of her readership might be inclined to make—are thoroughly ironized by the fact that she is the only one in the room who doesn’t know what’s going on.

Another British author celebrated for revivifying the contemporary British literary landscape, Salman Rushdie, describes the experience of having become a celebrated author, marketed as much for his representative racialised status as for the writing that this status authorised. He speaks of a split self — an ‘I’ that witnesses his own commodification — and the sense of a loss of writerly agency and irrelevance that accompanied it: ‘I feel as if I have been concealed behind a false self, as if a shadow has become substance while I have been relegated to the shadows’ (1992: 405). This split is perhaps a little simple, since it posits a unified ‘I’ who is a true self, and still available to witness the soul-destroying mechanisms of the literary marketplace, but it echoes the sacred/profane divide already discussed, and it’s a helpful way to think about the figures in this scene. On the one hand, it is tempting to make Sidonie the locus of authorial consciousness — Oyeyemi’s ‘true self’ and the moral and political conscience of the scene, the authentic Black self-present subject that looks in from the margins and calls ‘bullshit’ on these various performances, and so participates in the ethical imperative of Middle Passage epistemology towards the higher or more complete states of freedom and knowledge for Black subjects named earlier. In this case, Sidonie-as-author-figure would seem to judge Oyeyemi-as-historical-person for the crime of passing — not just in the sense that she ventriloquizes a white narrative voice, but in the more damning sense that she assumes and makes herself legible for a white audience. By the same token, however, might Sidonie represent a kind of metafictional loophole — a self-reflexive nudge-nudge wink-wink— through which Oyeyemi might win back some of the autonomy she gestures towards having lost? Does Sidonie, as the only legibly Black woman in the scene, and one of the only voices of lived Black experience in the novel, function as a kind of epistemological ground that Oyeyemi has Boy conjure because the literary genre of ‘passing’ narratives requires such a figure for the same reason that all crime narratives work best when they include a victim, who can either forgive or condemn the guilty characters on the author’s behalf, and so let the reader know where they ought to stand?

On the other hand, perhaps Sidonie more obviously serves here as a kind of fetish object that Boy summons to keep future traumas at bay: if Boy is repressing the knowledge of her fiancé’s racial identity, her fantasy of identification with Sidonie works to reinscribe Blackness as external to the room, and not (as perhaps Boy senses) already in it. In either case, Sidonie remains unreadable — we don’t have access to her interiority here or elsewhere in the novel — and her ‘authentic’ or autonomous Black gaze is reified as such in the service of a white woman trying to make sense of her own discomfort and alienation. But she also remains the only figure of authority in this tableau, and for that reason is central to it, the way Nella Larsen’s Clare required an Irene — the friend grounded in Black experience and the perspective from which Clare’s struggle was legible. In this way, Oyeyemi complicates the bifurcation that Rushdie gives us, in that Sidonie is readable as both true and false selves at the same time. Sidonie is the object of what Jose Muñoz would have called a ‘tactical recognition’ or disidentification (1999: 97):¹¹ Oyeyemi makes it impossible for us to read the one legibly Black woman in the scene as any one thing, which draws our attention to the many ways in which we try to make her mean. In other words, we become aware of her multiplicity and Oyeyemi’s unlocatability relative to her, and to the moment of our own interpretation.

Sidonie thus points to and explodes some of the conventions of literary marketability, whether post-colonial or merely (supposedly) ‘post-racial’: the trope of the mute subaltern witness to the performance of whiteness; the trope of melancholic and spectral Blackness that memorializes traumatic histories and functions as moral and political conscience; the trope of the ‘magical negro’ who comes to the aid of the white protagonist in a moment of need. Oyeyemi dis-identifies with Sidonie-at-the-window, as a figure of imaginary but decisive moral authority, as a way to comment on the ways in which her own figuration is circumscribed, and perhaps to open up more space to both be and not have to be this reified figure. What this says to me is that, while the mechanisms of literary consecration may have been thoroughly demystified (Sidonie after all is projected as an author figure as such, or as invested with authority as a figure), still they persist, if only because they give persistent structure to the unresolved contradictions of Middle Passage epistemology described by Wright. Sidonie can absolve the women for their ‘crime’ of passing, she can condemn them, or she can withhold judgement, but she cannot simply evade or ignore the fact of the transnational ethical imperative to move all Black subjects from slavery to freedom, which also as a corollary requires the imposition on racialised authors like Oyeyemi of a commodifiable ‘authenticity.’

Violent Assemblages

Above, I have argued that Oyeyemi’s aesthetic choices do not amount to a coherent and legible racial politics, and that in fact she evades and swerves away from these at every turn. In this final section, I will return to the term ‘exquisite corpse’ to gesture to a tangle of discourses in this novel that circulate around violence and the Black body, the urgency and seriousness of which create a kind of tonal dissonance alongside the more ludically performative aspects that I’ve been describing. In fact, there are a number of things that should make us uncomfortable with the intersection of Blackness and connotations of ‘exquisite corpses’: the aestheticization of violence and the fetishization of the Black body, as well as market-driven processes of reification and commodification (a kind of ‘corpsification,’ if you will), especially with regards to postcolonial or Black authorship. Even the now relatively commonplace notion that race is made and not given—that supposedly distinct races are actually exquisite-corpse-like assemblages, brought into being by the often violent workings of racism—is given new uncanny life in this novel, as the reader finds herself negotiating the relationship between style—sometimes jagged, sometimes mannered and even twee—and suffering.

The damaged body of Emmett Till is called up in a scene that seems designed to prompt this very question. In the book’s last section, when Bird is thirteen, the Whitmans host a Thanksgiving meal for both the Black and white-passing sides of the family for the first time. Bird’s uncle John, who has been raising Snow in Boston since she was sent away, tells a story about how he used to follow white women down the street just to make them nervous, just for ‘youthful kicks’ (280). Bird’s white-passing grandfather, appalled, evokes the name and image of Emmett Till as an admonishment: ‘You saw what they did to Emmett Till. You saw the boy’s face. Agnes, you cried and said he looked melted,’ adding that the perpetrators ‘didn’t do a single second of jail time’ (281). John responds that ‘those women would’ve been just as scared regardless, so why not make a joke out of it?’ but concedes that, ‘I saw the face that Emmett Till was left with. I want you to know that I wasn’t bragging’ (282).

In a novel full of unexpected swerves resonant of the play and cheekiness of an exquisite corpse poem, here we have the strange and frightening caveat that there is in fact a real corpse that was unable to fully, under the law, signify as such. As I noted earlier, though the novel’s timeframe corresponds almost exactly to the years that mark the civil rights era, it is narrated, as one reviewer put it, ‘like the voice-over of a fever dream’ (Khakpour 2014). In this atmosphere, it is hard to know how we are meant to understand the irruption of the reality of Emmett Till’s death and the evocative photos that circulated in its wake into the fairy-tale-adjacent world of the narrative. Outside the world of the novel, we might consider Mamie Till’s choice to hold a multi-day open-casket funeral for her son as a defiant but already-doomed effort against a highly organized and therefore not fully visible white supremacy, a demonstrative act of habeas corpus that showed how there was no justice for Black people and no childhood for Black boys, a legacy that carries on into the present. Others, however, might see it as a terrible event that was nonetheless a catalyst for meaningful change, effectively folding it back into the relatively linear history of the civil rights movement — which is how it has been memorialized at the Museum of African American History in Washington DC, for example. Both of these approaches—the latter somewhat more assured of its narrative of progress, and the former less so—can be understood within a Middle Passage epistemological framework, but neither are necessarily signaled by the novel itself.

Instead, in this scene, the memory of Till’s damaged body is evoked to shame a Black man for having played a game that, while dangerous, was also an expression of agency, however circumscribed, in the context of an overdetermined system of signification and necropolitical control. And since the conversation between the two men comes down to an argument about tone (‘I want you to know that I wasn’t bragging’ [282]), it is also a comment on the porous and shifting border between the sacred and the profane. It gestures, in other words, to the formal tensions that characterize the novel, between ongoing historical trauma and postmodern play, between formalism and its iterative context, and between seriousness and style. There is no way to know what the body of Till means, which suggests the difficulty of describing a politics that might contain it, whether inside or outside of the novel, and the difficulty of writing about race as it is perceived, experienced, and performed. This scene is one of the many places that the novel intersects directly with Middle Passage Blackness, but without assuming that the associated epistemology might answer all of our questions about it in advance. Indeed, if anything, the problem of Middle Passage Blackness is that it risks reducing Till’s death to a mere symbol, as if the successes of the Civil Rights movement in the wake of this young man’s death might in some way make up for it.

In this and other ways, the novel plays with our expectations about trauma, affect, and narrative time, without offering us the resolution we would find if it had simply failed to take these political issues seriously. For example, while in Passing, narrative tension is driven by the fact of Clare’s secret, and the destruction that will surely come when it is discovered, in Boy, Snow, Bird, we discover that the Whitmans are passing at the same time that our narrator, and the rest of the world of the novel, does too. A few pages later, we are propelled thirteen years into the future in a section narrated by Bird, who refuses to feel any guilt for what her birth has brought about, effectively turning the narrative structure of Larsen’s novel inside-out. Moreover, in that same section, Bird learns about her family’s suppressed history via letters from Snow: stories of racist encounters, racialised pride, anger, and self-loathing, all second-hand, for the reader as well as for Bird, who also becomes a writer. In this way, emblems of the continuing afterlives of slavery, including lynchings, murder-suicides, and the spectre of Emmett Till, all circulate as sign-posts or markers, bald and brutal material facts woven into the surface of the novel’s reality, but are never given any kind of primacy or weight, never function as repressed originary traumas that threaten to disrupt and reorganize narrative time in their wake. Instead, collage-like, they stage a fragmentary history that doesn’t settle into a recognizably coherent narrative framework, and that highlights the abject materiality of damaged bodies in doing so.

The novel thus acknowledges the histories of harm that inform the narrative’s present, but without consigning all subjectivities or identities — or all readings of the novel — to this archetypal origin. As Michele M. Wright might put it, the novel does not stage Blackness against the epistemological background of the Middle Passage, according to which ‘whiteness always retains the originary agency’ to which Blackness is always a reaction (Wright 2015: 116). In this essay, I have offered a reading of Boy, Snow, Bird that accords with Erika Renée Williams’ argument that it subverts the genre conventions of a ‘passing’ novel, since it doesn’t represent passing as a deliberate, willful act by a coherent, fixed subject. As Williams puts it, the ‘invocation of passing at once underscores the ‘politics of location’ and challenges the myth that a subject’s position can be unambiguously mapped’ (2021: 187).¹² As her use of the disorienting and swerving mode of exquisite corpse collage demonstrates, Oyeyemi’s writing makes a formal, metafictional argument for her own epiphenomenal Blackness, by rendering her authorial self (or selves) multiple, and its (their) precise relation to contemporary racial politics unmappable.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.