Abstract
Several novels of the Nigerian diaspora revolve around the experiences of children who have to negotiate their hybrid identities that result from both British and Nigerian cultural influences, hybrid identities that are experienced as negative and accompanied by psychological problems. Discussing Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), this chapter charts the young protagonist’s attempts to come to terms with the various racial and continental influences that she is exposed to. The novel itself is an example of hybrid literature, elaborately layered and informed by a mixture of English and Nigerian cultural references and employing different discourses, including Western psychology, Yoruba folk traditions, and postcolonial ghost stories.
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Notes
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A passage in 26a offers a description, which also aptly captures what happens at this stage in The Icarus Girl: “Sometimes people get lonely and sometimes they get scared of things. And to help them, they think of something that will make them feel better, like a special person, and this special person, […] if they think about it for a very long time, starts to be real. If you imagine it hard enough, it becomes a real thing. Do you understand?” (Evans 2006, 134).
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Twins as important characters appear in Evans’s 26a, Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Habila’s Measuring Time (2007). Cooper argues that one of the twins’ functions in this literature is to serve as “a coded language for the writers’ own splitting, doubling and questing for their identities in London or Alberta, as well as for their connection with Africa” (Cooper 2008, 52).
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Feldner, M. (2019). Second-Generation Nigerians in England: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and the Negative Experience of Hybridity. In: Narrating the New African Diaspora. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05743-5_8
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