“Recordless Company”: Precarious Postmemory in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl

Abstract

E. Kim Stone argues that Oyeyemi, like many third-generation novelists of the Nigerian diaspora, reimagines the coming-of-age tale as a narrative of transnational subject formation. When the novel opens, Jessamy Harrison, an 8-year-old with an English father and a Nigerian mother, despondently hides in cupboards and underneath beds in her London home, preferring to spend her time reading and “amending” classic Anglo-American girls’ texts—Little Women, A Little Princess—rather than interacting with girls her own age. Her low spirits rise on a trip to Nigeria, where Jess befriends Titiola, a girl whom only Jess can see. Like Jess’s parents who bring her to a psychiatrist back in London, Western readers of The Icarus Girl would find it easy to interpret Titiola as an imaginary playmate produced from Jess’s mental instability. However, Oyeyemi quickly dismisses psychiatric discourse as too limiting to account for Jess’s “madness.” This essay argues that the novelist purposefully produces an intertextual entanglement of Yoruba vernacular paradigms with British Gothic aesthetics to implicate both cultures in the African slave trade. Just as Jess has “amended” the classic literary narratives of Western girlhood, she must disentangle Titiola’s unfamiliar aspects from this forgotten history of slavery and then interrogate the unsung potency of this re-memory in order to reconcile this fraught past with her burgeoning diasporic identity.