About Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. The Icarus Girl was written while Oyeyemi was studying for her A-levels and she is also the author of two plays, Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese. She is currently a student of Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and is working on her second novel about Cuban mythology. The title ‘Icarus’ is taken from a Greek mythology and it means ‘protector’ .
Plot Summary
The Icarus Girl is a story of overwhelming, corrosive loneliness. Jessamy Harrison lives in London, the only child of a Yoruba mother and an English father. As the novel opens, this intellectually precocious, angry, solitary eight-year-old has shut herself into a cupboard because only in such confined spaces does she feel in control. Jess’s alienation springs from everyday realities. She has been moved up a year in school because of her academic gifts. Her rages and screaming fits distance her further from her classmates. She is a stranger to her mother’s family and language. On a deeper level, Jess is haunted by other identities which threaten to take over and destroy her own. The strongest of these takes the form of a little girl, Titiola, whom Jess encounters when she first visits Nigeria. Jess names the girl TillyTilly, and she appears to be the typical imaginary best friend of an isolated child. But TillyTilly is far more powerful than this. It emerges that Jess is not an only child, but a surviving twin. It also becomes clear that this novel is as much metaphysical as it is realistic.
The Icarus Girl takes its premise from the Yoruba belief that twins inhabit three separate worlds: the Bush, a ‘wilderness for the mind’ (page 298), the normal world and the spirit world. Oyeyemi has said that TillyTilly is from the Bush, ‘a world that doesn’t have the same structure as our world’. Through Jess’s loss of her twin and her isolation at school, Oyeyemi explores themes of loneliness, alienation and the difficulties - particularly for a young child - of being very obviously different. Jess’s mixed race, her precocity and her tantrums set her apart from her schoolmates, marking her out and only serving to intensify the loneliness she already feels. Helen Oyeyemi has drawn on her own experience in exploring this emotional terrain. She describes herself as ‘a real mess at school’, isolated from her classmates and regarded as ‘the weird girl’. At the age of fifteen she took an overdose and while recovering took refuge in reading: she still proclaims herself to be ‘more of a reader than a writer’. That summer, another family visit to Nigeria set the seal on her recovery although she doesn’t feel wholly Nigerian: ‘I’mjust British’ she says.
Twins bring blessings in Yoruba culture, but may also bring misfortune. If one twin dies at birth, the surviving twin is thought to have lost half her soul. A sacred image of the dead twin, an ere ibeji, must be carved and then tended like a living child; in its turn the ere ibeji protects the family. Otherwise, disaster follows in the form of sickness, death and barrenness. This fate overtakes Jessamy Harrison’s family. Helen Oyeyemi describes Jess’s psychic torment and near disintegration. Her father is sucked dry by depression, her teacher disappears on sick leave, and Jess’s one good friend is almost killed during a sleepover from hell. Oyeyemi’s writing is powerful if uneven. But at its best this is a chilling story about the anguish of separation from all that should be most familiar and dear. In the end, it is only in Nigeria, within the traditional family compound, that wounds can begin to heal.
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