Limitless vistas of fantasy Reading the Magic and Reality of

246 experiences of migration and heritage of multiple histories and genealogies inherent in myths and legends that inform the identity politics of diasporic selfhood. The portrayal of these childhoods therefore takes on, using the words of Jacque Ranciere
(2006) a politics of aesthetics in which representation becomes grounds for portraying a plethora of narratives, worlds, influences and points of view that politicise the way we have come to know regimes of representation. Terrestrial and celestial worlds intermingle reality and myth coexist in ways that problematise notions of linear space and time. The abiku childhood of Jess for instance is complicated by its crossing of continental borders and by its mixed race ontology. Indeed, how can the abiku motif that has been associated with an African literary historiography and a Yoruba worldview, and that has been normatively read in the context of a Nigerian spatio-temporality, be read in a newer cross-border, cross-race context Do the critical tools of magical realism, used in reading this motif (Cooper, 1998; Gaylard, 2005), suffice in a case that is complicated by race and a transcontinental context Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl poses some challenges to these tools of critical analysis. The predominant critique of magical realism from both Cooper (1998) and Gaylard
(2005), points to the sociopolitical and economic conditions that attend to Africa as a continent with a history of colonialism, as well as with a particularly fragmented and chaotic political climate. Artistic forms therefore take on dimensions that reflect on this fragmented and chaotic sociopolitical and economic environment. The question is how do you capture the fragmentation, chaos and anarchy through artistic forms Magical realism, for these critics, allows for the portrayal of diverse and alternative realities. Multiple influences, traditions and histories complicate the space and time chronotopes of artistic representation and so magical realism allows for what Cooper calls a disrespect of boundaries (1998:39), of space and time. Furthermore, Cooper asks, is it a mode, genre, style or politics (12) This question collapses the argument on form and content, allowing it (magical realism) to thrive on transition, on the process of change, borders and ambiguity (Cooper, 1998:15). Indeed, mobile childhoods, as in the case of flights of imagination and senses of identity as represented in Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl, invite,

247 but are not limited to, representational strategies like magical realism. The notion of a racialised abiku would seem to complicate magical realism as a prism of analysis that has been predicated on a specific Yoruba worldview. In fact, in the case of The Icarus Girl, a Yoruba worldview is one of many perspectives in contention for the protagonist Jess. In view of such competing worldviews, Harry Garuba (2003) offers an interesting analytical paradigm, which he refers to as animist materialism predicated on his idea that Magical elements of thought in an African social, cultural, economic and political milieu assimilate new developments in science, technology, and the organization of the world within a basically magical worldview) In this way, Garuba (2003) proffers, the world is continuously “re-enchanted.” If we consider Garuba‟s analytical paradigm, in the light of, for instance Jess‟s competing frameworks of identity – an abiku worldview contesting a scientific psychoanalytical one
– then we might want to make the assertion, as he does, that A recurrent theme in accounts of the meeting between traditional ways of life and modernity is the clash of cultures and the agony of the manor woman caught in the throes of opposing conceptions of the world and of social life. In these narratives a binary structure is usually erected, and within this world the agonistic struggle of the protagonist is drawn. The animistic trajectory of accommodation sketched here appears to belie the rigid binarisms of this narrative and to undermine the agonistic relationship often drawn by an elite in search of sites of agency and identity. What maybe much closer to reality is that animist logic subverts this binarism and destabilizes the hierarchy of science over magic and the secularist narrative of modernity by reabsorbing historical time into the matrices of myth and magic. (270)

248 Hence, Garuba seeks to problematise the hierarchies of worldviews, albeit through how modernity is assimilated in animist worldviews via the “re-enchantment of the world by magic. Indeed, the competing worldviews of the abiku child have always been in contention with the scientific notions of child mortality rate in Nigeria. However, while
Garuba‟s analytical paradigm seems to encompass what he calls a multiplicity of representational practices (2003:272) and therefore a larger scale of representative practices, the context of Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl still foregrounds the challenge of a racialised and migrant myth that manifests itself in ways that point to simultaneously competing interpretations. In other words, what happens when the myth of an abiku child
– in its (sur)reality – manifests itself in grounds of racial contestation and therefore of simultaneous interpretative contexts How can this animist realism of the abiku child be read in a diasporic and cross-cultural context The abiku child who traverses multiple worlds is a topos of representation, as well as an image and figure who embodies memories, historical and mythical landscapes in the imaginative subjectivities of the novel. The abiku becomes, in the words of Cooper, a fictional device of the supernatural, taken from any source that the writer chooses, syncretized with a developed realistic, historical perspective (1998:16). The Icarus Girl uses the motif of a transposed abiku as an entry into a supernatural and spiritual world which connects together Jess‟s world in London, to the other in Lagos Nigeria, pitting these places as zones of continuity and simultaneously as gulfs of difference in her multiple worlds. However, the magic of the abiku, to connect seemingly disparate and multiple worlds, allows fora semblance of coherence in Jess‟s life, as well as a nodal point from which one can draw trajectories on the path of Jess‟s schizophrenic and nervous subjectivity. Indeed,
Gaylard (2005) makes the observation that Magic is enabled by the belief in interconnection and correspondences that all things are in relation, association, contiguity, contagion, correspondence, and proximity with each other, and hence influence maybe extended from one to the other. (44)

249 Magic, as Gaylard proffers, allows for the defamiliarisation of realist perspectives. In fact, defamiliarisation links the new to the old, and therefore produces a synthesis of newness. In this way, old gods are brought into the new worlds of London, as we will see with the case of Maja‟s family in Oyeyemi‟s The Opposite House. Moreover, abiku childhood is a project of imagination. It engages with imaginative subjectivities that range from as collective planes as those of nations and cultures in the allegorical representations in Ben Okri and Cheney-Cocker‟s works, to those as micro- subjectivities as individuals in Oyeyemi‟s The Icarus Girl. Potentially, abiku childhoods adoption of postmodern attitudes is a politics of resistance portrayed in its suspicion of adultist grand narratives as well as of what Gaylard refers to as linearity, closure, which leads to indeterminacy and decentering and emphasis upon the apparently marginal, irrelevant and incommensurable” (2005:35). Gaylard‟s observations pickup on Coopers
(1998) views about the ways in which magical realism makes use of postmodern devices and this is perhaps where the two critics also realise the analytical shortcomings of magical realism. Gaylard locates the use of these devices, at the juncture of postcolonial experience and postmodern attitudes and consciousnesses. However, Gaylard, points out that “postcolonialism inflects postmodernism with a sense of urgency and an emphasis upon the precise geopolitical location of any given entity or phenomenon (This statement allows us to acknowledge the context-specificity of these devices, to be able to locate them in discursive formations that underlie their usage and open ways in which to assess authorial specificities, for instance, as part of a context that defines the usage of these devices.
159
We are therefore, from the start, made aware of the speaking positions of authors, and of the nomadic identities that underlie not only the intellectual lives of theorists and critics who espouse the postcolonial and the postmodern (Cooper,
1998:12-13), but also the fiction writers like Oyeyemi, who are conscious of their own
158
Gaylard‟s (2005) assertions can however be problematically construed to imply that the postcolonial provides the experience, while the postmodern provides the “aesthetics”.
159
Indeed, Linda Hutcheon (1988) also explains that a postmodern poetics, unlike a modernist one, informs discourse with the notion of context so that context provides the “pedagogies” like that of Bhabha‟s
(1994) “historicism” which is echoed in Brian McHale‟s (1987) notion of ontology a notion he examines in relation to modernism‟s epistemology The idea of a context for these critics highlighted specific ways of approach and analysis, something which they ascribe to postmodernism.

250 subjectivities, duplicities and complicities as diasporic subjects who can trace their genealogies and multiple histories indifferent continents in their craft. This consciousness and awareness underlies the notion of “self-reflexivity” that ironically puts in doubt diasporic subjects sense of “rootedness.” Linda Hutcheon (1988) and Gaylard argue that “self-reflexivity” is important in destabilising the positions of narrative authority and authorial voices in the text. In other words, the imaginatively subjective landscape of The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House can be found in the anxiety of narrative and authorial voices, if we for instance, keep in mind Oyeyemi‟s position as a diasporic subject. Therefore, diasporicity becomes a conceptual context that informs the discursive formations of Oyeyemi‟s works. As this chapter began by pointing out, the notion of the diasporic perspective, in relation to the other chapters is a shifting dynamic, in which in
Oyeyemi‟s works it takes on an experiential and embodied subjectivity as compared to just the authorial diasporic consciousness in the works discussed in previous chapters. Indeed, Oyeyemi who is part of anew diaspora is distinguished by the new temporal classifications of the offspring of first generation post-independent African immigrants to Europe and America, whose parents are their direct genealogical link to Africa. As a defining and conceptual dynamic, diasporic subjectivity is differentiated by aspects of time and space, by histories of migration and exile, whether self-imposed, involuntary, voluntary, economic, political or social. The products are ascribed variously as immigrants, migrants, exiles or refugees. These varieties of migration diverge at the point of departure from putative homelands, but converge at the shared history of mobility, as well as the notion of nostalgia or a homing desire (Brah, 1996:180). The notion of diaspora is moreover underlined by the processual element of mobility/movement, something outlined by Gilroy‟s (1993) use of the ship as a chronotope in his idea of the black Atlantic The desire for home and the homesickness of fiction (George, 1995), the anthropocentricity of the notion of diaspora (Braziel & Mannur, as well as the shifting cartographies of diaspora (Brah, 1996) are all underlined by the mobility of See Braziel, J E and Mannur A (2003) Nation, Migration, Globalization Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies p. 1-23.

251 narratives, histories, myths, legends and therefore diverge and converge at points of differentiation and disjuncture. This methodological outlook of the notion of diaspora is well outlined by Avtar Brah: Multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and relived, produced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory. It is within this confluence of narrativity that „diasporic community is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. (183) The importance of narrative is underscored in the statements above, pointing to an inexorable search for coherence, for linkages of memories, stories from macro and micro ethnoscapes of the diasporic community. Ina sense, as a “diasporic community imagination is essential in its process of identification. Through the narrative process, whether in divergence or convergence, this “diasporic community finds ways of identification in an already globalised cultural terrain. In fact, as a community the diaspora is de-territorialised, making use of imagination as a methodology for creating networks of identification that Appadurai refers to as “diasporic public spheres
(1995:22). For Appadurai, these spheres are aided by forms of mass media that breakthrough national and continental boundaries, making diasporas culturally in connection with their homelands. The project of imagination underlies how diaspora can be conceptualised. Indeed, the realities of diasporic subjectivities are mediated by imagination. In this way, Oyeyemi‟s life as a child was mediated by the project of imagination. Having moved into Lewisham London, enrolled in anew school and facing a different culture and neighbourhood, her imagination mediates her subjectivity towards these new circumstances. Her characters in

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