Childhoods of the New Diaspora in The Opposite House

282 historical and mythical genealogy of this Afro-Cuban family. As a family that has a complex diasporic history, multiple myths inform their sense of identity. The multiple myths reflect the melting pot constitution of this family. Its members speak several European languages, apart from originating and having lived in various countries and continents. The Cuban mestizo constitution of this family also informs the syncretism in the form of religious worship that they identify with. Oyeyemi portrays the practice of Santeria as a point of interaction for the various histories, myths, legends and genealogies that constitute this family. The notion of house as the title suggests has symbolic importance because of its implication of a constitution of familial genealogy. It may well reflect the homing desire that underscores diasporic consciousness and subjectivity. We can also seethe house as a leitmotif which is informed by the spatio-temporal mobility of childhood as this study has tried to trace. The house can be traced in childhoods marked attention to it (as explored in chapter 3), as a topography and as a space-time chronotope
– within the contexts of a diasporic consciousness and subjectivity. The house is a metaphor and metonym in which diasporic anxieties about place, space, time and belonging are played out. It stands out in contrast to Gilroy‟s (1993) idea of the ship in his concept of the black Atlantic. While the ship, according to Gilroy is metaphoric of his idea of “routedness,” the house in this case stands for the other polemic –
“rootedness.” The house is portrayed as also a micro-cultural and micro-political unit that connects mobile histories, cultures and therefore identities. As a micro-cultural unit, it is the site for micro-relationships that make visible familial genealogies – related to what this study examines in chapter four. These are the micro-relationships that define the text of childhood, in relation to family fiction, but are also informed by the anxieties of diasporic mobility and homing desires The house is a chronotope, where the symbolic elements of space, place and time converge, through micro-cultural and micro-political activities in it – familial genealogies, rituals, customs, beliefs and practices that connect this familial space to collective histories and identities in continuity or discontinuity with an external socio-cultural, economic and political framework. The notion of the house in The Opposite House is, however, caught in the contrast between mobility and rootedness. Again Oyeyemi juxtaposes reality and magic, through

283 the portrayal of an Afro-Cuban family living in London and another mythic family, in which an Afro-Cuban syncretic pantheon of gods live – in the somewhere house that has entrances from multiple continents. The notion of physical chronotopes of space and time are contrasted with those of a mythical space and time. Oyeyemi develops a dual narrative structure, with parallel chronotopes etched in reality, myth and magic related to the experiences of Maja‟s family in Habana and London, but also their mythical roots somewhere in Lagos Nigeria. Moreover, the notion of identity in The Opposite House is portrayed through the idea of travel. The identities of Maja‟s family are assembled in London through a literal journey. Maja, the protagonist moves to London from Cuba at the age of five, mirroring Oyeyemi‟s own migration to London at about the same age.
Maja‟s parents Papi and Chabella are academics who have not only lived in Cuba, but have also lived and taught in Germany and France, Maja‟s boyfriend Aaron is Jewish and was born and raised in Ghana. Assembled here are therefore, in the literal sense, travelled and in the sense of identity, travelling. This admixture of identities reflects a mestizo texture of identity formation, brought together through fragments of different experiences that cut across three continents. It is reflected in the several languages spoken in this household – English, German, Spanish, French, Yoruba and Ewe. The transnational texture of culture is also reflected in the syncretism of Santeria religious practice. Santeria is symbolic of along transnational history that dates back to religious Atlantic slave trade activities in the seventeenth, eighteenth up to late nineteenth centuries.
Santeria‟s historical development in Cuba brings together this family to Cuba as a place where their histories converge. Especially practiced by Maja‟s mother, it foregrounds a maternal genealogy in The Opposite House that draws spatio-temporal connections of the family to sugar plantation and slave history in Cuba (9). Santeria also has a strong connection to Yoruba religious practices that were syncretised with Catholic ones, drawn from the cartographies of slave history and activities in the black Atlantic Santeria can therefore can be what Gilroy (1993:3) has described as bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that [Gilroy has heuristically called the black Atlantic world Gilroy‟s examination of England‟s black urbanscape

284 and its expressive cultures is informed by WEB Du Bois‟ (1903) notion of a double consciousness. This consciousness according to Gilroy underpins black cultural forms in the diaspora, what he calls counterculture to modernity‟s” claims of enlightenment – reason, civilisation, morality and legality. Gilroy‟s methodological approach to these black cultures is influenced by his theoretical conception of the black Atlantic as apolitical and cultural formation (1993:19), with a transcendental vision that ruptures ethnic, national and continental formations because of the transnational nature of slave history. This particular dynamic of black Atlantic cultures transnational outlook is especially significant in examining the sociopolitical history of Santeria in Cuba, in relation to the changing attitudes to national culture and politics – part of the historical contexts that inform the migration of Maja‟s family to London.

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