English Academy Review

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Diaspora, gender and identity:Twinning in three

diasporic novels

Brenda Cooper

To cite this article: Brenda Cooper (2008) Diaspora, gender and identity:Twinning in three
diasporic novels, English Academy Review, 25:1, 51-65, DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099482

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 Diaspora, gender and identity:Twinning in three
diasporic novels

Brenda Cooper
Department of English
University of Cape Town
South Africa
Brenda.Cooper@uct.ac.za

The article focuses on young women writers, who have grown up in Europe or North
America, one or both of whose parents are African. These parents grew up in Africa and
migrated. The cultural consequences of this background are explored. These writers, as
Black and female, occupy an ambiguous space of contested citizenship because of what
they inherit from Africa and because they wear the signs of their parents’ backgrounds on
their black bodies. But they occupy a profoundly different territory from their parents. It
is this territory, both a literal place and a space of the performance of multiple imaginings
that this article attempts to map out. In order to do so, it examines three writers, who play
with form, language and identity through the construction of fictional twins: Diana Evans’s
26a (2005), Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) and Helen Oyeyemi’s
The Icarus Girl (2005). The use of twins becomes 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. This inspiration from African oral myths in general, and those of
twins in particular, gives rise to a version of gendered magical realism.
Keywords:  Diaspora; gender; identity; magical realism; twins in fiction

This article focuses on writers, who have grown up in Europe or North America, one or
both of whose parents are African. These parents grew up in Africa and migrated. The
cultural consequences of this background are examined. This new generation of writers
is now more culturally British or American, does not speak an African indigenous
language and is ignorant of first hand experience of Africa. However, these writers,
as Black and female, occupy an ambiguous space of contested citizenship because
of what they inherit from Africa and because they wear the signs of their parents’
backgrounds on their black bodies. But they occupy a profoundly different territory
from their parents. It is this territory, both a literal place and a space of the performance

English Academy Review 25 (1) 2008

ISSN: Print 1013-1752/Online 1753-5360
© The English Academy of Southern Africa pp 51–65
DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099482
52 Brenda Cooper

of multiple imaginings that this article attempts to map out. In order to do so, I look at
three writers, who play with form, language and identity through the construction of
fictional twins. Twins are central to Diana Evans’s 26a, Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life
of Samuel Tyne and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. Evans’s mother is Nigerian and
her father British and she grew up in London; Edugyan’s parents are Ghanaian and she
grew up in Canada; Oyeyemi’s Nigerian parents moved to London when she was four
and where she has remained.
There is no clarity as to how to classify these writers – British? Canadian? Black?
Simply Writers? There is a hesitation, a stutter, at the heart, at the start, where
classification is incoherent and impossible. However, what characterizes all of them is
that they are playing with the perplexities of juggling two continents; they struggle with
the differences in power between these continents and in the overriding hegemony of the
English language. They simultaneously assert and resist their ‘inauthentic citizenship’
(Joseph 1999, 2) in London or Alberta, and excavate African stories and beliefs, in
order to do so, and also to stake a claim to Africa as part of their heritage. However,
their knowledge of Africa is limited. As Pilar Cudar-Domínguez, puts it, ‘the material
and cultural practices of contemporary West Africa remain alien to them’ (2005, 311).
Or, in the evocative words of Oyedeji: ‘For many of a Black generation born in Britain,
a knowledge of Africa remains no more than facing The Unexamined River. A rippling
river across which you can see Africans on the other side’ (2005, 355).
Their knowledge of Africa may be partial and imaginary, yet we see the uncanny and
recurrent use of African myths surrounding twins in the three novels under discussion.
The use of twins becomes 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. This inspiration from African oral myths in general, and those of twins in
particular, gives rise to a version of gendered magical realism. In my earlier work on
magical realism, I pointed out that the supernatural could be derived from any source, but
that African oral traditions, and the world views they emerge from, played a particularly
strong and important role as the inspirational source for deriving the magical, in West
African writers, like Ben Okri, Kojo Laing or Syl Cheney-Coker (Cooper 1998, 16).
What is emphasised in that earlier study is that magical realism tantalisingly balances
upon the tension created by the simultaneous and strategic commitment to that pre-
colonial world view and the ironic distance from it, a distance, which is the natural
consequence of writers, who are Western educated world travellers.
This tension is even greater here because these women are further away from those
oral traditions. These twin novels are predicated on a degree of acceptance of African
beliefs in the special powers of twins, which were widespread through parts of West
Africa.1 Their belief in the magic is crucial and at the same time, they are ambivalent
about using such African myths, given their simultaneous assertion of their right to
‘authentic’ British citizenship. As Kwame Dawes puts it, ‘if they seek ‘mythic’ answers
or frames to the enigma of their existence in Britain that emerge from outside Britain, this
‘will be a denial of their Britishness’ (2005, 269). However, they do feel the urgency ‘to
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 53

construct new myths for the British Black world’ (270) and do ‘recognize in themselves
a connection to something else’ (280).
The search for this connection to Africa, and also to Europe, may take these writers
into a belief in the imagined, supernatural world of their parents, but it also challenges
them to anchor this floating imaginary across the river in the everyday world of material
reality. Detail about food and dress and most especially about hair, which is at the
cutting edge between the material and the figurative, abounds as these women look in
the mirror at their hair, which is metonymic of their bodies, their identities and their
differences. The visceral texture of African hair stands for the racism that unites black
people’s experience outside of Africa. According to Kobena Mercer, ‘within racism’s
bipolar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically devalued
as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin’ (1994, 101). Mercer, with
a degree of perplexed exasperation, questions ‘why so much time, money, energy and
worry [are] spent shaping our hair’ (100) It is undoubtedly the case, however, that hair
is linked to identity in a profound way most especially for Africans or those of African
descent living outside of Africa.
The material culture of food is also powerful in this writing and, like hair, performs a
coded language from which to read off questions of subjectivity and citizenship. Kadija
George Sesay distinguishes between migrant writers, who are postcolonial, and those
born in Britain, according to this difference in their knowledge base. Migrant writers
‘employ luxuriant imagery and focus on the color and objects from their home countries
or islands – using tropical foods and flora, in particular’ (2004, 105). She suggests that
by contrast Black British writers ‘usually use only images and food references directly
connected to England’ (105). I would disagree with her on the last point, in that these
writers constantly refer to African food, but as a lack, an ignorance, a tension, which
disturbs their everyday British reality.
The combined belief in magic and in the concrete materiality of the everyday is a
powerful narrative tool in all three novels. They provide poignant examples of Harry
Garuba’s concept of ‘animist materialism’ (2003, 268). Everyday objects are perceived
as ‘the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits’ (267). What we
have, then, is ‘the ‘locking’ of spirit within matter or the merger of the material and
the metaphorical, which animist logic entails’ (267, my emphasis). In the world of
fiction, with which we are dealing, it becomes a narrative device, ‘a representational
strategy that involves giving the abstract or metaphorical a material realization’ (284).
This narrative strategy becomes particularly potent in the hands of these writers, who
manipulate their daily domestic realities, such that they become invested in the spiritual
struggles to find a language, with which to combat some of their perceived exclusions
from power, knowledge and voice.
However, when this struggle drives them mad, the belief in the magical itself becomes
muted, given that explanations for weird behaviour and strange happenings that are
accounted for as dreams, drugs or insanity, are ‘scientific’ rather than supernatural.
There are mental disturbances, which range from the insanity of the twins in Edugyan’s
54 Brenda Cooper

fiction, to the suicidal depression of one of the twins in Evans’s, to a mentally disturbed
protagonist in Oyeyemi’s. This escape into madness links these writers to a different
tradition, a Western feminist one, where madness is the consequence of the silencing of
women. The madwoman in the attic, taken from the canonical Jane Eyre, has become
the apocryphal reverse image, popularised by Gilbert and Gubar in their major work of
that title.2 This tradition, then, uneasily coexists with the narrative belief in the magic of
powerful twin spirits. A close look at the novels should illustrate this complex, gendered
and muted magical realism of these three young writers of the new Diaspora.

A cacophony of beliefs and inheritances: The Icarus Girl

In The Icarus Girl (2005), the African story about twins merges with the absent presence
of the Greek myth of Icarus, which provides the title, and which leaves only a ghostly
imprint of its significance. In addition, there is an amalgam of myths, poems and stories,
of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, jostling with the Bible and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla
Kahn with its ‘ancestral voices’ echoing African spirits (50–51), along with the quest of
Sir Galahad for the Holy Grail and the Bible (51). The Epigraph by Emily Dickinson,
arising from yet another tradition, sets the tone of spectral reality:
Alone I cannot be –
For Hosts do visit me –
Recordless Company . . .

  Jessamy, the protagonist, is puzzled by fairy stories such as Sleeping Beauty; she
longs for the African Goddess of twins ‘to tell her some simple story that could show
her how to know the difference between leaving and being taken away, spell-caster
or spellbound’ (167). Those who recognise, and are familiar with, the fairy stories are
the ones that cast the spells; the others, the marginalised, like Jess, and perhaps like
Oyeyemi herself, become the spellbound, the ones who are acted upon, who sleep,
silently for a hundred years and who may only be brought to life by the kiss of a princely
white man. Her mother has told her African stories, but Jess, growing up in London,
among English school pupils, wishes she knew more of the ‘‘normal’’ stories ‘that her
mother omitted to tell her’, an omission, which ‘always made her seem stupid when the
other kids talked about them and she didn’t know them’ (167).
Jessamy is a troubled child of eight, who was born and bred in England. Unbeknown
to her, she was one of a twin, who had died during childbirth. Having been brought up
in England, with a British father, Daniel, and a sceptical Nigerian mother, Sarah, none
of the rituals and safeguards, relating to twins and specifically to the death of one twin,
had been observed. At the core of the novel’s magic is its genuine belief that this neglect
may account for much of Jessamy’s dislocation as she throws tantrums, does not fit in
at school, and eventually appears to be possessed and haunted by a twin of a kind, a
demonic character with an echoing name, TillyTilly.
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 55

The Icarus Girl begins with a visit to Nigeria to see Jess’s grandfather and the rest
of her mother’s family. TillyTilly materialises under strange circumstances in Nigeria
and the novel is, in fact, replete with an amalgam of mysterious characters, all linked
to twins – TillyTilly, Jess’s dead twin, Fern, the goddess of twins, who is a woman
with long arms, who metamorphoses from a charcoal drawing, to a dream, to a wooden
statue. The boundaries between them may be fluid, but they merge into one another only
painfully and confusingly: ‘TillyTilly, JessJess, FernFern’ which could be ‘JessFern? Or
FernJess?’ (237). Potentially Jess might fall between the gaps given that the performance
of multiple identities is hazardous and may result in the loss of sanity altogether or in
suicide: ‘It happened in the gap between the seconds. Realising they were about to
collide, Jess . . . tried to step aside’ (189–190, my emphasis). Jess herself understands
that her difficulty is being both English and Nigerian and later refers to herself as a
‘half-black’ person (240). She has a sense that if she could decide which one to be,
‘maybe she would be able to get rid of TillyTilly’ (243), who had become demanding
and demonic.
In other words, this difficulty of choice is profoundly linked to language and culture
in these writers, these ‘half-black’ persons, like Oyeyemi characterizes Jess to be, and
presumably herself as well, albeit that her parents are both Nigerian. The mysterious
goddess of twins speaks in a non-language – she ‘wasn’t speaking in English, and
it wasn’t Yoruba either’ (98, her italics). This is the yawning abyss, being between
languages and cultures, which could have disastrous results. Jess’s grandfather explains
to her that she had not been told of the death of her twin because the profoundly African
meanings attached to twins meant that ‘there is no way to say these things directly in
English’ (282). When Jess, on her second visit to Lagos, can suddenly, magically, speak
Yoruba, this is Oyeyemi’s wish fulfilment: ‘[Jess] took a deep breath. ‘Ko si nkan-
nkan,’ she replied at length, capturing the accent and even the lift in tone perfectly’
(290). Alongside this magical, unaccounted for, proficiency in an indigenous language,
there are also ‘scientific’ explanations proffered by the novel to account for some of the
strange goings on, creating tension with its magical realism. Jess is often ill and running
a fever and much of her experience of the supernatural could be ascribed to her delirium
(130), or to her mental state (261).
She is the Icarus Girl of the title only in the sense that she may be doomed to
plummet, given the fragility of her own wings, forged in the confusion of European and
African legends. With TillyTilly, she begins ‘to dip and plummet’, their flying ending
in smashing against the ground’ (139); they crash and fall ‘through the earth as if it
was air!’ (140); Jess longs to fly instead of falling downwards through the earth (148).
Later, in the inversion nonsense mode of Alice in Wonderland, she dreams that she ‘was
sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky’ (200, her italics).
The ending of the novel is, however, ambiguous in this regard and I will return to
it later. Perhaps the absent presence of Icarus is buttressed by the wings of the flying
bird in the African folktale that the goddess of twins tells Jess, enabling her flight to be
56 Brenda Cooper

successful. The goddess tells her about ‘a boy and a magic bird that spread its wings
over the land and made everything green and good . . . The words were making her feel
fresher, coating her in dew’ (156). It is the words of the story, rather than the sense of
flight, that are healing. Later rain falls from the wings of the bird, ending the drought
(157). Perhaps this bird has given Icarus genuine wings, enabling Jess to metamorphose
into a story of a Greek boy with the wings of an African bird? As I will substantiate later,
this is probably not the case.
In its mix of myths, belief structures and genres, Oyeyemi’s novel exemplifies the
multiple worlds to which its author has been exposed. It is attempting to discover a
mechanism by which she, through her young, confused protagonist, might be radically
and alternatively re-fashioned through knowledges that have been repressed and lan-
guages that have been marginalised in the Western archive. We can also see the symbio-
sis between the literal and the figurative, the material and the spiritual, the supernatural
and the ‘scientific’ in Diana Evans’s 26a.

The magical and the material: 26a

Ida, the mother of the twins depicted in 26a (2005), comes from the Nigerian village
of Aruwa, from which she ran away as a young woman in order to avoid an arranged
marriage. Her father, Baba, who is fat and avaricious, had ‘sold’ his older daughter
for a radio and wished to sell Ida for ‘two goats. Four hundred naira. And a portable
television from England’ (29). We see how the magical is matter-of-factly part of the
fabric of daily material realities of life in Aruwa. On her way out of the village, Ida
passes ‘the singing tree’, which ‘was where the spirits lived and wisdom was woven,
where children climbed branches in pursuit of magic’ and where Ida herself had heard
whispers and voices (26).
Ida runs away to Lagos, where she meets the Englishman, Aubrey, who had been
transferred there from the financial company for which he worked in England. She
agrees to marry him and returns with him to England. She takes with her the spirit of
an old woman, housed in a carving. This will sustain her in London, where she loses
her language and her name. When she marries Aubrey, the priest could not say her
name – ‘‘Tokhokho’’, a name, which ‘was about to be lost, sent drifting out to sea on
a raft made of yesterday’ (20). Later, when Ida wants to teach her children her mother
tongue, Edo, Audrey protests – ‘”We’re in England now,” he said. “The girls don’t need
Nigerian here”’(97). However, in their house, Ida ‘put up an ebony carving of an old
spirit woman with horns’, which she positions, crucially, ‘opposite the mirror in the
hallway, so that you could see it if you saw yourself’ (37–38). This primal image of the
women searching for her identity by looking in mirrors is linked here to Ida’s ability to
see the spirit woman, who has migrated with them, along with the stories and beliefs of
Africa. Ida says this spirit ‘‘‘will give us wisdom . . . and wise children’’’ (38). This spirit
woman in Evans’s novel coexists with a concrete and material world, which substitutes
for the language that Ida had left behind.
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 57

Later, when the twins Bessi and Georgia are born in the house at 26 Waifer Avenue,
their origins are explained in terms of a mixture of myths – African and ‘a personal
creation myth’ (Mishan, first page), including an intertextual reference to the hungry road
of their previous lives and of Ben Okri’s novel (1992). They were little furry animals in
their previous incarnation, which explains their later deep affinity to their pet hamster,
and which contests the boundaries between the human and the animal, the spirit and
the flesh. The little furry creatures reach a big road – ‘one of those huge open spaces of
catastrophe where so many had perished’ (3) – echoing the myth of the hungry monster
of the famished road. They do indeed become road fodder and a recurrent image is of
‘two furry creatures with petrified eyes staring into the oncoming headlights, into the
doubled icy sun, into possibility’ (3). Their death is also their re-birth, the possibility
heralded by newness. The blood of the kill, which ‘seeped into the road’ metamorphoses
into the ‘warmth, softness, wet’ of birth – ‘then a violent push and they landed freezing
cold in surgical electric white’ (4). The memory of the death as birth ‘stayed with them’
and ‘helped explain things. It reminded them of who they were’ (3).
While 26a traces the degeneration into depression and ultimately suicide of one of
the twins, death is understood in terms of their multiple lives, as African and English,
as human and animal and as part of the cycle of regeneration, which is comforting. The
subjectivities of Evans’s twins are forged through these worlds and stories, from the
very start. There are African worldviews and very concrete English spaces – perhaps
the furry animals were killed on ‘the M1 from Staples Corner to Watford’ (3). Later
they think it was ‘the North Circular that raged across the bottom of their street’ (4).
Later still, when Bessi remembers ‘all that time and space ago, two furry creatures
with petrified eyes, staring into the headlights, the engine surging, the lights threatening
blindness’ (162), she suggests to Georgia that they were not made for this world, which
Georgia totally endorses, with overtones that Georgia is abiku, a spirit child.
The whole family returns to Nigeria when Aubrey is transferred there by his finance
company. They go on a visit to the village where Ida grew up and Baba, her father, tells
the children the story of the myth surrounding twins. Reminiscent of the magic tree full
of spirits mingling with the lust for sewing machines and radios that provided the setting
of her childhood, this story telling punctuates the unpacking of all the presents Ida has
brought with her. These are precious gifts of everyday items, which are treasures in the
village; they are the critical material objects riveting onlookers and providing tangible
reality of the returnee’s success and status in the world. Ida had been preparing for this
for weeks before they left London. Every day, ‘Ida came home laden with plastic bags
splitting down from the weight’ (41). What she bought were ‘ordinary things that were
a part of life, like shampoo and bubble bath, soap bars and clothes and toys’ (41). She
bought ‘fabric and false hair and cocoa butter’ (41). Now ‘Ida unzipped her bags and
started taking out the shops – the shampoo and cocoa butter and toys and clothes’ (61).
And while she is doing this, Baba, who is talking about evil witches inhabiting the bush,
is sitting ‘up in his chair next to the sewing machine’ (62). The material entwines with
58 Brenda Cooper

the magical, which is not compromised. The ignorant Aubrey, whose view of the world
does not receive any authorial endorsement, may think to himself that these magical
‘superstitious’ beliefs being narrated by Baba are ‘a load of haddock’, but Ida, whose
judgement we respect more, knew that ‘all the stories Baba told were true’ (63).
Baba’s stories of twins as the progeny of evil witches who lived in the forest (62) may
be true, but they are put into perspective by the shampoo and sewing machine. The twins
may be terrified by Baba’s stories, but their daily lives are dictated by the mixture of
African and British material realities. Bessi, is sent into ‘torrential grief there in front of
the mirror’, when, back in London, her hair is badly cut by ‘the hairdresser in Neasdon’,
who was ‘not up to the challenge posed by afros’ (42). Perhaps in compensation, their
older sister, Bel, studies to be ‘a chemical-free hairdresser – ‘no relaxing, no bleach,
just plaits, afro treats, twists and henna’’ (96). They may not have been allowed to
learn their mother’s indigenous language, but the preoccupation with hair is a code
for their learning about being partly their mother’s African children. They spend long
hours together while Bel ‘plaited their hair into zigzag cornrows or pineapples shoots,
or sprayed the twins’ afros to make them shiny’ (96). Kemi, the twins’ younger sister, is
frustrated by her softer, mixed blood hair in 26a, which hampers her growing dreadlocks
and results in ‘uneven clumps of hair wired together by daily-applied beeswax’ (154).
26a abounds with everyday life and its material objects. Maya Jaggi refers to the
novel’s ‘minutiae of flapjacks and icepops, lip gloss and daisy hairclips’ (2005, 3).
Ida’s food is described as ‘special’. It is slightly reminiscent of African food, but very
different in its London incarnation. Everything had to be stewed – ‘she liked to be
able to pour her roast dinner, steak and kidney pie, rice and stew, sausage and chips,
with the beans, on to her plate’ (18). She also liked her food hot and so ‘she warmed
everything up, including salad, cake, bread, cheese, coleslaw, Safeway’s blackcurrent
cheesecakes . . . apples, biscuits and ice cream’ (18). This is funny and yet serious as Ida
battles to adjust to her loss of big and supposedly small cultural anchors from her past.
Perhaps Georgia’s descent into depression and terror has been catalysed by these losses.
Ultimately, part of mourning for her twin sister, after her suicide, Bessi wears her hair
‘plaited into cornrows with beads at the end the way Georgia liked to wear it’ (220). This
hairstyle marks Bessi’s growth into incorporating her double into a survival tactic as an
African living in London. We will return to the image of her mutation from two into one
later.
Some of the issues of dislocation in the Diaspora in relation to language, names and
twins recur in Edugyan’s novel, where the mood throughout is much more sombre. As
in The Icarus Girl, we need to read these twins in terms of how and why Edugyan is
digging into, and transforming, African myth surrounding twins, in order to pinpoint the
painfulness of attempting to become part of the language and coded meanings of a new
culture. Again we see magical realism as a device, malleable enough to duck and dive
across cultures and continents.
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 59

Twins with the evil eye: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) begins with a description of the house in Aster,
Canada, which the family has inherited from Samuel’s uncle, Jacob. It ‘had always had
a famished look to it’ (1). The reference to Okri [who derived the title of his novel from a
line in Soyinka’s play, The Road] is light, but clear, not least of all for its magical realist
associations, including oblique reference to unnatural spirit children, who inhabit both
Okri’s and Edugyan’s novels. The novel could have been called The Famished House
and key to its hunger is the confusion of its Ghanaian Canadian inhabitants such that
‘the entire house radiated not only another era, but another world’ (44). Although there
is a print of ‘Jesus and his black disciples robed in kente cloaks’ (120), this spiritual
hybridity is not being celebrated in the house. Maud hated the Gold Coast, but Samuel
dislikes Western food, so she has to keep up the cooking and when Gold Coast became
independent in 1957, ‘they ate a half-hearted feast of goat stew and fried plantain’ (8). It
is gloomy and unappetising fare, not least of all because they have no real home either in
Aster or Accra, given that they never learn to say Ghana because ‘having lived so long
away from it, in their minds, it was largely defined by its name’ (8).
The house, then, is hungry because it is neglected and everything is old and musty.
Most of all, the family which inhabits it lacks love, ritual and nurturing. Alongside its
other traditions, the house is gothic and the horrors that play out in it are an explosive
cocktail of African and Canadian/European histories gone rotten. Inside this house the
twins, Chloe and Yvette, degenerate into cold madness, their creepy eyes and secret
language excluding the world. Their parents, Samuel and Maud are finally forced
to recognise how sick their children are and they are sent to a facility for distressed
children.
These confused parents, who are desperate to assimilate in North America,
simultaneously were ‘embarrassed’ by their surviving superstitions about twins:
‘Twins. Both Samuel and Maud were embarrassed to admit that not even an ocean
could distance them from their superstitions. For twins were a kind of misfortune’ (21).
They may have retained these beliefs, but they have not fulfilled any of the African
rituals, which support and contain them. These include the special ceremonies linked
to twin births when their twins had been born, or of mourning the dead when Jacob had
died. These rituals might have provided a framework for the twins to come to grips with
their difference from the Canadian world around them. This echoes Oyeyemi’s point
about the maladjusted Jess, whose vulnerabilities may have originated from this ritual
omission. The twins are left as outsiders and pariahs in a vicious cycle as their oddness
excludes them from sociality and language, as black girls within a hostile, racist society.
The school counsellor remarks on the fact that their speech is ‘sluggish’ but supposes
that this could be that ‘we’re just not used to the accent’ (23). This rightly makes Maud
furious and she informs her that the twins were born in Canada. Maud feels that the
whole interview ‘was some subtly racist attempt to discredit her daughters’ (24). Maud
may be angry and defensive on their behalf, but has contributed to their eccentricities by
60 Brenda Cooper

her own cultural confusion, embodied metonymically in her bizarre hairstyle – ‘half of
her hair seared straight by a hot comb, the other half an Afro awaiting transformation’
(188). Her twins wear headscarves to cover up their African textured hair in the vain
attempt to look more like classmates, and Yvette ‘‘got tired of being black’’ (27) and
of being asked where she was really from and of ‘being talked to as though she didn’t
speak English’ (27).
What all of this means is that there is an amalgam of explanations for the twins’
madness, which relate both to the unnatural state of twin-ness, as in African beliefs, as
well their emotional neglect, at home, and ostracism, at school. Deprived of conventional
language, what is intriguing, and reminiscent of Jess’s magical ability to speak Yoruba,
Chloe is suddenly, magically, able to play Bach on the piano, like a professional. Here the
magical realism is palpable and linked to the belief that twins are special, have powers
beyond the ordinary and is particularly menacing in a context where these powers have
not been checked, domesticated and brought into sociality, by ritual and custom: ‘It was
a whimsical aria, played on the high register of the antique piano, a variation with so
many notes it was dizzying to listen to. The swift, piercing notes rose and fell over each
other’ (98–99). It is emphasised that ‘neither twin had taken a single piano lesson’ and
‘neither Maud nor Samuel knew how to play’ (99). The aria may be Bach, pinnacle of
European high culture, but the magic is African, ascribed to the supernatural power of
twins run rampant. The rituals that are lacking are, by implication, an alternative gateway
constituting identity, outside of the patriarchal, imperialist Law, which constitutes its
citizens in the image of white Gods and European myths. The parents’ lack of observing
African spiritualities is, therefore, catastrophic and the cause of the hunger of the house
and all its impoverished, starving inhabitants. Finally, belatedly, after the twins are
certified in an institution, and Maud has died, Samuel fulfils the rituals and perhaps
appeases the ancestors, using viscerally material objects as the props for the fulfilment
of the rite of passage – a vase, photographs, a dried rose and the offerings of ‘yams and
whisky to god, with prayers for the well-being of the dead’ (264).
This animist spirituality, turned demonic in Canada, pervades the novel. The alienated
catatonic twins occupy a room where objects are half alive, the table sagging ‘with
almost human exhaustion’ (15). The confused twins write a fake letter, never meant
to communicate to outsiders from their own bewitched circle, in which they describe
objects, which ‘seem to have a life of their own, they live and die like us, and have the
power of motion . . . Our belongings keep moving by themselves. There is object will, and
there is human will’ (174, her italics). This animism has no place in their daily realities
in Canada. In this vacuum of spiritual rites of passage, the twins copy each other ‘like a
delayed mirror, speaking pig Latin with the dexterity of a first language’ (22), like their
creepy, proficient piano playing. They begin to write their own crazy poetry, but they
pattern it ‘after Lord Byron’s’ (22). Their reading of the big books of European culture
turns into the language of nonsense as they chant the names metonymically, the only
structure of meaning being that the names all begin with the letter ‘D’ – ‘Chloe recited,
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 61

“Dostoevsky, Dickens, Disraeli”’ (61). Later, it will be the letter ‘C’ as their language
becomes gobbledygook.
The language the twins devise is a secret blend of tongues, which incorporates the
bric-a-brac of Western culture, master texts as well as African and invented sounds,
stories and images. It is Oyeyemi’s amalgam of Icarus and the Goddess of twins; it is
Evans’s ebony carving of the old spirit woman with horns, who stares out at a wall of
‘miniature watercolours of the English countryside’ (38). What are these new myths and
mutations that, along with twinning and doubling, are characteristic of this diasporic
space?

New myths and mutations: Conclusion

there was a current in those cold eyes, a judgment that saw through human bustle and cheer.
(Edugyan 2004, 204)

In Homi Bhabha’s essay on Frantz Fanon, entitled, ‘Interrogating Identity’, he refers to

‘a black woman, descendant of slaves, Meiling Jin, writing in the diaspora’ (1994, 45).
Her poem ends:
Only my eyes will remain to watch and to haunt,
and to turn your dreams
to chaos. (46)

  In Bhabha’s suggestive emphasis on ‘the empty eyes’ which ‘endlessly hold their
menacing gaze’ (46) of the diasporic black woman, he could be referring to Edugyan,
and her creation of her unnatural twins with their judgemental, cold eyes. They are not
the hybridised migrants of their parents’ generation, and in casting their evil eyes over
the inhospitable Canadian landscape, they embody the chaos of their homelessness.
Why twins? Bhabha turns to ‘the figure of the double’ (50), which splits identities and
‘frustrates’ ‘the fixity of sexual difference’ and of ‘racial stereotypes’ (53). And as always
with Bhabha, it is a strategy of writing and a subversive strategy of resistance – ‘a certain
strategy of duplicity or doubling’ (53) and ‘these partial eyes bear witness to a woman’s
writing of the postcolonial condition’ (53). Within this space, Bhabha privileges the
‘specifically feminist re-presentation of political subversion in this strategy of the evil
eye’ (56). It is the ‘secret art of revenge’ of the migrant woman (56). It is double in that
it compromises two spaces – ‘It is the uncanny space and time between’ (53). It is ‘a
space in-between the . . . Southern Hemisphere of slavery and the Northern Hemisphere
of diaspora and migration’ (55, emphasis in the original). It goes beyond migrancy in
that it is the space of the descendents of migrants. It is both a place and a condition of
complex negotiations of identities.
This is also Sukdev Sandhu’s point when he suggests that hybridity conventionally
characterises the earlier generation of migrants, who were not born in London. They
62 Brenda Cooper

occupy a state of ‘‘in-betweenness’’, of double cultures where ‘forever the twain

shall meet’ (2003, 142). By contrast, he poses a model of ‘self fashioning’ for second
generation writers, like Hanif Kureishi, and his characters, who happily perform many
identities, ‘can wear as many masks, create as many personae, explore as many new
avenues’ as they wish (142). Place, London in particular, is crucial in this ‘potential
for self-fashioning and the constant mutation and updating of the self’ (143). It is what
Bhabha calls a ‘rhetoric of . . . doubling’ which ‘displays the art of becoming through
a certain metonymic logic disclosed in the ‘evil eye’ (1994, 54, his emphasis). It is
metonymic as in the eye as a part for the whole body; it is a visceral, bodily response of
resistance through wiliness.
This mutation is not necessarily as beneficent as Sandhu’s ‘self fashioning’ might
suggest. In Bhabha it is ambivalent and duplicitous and the evil eye is both powerful
and passive. By contrast, the doubled, crazed eyes of Edugyan’s twins look on the abyss
of madness and dispossession; they are removed from the creepy, uncanny house of
homelessness and subjected to a double exile in a home for disturbed children. Evans’s
sister and, possibly, Oyeyemi’s Jess disintegrate within the stress of their split time
and place. Within this ambivalent site of the magical and the material, of fleshy bodies
and evil eyes, however, new imaginaries are emerging, both demonic and wondrous.
The question for us is: what exactly is emerging in this space where the spirits roam
across the river, animate everyday objects and fit imperfectly between daily realities
on this side and on the other side of the bank? Cyborgs, perhaps, and with them new
narrative formations. These could be newly melded twin creatures, literal and figurative,
symbolic and real. In the process, myth may have become magical and material and
metamorphosed into a new symbolic. Emily Apter, specifically links the image of the
cyborg to the generations being born of mixed parents and backgrounds in the Diaspora
when she suggests in Continental Drift that ‘the cyborg’s transracial, transnational
body conjures forth an identity no longer split between First and Third World, between
metropole and native home, but rather, a body so fragmented that its morphology is a
diaspora’ (1999, 217). She enlarges that ‘members of minority populations historically
excluded from public forms of national self-representation’ are finding creative ways of
‘reclaiming the alien’, what she refers to as ‘Afrofuturism’ (225).
The site is unstable and the outcome uncertain, given that language and the
narratives into which it is shaped, may go in many diverse and unpredictable directions.
Abominations coexist with the angels in this futuristic landscape. For example, there is
a potentially demonic mutation at the enigmatic ending of Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.
Jessamy appears to merge with the wicked spirit, TillyTilly:
hop,
skip,
jumped
into Tilly’s unyielding flesh as she clawed at Jess’s presence
(it hurt them both burningly)
Diaspora, gender and identity: Twinning in three diasporic novels 63

back into herself.

Jessamy Harrison woke up and up and up and up. (2005, 302, original emphasis)

  It is unclear whether a liberated new creature has been born; the signs are not good
as Jessamy soars up and up like the doomed Icarus, and becomes the Icarus girl of the
title. TillyTilly, ominously, had ‘clawed at Jess’s presence’ (302) like a leopard. The
novel ends with a postscript, which gestures to this moment as echoing the action of a
leopard man, a murderer linked to the cult of leopard societies of West Africa. These are
the weighty last words of The Icarus Girl, taken from a Yoruba poem and translated into
English, given in italics:
‘Praise of the Leopard’ (Yoruba)
Gentle hunter
his tail plays on the ground
while he crushes the skull.
Beautiful death
who puts on a spotted robe
when he goes to his victim.
Playful killer
whose loving embrace
splits the antelope’s heart. (Final, unnumbered page, original italics, underlining added):

  Research reveals that the person selected to conduct a killing within the cult ‘wore
the ritual leopard mask and a leopard skin robe’ and the weapon was a ‘two-pronged
steel claw’ (Encyclopedia of the Unusual and the Unexplained). This leopard-man, with
his leopard skin and steel claw is a terrifying mutation, Frankenstein’s monster let loose
to roam the planet. This is the danger writ large as writers and artists struggle to find
alternative myths and belief structures, which may turn out to carry their own forms of
domination and violence.
Jess’s ‘silent sister-girl’, presumably her dead twin sister, Fern, had begged her not
to take the route of merging with the wicked TillyTilly – ‘telling her that it wasn’t the
right way, not the right way at all’ (302). The overtones are that Jess has destroyed
herself, become prey to the leopard. Deleuze and Guattari refer in their theory of strange
becomings specifically to the ‘becomings-animal’ in ‘crime societies, leopard-men,
crocodile-men’ (1987, 247). ‘Becomings’, however, are also full of the potential of new
beings, which ‘come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around
roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming’
(241–242). The multiplicity, the doubling of the many branches of the rhizome is more
promising than the solidity and closure of the single tap root. However, becomings
animal include these scary leopard men who stalk and murder their prey, amongst which
may have been the confused Jess, who, quite possibly, did not find a way out of the
maze of myths, stories and languages. Instead of the son or the father – the constricting
64 Brenda Cooper

family – there is the sorcerer, who is also the writer, because ‘writing is a becoming’
(240). Both sorcerer and writer, poet and possessor of the magical evil eye, identity in
this diasporic space of uncanny doubles are dynamic, changing and incomplete. It can
go either way.
And so, alongside the fear, there is also the frisson of possibility. When Georgia
merges into her twin, Bessi, in 26a, the ‘becoming’ is full of hope that this new being,
Bessi, Evans herself, forged out of African myth, might heal, recover from mourning
and emerge as an African British fully fledged citizen – ‘a flash, a jump. I became
white light, silver flesh and galactic bone’ (2005, 211). Edugyan’s novel also ends on a
positive, albeit much more muted note. After the death of her sister, Yvette, ‘the lone twin
returned to reclaim the home’ (2004, 277). The doubling, splintering and evil eyeing is
potentially over. She is trying ‘to know there is meaning in being alone’ (277), but she
is still changing and struggling in her becoming. Her quiet quest for calm and home in
the Diaspora into which she was born is an appropriate note on which to conclude:
It will not be an easy road, but many have worse, and her only obligation amidst all the
pain and occasional pleasure is to live in the best way she is capable of. That is all we have.
(277)

Notes
1  African attitudes to twin births are obviously varied, and have been changing all the time.
For more information regarding these attitudes, see the special issue of Ethnology on Twinship in
Africa, edited by Renne, Elisha P. and Bastian, Misty L. Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 2001.
2  See also Gubar, 1979, 307, Kristeva, 1981, 24, and Ostriker, 1986, 211.

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Self-made women in a (racist) man’s world:The ‘tragic’