Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women's Writing - Making Love, Making Worlds-Palgrave Macmillan (2021)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING
Love and Space in

Contemporary African
Diasporic Women’s Writing
Making Love, Making Worlds
Jennifer Leetsch
Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
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International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt
University of Bath
Cambridge, UK
Denise deCaires Narain

University of Sussex
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Andrea Quaid
Bard College
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Jennifer Leetsch
Love and Space in

Contemporary African
Diasporic Women’s
Writing
Making Love, Making Worlds
Jennifer Leetsch
Department of English Literature
and British Cultural Studies
University of Würzburg
Würzburg, Germany
ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
ISBN 978-3-030-67753-4 ISBN 978-3-030-67754-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1
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Acknowledgements
This is a book about love, kinship and relationality—and it is here that I

want to acknowledge some of the webs of relation and kin that have held
me throughout the years. My greatest debt for the writing of this book is
with Isabel Karremann, whose intellectual rigour, purposefulness and
unfaltering belief in me has sustained me from the moment I sat in one of
her seminars in Munich almost a decade ago. Without her this book would
not exist. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Zeno Ackermann for his
intelligence, honesty and kindness, and for always finding the right words.
My thanks also go to Tobias Döring for not only providing vital food for
thought throughout my studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University
Munich but also serving as my external examiner.
I am grateful to all the people with whom I had the pleasure of working
with at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg and who have so gener-
ously accompanied my process in research colloquia, in the hallways or at
dinner tables with a much-needed glass of Franconian wine: Ina Bergmann,
Elfi Bettinger, Carolin Biewer, Sladja Blažan, Annabella Fick, Uwe
Hausmann, Stefan Hippler, Sabrina Hüttner, Barış Kabak, Patricia
Kemmer, Florian Kläger, Sarah Knor, Dieter Koch, Matthias Krebs, Lisa
Lehnen, Patrick Maiwald, Hannah Nelson-Teutsch, Ralph Pordzik, Heike
Raphael-Hernandez, Katrin Horn, Johannes Schlegel (with, of course,
Susanne and Greta), Daniel Schulze, MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, Andrea
Stiebritz, Miriam Wallraven and Kathrin Zöller. Special thanks go also to
the research assistants in the English and American Studies Departments:
Isabel Eder, Sonja Fiedler, Molina Klingler, Paulina Kriesinger, Anna
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Frieda Kuhn, Sophie Renninger, Haykanush Sazhumyan, Caterina Seeger,

Kristina Seit, Selina Stranz, Dina Youssef and Laura Werthmüller, and,
above all, to our secretary, Elke Demant, without whom we would all be
lost at sea. I am very thankful to all my students who have taught me as
much as I taught them and whose love of literature has sustained me.
I am incredibly grateful for the companionship of other early career
researchers without whose solidarity, friendship and verve I would have
been so much more alone and poorer in all regards: Anurima Chanda,
Leila Essa, Cedric Essi, Christina Domene Moreno, Elena Furlanetto,
Baldeep Grewal, Kate Harlin, Kathrin Härtl, Katharina Hiery, Valerie
Kiendl, Gabriella Lambrecht, Lena Mattheis, Anna Sophia Messner,
Frederike Middelhoff, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Nele Pollatschek, Helene
Roth, Julia Spahn, Veronika Schuchter, Hanna Teichler, Daria Tunca,
Julian Wacker and Laura Zander.
I want to thank my friends for listening to my fears and for unfailingly
cheering me on, if they knew it or not: Johanna Bedenk, Sonja Bonneß,
Sina Brückner-Amin, Matthias Hauer, Mathias Häusler, Melanie Hering,
Tatjana Herold, Fabian Kober, Franziska Kunze, Stephan Lang, Annika
Lange, Franziska Linhardt, Magdalena Mader, Danijel Matijevic,
Maximilian and Kati Meckes, Johannes Pömsl, Lina Schaare, Nicole
Scherl, Matthias Scherer, Susanne Schneider, Rebecca Seemann, Katharina
Sprenger and Julia Weigl. All my thanks go to my two families: Anne,
Stefanie and Uwe Leetsch, and Birgit, Pauline and Peter Westphal.
I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to the rich and vibrant aca-
demic communities that have given me so much energy, generosity and
support. Special mention must go to the Münster crowd who put on one
of the first conferences I ever attended in 2015 and who I now regard as
part of my academic family—thank you Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline
Kögler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark Stein and Julian Wacker; and to the
Oviedo crowd during the 16th Triennial EACLALS Conference in 2017
which gave me a much-needed push when I was stuck on my chapter on
Zadie Smith—thank you Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal, Chelsea Haith,
Sam Holland, John McLeod, Emma Parker, Beatriz Pérez, Amy Rushton,
Veronika Schuchter, Hayley Toth and Laura Zander. Thank you also to
Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff for so kindly inviting me to the LMU Center for
Advanced Studies Munich to talk about Warsan Shire in 2017. My think-
ing on postcolonial, global matters would not be the same without my
involvement in the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) / IGP
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
(Indo-German Partnership in Higher Education)- funded programme

“Literature in a Globalized World”. I thank Saugata Bhaduri and all the
wonderful researchers and students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in
New Delhi for their hospitality and their forever- inspiring critical
engagement.
I am especially grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for the ease with which
this project was developed and guided throughout the publication pro-
cess. I am indebted to the series editors of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary
Women’s Writing for being so willing to take on this project. Particular
thanks go to my anonymous readers, whose thoughtful comments were
much appreciated, to Molly Beck and Rebecca Hinsley, who have been
unfailingly insightful and encouraging as my commissioning editors, and
to Md Saif and Hemalatha Arumugam who have skilfully guided me
through the editing and production process.
I am also immensely grateful to the journal editors and anonymous peer
reviewers who gave an early career researcher the space to experiment with
some of the preliminary ideas that would later form the chapters in this
book: special thanks to Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke and the Journal
of Popular Romance Studies, to Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi and the
Journal of the African Literature Association, to Kairos: A Journal of
Critical Symposium, to Hella Cohen and Sreyoshi Sarkar and Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and to Jenni Ramone and
The Literary Encyclopaedia.
This book on love and all its struggles is dedicated to M., my first
reader always.
Contents
1 Introduction: Be/longing 1
Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds 2
Longing: (Im)possible Love 6
Works Cited 18
2 Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 21

Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America and
Europe 25
Textual Entanglements: Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack 44
Returns and Romance: “It’s Just a Love Story” 57
Works Cited 71
3 London Lovers: Zadie Smith 75

(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions 78
The Affective Architecture of City and Text 93
Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere 102
Works Cited 132
4 Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi137

Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The Postcolonial Gothic 140
Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/Land 161
Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love 169
Works Cited 193
ix
x Contents
5 Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel199

Watery Failures, Watery Potentials: Transoceanic Poetics 204
Travelling Texts: Performative Poetry Online and on Stage 225
Wording the Wound: Connective and Collective Love 238
Works Cited 255
6 Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”261

Cobwebs 266
Works Cited 269
Index271
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Be/longing
Erotic encounters on the bustling streets of Lagos or London; romantic

weekend getaways in the Nigerian countryside; unhappy lovers confined
within a haunted house on the coast of Dover; non-normative families
that emerge somewhere between the UK and the Caribbean; queer sexual
awakenings mediated across the Indian Ocean; refugee love stories that
span from East Africa to Europe via the Mediterranean … The literary
texts this study considers conjoin two spheres that are rarely brought
together in particularly fruitful ways: space and love. These two realms,
however, may coalesce to rethink and reimagine conceptual paradigms
that surround both love and space, longing and belonging. As will become
clear throughout the chapters that make up this book, the results of such
rethinkings and reimaginings are unexpected ways of charting geography
and locality, unconventional ways of dealing with love and desire. In the
contemporary novels, poems and performances by Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and
Warsan Shire that I have selected for this study, the thinking-together of
space and love comes to designate new possibilities of living in an ever-
more mobile, globalised twenty-first-century world—a world generated
by women “from everywhere and nowhere, women who struggle against
imperial patriarchies, capitalist, normative, nationalist structures in place
within and beyond their own communities” (Subramanian 2018, n. pag.).
By dealing with geo-political issues such as neo-colonialism, refugee crises
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic
Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s
Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_1
2 J. LEETSCH
and diasporic displacement and by simultaneously depicting the vulnera-

ble, private spheres of love and desire inhabited by mainly black, queer and
female characters, these texts manage to wilfully renegotiate ostensible
oppositions between public and private, global and intimate. One of my
main contentions throughout this book will be that the texts I have cho-
sen engage with innovative ways of writing into the centre of attention
those that are usually excluded and muted: women “perched forever on
various borderlines”, women “who can reorient the imperial gaze, the
colonial gaze, the hierarchical gaze of even their lovers who participate in
the old economy of rating women’s bodies and ontologies against one
another, so that women are named authorial subjects, able to control their
stories, and no longer remain in the shadow” (ibid.).
What I have set out to do, then, is to draw out of the shadows and into
the light the possible connectivities that arise when putting together love
and space, to tease out the disruptions that become inherent when con-
joining longing and belonging in literary texts and poetic performances
from the African diaspora. I am thus placing two ostensibly disparate
things into dialogue—however tense and fraught this dialogue may be.
And what I hope will emerge when I probe this dialogue is the fact that
the texts by black female writers chosen for this study show us new ways
of writing the world not only as more inclusive, fluid or open but also as
ultimately possessing the potential to create intimate and affiliative (ex)
change: that the making of worlds, in short, comes to be deeply entangled
with the making of love.
Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds

The texts I have chosen for this study all stem from the context of the
African diaspora—as wide-reaching, multi-faceted and hard to encompass
as that is. As contemporary, diasporic novels, poems and performances,
they each deal with a particular spatial set-up that is exemplarily attuned to
notions of belonging, the politics and poetics of postcolonial place-making
and displacement in the twenty-first century, including new diasporic
identity constructions such as the refugee, the returnee, the exile commu-
nity, the immigrant, the guest worker and many more. While they all tackle
their diasporic origins with ultimately differing strategies of constructing
space and belonging, what lies at the heart of all their literary imaginings
is the tension that exists between the oppositions of home and away,
everywhere and nowhere. This tension creates a sense of multiple
1 INTRODUCTION: BE/LONGING 3
belongings that is carved out from an ambiguous and charged attachment

to space. Working with a notion of place and spatial construction as always
relational, always belonging to a network of social liaisons and affiliations
(Massey 1993; Brah 1996), provides a productive lens to focus on postco-
lonial and diasporic narratives of identity and belonging, home and dis-
placement. As will become clear throughout this book, emotions and
senses are inevitably implicated in the production of place and spatial,
political practices. This relation results in situated knowledges which
reclaim and re-politicise, re-map and re-connect territories. As Smith et al.
have noted, “[e]motions are […] intimately and inescapably caught up in
the current re-writing of the earth, the production of new, transformed,
geographies, and New World Orders, that affect us all, albeit in very dif-
ferent ways” (2009, 3). This is especially important in contexts of postco-
lonial and diasporic constructions of the world in which knowing how to
reclaim space and place, how to build neighbourhoods and communities,
becomes a mode of resistance and perhaps even survival. The texts by
African diasporic women writers I have gathered in this study, even though
they widely vary in their geographical and emotional set-ups, all share this
desire to represent new ways of working across “the radically reconfigured
spaces of the global present” (Davis 2013, 3). In putting to the forefront
of their spatial imaginaries the aspects of love, desire and romance, they
take part in a relational and affective writing of space. As Geraldine Pratt
and Victoria Rosner argue concerning interrelations of the intimate and
the global, “[t]o disrupt traditional organizations of space, to forge pro-
ductive dislocations, to reconfigure conventions of scale” should remain
the goal of especially feminist rewritings of the world (2012, 1). Drawing
on these arguments as well as on Smith et al. who foreground the same
“re-writing of the earth” and the imagination of “transformed geogra-
phies” and “New World Orders” (2009, 3) through strategies of emo-
tional geography, in the following I want to ask what it might look like to
dare imagine alternative possibilities for living in this world.
Both the production and imagination of space are inherently generative
and transformational. In other words, literary imagination may bear the
potential to actively write into existence other worlds, new locations. With
this outset, I seek to further develop the project of thinkers who posit lit-
erature as a worldly force, as impacting the creation of the world. One of
these thinkers is Pheng Cheah, a theorist of postcolonial literature and
cosmopolitanism, who suggests that literature opens worlds.1 In his What Is
a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), he traces
4 J. LEETSCH
how contemporary fictional texts free up new possibilities for remaking

the world by negotiating and ultimately resisting structures of capitalist
globalisation:
This book explores how the conceptualization of the world […] provides a
normative basis for transforming the world made by capitalist globalization
and how this normative understanding of the world leads to a radical
rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the mak-
ing of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that
participates and intervenes in these processes. (2016, 2)
His approach to postcolonial, diasporic literature is marked by a complex

engagement with several philosophical strands.2 His most important con-
tention, in my opinion, however, is his argument that literatures may
“generate alternative cartographies that enable a postcolonial people or a
collective group to foster relations of solidarity and build a shared world in
which self-determination is achieved” (17–18). The world is thus formu-
lated as verb and not as noun; and within the term “worlding”3 we might
find alternatives to systems of oppression, to bring to life a sense of shared
worlds and communal living. In the second half of his book, Cheah’s con-
cept emerges most clearly. Here, he argues that “literature can play an
important role in announcing the advent of new collective subjects and
giving public phenomenality to their outgoing attempts to remake the
world” (210). Embedded within his literary analyses, he formulates a
conception of world literature as the literature of the world (double geni-

tive). This refers to imaginings and stories of what it means to be part of a
world that tracks and accounts for contemporary globalization and earlier
historical narratives of worldhood. […] Such a literature is also one that
seeks to be disseminated, read, and received around the world as to change
it and the lives of people within it. More important, because it points to the
opening of other worlds, such a literature is also a real and ongoing process
of the world, a principle of change immanent to the world. (210, emphasis
in original)
What follows from such thinking is the responsibility we need to take on

to stay alert of potentially harmful processes of globalisation in a world
shaped by an all-pervasive capitalist modernity which “occurs through the
exercise of biopolitical, ideological, and repressive technologies” (209).
The central question Cheah asks, and that we should ask ourselves in turn,
is how we can animate, shape and think into existence other, alternative
worlds. An answer can be found in forms of resistance and wilful interven-
tion within literatures of the world: literature that belongs to the world
and literature that changes the world through its imaginative and creative
force. As Cheah remarks towards the end of his chapter on Nuruddin
Farah’s novel Gifts (1992) and its storytelling powers in a Somalian
context,
literature’s vocation is to think the force of worlding, […] to enact the

unending opening of a world as a condition for the emergence of new sub-
jects in spite of capitalist globalization. Its non-utopian promise is that we
can belong otherwise, in different ways, because quivering beneath the sur-
face of the existing world are other worlds to come. (309)
Belonging otherwise, imagining other worlds—this is how we will be able

to resist the dehumanising structures of oppression imposed by global
capitalist modernity that is determined by forms of neo-colonialism and
post-Empire. With these articulations, Cheah in fact references another
philosopher of the world, the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and his
work in The Inoperative Community (1991), The Sense of the World (1997)
and The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007).4 Nancy has simi-
larly traced the tensions that arise from the opposition of a globalised
world order and what he calls “mondialisation”, an “authentic world-
forming” that advocates habitable, hospitable worlds—“a making of the
world” (2007, 1; emphasis in original). For Nancy, the global “evokes the
notion of a totality as a whole”, whereas mondialisation, “by keeping the
horizon of a ‘world’ as a space of possible meaning for the whole of human
relations […], gives a different indication than that of an enclosure in the
undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality” (28).
What unites Cheah and Nancy, then—and what I want to take on as one
of my guiding principles leading through this book—is the sense that we
need to find ways of being in the world together. It is the responsibility of
literature to imagine a new sense of existence that may arise from the mate-
rial realities of fractured lives and disrupted belongings. Holding on to
these notions of the transformative power of literature, in the following
chapters I set out to examine poetic texts and medial performances that,
through positioning themselves at the intersection of love and space, strug-
gle to imagine possible worlds that are open, relational, liveable and hospi-
table. As Nancy would have it, “[t]o create the world means: immediately,
6 J. LEETSCH
without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for
what must form the contrary of a global injustice” (54–55; emphasis in
original). As I will show, these texts by twenty-first-century black female
authors actively engage in such a “struggle” by negotiating socio-political,
affective and ethical issues from an ex-centric, non-Eurocentric standpoint.
They strive to imagine the making of the world from the perspective of a
postcolonial African diaspora—and are thus not only exemplarily attuned
to but also attempt to contest and ultimately transform the political, mate-
rial and cultural conditions of their multi-sited belongings.
Longing: (Im)possible Love

When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation
and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves
in the other.
—bell hooks, All About Love (2000, 93)
Throughout her decade-spanning work, the African American philoso-

pher bell hooks has frequently addressed the idea of love as foundational
for her thinking: as such, she has always construed love as something
inherently relational. For hooks, love is the possibility to connect and to
find oneself in that which is other, in the one who is other. It is an exchange
that makes possible to see and recognise one another, however faulty that
vision may be. In the following, and with the help of hooks, I will draw on
a tradition of thinking about love from viewpoints such as radical black
and feminist ones. These thinkers have shed light on how engagement
with love can constitute both empowerment and oppression—a tension
that is continuously worked out in the growing field of critical and femi-
nist love studies which has developed in tandem with the affective turn
(Clough and Halley 2007; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). In the intro-
duction to their edited volume on feminist love, Ann Ferguson and Anna
Jónasdóttir identify the field of “Love Studies” as a “new, expanding field
of academic scholarship” that has been growing since the 1990s across
many disciplines (2014, 1). In order to define this field, Ann Ferguson and
Margaret E. Toye posit elsewhere that
a distinctive feminist love studies questions the continual tendency within

both traditional examinations of love and this new turn in contemporary
love studies to take male, patriarchal, and heterosexist assumptions and
models as the norm. Feminist Love Studies stresses the importance of devel-
oping alternate models and illuminates the contributions of feminist authors,
including by reclaiming feminist historical work. (2017, 5; emphasis
in original)
They conceive of love as “a possible important creative force, connecting

energy or capacity—while not abandoning earlier feminist theory’s ten-
dency to focus on harmful aspects of patriarchal, heterosexist, and colonial
concepts of care and love” (5). They argue love has taken on an essential
role in feminist thinking throughout its history and cursorily list these
contributions: from the early thought of Mary Wollstonecraft to Emma
Goldman; from Clara Zetkin to Simone de Beauvoir; from the works of
Shulamith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson to Marxist feminists like
Nancy Hartsock and Silvia Federici; from psychoanalytic feminists such as
Nancy Chodorow to deconstructionists like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
or Hélène Cixous; and from black feminists like Audre Lorde, the
Combahee River Collective and bell hooks to Latinx feminists like Chela
Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. To continue this project
of honouring engagement with love off the beaten tracks, and to give
prominence to rethinkings of love and affect through lenses that provide
an alternative to a long white, male and Western tradition of defining love,
I want to draw attention to specifically black feminist and queer critics
who see love as deeply inscribed to, but at the same time harbouring the
potential to overcome, systems of oppression.
In such thinking, love is regarded as fraught with ghosts and histories,
with the material, political implications tied up in it. When hooks in All
About Love argues that “when we choose to love we choose to move
against fear—against alienation and separation” and that “the choice to
love is a choice to connect” (2000, 93), she attempts to conceptualise love
as a force to bring forth social change and repair centuries of harmful sub-
jugation of society’s others. Throughout her work, hooks has remained
critically attuned to the violent, dehumanising conditions black people are
confronted with. This orientation becomes quite evident in a range of her
works. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, for example, she writes:
“It struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot
control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolo-
nized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at
the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity” (1992, 3–4).
Recognising how love may act as tool within these structures as an
8 J. LEETSCH
exclusionary force provides the possibility to re-formulate it and posit it as

something that can tend to the rips and tears in the fabric of black self-
hood. What hooks and many other thinkers of black radical love do, then,
is to take into account love and its discontents, its normative and poten-
tially harmful implications. Together with hooks, there are many contem-
porary thinkers who critique love as a tool for heteronormative, patriarchal
and (neo)colonial power structures. Especially work stemming from the
disciplines of postcolonial, gender, queer and affect studies has outlined
how love has come to signify structural imbalances—and how it seeps into
the complicated bound of gender and race. As Jennifer Nash succinctly
points out, love “can be deployed to shore up heteronormativity, to re-
energize dominant narratives of romance, and to advance claims to power”
(2013, 19). Sarah Ahmed, in the same vein, gestures towards the often-
insidious normative power love potentially holds. In The Cultural Politics
of Emotion, she excavates the structures and functions of powerful feelings
such as love and hate, attraction and fear, desire and disgust and explains
that while “love may be crucial to the pursuit of happiness, love also makes
the subject vulnerable, exposed to, and dependent upon another, who in
‘not being myself’, threatens to take away the possibility of love” ([2004]
2014, 125). She shows how the work of love can also hold other, more
insidious implications, for example, when “the choice of love-object is a
sign of the love for the nation” (124) and love becomes sticky with other
emotional economies, such as nation, gender or race.
Paying attention to such interrelations, the scholar Keguro Macharia
has argued that “policing love is central to establishing and sustaining
claims about difference. This policing hierarchizes loving and lovability,
imbuing dominant groups with the capacity to elicit, cultivate, and
embody love while claiming that minoritized groups do not know how to
love properly, if at all” (2015, 68). Macharia astutely points out how across
different geographies and histories, “minoritized practices of labor, reli-
gion, and intimacy have been framed as examples of attenuated, corrupt,
or perverse loving, or as demonstrating love’s absence altogether” (68).
As historical examples for these harmful framing processes he reminds us
to consider
chattel slavery, which treated men and women as “breeders,” unable to form
loving attachments to each other or to create loving families; indictments of
queer individuals as randomly promiscuous, unable to sustain attachment or
create homes for children; the state-sanctioned removal of Australian
aboriginal children from their homes in the twentieth century, ostensibly to

provide them with better structures of care; colonizing efforts to transform
domestic life and intimate practices to resemble the Western, white hetero-
sexual couple. (68)
Such examples show how the white bourgeois nuclear family, the epitome
of goodness and pureness and integrity, has been utilised as a weapon
against all those who do not fit such a narrow frame of how to love one
another. Love is deeply implicated in the scripts of racial and gendered
power relations. While often thought of as apolitical, an affective dimen-
sion into which you enter almost unwittingly, what Ahmed, Macharia and
others have shown is that instead, love is inherently political and politi-
cised. “Linked to broader structural violences faced particularly by women
of colour globally” and embedded “within the constituent discourses of
love—of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment”
(Gebrial 2017, n. pag.), who is allowed to love and how becomes a ques-
tion of intent, power and agency. In believing in love’s possibilities and
impossibilities, it is necessary to pay attention to such codes and often
hidden structures. Advocating for love, as bell hooks so unashamedly
does, means to engage in continuous political and ethical acts of question-
ing how these assumptions about love are perpetuated structurally and
materially and to see love as an unequivocal chance to defy systems of
power, to rupture everyday being.
In her trilogy of works about love, All About Love: New Visions (2000),
Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) and Communion: The Female
Search for Love (2002), hooks formulates love as such an active and trans-
formative practice: “[t]he word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet
[…] we would all love better if we used it as a verb” (2000, 4). She devel-
ops a love ethic that may function as an antidote to how love has often
been instrumentalised. The three books in hooks’ love trilogy are essen-
tially framed as self-help books and they indeed provide help to think a
black self that is connected to the world and to communities of others. As
she argues in “Love as the Practice of Freedom”, “without an ethic of love
shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we
are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to
systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism” ([1994]
2006, 243). In hooks, love emerges as a means to think through non-
sovereign, dissident identity formations. She posits love as a site for a col-
lective becoming-other, being-other, that can help to inform alternate
10 J. LEETSCH
socio-political imaginaries: “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the

right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimen-
sion of our lives, our society would need to embrace change […]” as well
as “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as ultimately con-
nected to those of everyone else on the planet” (2000, 87–88). This ethi-
cally framed politics of love reveals to us a long tradition of black feminist
thought that is acutely invested in “crafting political communities consti-
tuted by heterogeneity and variety, rather than homogeneity and fixity”,
that “engenders new publics, new forms of relationality, even if tenuous
and fleeting, marked by forms of collective sentiment” (Nash 2013, 13;
14). Love can function as a tool to re-appropriate and to rebuild certain
power relationships, and once we accept it as such an empowering strat-
egy, it harbours the potential to destabilise restrictive orders. hooks and
others have recognised the capacity of love as ultimately transformative of
structures that underlie harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, rac-
ism, inequality and heteronormative restriction.5 Their radical love-politics
entails not only a reparative practice of the self but also a communal, rela-
tional strategy for constructing political communities.
Lauren Berlant, in her work on love, has stated that love has “been
floated by so many as a solution—literally, a loosening or an unfastening,
a dissolution—to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured com-
munity” (2011, 685). But if we posit love as a force which sets in motion
“the work of normative negation that a revolutionary project must assume
as its burden”, as Ahmed and Macharia have shown us, love must also
entail something much messier and more untameable: “If love is force,
though, it is a mess-making force, as its aim is to dissolve toxic sureties.
There are no sureties on the other side of surety. Such a process does not
clean up the world well” (685). What I find interesting, and fruitful,
about these thoughts is the notion that if love is a force it not only repairs
and restores but also has the potential to be unruly and destructive, to
“make a mess” of the world.6 Berlant ascertains that her scepticism does
not necessarily suggest that thinking of love as a powerful force is futile:
“these arguments do not mean that love is a useless concept—its […]
utility is that love allows one to want something, to want a world, amid
the noise of the ambivalence and anxieties about having and losing”
(2011, 687). What lies at the heart of Berlant’s criticism, then, and what
I want to take up as one of the core guidelines for my discussions of
African diasporic engagements with love- and world-makings is that love
allows us to “want a world”, to imagine “the affective dimensions that it
would take to (re)build a world” (ibid.)—however messy and untidy such

a world might be.
Taking the cue from these complex formulations of world and love
traced throughout this introductory chapter, my book endeavours to trace
the project undertaken by contemporary African diasporic literature to
imagine a (re)building of the world. As texts which present love stories
that are deeply entangled within twenty-first-century realities of migration
and displacement, these novels, poems and performances make a mess of
the toxic sureties that pervade processes of globalisation and neo-
colonialism. The love stories offered by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie
Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire mark the ruptures
that arise from collisions; they play with the tensions that emerge when
gender and race, love and worlds converge. Attending to the deeply per-
sonal and relational while also depicting matters of geography and belong-
ing in a time of global flows, migrant crises and refugee movements, these
authors long for different, possible worlds.
A Road Map
Pheng Cheah proposes that the world should not be regarded as a noun
but as a verb. bell hooks claims that love is usually defined as a noun, but
that we should rather use it as a verb. Love and world, then, both employ
the activity and forward movement of the verb instead of the settled stabil-
ity of a noun. In conceptualising both worlding and loving as mobile,
transformative and relational, I have established the frameworks I will
work within in the following analyses of contemporary African diasporic
texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Olajumoke
Oyeyemi, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel. My choice of texts—ranging
from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-
known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the intri-
cate, itinerant poems and performances of Patel and Shire—is due to the
pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of
space and love, of thinking and feeling worlds. The works selected for
close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic
imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian American, Caribbean,
Nigerian British, Somali British and Kenyan American. Read alongside
each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly
and differently connected global imaginary—an alternative to dominant
12 J. LEETSCH
constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive

hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.
To make visible the tensions and potentials that arise when these texts
interlink world- and love-making, each chapter of this book is structured
along three axes: space, textuality and love. With this tripartite structure,
the book gives weight to the transformative, creative potential of the
works discussed. In a first step, each chapter describes the space-building
strategies of the literary works by examining notions of mobility, travel
and diaspora; settlement, home and neighbourhood; cartography, map-
pings and architecture. This allows me to examine different literary
world-building, or mondialisation, strategies while also mining theoreti-
cal sediments as I make stops along the way to trace some of the most
important developments in postcolonial and diasporic spatial theories of
the last decades: the transnational (Adichie), the postcolonial metropolis
(Smith), the postcolonial uncanny domestic (Oyeyemi) and the global
blue humanities (Shire/Patel). The second part of each chapter teases
out the affective textuality and embodied materiality of the novels, poems
and performances. What takes precedence here are discussions of form,
structure, genre and aesthetic patterns which link my thoughts about
space and love in each chapter and which play into the rich and powerful
potential of literature to be of and in the world—these interludes in each
chapter allow me to fully and enthusiastically explore the potential of
literary imagination to want a world, while revelling in all its messiness,
ruptures and tensions that often run slant to canon and convention. The
third part of each chapter activates the affective and relational dimensions
of love, romance and desire negotiated in the texts. Here, the book fully
delves into the makings of love as it explores the sometimes joyful, some-
times traumatic intimate experiences of the texts’ black, female characters
in love: each chapter is dedicated to upholding not only the fraught his-
tories and harmful implications at work within love but also the joyful,
transformative potential that emerges when we witness black, queer
women recognise new forms of sexual, intimate or platonic relationality
and communality.
The chapters are ordered not only according to this tripartite internal
structure but also according to a larger macro-structure: to fully spell out
the complex imaginings of love and worlds provided by the texts, the book
will travel along certain spatial and affective scales. Concerning the spaces
opened up by the literary texts, the book moves from global contexts to
smaller spatial constructions, only to then expand them again in the last
chapter. The second chapter (Adichie) looks at movements spanning

nations and continents; the third chapter (Smith) examines the urban
space of the postcolonial metropolis; the fourth chapter (Oyeyemi) probes
constructions of the countryside and the interior space of the home and
the fifth chapter (Shire/Patel) delineates the watery space of the ocean.
Throughout my discussions, I will thus trace four complex spatial sites
which are written from positions oscillating between the Global North
and the Global South: encompassing the wide-reaching movements of the
postcolonial African diaspora, the texts write the world from different geo-
graphical positions—Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia—all the while
utilising multiple and often-intersecting spatial configurations.
Regarding the constructions and imaginations of love, I will similarly
attest to various and often differing dimensions opened up by the texts by
applying a macro-structure to my discussions. The second chapter
(Adichie) examines largely normative and heterosexual notions of romance
and happy endings; the third chapter (Smith) moves on to trace uncon-
ventional familial and affiliative partnership constructions and open struc-
tures of homosocial relationality; the fourth chapter (Oyeyemi) looks at
much more radical depictions of queer desire and the fifth chapter (Shire/
Patel) moves from the intimate couple form between lovers to include
communal and collective notions of love and female solidarity. Throughout
these chapters, I will not only interrogate notions of romance plots and
narrative constructions of love but also the subversive, critical and poten-
tially reparative engagement of the texts with female sexuality, desire and
corporeality. By focusing on these literary, imaginative constructions of
love and world-building and by tying them to the works’ material perfor-
mances of their own textuality, my analyses will add a more complex
dimension to the project of African diasporic imagination—critically test-
ing notions of longing and belonging which revolve around the question
of how to be part of the world, of how to write one’s longing into
the world.
Chapter Summaries
I begin my analyses in Chap. 2 with an examination of Chimamanda
Adichie’s third novel, Americanah (2013). Americanah connects Africa,
America and Europe with each other, and I will argue that by expanding
its scope beyond the notion of the nation, the text creates a relational
world that exists in the gaps between the local and the global. These
14 J. LEETSCH
geographical relations are always closely connected to stories of love and

desire which act as the driving forces behind Americanah’s diasporic
movements. In analysing how it fashions its American, European and
African spaces, I will show that Americanah emerges as a text that prob-
lematises its own spatial implications. I will extend my discussion of the
novel’s transnational routes by examining its textual, textural entangle-
ments in the second section of this chapter: the main linking devices the
novel employs, hair and the internet, act as the starting points from which
Ifemelu, the novel’s female protagonist, spins her story of belonging.
Utilising theories of weaving and textuality, I will show how both the
braiding process and the virtual space of the World Wide Web create con-
nections across nations only to then lead the story back to Lagos, Nigeria.
In the third part of this chapter, I will expound the notion that there lies
subversive potential at the heart of Americanah’s love story as both its
protagonists return to Nigeria from the years spent abroad elsewhere.
Subverting the conventions of a “successful” migration narrative that
includes processes of assimilation in the West, while seemingly conforming
to the conventional structure of the romantic “happy ending”, the novel
displays an innovative new way of imagining Africa and its diasporas—
shedding light onto its own humanity and asking hard questions about the
nature of love in a globalised, transnational world.
The third chapter discusses Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, White Teeth
(2000), NW (2012) and Swing Time (2016). Here, I maintain that the
cityscape of the postcolonial metropolis London offers productive contes-
tations of global and national world formations. In the first part of this
chapter I will sketch a history of postcolonial London writing, with a spe-
cial focus on the city post-Windrush in order to situate Smith’s London
novels in their historical, socio-political and literary context. In this first
part, I will discuss how Smith’s first London novel, White Teeth, inscribes
itself into—and subverts—its literary precursors through its protagonist
Irie’s affective, corporeal engagement with London and the Caribbean as
well as through the alternative love and family structures she manufac-
tures. The second part will examine NW with regard to its structural,
performative textual rendering of the city. These examinations will be
linked to the affective and relational encounters the text produces. The
results are alternative and emotive “architextures” and cartographies that
forge the city as an inherently shared communal space which, as such,
offers ways of accessing migratory and diasporic urban identity and affilia-
tions. The third part of this chapter will then shed light on the intimate
relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time in order to

examine how city and love become entangled in a new understanding of
postcolonial, diasporic together-ness. Queer disruptions of heteronorma-
tive romance (in NW) and ambivalent female friendships (in Swing Time)
will bring forth different renderings of relationality, community and
neighbourhood in the urban space.
Chapter 4 explores Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White is for Witching
(2009). With this chapter, the spatial scale further decreases as we move
from transnational movements across the globe and the bustle of the post-
colonial metropolis to the English countryside and the interior, domestic
space of the house. The first section of this chapter will revolve around the
layered constructions of space in White is for Witching. I will not only trace
the literary histories of the haunted house on which Oyeyemi draws but
also show how the house, the home and the homeland are destabilised by
the peculiar unhomeliness of the novel’s postcolonial gothic engagement
with space. As with my chapters on Adichie and Smith, the second section
will look at how the novel performs its own textuality. Similar to the tex-
tual and textural transnational tactics employed by Americanah or the
urban mappings performed by NW, Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is a
text that self-consciously displays its own materiality and intertextuality. I
will examine how the novel evolves from merely depicting a house that
haunts to actually becoming a haunted/haunting text—through employ-
ing modes of non-linearity, circularity and fragmentation. The third sec-
tion will then concern the novel’s constructions of love. I will look at the
second gothic stock concept the novel proffers, the figure of the vampire
and, closely connected, the desire for consuming the other. I will show
how the novel sets up its very own queer vampiric love story and creates a
narrative that turns on its head genre conventions as its two female pro-
tagonists fall in love. Revelling in the queer and the unhomely, Oyeyemi’s
story proposes ways of longing and belonging elsewhere.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this study move from discussing passages
between the continents of Africa, America and Europe to the enworlded
spaces of the postcolonial metropolis to the countryside and the tension
between domesticity and nation-building within the interior space of the
house. The fifth chapter of this study will then once more expand these
scales and dimensions as I discuss the water space of the ocean. In the fifth
chapter, I turn to Warsan Shire’s poetry collections Teaching My Mother
How to Give Birth (2011), Our Men Do Not Belong to Us (2014) and Her
Blue Body (2015) and Shailja Patel’s poetry-performance piece Migritude
16 J. LEETSCH
(2010). Moving towards the fluidity of poetry and away from the novel
form, this final thematic chapter ventures to open up this study in terms of
genre as well. As with my other chapters, I will employ a tripartite struc-
ture which examines configurations of space, textuality and love in Shire’s
and Patel’s poetry. The first part of this chapter examines how the ocean
figures as a spatial, political and poetic reservoir for the affective encoun-
ters in the works of Shire and Patel. Through mapping their writings
within the intersecting networks of continents and oceans, I will show
how in employing oceanic routes both poets reclaim histories and connec-
tions overwritten by the violent machinations of Empire. In the next part
on form, genre and textuality, the space of the ocean will be supplemented
by other quasi-spatial configurations—the digital space of the internet in
Shire’s case and the performative space of the stage in Patel’s. Here, I will
examine how the experimental poetic text formations of both writers mir-
ror the movements of diaspora and displacement experienced by those
inhabiting their poems. The figurations of love considered in this last
chapter will both echo the different notions of love discussed hitherto and
expand them to include more collective and connective models—my main
focus point will be the recuperative, reparative work of love undertaken by
both poets. Shire and Patel join the ranks of the other African diasporic
authors discussed throughout this study as they take the female experience
of displacement as a starting point for their explorations of love, desire and
sexuality. I contend that these formations of cross-oceanic female com-
munity and empathetic kinship encompass and embody new forms of
worldly affinity. By ending my explorations of how love and spatiality are
intimately connected in the diasporic writings of contemporary women
writers with a chapter on poetry, water spaces and trans-oceanic notions of
collective love, I will show how these texts, together with the others I
discuss throughout this study, manage to transform both love and space
into verbs.
Notes
1. Cheah’s work references a long and extensive history of thinking (about)
the world and about “world literature”. This term, much as the postcolo-
nial, is a loaded term and draws on centuries of scholarly, philosophical
engagement—beginning with Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and ending
at contemporary discussions of global political, social and cultural forma-
tions. For a comprehensive overview of the field of world literature, see
Damrosch, World Literature in Theory (2014), or the earlier Moretti,

“Conjectures on World Literature” (2000). For a more critical take on
world literature, cf. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of
Untranslatability (2013).
2. Taking postcolonial fictions of the Global South as his point of departure
and drawing on a rich critical archive of continental philosophy and decon-
struction—ranging from the idealist theorisations of Goethe and Hegel, via
Marxism, to the phenomenologies developed by Heidegger and Arendt and
arriving tentatively at Derridean ontological deconstruction—Cheah defines
worlds as a “gathering and holding-together” (2016, 12). As Caroline
Levine has argued, in Cheah’s thinking worlds come to mean “constella-
tions of shared practices that connect us to others in an ongoing way […].
The particular world imposed by capitalist globalization is just one particu-
larly destructive model of ‘the world’ that has eradicated many other mean-
ingful frameworks for living created through rituals, labor, religious
practices, and ethical bonds” (Levine 2016, n. pag.).
3. Cheah’s work on “worlding” needs to be contextualised within the frames
already set up by other thinkers, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.
Drawing on Said’s seminal work in Orientalism (1979), Spivak has utilised
the term “worlding” to describe how European colonial powers constructed
the geography of colonies; in her famous essay “The Rani of Sirmur”
(1985), she intertwines discussions of othering and worlding to show how
imperial Western powers attempted to structure the world in accordance
with their own needs. Interesting to note in this context is also Spivak’s
more recent engagement with the world, which finds expression in her theo-
risations of the planetary as, for example, in An Aesthetic Education in the
Era of Globalization (2012) or Death of a Discipline (2003).
4. For discussions of Nancy and his work on community and communality, cf.
Miller, Communities in Fiction (2015). For further background on Nancy’s
influences regarding his philosophy of the world, cf. Gratton, Jean-Luc
Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and
Sense (2012).
5. I would be remiss to not also mention at this point similar arguments made
by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose
work constitutes an important extension of hook’s call to love as resistance.
In their theorisations of love as transformative political power, Hardt and
Negri, even though they never acknowledge predecessors such as hooks and
other black feminist thinkers, echo their attempts to place love into political
discourse. Cf. their trio Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire (2004) and Commonwealth (2009).
6. My arguments here, as well as throughout the book, revolve around the
side-by-side of repair and injury. As such, they are fundamentally shaped by
18 J. LEETSCH
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thinking of the “reparative”: reparative readings

establish a critique of what Sedgwick has, in turn, called “paranoid reading”,
a hermeneutic of aggravated suspicion and negative affect (1997, 2003).
Instead, Sedgwick proposes a “less aggressive, less thesis-driven, less angst-
ridden style of critique that would seek to repair the damage of homophobia
and other forms of prejudice and violence rather than simply revealing alleg-
edly new and ever more insidious forms of abuse in rather unlikely places”
(Hanson 2011, n. pag.). What lies at the heart of Sedgwick’s thinking, then,
is an integration of seemingly opposing principles. For Sedgwick, the poten-
tial to repair, heal and restore never loses sight of, indeed cannot exist with-
out, what has been broken and the reasons for its broken-ness.
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CHAPTER 2
Routes of Desire: Chimamanda

Ngozi Adichie
Always use the word Africa or Darkness or Safari in your title. […] Never
have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it,
unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs,
naked breasts: use these. […] In your text, treat Africa as if it were one
country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals
and tall, thin people who are starving. […] Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic
scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to
African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not
suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
—Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write About Africa” (2006, n. pag.)
In his satirical Granta piece, the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina
sheds light not only on how the West writes about Africa but also on how
it writes Africa into existence—how it produces a clearly demarcated space
that can be consumed and understood along known parameters such as
poverty, human rights and corruption, or simply its landscapes and fauna,
disregarding the continent’s humans entirely. What Wainaina does here is
not just criticising global literary marketing campaigns or one-dimensional
novels about Africa by non-African writers, but he draws on how
the violence of colonialism is carried over into other violent acts of mut-
ing: “Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle
you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your inter-
vention and your important book, Africa is doomed” (2006, n. pag.).

Switzerland AG 2021
22 J. LEETSCH
Achille Mbembe has similarly argued that Africa is seen by the West as “a
headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion
of center, hierarchy, or stability, […] portrayed as a vast dark cave where
every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and
the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed” (2001, 3).
Mbembe’s and Wainaina’s conceptualisations of such a flattening repre-
sentation of Africa by the West have been mirrored by other African and
African diasporic writers over the years who have attempted to tackle the
problem of an Africa turned into an empty, monolithic category. Taiye
Selasi, a Ghanaian Nigerian writer living in the African diaspora, for exam-
ple, claimed in a talk at Literaturfestival Berlin that “African literature
doesn’t exist”: “By ‘African literature,’ I refer not to the body of written
and oral texts produced by storytellers on and from the continent—but
rather to the category. African Literature is an empty designation”
(2013a, 1). She explains that “Africa” as a category is frequently used to
“invent some monolithic Africa” (4), severely hampering its varied identi-
ties, languages and cultures.
Selasi describes how a shrunken version of what it means to be “African”
is produced by a restricted and restrictive Western imagination. This ver-
sion of Africa is not supposed to overstep its bounds or to expand beyond
its tightly controlled borders. In posing these problems, Selasi makes vis-
ible how writers of African descent, either domiciled in one of the conti-
nent’s countries or living elsewhere in the diaspora, are not supposed to
spill over the edges. Instead, they are expected to perform a conventional
version of their Africanness. When read in such a deadening way, Africa
and literature from and about Africa may be allowed to encompass pov-
erty, suffering, war and trauma, but certainly not the other things that
make us human: friendship, humour and tenacity. As Somali American
thinker Sofia Samatar writes,
there is a reason that it is easy to read War and Peace and say well, yes, it’s
about war, but really it’s about character. And not so easy to say the same
thing about Half of a Yellow Sun, not easy to say this also is a love story, this
is a story about passion. There are different ways of reading. We learn them,
repeat them, pass them on. We learn to read Tolstoy for character. We learn
to read Adichie for the history of the Biafran War. (2015, n. pag.)
We ascribe complexity to what we know and reversely try to put boundar-

ies around the things we know nothing about. In constructing a single,
2 ROUTES OF DESIRE: CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE 23
seemingly comprehensive story, all the other smaller and more wilful
stories are overwritten: “the assumption is that African novelists write only
about the condition of African-ness. Never we mind the family dynamics,
romantic catastrophes, intellectual musings—all of this humanity is sec-
ondary to the African-ness at hand” (2013a, 2013b, 8). While the West
tries to be “morally correct”, to recognise the suffering and the hardships
of a “third-world country”, it perpetuates damaging stereotypes while
participating in the shrinkage of a culturally highly diverse and multi-
faceted, multi-sited continent. And while attention is paid only to these
one-dimensional narratives, “we let the larger story swallow the smaller
ones, the human ones—in err” (9).
A solution lies in being alert to the smaller stories, the different, the
utterly human stories which might provide an alternative to the restricting
ways Africa and its diasporas have traditionally been mediated and con-
sumed. To come back to the theorisations of Pheng Cheah and Jean-Luc
Nancy on worlding I engaged with in this book’s introduction, the telling
of such stories—in our imagination and through literature—may enact the
opening of a world, a habitable world that enables shared humanity (cf.
Cheah 2016, 210; cf. Nancy 2007, 1). In this chapter, I argue that such
an alternative opening can be found in Nigerian writer Chimamanda
Adichie’s third novel. Americanah, published in 2013, tackles the big,
comprehensive stories of corruption in Nigeria, racism in the US and
Great Britain, the divide between poverty and wealth in both Africa and
the West and the political implication of migration between continents.
The novel also, however, achieves “a balance of stories” as it unsettles
conventional and stereotypical binaries. Focussing on love, friendship, and
family as well as on the cultural complexities of black female corporeality
and hair, the text cleverly intertwines the personal with the political all the
while jumping between disparate geographical spaces. With this, Adichie
belongs to an ever-growing collective of contemporary writers who create
African and African diasporic imaginaries that refuse to be pinned down to
an “a-priori”, an already known and flattened designation of Africa—their
Africa, “far from being single or transparent, is one which spans subjectivi-
ties and collectivities, coming to life in locations as diverse as East Lost
Angeles, Lagos, Croatia, London, Johannesburg, and speculative lands
that do not exist anywhere in this world at all” (Krishnan 2014, 19).
With Americanah, Adichie, who herself travels between continents as
she divides her time between Nigeria and the US, has written a novel that
resists the single story. I agree with Madhu Krishnan who states that here
24 J. LEETSCH
“Africa takes its roots in Nigeria and extends across the globe, taking hold
in America and enlivening the continuities of transnational blackness”
(20). Adichie has created an Africa that “is more than a space of military
coups and postcolonial mismanagement; instead, it transforms into a
human space, a space which defies a single description in favor of the con-
tradictions and confusions of individual lives and unsettled collective
becomings” (ibid.). While Adichie’s first two novels stay within the
national framework of Nigeria, Americanah moves across borders. Her
debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), re-tells the Achebian Bildungsroman
from a female point of view in contemporary Nigeria, and Half of a Yellow
Sun (2006) delineates the horrors of the Biafran War. Both engage with
notions deeply inscribed into Nigeria’s colonial past, the country’s decolo-
nisation and subsequent periods of troubled post-independent nation-
building. Americanah is, as Adichie herself has boldly stated in a
conversation with Zadie Smith, her “fuck you book” (2014a, 16:31), “a
fuck you to another version of herself” (16:35). She says that “with Half
of a Yellow Sun I was very dutiful. For so long I have been a dutiful daugh-
ter of literature. I’ve followed the rules … show don’t tell” (16:40). This
figure of the respectful daughter calls up notions of obedience and of liter-
ary parents as authoritative figures but certainly also encourages notions of
going against these traditions and parental influences. In refusing one-
dimensional and one-directional “African” writing and in progressing and
then transgressing Chinua Achebe’s analyses of Nigeria’s traumatic pasts,
Adichie makes way for alternative ways of writing (about) Africa. As Yogita
Goyal has stated, Americanah “challenges the association of Africa with
trauma, torture and politics, bringing into view non-Afro-pessimist repre-
sentations of Africa” (Goyal 2014, xiv). The taboo subjects that Selasi and
Wainaina both had ironically outlined—love, education, family, intellect—
appear as important components in the evolution of Americanah’s two
protagonists. I argue that narratives of desire, (self-)care and romance take
centre stage in a novel that can essentially be defined as a love story. This
love story is complexly interwoven with reimagined geographies of dias-
pora which transverse not only spatial but even more so emotional bound-
aries. In this sense, the text carefully and creatively negotiates the
thinking-together of love and space—a thinking-together that designates
new possibilities of living in a global twenty-first century while astutely
paying sustained attention to the lived realities of love, affect and trust.
To show how Americanah’s love story follows along geographical,
affective and textual routes of desire, in the following I will analyse the
novel’s intricate interplay of longing and belonging. This chapter will, in a

first section titled “Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America,
and Europe”, outline Americanah’s constructions of spatiality while pay-
ing close attention to current discussions regarding the emergence of new
transnational African diasporic writings. The main contention here will be
that the novel’s geographical relations are always closely connected to sto-
ries of love and desire which act as the driving forces behind Americanah’s
worldly movements. In the second section, titled “Textual Entanglements:
Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack”, I will extend these discussions by exam-
ining the novel’s textual, textural enterprises: two of the main linking
devices the novel employs, hair and the internet, act as Americanah’s
affective and structural starting points from which Ifemelu, the novel’s
female protagonist, spins her story of belonging. Expounding on such
entanglements allows me to shed light on how this novel helps us ask
questions about personal and communal forms of building possible and
impossible worlds. Thirdly, in a section called “Returns and Romance:
‘It’s Just a Love Story’”, I will further deepen the notion that there lies
critical potential at the heart of Americanah’s love story as both protago-
nists return to Nigeria from the years spent abroad in America and
England, respectively. Undermining narrative conventions in African and
African diasporic novels of the twenty-first century of “successful” migra-
tion stories of assimilation, upward social mobility and settling in the West,
while seemingly conforming to the worn-out romantic trope of the happy
ending, the novel’s insistence on love as an active (and critical) force par-
takes in a new writing about Africa—one that pays attention to its own
humanity and asks questions about the nature of love in a globalised,
transnational world: it is important to want a world, to allow ourselves to
want a world and to imagine the affective dimensions that may rebuild a
world from and within new messes.
Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America

and Europe
Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked

the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes,
the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it
was this, the lack of smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the
other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia
had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelt of neglect. Baltimore
26 J. LEETSCH
smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton

had no smell.
—Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (2013a, 3)
We first meet Ifemelu, one of the two protagonists of Americanah, when

she has lived in America for 13 years; an immigrant from Nigeria who had
come to America when she was only a teenager, she just finished a fellow-
ship at Princeton University, runs a famous blog about race and politics
and seems settled both professionally and personally in a relationship with
a Yale professor—hers seems to be the epitome of a successful immigrant
life. Already in these first lines, the novel gives us a taste of her journey
across the US, hinting at her past geographical attachments: Philadelphia,
New Haven, Baltimore and Brooklyn. For now, however, I want to focus
on the first locus the novel offers us and how it complicates one-dimensional
imaginations of the world and its spaces from the outset. Everything in the
first paragraph of the novel, which has been used as this chapter’s epi-
graph, seems to point at the ease with which Ifemelu has found her place
in America: the “tranquil greenness”, the “calm and stately homes”, the
“quiet abiding air of earned grace” and the lack of smell all seem to con-
strue Princeton as a place where one can perhaps too easily feel at home
(3). This stability is broken up straight away though: “She liked, most of
all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone
else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone
adorned with certainty. But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton
to braid her hair” (3). Ifemelu’s blackness at once takes centre stage and
the novel points out how the affluent ease of Princeton is only available to
a certain group of people. The insistence on Princeton’s cleanliness and
odourlessness in Ifemelu’s narrative, and her own slant positioning to this
space, makes Princeton recognisable and comprehensible as a system that
is hermetically closed off, revealing initially invisible notions of white privi-
lege and societal as well as cultural hierarchies at play in even the most
educated, seemingly progressive university towns.
The fact that Ifemelu must leave Princeton to go to the suburb Trenton
to find a black hair salon destabilises Princeton and the certainty she
ascribes to being allowed “into a hallowed American club”. This is juxta-
posed with her inner emotional turmoil:
There was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning
disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amor-
phous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she
could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.
[…] Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could
sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off
the soil. And, of course, there was also Obinze. (5)
In these first lines of the novel, we learn of Ifemelu’s desire to return to

Nigeria—something that will only happen in the very last part of the book
after we have been told most of her story. The mention of Obinze,
Ifemelu’s high school boyfriend, seems to hint at larger things we as read-
ers know nothing about as of yet and the novel will, in fact, from here on
rotate around both their fates in alternating chapters. Their relationship
and then later the absence of one marks one of the main engines for the
plot to move forward and motivates the geographical travels undertaken
by the two protagonists.
When Ifemelu finally arrives in Trenton after taking the train from
Princeton, the narrative sets up the hair salon as an alternative universe to
the college town:
Mariama African Hair Braiding. It was her first time at this salon—her regu-
lar one was closed because the owner had gone back to Cote d’Ivoire to get
married—but it would look, she was sure, like all other African hair braiding
salons she had known: they were in the part of the city that had graffiti, dank
buildings, and no white people, they displayed bright signboards with names
like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding, they had radiators that were
too hot in the winter and air conditioners that did not cool in the summer,
and they were full of Francophone West African women braiders. (10)
Underlining the notion of intertwined familiarity and otherness that

emerges from this description, Ifemelu goes on: “The conversations were
loud and swift, in French or Wolof or Malinke, and when they spoke
English to customers, it was broken, curious, as though they had not quite
eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism.
Words came out half-completed” (11). Opposing Princeton, which smells
of nothing, the hair salon is painted as a dirty, noisy and smelly place where
cultures and languages clash, revealing Ifemelu’s own learned classed
assumptions. However, the novel is not content to rest on such easy
notions of hierarchy: in its buoyant bustle, the salon offers an alternative
to lifeless, odourless Princeton. With this opposition, Adichie undermines
clear-cut narratives of a protagonist having arrived at a stable identity as an
28 J. LEETSCH
Americanised African immigrant. What is more, Americanah’s worlded

and worldly ethics become evident within this space of the hair salon; it is
not only a space that contrasts Princeton but also a collective space of
black femininity which unites many different locales: Ifemelu from Nigeria,
the braiders Mariama and Halima from Mali as well as Aisha from Senegal
and customers from South Africa—they all enter into an uncomfortable
companionship within the space of the salon. Stemming from completely
different geographical, cultural, religious and class backgrounds, they nev-
ertheless converge in this strictly female space. Mariama African Hair
Braiding thus emerges as “a contested terrain where beauty constructions
blend and clash with the interchange of knowledge and experiences
between Black women of different origins and social status” (Cruz-
Gutiérrez 2019, 69). In this way, as Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez has argued,
the novel echoes bell hooks’ definition of the beauty salon in an article on
“Straightening Our Hair” in Zeta Magazine as “a real space of black
woman bonding through ritualized, shared experience. […] a space of
consciousness raising, a space where black women shared life stories—
hardship, trials, gossip” (1988, 34). This reveals an engagement with
female black space that is never one-dimensional but always ambiguously
multi-sited. The hair salon comes to act as one of the novel’s most impor-
tant connective spaces and can be defined as the core of the movements
the novel produces: “So here she was, on a day filled with the opulence of
summer, about to braid her hair for the journey home” (9). In an of itself
a space marked by multi-sited-ness, the salon also structurally causes the
story to move across borders, to connect continents and nations.
Throughout the course of the novel, whenever the narrative returns to the
story’s present time in the hair salon, a significant temporal and geograph-
ical shift takes place.
The first of these shifts occurs in the first chapter as Ifemelu sits in the
salon, talking about Nollywood films, reluctantly advising her Senegalese
braider Aisha regarding her two Igbo boyfriends and verbally sparring
with a white customer about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Jean
Toomer’s Cane—during all this, “feeling reckless”, she sends an e-mail to
Obinze to inform him that she would be coming back to Nigeria (19).
With this moment of reaching out and breaking years of silence, the per-
spective changes to Obinze who receives her e-mail, and the text trans-
ports the reader from East Coast America to West Africa. Following the
first chapter, which circles around Ifemelu in Princeton and Trenton, with
a chapter on Obinze, Ifemelu’s former boyfriend in Lagos, the text
continues to refuse to focus on just one, stable locus. Moving from the
hair salon which complicates Princeton, to the Nigerian city of Lagos, the
novel does not give precedence to either. Regarding Adichie’s representa-
tion of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, Pankaj Mishra argues that “far from
being an imaginary homeland, Lagos emerges in Americanah as one of
the ‘developing’ world’s gritty megacities, complete with broken roads,
chronic power outages, organic food-fetishists and Hello magazine clones”
(2013, n. pag.). As we encounter Obinze stuck in Lagosian traffic, the city
around him materialises as a three-dimensional place, swimming into focus
between the grey gloom of rain, “the radio turned on low to the Pidgin
English news on Wazobia FM” and the colourful CD covers pressed
against his limousine’s window by a street hawker (23). In contrasting the
experiences of the two protagonists in New Jersey and Nigeria, the novel
amplifies the world-building parameters set up in the hair salon as they
constantly shuttle between differently situated points of origin. Obinze,
deeply immersed in American literature during his childhood and teenage
years but, unlike Ifemelu, denied a visa to the US, went to England where
he worked illegally only to be then deported back to Nigeria after a few
years. Here, in the narrative present, Obinze “has made it” and counts
among the wealthy elite of Lagos. Tracing his and his wife Kosi’s various
social engagements, the novel carves out a complex image of Nigerian
society. Mirroring Ifemelu’s multi-sited experience in the hair salon,
Obinze describes a similarly hybrid situation:
Mohammed, the gate-man, wiry in his dirty white caftan, flung open the
gates, and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the tan colonnaded
house. Inside was his furniture imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-
old daughter, Buchi, the nanny Christiana, his wife’s sister Chioma, who was
on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and
the new house girl Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after
his wife decided that Nigerian house girls were unsuitable. […] the kitchen
would be fragrant with curry and thyme, and CNN would be on downstairs,
while the television upstairs would be turned to Cartoon Network, and per-
vading it all would be the undisturbed air of well-being. (26)
This shows not only Obinze’s acquired wealth and his privileged position
among Nigeria’s upper class but also the cultural complexity inherent to
his life as many different worlds intermingle, from CNN to Benin Republic,
from Italian furniture to the smell of curry. Like Ifemelu, however, Obinze
quickly disrupts this sense of “well-being”—“he had begun […] to feel
30 J. LEETSCH
bloated from all he had acquired […] and would, from time to time, be
overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be
free” (26). Obinze is slowly realising that even though everything seems
perfect on the surface, he is deeply unhappy, both with his marriage and
his professional life. This chapter ends with Obinze composing a reply to
Ifemelu and stepping out on his veranda, breathing in Lagos’ hot night
air, feeling “as if he could float, and all he needed to do was let himself go”
(44). This ambiguous last sentence not only tethers him to his home in
Lagos but also hints towards the restlessness his life in Nigeria is
imbued with.
With these two introductory chapters, then, the first part of the novel
sets up a fundamental structure of not only moving between narrative
perspectives but also moving between geographical locations: Nigeria,
England and the US become spaces which are always infused with other
worlds. This world-making can be described as a transnational act as it
consciously fashions multiple points of contact between nations. Ifemelu’s
American space is inherently linked to Obinze’s Nigerian one, much in the
same way as Nigeria later in the narrative becomes linked to England
which in turn connects to America. Americanah, with its oscillation
between different spaces of belonging, promotes thinking beyond tidy
entities of nations and categories. It not only escapes the narrow confines
of national borders but indeed troubles narratives of national belonging.
What is most interesting about Americanah’s transnational spatial prac-
tices is that it never gives precedence to the West over the Rest and that it
pays attention to its African, European and American spaces with the same
emphasis. As we have seen just from its first two chapters, the novel swings
between spaces across the globe, but never denies itself a sense of locality,
of being tied to a specific place of origin. This imaginative strategy is
unusual for traditional African diasporic fiction, which has often focussed
on the country of destination, but one which has become more and more
pronounced in recent works. Together with a new canon of twenty-first-
century African diasporic fiction such as Teju Cole’s Open City (2011),
Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011),
Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013b), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New
Names (2013), Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), Yaa Gyasi’s
Homegoing (2016) or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), to name but a
few examples, Americanah offers an intense sense of being located else-
where whilst at the same time being placed within Africa. It engages in
these localised emplacements without ever negating the movement
between nations. This new wave of contemporary transnational literature,

to which Adichie’s novel belongs to, refuses to be pinned down to one flat
notion of what it means to be African, either on the continent or in Africa’s
diaspora. Regarding this co-existence of local/global and centre/periph-
ery in transnational imaginaries, Parker and Young posit that
transnationalism is not a new term for internationalism or globalization or

any other existing system. It marks a break with the old model of centre and
periphery. Instead of emphasizing traditional national boundaries, transna-
tionalism places importance on the “trans”: it marks movements across or
beyond prescribed cultural and national spaces without privileging those
spaces. It grows out of local sites of production but acknowledges that the
local must have a conversation with the global. (2013, 1)
Echoing this, Sara Ahmed reminds us in Strange Encounters that “transna-

tional journeys of subjects and others invite us to consider what it means
to be at home, to inhabit a particular place, and might call us to question
the relationship between identity, belonging, and home” (2000, 78).
Americanah, focussing on geographical and affective movements between
spaces and perspectives, can be regarded as a prime example of writing and
understanding the world transnationally and excels in calling into question
uncomplicated, one-sited notions of home and belonging both within and
beyond the boundaries of the nation.
In light of these transnational strategies of writing about contemporary
African diasporic belonging, part two of Americanah returns to Ifemelu
and the hair salon. The further the novel delves into the past, the clearer
becomes its strategy of troubling and complicating stories about identity
and nation. To do so, the hair salon is again utilised as a connective space
and propels the narrative into Ifemelu’s childhood in Nigeria:
“Your hair hard,” Aisha said.

“It is not hard,” Ifemelu said firmly. “You are using the wrong comb”. And
she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.
Ifemelu had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-
black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took
hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic
rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. (49)
Taking hair and its embodied, sensible realities as the structural and affec-
tive link between past and present which couples the experiences in hair
32 J. LEETSCH
salons in different countries, the narrative goes on to chronicle Ifemelu’s

and Obinze’s childhood and how they meet and fall in love during sec-
ondary school in Lagos and then in Nsukka where they go to university in
the late 1990s. Through delineating her mother’s almost fanatical
Christian beliefs and describing her father as a “man full of blanched long-
ings, a middle-brow civil servant who wanted a life different from what he
had, who had longed for more education than he was able to get” (57),
Ifemelu paints a picture of a family that places all its middle-class hopes on
their only child and on a Nigerian nation that teeters between an uncertain
future and an oppressive past. Ifemelu’s father seems tied to a trauma that
he cannot overcome—he has become stuck within old colonial economies
of value and power (58). In contrast, Ifemelu’s younger Aunty Uju, her
closest confidante, is the first family member to openly criticise the nation:
“You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this
country is not corruption” (93). She is also the first to leave Nigeria. She
becomes the mistress of a man called “The General”, a fictional version of
one of Nigeria’s leaders during the military dictatorship (more specifically
the Second Junta 1983–1999 under Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim
Babangida and Sani Abacha), and has a child with him. When the General
is killed in a military plane crash, she escapes to America with her son,
Dike. This migration to the US foreshadows Ifemelu’s own travels but can
also be read as exemplary of how the novel brings to light the intersections
between histories of colonisation, postcolonial agency and new global and
transnational flows of people; the multi-routed connections between the
nation and the world.
All of Ifemelu’s friends have either American or British passports or
move there once their parents give up hope in the face of Nigeria’s politi-
cal corruption. Especially for the younger generation, it is not the old
colonial ruler Great Britain—as is the case with Ifemelu’s father—but
America which is regarded the ultimate goal. This desire is expressed in
the term “Americanah” which becomes a label, half-mocking and half-
admiring, for those Nigerians who “have been to” America: “They roared
with laughter, at that word ‘Americanah,’ wreathed in glee, the fourth
syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below
them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affecta-
tions, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to
every English word she spoke” (78). But later, when Ifemelu listens to her
more privileged classmates, it becomes clear that underneath all the mock-
ery lies an earnest wish to leave behind the hopelessness of their Nigerian
homes: “‘American passport is the coolest thing,’ Kayode said. ‘I would

exchange my British passport tomorrow’”; “‘I very nearly had one o,’
Obinze said. ‘I was eight months old when my parents took me to
America’”; “‘I was on my mom’s until primary three, then my dad said we
needed to get our own passports,’ Osahon said” (79). Once one of the
most important routes for transatlantic slave trade, the passage to America
is now seen as desirable—as an often-unattainable possibility for education
and freedom. The crossing over is now a self-facilitated and a voluntary
one. But despite the affirmative re-inscription of this route which had
once been imbued with death and violence, the themes of homelessness,
displacement and the struggle to forge belonging pervade Americanah.
The novel powerfully evokes Africa’s colonial history by re-tracing the
triangle of the transatlantic slave trade in connecting three nations with
each other. In following Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England, the
novel pays tribute to these legacies of colonialism and slavery as it not only
reconnects Africa, America and Europe through its transnational and
multi-routed travels but also probes the difficulties of contemporary and
voluntary African migrants. The text not only creates new geographical
imaginaries but also problematises existing frameworks, as Ifemelu and
Obinze shed light on both the US’s and the UK’s fraught engagement
with the other and the foreign. Both Ifemelu in America and Obinze in
England offer a reconsideration of the relationship of black subjects to the
West all the while upending the binary opposition between Africa and
the rest.
Ifemelu’s America
Americanah produces highly complex interrelations between its charac-
ters and the worlds they inhabit. I will now continue to examine the space-
building that Ifemelu engages in—a space-building that always lies close
to the emotional and relational facets behind geographical displacement,
thus recognising the novel as deeply dedicated to revealing how black
diasporic women wrangle with the frames of the private, personal, intimate
and vulnerable—all while bearing the marks of twenty-first-century dia-
sporic displacement and political turmoil. When Ifemelu first comes to
America as a teenager, full of hope and naivety, Brooklyn is connected to
her aunt and cousin. As quoted at the beginning of the novel and this
chapter, its smell of sun-warmed garbage evokes the long hot summer
Ifemelu spends in New York. Again, it is a situation at the hair salon in the
34 J. LEETSCH
narrative present that triggers the narrative to move back in time and start
Ifemelu’s story of American initiation:
Ifemelu brushed away some sticky hair on her neck. The room was seething
with heat. “Can we leave the door open?” she asked. Mariama opened the
door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.”
Each heat wave reminded Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was
summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “over-
seas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was
“overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by rea-
son, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for
her trip. (126–127)
When Ifemelu arrives in New York, she feels suspended: “that first sum-
mer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just
around the next corner she would turn” (136). Her time in Brooklyn is
marked by disassociation as the America she encounters does not fit the
image she had constructed back in Nigeria. When she moves to Philadelphia
to start college, she lives in a small dingy flat with three American girls:
“her roommates, Jackie, Elena, and Allison, looked almost interchange-
able, all small-boned and slim-hipped, their chestnut hair ironed straight,
their lacrosse sticks piled in the narrow hallway” (156). Just as Ifemelu
describes it years later as having the musty scent of history, Philadelphia is
indeed the place where her story starts. This inauguration of Ifemelu’s
American history is one that is deeply ambiguous:
She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a
toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who
lived in exclamation points. […] People who did not scrub in the shower:
their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom,
but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made
them seem unreachable alien to her. (156–157)
This interplay of intimacy and alienation with the other girls’ beauty rituals
is striking. The bathroom is a girly room that is not her own as its cultural
codes and politics of hygiene remain separate from her. She cannot gain
entry into that room and is excluded. She feels estranged and foreign to
herself and thus Philadelphia is put in stark contrast to her life in Nigeria
and especially her connection to Obinze, who tries to guide her through
her new life via telephone: “The world was wrapped in gauze; she could
see the shapes of things but not clearly enough, never enough. She told
Obinze that there were things she should know how to do, but didn’t,
details she should have corralled into her space but hadn’t. And he
reminded her of how quickly she was adapting, his tone always calm,
always consoling” (160–161). Despite her initial difficulties, however,
Philadelphia is also the site demarcating her initiation into America—
where she begins knowing and vocalising herself: “New words were falling
out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing” (167). She starts to
make sense of her new home via the medium of language and literature as
Obinze sends her reading recommendations per e-mail: “a cyber-café had
just opened in Nsukka—he gave her a list of books. [Baldwin’s] The Fire
Next Time was the first” (166). As she reads, “America’s mythologies
began to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and
region—became clear” (167). But the one thing that most of all creates a
feeling of community and belonging is when she becomes a member of
the ASA, the University of Pennsylvania’s African Students Association.
The ASA meetings “were held in the basement of Wharton Hall, a harshly
lit, windowless room, paper plates, pizza cartons, and soda bottles piled
on a metal table, folding chairs arranged in a limp semicircle” (170). This
room, though provisional, dirty and messy, is a room for communication
and exchange, dialogue and affiliation. It provides an environment for
critical thinking about what it means to be African in America and not
African American:
Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians,

Zimbabweans, one Congolese, and one Guinean sat around eating, talking,
fueling spirits, and their different accents formed meshes of solacing sounds.
They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How
bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a
day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absur-
dity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of
longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.
Here, Ifemelu felt a gentle, swaying sense of renewal. Here, she did not have
to explain herself. (170–171)
The temporary and transitional basement room creates a safe space—one

where many different voices and disparate accents mesh. As Sara Ahmed
argues in Strange Encounters, shared displacement can create a bond and
communities are built through the “shared experience of not being fully
36 J. LEETSCH
at home”: “the process of estrangement is the condition for the emer-

gence of a contested community, a community which ‘makes a place’ in
the act of reaching out to the ‘out-of-place-ness’ of other migrant bodies”
(2000, 94). As a tenuous link between American and African worlds, the
ASA provides the possibility to forge a new, transnational home. The ASA
basement, which smells of many things, thus constitutes a space of longing
and belonging where a communal group identity is forged.
This connection to the ASA as well as her connection back “home” to
Nigeria and to Obinze is radically severed by Ifemelu when she undergoes
a traumatising experience: searching for a way to pay her expenses and
send money back home, she takes on a different name to work under a
false security card. “At first, Ifemelu forgot that she was someone else”
(159), but then she gets used to living invisibly, hiding her name and
revoking her identity. When all attempts at finding a job remain unfruitful,
however, she responds to a newspaper advertisement looking for a “female
personal assistant for busy sports coach in Ardmore, communication and
interpersonal skills required” (176)—this entails “helping him relax”
(177) by letting him touch her while he masturbates. Initially she refuses
to engage with him, but when she fails to pay yet another bill, she takes
him up on his offer out of desperation and existential fear. The violation
of her body precipitates a process of derealisation: “She wanted to shower,
to scrub herself, but she could not bear the thought of touching her own
body, and so she put on her nightdress, gingerly, to touch as little of her-
self as possible” (190). Falling into a deep depression after these distress-
ing events, she also cuts herself off from anything else, her American life,
her Nigerian family and, most of all, from Obinze:
That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the
world outside her window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by lay-
ered snow. She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness
descended too soon […] Obinze called many times but she did not pick up
her phone. She deleted his voice messages unheard and his e-mails unread,
and she felt herself sinking, sinking quickly, and unable to pull herself up.
[…] Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. […] She no
longer went to class. Her days were stilled by silence and snow. (191–192)
It is certainly no coincidence that in this moment of utter displacement

and isolation in America, Ifemelu experiences her first snowfall. The cold-
ness and whiteness seem to envelop her and make any connection to
Nigeria impossible. Ifemelu’s inability to put into words what has hap-
pened to her and the denial of any form of communication with Obinze is
mirrored by her engagement with place. Instead of partaking in processes
of relationality and productive meaning making, she shuts herself off from
any form of placed attachment—this is marked by her refusal to go outside
and interact with the wintery city that sinks into snow. She is “detached”
and “bloodless” and Philadelphia becomes what Marc Augé would call a
non-place, a place of no “relation, only solitude” (1995, 103).
The only thing that eventually shakes her out of her depression is when
her friend Ginika forces her to take on a job as a babysitter. This rings in
the second stage of Ifemelu’s life in America; she has now revoked all con-
tact with her former boyfriend Obinze, whom she has completely cut off
out of a deeply seated sense of shame and guilt: “With each month of
silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and
become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat” (241). After a few
months at her babysitter job, she meets enigmatic Curt, the uncle of her
protegees. They date and she subsequently moves with him to Baltimore.
Baltimore and her relationship to Curt initiate another phase in her
American life—one which is once again signalled by a section of the novel
that harks back to the hair salon in the present-time narration (229–235).
Here, Ifemelu observes a white American girl coming to the salon to get
her hair braided in what is described if not as cultural appropriation or
outright racism then as plain ignorance. This foreshadows the struggle
with her own notions of beauty and African hair during her relationship
with Curt.
Equating Baltimore with the smell of brine, the text points not only
towards the city’s liminal geographical location at the coast as the second
largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic but also to a more abstract emotional
geography that is Ifemelu’s identity as an African migrant in America.
Upper-class white Curt seems to open up a new world for her, a comfort-
able space full of possibility: “A sense of contentment overwhelmed her.
That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. How
quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa
stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first class cabins […] She
had slipped out of her old skin” (246). Ifemelu not only experiences an
opening up of the world (they go travelling, hiking, kayaking, camping
and visit Europe) but also personally seems to find a new openness: “With
Curt, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares […] She
38 J. LEETSCH
was lighter and leaner” (241). Baltimore, situated on the coast at the bor-
der between sea and land, seems to denote a new sense of opportunity.
The artificiality of these processes, however, is revealed when her care-
fully constructed new sense of self is suddenly disrupted by an event that
punctures the safe bubble of her cosmopolitan life with Curt. One Saturday
afternoon at the mall, she meets one of her childhood friends from Lagos,
Kayode DaSilva: “They hugged, looked at each other, said all the things
people said who had not seen each other in many years, both lapsing into
their Nigerian voices and their Nigerian selves, louder, more heightened,
adding ‘o’ to their sentences” (276). The superimposition of linguistic
markers of “original” Nigerian voice and “newly acquired” American
voice and the retreat into familiar speech patterns points to an intricate
interplay of language and identity. That this happens at an American mall,
of all places, only serves to stress this hybridity. The incident not only
inserts Nigeria back into Ifemelu’s American space but also propels her
out from her closed off world with Curt. Kayode says, “‘I love Maryland.
I run into Nigerians at the grocery store and in the mall, everywhere. It’s
like being back home. But I guess you know that already.’ ‘Yes,’ she said,
even though she did not. Her Maryland was a small, circumscribed world
of Curt’s American friends” (276). The two Marylands that are being
opposed here make visible different structures of making worlds and mak-
ing community—an opposition in which Ifemelu inhabits the side that
stands for isolation and confinement. The lack of social structures, the
absence of friendships and links back home, is overwritten by an even
larger void, brought back to the surface by Kayode, who mentions that he
is still in contact with Obinze, who is now living in England:
A numbness spread swiftly through her. […] She had created the distance,
ignoring him, changing her e-mail address and phone number, and yet she
felt deeply betrayed by this news. Changes had been made in his life that she
did not know about. He was in England. Only a few months ago, she and
Curt had gone to England for the Glastonbury Festival, and later spent two
days in London. Obinze might have been there. She might have run into
him as she walked down Oxford Street. (277)
Struck by this blank space which suddenly threatens to topple her carefully
built American home, Ifemelu tries to resuscitate the formerly severed link
between her and Obinze and contacts him via mail. This reaching out via
e-mail transports the text from America across the Atlantic to Europe.
Obinze’s England
As the novel deftly takes the meeting between Ifemelu and Kayode as a
turning point to leave Ifemelu’s story and to venture into Obinze’s life, in
the following I similarly want to concentrate on the counterpart to
Ifemelu’s America, Obinze’s England, before returning to Nigeria with
both of them. Thinking back to how Ifemelu describes her experience of
England when she visited with Curt, it becomes clear that there could not
be a more extreme contrast between her and Obinze’s experiences abroad:
she visits the UK as a sheltered, upper-class tourist with a green card, goes
to Glastonbury festival and shops in Central London, while he works as an
illegal immigrant, cleans toilets and desperately tries to arrange a fake mar-
riage in order to attain a visa: “In London, night came too soon, it hung
in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk
descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air. In those
first weeks, the cold startled Obinze with its weightless menace, drying his
nostrils, deepening his anxieties, making him urinate too often” (281).
Obinze’s England is a cold one and his precarious status as an illegal immi-
grant is mirrored by his spatial tactics: he seems to be always on the move,
drifting from one tube station to another, walking the streets of London,
sitting on the train, driving or working at a moving company. These con-
tinuous movements underline the helplessness and purposelessness of his
life in England. Especially the tube station as an inherently metropolitan,
transitory space signifies one important spatial aspect of London, the for-
mer heart of the Empire: the London tube with its labyrinthine branches
and colourful lines transports bodies in and out of the city as it bridges
different suburbs with various ethnic make-ups. It is almost always tube
stations that figure as important players in Obinze’s fate: “It was at a tube
station that he met the Angolans who would arrange his marriage” (281),
“He met the girl, Cleotilde, a few days later at a shopping centre, in a
McDonald’s whose windows looked out onto the dank entrance of a tube
station” (282), and it is also at a tube station that he realises that he might
develop feelings for this stranger woman whom he is supposed to marry
(285). The stations serve as meeting points between different cultures;
they seem like dreary, damp and grey versions of the contact zones Ifemelu
had experienced in America. For Obinze, the tube stations do signify
points of contact, but they also point towards the sheer vastness and arbi-
trariness of the city: “the word ‘underground’ made him think of doomed
tunnels that fed into the earth and went on forever, ending nowhere”
40 J. LEETSCH
(307). These contact zones are only accessible to Obinze in a restricted,

shadowy way. His life in London resembles a closed-off cage in which he
has to deal with his anxieties and hardships alone: “He would walk fast on
the pavement, tuned tightly into himself, hands deep in the coat his cousin
had lent him […] [A]nd he would think: You can work, you are legal, you
are visible, and you don’t even know how fortunate you are” (281).
Obinze lives in London “invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil
sketch” (318), he seems a faint trace of himself without ever being seen or
recognised. These processes of becoming un-named echo Sara Ahmed’s
conceptualisations in her essay “Wiggle Room” of race as a restrictive
room which stifles and makes small:
You feel cramped, even nervous. To feel whiteness as oppressive is to be

shaped by what you keep coming into contact with in such a way that you
are restricted. I am speaking, here, of non-white people who inhabit white
spaces, spaces that have become white through who as well as how bodies
gather. […] You might experience yourself becoming tighter in response to
a world that does not accommodate you. You have less room. Sometimes a
world can be so tight that it is hard to breathe. (2014, n. pag.)
The restrictiveness with which Obinze experiences his surroundings can

be traced through how he moves through London: he is “turned tightly
into himself”, “nearly swallowed” by his surroundings (281). The only
place which seems to give him room to breathe, at least for a short time,
is a bookstore where he could “become Obinze again” (317). The book-
store marks another transnational node of connection and community in
the novel, as he reads only contemporary American fiction there, hoping
to “find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that
he had imagined himself part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life
in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them
and what attracted them” (317). He tries to become part of the America
he had longed for in his childhood and perhaps also to reach (for) Ifemelu
through literature. He consumes these novels to be able to insert himself
into another (imaginary) world, but ultimately fails.
That he cannot escape his reality in England becomes clear when the
novel draws on the historical political situation of the time to flesh out
Obinze’s status as an illegal immigrant. This tension is again played out in
the ambivalent space of the London tube:
He sat on the stained seat of the noisy train, opposite a woman reading the
evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. […] The
wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seek-
ers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles
were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a
world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never
considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of
black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he under-
stood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. (320)
The medical discourse of infection employed here by this post-9/11

nationalistic rhetoric against a perceived reversed colonisation evokes
racial anxieties of a nation which has lost some of its hegemony in a glo-
balised, global world. The notion of immigration as a movement into the
wrong direction is deeply entrenched in the utterances of David Blunkett,
who became Britain’s Home Secretary in 2001, and one that Adichie uses
to underline Obinze’s troubled existence below the radar of legal citizen-
ship. This displacement plays out in a remarkable scene, when Obinze—
again on a train—experiences a short episode of dissociation: “Later, on
the train to Essex, he noticed that all the people around him were
Nigerians, loud conversations in Yoruba and Pidgin filled the carriage, and
for a moment he saw the unfettered non-white foreignness of this scene
through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube” (320). In
pitting white and black perspectives against each other, the novel dislodges
Obinze’s black outsider position in a white space as it makes him tempo-
rarily compliant with the white gaze onto his Nigerian expatriate compa-
triots. The shift in perspective and this short moment of being inside-out
can be regarded as exemplary for his whole experience of London, one
that is once removed from every community. As he is not legal, he cannot
build lasting friendships with his work colleagues, and for the same reason
his contact to his Nigerian friends in London is disrupted repeatedly. A
deep raft of misunderstanding and apathy functions as a white noise which
interrupts all his interpersonal connections.
The only meaningful relationship Obinze seems to be able to hold up
is with the girl he is introduced to by a pair of Angolan brothers he pays
to arrange a fake marriage to be able to stay in the UK. Against all odds,
Obinze and Cleotilde start developing feelings for each other, but the
marriage never goes through. At the last second, he is arrested by official
government workers and put into detention in Manchester before being
42 J. LEETSCH
transported to Dover and flown back to Nigeria: “He was led to a cell. It
was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could
not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s
dismal, forgotten zoo” (344). Obinze decides not to fight the deportation
process and so the lawyer assigned to him “was going to tick on a form
that his client was willing to be removed. ‘Removed.’ That word made
Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath
and mind. A thing” (345). His status as an unwanted, undesirable object
completes Obinze’s failed attempts to make a home for himself in the
UK. The allusion to Nsukka zoo plays out again when he is led through
Manchester Airport and he imagines all people staring at him like a caged
animal: “He hated the cold heaviness of the handcuffs, the mark he imag-
ined they left on his wrists, the glint of the interlinking circles of metal that
robbed him of his movement” (345). His restricted engagement with the
city and with England thus reaches an unhappy climax when he is trans-
ferred from Manchester to Dover:
Obinze had read about Dover in a newspaper. A former prison. It felt sur-
real, to be driven past the electronic gates, the high walls, the wires. His cell
was smaller, colder, than the cell in Manchester […]. He felt suffocated in
that cell, let out only to exercise and to eat, food that brought to mind a
bowl of boiled worms. He could not eat; he felt his body slackening, his
flesh disappearing. (349)
The psychological trauma of displacement and isolation is transported

onto a bodily level, he can feel himself shrink and disappear: “he felt raw,
skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off” (347). The contrast
between Ifemelu’s experience of Great Britain as an Americanised citizen
with a green card visiting Glastonbury, and Obinze, who tries to make a
living as an illegal guest worker in London but ultimately fails, could not
be greater. The novel sets up this opposition to shed light on the complic-
ity of a cosmopolitan elite moving across the globe and the shadowed lives
of those living below the shiny surfaces. Subtly drawing out difference,
privilege and power, Adichie not only celebrates transnational mobility
but also calls attention the ugly underbelly of globalisation and the para-
digms accompanying it, such as cultural assimilation or the ascendancy of
neo-liberal capitalism as the worldwide economic model.
Discussions of the potential of transnational literature have often

highlighted the power imbalances inherent to diasporic, migratory experi-
ences: on the one hand, there exist the “privileging experiences of postco-
lonial intellectuals, cosmopolitan escapism, and apolitical aestheticism”
(Martinek 2013, 219), while on the other hand, we need to pose ques-
tions like Robert Young’s when he asks: “How can a migratory identity be
celebrated in the refugee camps of Qetta, Jolazi, and elsewhere in Pakistan,
[…] in the West Bank, in the former Sangatee camp in France?” (2004,
53). I posit that Americanah draws attention to exactly this point of con-
tradiction as the text pits Obinze’s failed journey against Ifemelu’s story of
American success, constantly weighing these narratives against each other
as they entangle in alternating chapters which jump across the globe.
Adichie’s writing is a transnational writing which challenges compliance
and complacence and which questions class and privilege.1 As John
McLeod succinctly argues, “in its attention to the nodes and networks of
transnational movement, transnationalism captures something of the
continual movements and crossings between locations in ways, rather than
focussing on a single, monumental passage of the migrant or the exile”
(2001, 89; emphasis in original). In focusing on many different locations
and networks, Americanah complicates the one-directional, one-
dimensional notion of immigration and pays attention to the many layers
of transnational movement. Obinze’s jarring experience in England and
his deportation back to Nigeria is not a story we as readers suspect to be
told after following around Ifemelu through her American Bildungs-
narrative. Even less so do we expect Ifemelu herself to return to Nigeria
after she has become so successful in the States. In focussing on these
many-layered relocations across the world, the novel offers sites of contes-
tation to all too narrowly defined notions of home. In doing so, it pro-
vides an alternative to what Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur describe
as the “hegemonic homogenizing forces of globalisation” (2003, 7).
Engaging in these often-discordant transnational imaginaries, Americanah
rethinks the categories of nation and nationhood as it configures the rela-
tion between world citizen and a geographically definable space of belong-
ing anew, for both its protagonists and readers. Adichie’s novel, then,
animates, shapes and thinks into existence alternative worlds as it itself
firmly, inextricably belongs to the world.
44 J. LEETSCH
Textual Entanglements: Braiding

and Blogging B(l)ack
The transnational dynamics the novel engages in would not be possible

without the connection between the two lovers. Ifemelu and Obinze
become separated early in the narrative and all subsequent chapters revolve
around the absence of, and longing for, the other. This connectivity
between the lovers, and between Africa, America and England, is estab-
lished through a plethora of linking devices which transfer the geographi-
cal movements narrated within the story onto a meta-textual, textural
level. In the discussions above it has become clear how Adichie’s novel
creates a transnational narrative fabric that spans countries and continents:
expanding a Barthesian notion of text as tissue,2 I propose that the novel
should be read as incorporating different textures and different materials
which are effected through continuous and generative interweavings. This
process of weaving or interweaving is achieved in Americanah by textual,
textural strategies that not only constitute structural links (across time and
across space) but on a more abstract level lend a specific self-referential,
performative quality to Americanah’s crossings. Two of the most intrigu-
ing linking devices are hair and the internet. Both not only connect differ-
ent parts of the story but also engage in other ways of producing a text
that is inherently relational and connective. The textural practices con-
nected to hair, such as braiding and weaving, and those connected to the
World Wide Web, such as linking and threading, are taken up by
Americanah in order to self-referentially foreground the materiality of the
novel and to make visible how it creates a complex web of affect and rela-
tionality which is woven together by many different threads. To further
mobilise and stimulate my discussions on dis- and emplacements between
Africa, America and Europe in section one of this chapter, in the following
I will analyse these two linking devices to ascertain what kind of transna-
tional textuality the novel performs and how it creates an intertwined net
of geographical and affective encounters.
Hair Textures
Is Your Hair Still Political?
tell me / when it starts to burn …
—Audre Lorde, “A Question of Essence” ([1986] 1997, 410)
In the hair salon, Ifemelu not only has her hair braided for her journey
back home but also starts a braiding process that takes much longer—in
the case of my Americanah edition, 588 pages. As Kathryn Schulz has
stated, “Adichie, too, is braiding and weaving, and the longer she leaves
Ifemelu in that dilapidated, overheated salon, the more clearly the strands
of her story emerge” (2013, n. pag.). Just as the teenager Ifemelu had her
hair braided in Nigeria for her trip to States, she repeats this braiding pro-
cess years later to return: her braids literally frame the story of Americanah.3
Hair (and the locations it is combed through and plaited in, like the salon
in Trenton) functions as a structural linking device between text passages,
temporal levels and geographical spaces, but it also points towards the
political issues linked to black hair. It opens up a space to think about how
inherently interlinked notions of aesthetics and politics are. “Is your hair
still political?/tell me/when it starts to burn”, asks Audre Lorde in her
1986 poem “A Question of Essence”, used as this section’s epigraph.
About four years later during a trip to the Caribbean, as related in an essay
reprinted in the collection I Am Your Sister (2009), Lorde is yet again
confronted by her question as the style of her hair, natural locks, delays her
from being allowed to board her flight (224). Because the woman behind
the Immigration Control desk assumes she is Rastafarian, Lorde’s hair
suddenly takes on an additional, undesirable meaning—one deeply entan-
gled in diverse historical, socio-political, aesthetic and economic realities:
“On this tiny island, I had found another example of Black people being
used to testify against other Black people, using our enemies’ weapons
against each other, judging each other on the color of our skin, the cut of
our clothes, the styling of our hair” (227). As Durell M. Callier and
Kimberlee Pérez argue in their forum on “Still Political: Reflections on the
Complex Histories, Negotiations, and Significations of Hair”:
Within the repetitive and situated ongoing politics of hair, we locate hair’s
communicative doing, its performativity, and its signification of race, gen-
der, sexuality, and class. Hair is a powerful and meaningful performance of
identity and, subsequently, of public relation. Often in its signifying, hair
symbolizes acceptability, thereby confirming or disaffirming one’s belong-
ing to social groups, communities, and particular codes of conduct. That
hair—its texture, styling, and presence and absence—is private and personal
while simultaneously hypervisible and public is one of its intriguing ironies.
(2014, 391)
46 J. LEETSCH
A direct response to such questions and complexities, Americanah, simi-

larly, shows how Ifemelu grapples with her appearance and how she slowly
comes to understand the contested field of black femininity and beauty.
During her relationship with Curt, her white American boyfriend, for
example, she becomes freer and more mobile as she travels with him and
profits from his financial privilege—at least at first. But the narrative also
describes another process while she is with him: the process of trying to
tame her hair to become more American, whiter, more acceptable. When
Curt helps Ifemelu get a job interview at an advertising agency, both her
Nigerian Aunt Uju and her African American friend Ruth advise her to
straighten her hair in order to heighten her chances of actually getting the
job. Here, hair relaxation can be read as rite of passage into an American
corporate context: “I need to look professional for this interview, and
professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has
to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never
kinky” (252). Loosening the braids she used to wear, she regards the
relaxation process as an adventure. Initially, she attempts to relax her hair
at home by herself, but when this relaxer does not take, she goes to a hair-
dresser: “Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser
rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink,
needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to
different parts of her body, back up to her head” (251). The end result
seems to conform to the expectations: “Her hair was hanging down rather
than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a
slight bob at her chin” (251). But, as she quickly notes, the “verve was
gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully;
while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of
something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a
sense of loss” (251). This pervasive sense of loss is coupled with bodily
discomfort: “Two days later, there were scabs on her scalp. Three days
later, they oozed pus” (252). She gets the job. Black female hair comes to
signify the insidious ways black female bodies are often violently subjected
to social control mechanism (cf. Banks 2000; Dabiri 2020)—Americanah’s
portrayal of Ifemelu’s hair journey sensitively attests to such dehumanising
processes.
The question of black (female) hair—small afros, big afros, straight
weaves, kinky coils, cornrows, box braids, dreadlocks, twists, raucous curls
and TWAs (teeny weeny afros) (cf. 262)—and its textural recalcitrance is
taken up repeatedly during the novel. As Adichie says in an interview with
the Guardian: “Hair is hair—yet also about larger questions: self-

acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many
black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable”
(Adichie 2013b, n. pag.). In his seminal article on “Black Hair/Style
Politics”, Kobena Mercer concisely outlines these issues. He argues that
we need to
recognize hair-styling itself for what it is, a specifically cultural activity and
practice. As such we require a historical perspective on how many different
strands—economic, political, psychological—have been woven into the rich
and complex texture of our nappy hair, such that issues of style are so highly
charged as sensitive questions about our very ‘identity’. As part of our
modes of appearance in the everyday world, the ways we shape and style hair
may be seen as both individual expressions of the self and as embodiments
of society’s norms, conventions and expectations. (1987, 34)
He goes on to argue that aesthetic and political strategies surrounding

black hair can be read as “creative responses to the experience of oppres-
sion and dispossession. Black hair-styling may thus be evaluated as a popu-
lar art form articulating a variety of aesthetic ‘solutions’ to a range of
‘problems’ created by ideologies of race and racism” (34). Pointing out
the histories of oppression tied up with black hair, he reiterates that hair
was and still is “burdened with a range of ‘negative’ connotations” that
divide between black and white, ugly and beautiful (35): “Good”, or
European, hair is connected to textures such as soft, straight and shiny,
whereas “bad” black hair takes on connotations of ugliness and impurity
with textures described as tough, hard and woolly. Americanah echoes
these issues as Ifemelu grapples with the meaning of her hair during her
time in the US.4
Interestingly, the decisions she makes about her hair become entangled
with decisions she makes about her private life, literally intertwining the
personal with the political. When her hair starts to fall out, the text also
centres around her fading attachment to Curt: “And then her hair began
to fall out at the temples. She drenched it in rich, creamy conditioners, and
sat under steamers until water droplets ran down her neck. Still, her hair-
line shifted further backwards each day” (257). This passage directly fol-
lows a section about Curt: “There was something in him, lighter than ego
but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, wax-
ing” (257). Ifemelu’s burgeoning disenchantment with Curt coincides
with the disintegration of her hair. Later, when she has found a way to be
48 J. LEETSCH
happy with her hair, Ifemelu also finds a way to express why her relation-
ship to Curt did not work: “But it was also true that she had longed, with
Curt, to hold emotions in her hand that she never could. She had not
entirely believed herself while with him. […] She loved him, and the spir-
ited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough
edges, to squash his sunniness, even if just a little” (355). The smooth and
perfect way of life offered to her by Curt, echoed in her sleeked and relaxed
hair, seemed almost too smooth to be good to her—she misses the rough-
ness and the edges, just like she misses the textures of her natural hair.
It is important to note here how Ifemelu reconciles with her hair. She
does so not through her relationship with Curt but through the guidance
of her female friends and an online community of black women. Her
friend Wambui offers her to help cut off the relaxed hair, arguing that it
was not meant to be confined, controlled. But when the hair is cut, Ifemelu
thinks of amputation, feels incomplete: “She looked unfinished […]. In
the bathroom mirror, her hair startled her, dull and shrunken from sleep,
like a mop of wool sitting on her head” (258, 259). She finds salvation in
an online community called happilykinkynappy.com:
They were done with pretending that their hair was what it was not, done
with running from the rain and flinching from sweat. […] They complained
about black magazines never having natural-haired women in their pages,
about drugstore products so poisoned by mineral oil that they could not
moisturize natural hair. They traded recipes. They sculpted for themselves a
virtual world where their coily, kinky, nappy, woolly hair was normal. And
Ifemelu fell into this world with a tumbling gratitude. (263)
The website gives her a sense of belonging: “Posting on the website was
like giving testimony in church; the echoing roar of approval revived her”
(264). The notion of giving testimony and “the echoing roar of approval”
suggest the musical call-and-response dynamics found in African and
African American gospel singing and further underline Ifemelu’s sense of
new-found community. In seeking support via the internet and the blogo-
sphere, Ifemelu learns to accept her hair. She releases her fractious hair and
takes a step further in learning to be herself and to place herself in America:
“On an unremarkable day in early spring—[…] she looked in the mirror,
sank her fingers into her hair, dense and springy and glorious, and could
not imagine it any other way. That simply, she fell in love with her hair”
(264). What binds together the online space of happilykinkynappy.com

and the hair salon is not just an engagement with the politics, aesthetics
and embodiedness of hair but also a pervading and nurturing sense of
female solidarity. Weaving together experiences of black womanhood from
different parts of the world, these communities become transnational
gatherings situated between home and away, familiarity and estrangement,
roots and routes. As Tiffany M. Gill has shown, these online spaces of soli-
darity and care “allow black women, who rarely see images of people who
look like them valorized in media, to create an alternative narrative of
beauty” (2015, 76). This constitutes a fruitful continuation of the argu-
ments by hooks I outlined in this book’s introduction: the love between
women, enacted here in Adichie’s novel via a shared online space of
exchange, speaks of a collective becoming-with-another (hooks 2000,
87–88), which then informs and revolutionises socio-political imaginar-
ies—in such a love ethics, our lives emerge as connected to everyone else
on the planet and speak of an intimate, global world order in which we
should care for others.
While structurally the braiding and weaving processes of Americanah
can be read purely as enabling the text to jump between temporal levels
and different geographical spaces, the braiding also generates a multiply
interwoven web of community and meaning within the pages of the novel
and outside for its readers. The notion of weaving, of course, evokes prac-
tices which are mostly coded as female. As Teemu Paavolainen argues,
figures of thought of weaving and embroidery “suggest female-specific
metaphors of thought, creativity, and collaboration, potentially subversive
of patriarchal systems of technology and domination; for others, they only
go to reinforce essentialist stereotypes of domestic womanhood and female
submission” (2017, 173). Americanah refuses to conform to essentialised
notions of either submissive womanhood or black and kinky hair as less
beautiful. Instead, we are confronted with a text that is not only geo-
graphically flexible as it crosses between different worlds, but one that is
embedded in openness, emotion and notions of female affiliation and col-
laboration. Through thinking with hair, Americanah generates a powerful
enmeshment of different textures and textualities and Ifemelu not only
finds a space of belonging within the communities of the salon and the
blogosphere, but she also finds her own voice in order to criticise the
superficiality and hypocrisy of American society.
50 J. LEETSCH
World Wide Web(s)

Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes […]
Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space.
—Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (2013a, 380)
The processes of weaving and braiding I have described above directly cor-
respond to rhizomatic network metaphors frequently applied to the inter-
net or the World Wide Web. As Guiomar Rovira Sancho contends in her
article on online network communities and global activism, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari “proposed the botanical metaphor of the rhizome well
before the existence of the Internet: a structure where every point can
connect to all others, where there is no universal linguistic translator, only
jargons and dialects” which is why it offers “only appropriation of mean-
ings and creation of multiple meanings” (2013, n. pag.; referring to
Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 13–18). A rhizome “has no beginning or
end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.
The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance” (1987,
25). Both rhizomatic and online structure is “open and eccentric: there
are multiple entry points, there are no central elements of organization,
and it does not respond to any model” (Sancho 2013, n.p.).5 Like Barthes’
notion of text as tissue and as continuously implicated in interlinked pro-
cesses of meaning making, the virtual space of the internet continues to be
de- and reconstructed through endless and open-ended textural mecha-
nisms which can be metaphorically described as linking, weaving, patter-
ing, threading and layering. In their article “Notes on Weavin’ Digital:
T(h)inkers at the Loom”, Teshome H. Gabriel and Fabian Wagmister
argue for the conceptual connections between older practices of weaving
and new digital media and the implication they have on the division
between Western and Eurocentric though systems and Third World epis-
temologies. They posit that
despite the newness often attributed to computer technology, much of its

vocabulary, as well as that of the internet, draws on relational concepts bor-
rowed from back-strap weaving. Terms such as texture, pattern, layering,
links, nodes, sampling, net, network, web, web weaver, and threads belong
to a lexicon employed in both weaving and computing. On a structural
level, they both rely on the use of crossing, interweaving lines. Aesthetically
and conceptually, too, there are similar cross-thread mechanisms at work.
The origins of the computer have in fact always been connected to weaving:
the first machines were merely extensions of looms, and computers the
extensions of mechanised looms. ([1997] 2010, 335)
Mirroring my arguments concerning the connective and collective strate-

gies of weaving and braiding hair offered in Americanah, Gabriel and
Wagmister recognise the relational practices inherent to both weaving and
online systems of interlinkages and interrelations:
Weaving, as a practice, is a matter of linkage—a connectedness that extends

the boundaries of the individual. This sense of open-ended connection and
inter-relation is precisely what Western notions of technology, in their
instrumentality and emphasis on the individual, tend to repudiate. Yet, as
the metaphors of weaving indicate, computer technology also opens up the
possibility of a digital weaving that acknowledges this sense of connec-
tion. (337)
Virtual online spaces and new digital technologies take on a similar role as
hair and the hair salon in Americanah. The internet comes to designate
border crossings and the movements between nations. However, like the
flashbacks provoked by certain situations in the hair salon and the use of
hair as a linking device, the internet not only interlinks geographical spaces
or disparate time frames with each other but serves as one of the main con-
nective and affective links between the novel’s characters and the diasporic
communities they build across the globe.
One example for these interlinkages would be the e-mails the lovers
Ifemelu and Obinze send each other across the world: e-mails and the
process of them being sent and received often double in the text (i.e.,
when Ifemelu sends one and pages later Obinze opens it) and thus create
connections and ruptures across the narrative. At the beginning of the
story, these e-mails link Ifemelu in America with Obinze in Nigeria. As
Anna-Leena Toivanen argues in her article on the use of new technologies
in contemporary African and African diasporic women’s fiction, e-mails
“tie geographically distanced places closer together in a way that does not
necessitate physical human travel, and that may, ideally, lead to […] a sense
of being in the world informed by an awareness of the transnational and/
or the universal situated within a condition of local embeddedness” (2016,
136). After Ifemelu visits the tennis coach in Ardmore, however, e-mails
go unread, are deleted. They become a marker for how an interpersonal
connection is severed: “She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com
52 J. LEETSCH
because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, reminded her of
Obinze. […] She still deleted his e-mails unread. […] Deleting his e-mails
took a click, and after the first click, the others were easier because she
could not imagine reading the second is she had not read the first” (196,
197). Furthering this sense of rupture, the e-mails sent later in the story
between England and America are ignored and vanish: deleted data lost
somewhere across the Atlantic. This trope of interrupted communication
and emotional distance creates tension and serves to underline the charac-
ters’ displacement and the difficulty to make a home for themselves. The
unwritten and unread e-mails are just as important as the written and read
ones, and they serve as nodes in the transnational (world-wide) web of
communication and silence Americanah constructs.
The text revolves around these points and thus structurally expresses
the longing both Ifemelu and Obinze feel for each other as well as for their
homeland. When they finally re-establish their connection, it is via e-mail.
The negative space of non-communication and deleted messages is
replaced by an overabundance of language; while Ifemelu is preparing for
her travels back to Nigeria and Obinze becomes estranged from his wife in
Lagos, their e-mail exchanges foreshadow not only the physical reunion as
they both move closer towards each other when Ifemelu physically flies
back to Africa but also an affective, emotional closeness that slowly grows:
“He began to write to her about his time in England, hoping that she
would reply and then later looking forwards to the writing itself. He had
never told himself his own story, never allowed himself to reflect on it
[…]. Writing her also became a way of writing himself” (461). Ifemelu’s
answer confirms the newly established link between the two: “I have loved
your e-mails about England and they have been so good for me, in so
many ways, and I cannot thank you enough for writing them” (461).
Communication with the other, and the writing of the self as a reparative
process, become entangled and reconnect the spaces of America and
Nigeria with each other. As these e-mails flow back and forth along the
digital routes of cyberspace, they also unearth the rhizomatic, entangled
roots of desire between the lovers which had been buried for so long.
The e-mails are one way to describe the web woven by Americanah as
it crosses the world. The notion of interconnection, multi-layered mean-
ings and networks of alliance becomes even clearer when examining the
blogs created by Ifemelu. The founding of her first blog continues themes
that had come to the surface during Ifemelu’s hair transitioning process:
“That evening, Ifemelu wrote a long e-mail to Wambui about […] the
things she didn’t tell Curt, things unsaid and unfinished. It was a long
e-mail, digging, questioning, unearthing. Wambui replied to say, ‘This is
so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog’”
(366). She takes her friend’s advice and the first blog post she composes is
a rewriting of the e-mail she had send Wambui, setting the stage for future
blog posts which revolve around topics concerned with race, feminism and
class. The blog becomes a space for her to be able to articulate herself:
Blogs were new, unfamiliar to her. […]; she longed for other listeners, and
she longed to hear stories of others. How many other people chose silence?
How many other people had become black in America? How many had felt
as though their world was wrapped in gauze? She broke up with Curt a few
weeks after that, and she signed on to WordPress, and her blog was
born. (366)
Her blog, at first titled Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-

American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America, not only brings her
success and financial security but also introduces Blaine into her life (they
meet at a blogging convention). An African American professor of com-
parative politics at Yale, he will become her second boyfriend and they will
stay together until she decides to move back to Nigeria. Given the way the
novel strategically and continuously aligns questions pertaining to home,
belonging and affect with each other, it comes as no surprise that Ifemelu’s
very first post revolves around the importance of emotions and love:
The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love.

Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that
both people remain comfortable. But real deep romantic love, the kind that
twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils
of your beloved. And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and
because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American
Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be
solved. (366–367)
Hinting at her failed relationship with Curt and foreshadowing the rea-
sons why her relationship to Blaine will also fail, this post intertwines
themes of race and love, of politics and the personal. Other topics she
writes about circle around mental illness and race (“On the Subject of
Non-American Black Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse
to Know”, 194), online dating as a black woman (“What’s Love Got to
54 J. LEETSCH
Do with It?”, 377), Beyoncé and Michelle Obama (“A Michelle Obama
Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor”, 367) or different shades of
whiteness and blackness (“Understanding America for the Non-American
Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?”, 253; “On the Divisions Within the
Membership of Non-American Blacks in America”, 255). The constant
interplay of inclusion and exclusion materialises in the name and the titles
of her blog entries, which oppose American Whites, American Blacks and
non-American Blacks with each other in an often exaggerated, tongue-in-
cheek way.
Ifemelu uses her blog to create a space for herself to mediate her experi-
ences as an African immigrant in the US. The blog serves as a means to
negotiate her new home, the fraught relationship to questions of race and
class, and as a way to communicate with others who feel the same way. It
becomes not only an outlet, but a deeply emotional, affective space for her
to grow. One blog entry which exemplarily points to this is the one I have
used as this section’s epigraph: “Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up
Negroes: This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the upwardly mobile
American and Non-American Blacks who don’t talk about Life Experiences
That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to keep
everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe
space” (380). An online thread, used as a feature in internet forums, bul-
letin boards or on blogs, is a possibility to facilitate ongoing discussions
which are made up of reactions and answers—these can be arranged lin-
early or a-linearly, hierarchically and non-hierarchically. A software to visu-
ally aid grouped discussions, a thread can be regarded as an inherently
relational way to construct dialogue and to establish a narrative told by
many different voices in the same space. A thread of course is also a tex-
tural element, a string or ribbon, which again points towards the space of
the internet as something that is woven out of different filaments and
textures. The open thread set up by Ifemelu offers a space to unzip and to
speak freely to those who are black in America and thus disrupts oppres-
sive, racist structures in real life which hinder exchange or empowerment.
Vis-à-vis her blog, Ifemelu becomes invested in crafting communities
which are global and intimate, personal and political at the same time. As
Camille Isaacs argues in her discussions of social media in Adichie and
Bulawayo, “the multi-layered, synchronous, affective communication
enabled by online communities allows for a complex, non-fixed diasporic
subjectivity that is not limited to one geographical space or to the other,
but rather present simultaneously in different places” (2016, 178).
Ifemelu’s blog thus can be defined as a virtual network that produces rela-
tion and participation. Just as the engagement with Ifemelu’s hair draws
attention to all kinds of textures (smooth, kinky) and thus to different
structures (of oppression, of empowerment), Americanah’s use of cyber-
space and new digital media as a way to criticise racism and misogyny also
introduces different textures to the novel.
Chronologically, the post about race and romantic love quoted above is
the first blog post Ifemelu writes—but it is not the first blog post we
encounter as we read the novel. From the beginning on, the blog entries
are inserted into the main body of narrative. Sometimes they appear as just
titles, sometimes as quotes integrated into the narrative and sometimes as
whole posts which are then detached from the main body of the text. They
function as either additional commentary or actively propel the plot for-
ward. Because these blog inserts are not in line with the rest of the narra-
tive, on first reading they tend to have a disruptive effect. Later, they align
with the plot strands and act as important parts of Ifemelu’s American
story—like the post on mental illness and depression mentioned above,
which is inserted right after Ifemelu’s experience with the tennis coach in
Ardmore: “Years later, she would blog about this” (194). These shifts
“allow for a double take on many of the character’s experiences as black
migrants in the US, so that the reader confronts the young Ifemelu’s sense
of bewilderment and emotional pain together with the older Ifemelu’s
more distanced elaboration of the same episodes and issues” (Guarracino
2014, 13). The novel thus incorporates online technologies as a medium
for critical engagement with race and gender. Blogging assumes centre
stage to negotiate and deconstruct stereotypes and creates multi-layered
text, textural forms: “With its interweaving of creative writing and opinion
making, novel and blog, Americanah […] offer[s] a poignant example of
the mutation of narrative forms in the information age” (ibid.). Through
the blog posts which are typographically set off from the rest of the text
through a sans-serif font, the novel comments on the different media
forms and textual expressions used within Americanah. The blog posts’
texture is different from how the rest of the narrative looks and feels and
thus introduces an element that adds to the main narrative but constitutes
an unruly interruption of it at the same time.
Another play on text and textuality is linked to the blog’s name,
Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly
Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. This title intertextually
alludes to the genre of American slave narratives, with titles such as Charles
56 J. LEETSCH
Ball’s Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures
of Charles Ball, A Black Man (1836) or John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia:
A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive
Slave, Now in England (1855). Narratives by African slaves from North
America became one of the main genres of African American literature
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writers like Harriet
Tubman, Frederick Douglass or Harriet Ann Jacobs expressed their expe-
riences by giving accounts of their lives as former slaves and were deeply
entangled with the abolitionist movement, as becomes evident in Douglass’
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) or
Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). One of their functions
was to draw a white readership into the lived experiences of black Americans
(cf. Ernest 2014; Fisch 2007), and Ifemelu’s blog as a twenty-first-century
intertextual continuation of these narratives both mirrors and subverts this
as it creates an intricate interplay between empathy and an insistence on
difference. It shuttles between positions of outsider and insider and com-
ments on Ifemelu’s in-between position as African in America, and not an
African American. Raceteenth is also a reference to Ralph Ellison’s novel
Juneteenth. The term Juneteenth is a portmanteau of “June” and “nine-
teenth”: known today as Independence Day or Emancipation Day, it com-
memorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in 1865 in Texas,
and more generally, the emancipation of enslaved African Americans
throughout the US. Juneteenth was Ellison’s second novel after 1952’s
The Invisible Man and remained unfinished; it was published posthu-
mously in 1999 and offers a cacophonous choir of voices—juxtaposing
African American vernaculars, Bible-Belt sermons and quasi-Joycean
streams of consciousness which suggests “that the unfinished work might
have used the rich, interpenetrating strands of American language to
underscore the ways in which black and white experience overlap and blur,
the ways in which individuals use language to both define and reinvent
themselves” (Kakutani 1999, n. pag.).
In consciously referencing these pre-texts and in echoing and diverting
their historical contexts, Ifemelu’s blog entries create a connection
between dissident voices that speak up about oppression and violence.6
Americanah interweaves various text forms such as e-mails or the differ-
ently formatted blog entries with Ifemelu and Obinze’s stories and conse-
quently creates a texture of layers and links. Reading the novel as a fabric
or tissue holding all these things together—from questions of black hair,
self-love and beauty to activist online communities to slave narratives—I
argue that it binds together disparate experiences across time and space
and texts: simultaneously braiding hair and stories, weaving digital and
intertextual webs and thus reaching towards a hopeful future in which
love and affective connectivities shape new forms of community.
Returns and Romance: “It’s Just a Love Story”

Don’t we all in the end write about love? All literature is about love. When
men do it, it’s a political comment on human relations. When women do it,
it’s just a love story. So, although I wanted to do much more than a love
story, a part of me wants to push back against the idea that love stories are
not important. I wanted to use a love story to talk about other things. But
really in the end, it’s just a love story.
—Chimamanda Adichie, Interview with The Guardian (2014b, n. pag.)
This chapter has revolved around the transnational spatial practices acted
out in Americanah, as well as the textual, textural strategies it employs. I
have shown how the novel not only literally travels between nation and
continents and worlds, but that it can be read as an inherently connective
and relational text that entails much more than just geographical displace-
ment. In this last section, I want to gather all these threads together in
order to discuss the novel’s intrinsic centrepiece: the love story. The most
conventional of all narrative scaffoldings, the love story in Americanah
constitutes the affective core around which everything else orbits, be it its
geographical movements or its meta-textual, performative motions. In the
first parts of the novel, the two protagonists migrated abroad and spent
their time away from their African origins to explore new spaces and new
homes—to more or less successful extent. These transnational travels were
supplemented by other emotional travels. In the last parts of the novel,
both Ifemelu and Obinze return to Nigeria—and return to each other. In
the following, I will trace these returns and will draw together the concep-
tual spaces opened up in previous sections. I will focus on what happens to
the transnational spatial imaginaries and the multi-layered textual struc-
tures of Americanah as Ifemelu not only returns to Lagos but also is
reunited with her lover in what can only be called the ultimate narrative
goal of every love story: a romantic happy ending. I will show how
Americanah utilises the heteronormative formula of the happy ending and
expands it beyond the confines of the text, to write something that is
much more than a love story—but also, in the end, “just a love story”
(Adichie 2014b, n. pag.).
58 J. LEETSCH
Ifemelu’s break-up with Curt in Baltimore concurs with her cutting her
hair and finding confidence in her natural appearance—it is no coinci-
dence, then, that her break-up with Blaine in New Haven falls together
with closing her blog Raceteenth. Her online persona, the famous black
American race blogger, had started to ring false as we learn at the begin-
ning of the story: “She had written the final post only days ago, trailed by
two-hundred and seventy-four comments so far. All those readers, grow-
ing month by month, linking and cross-posting, knowing so much more
than she did; they had always frightened and exhilarated her” (5). Spelling
out the estrangement process, Ifemelu goes on to explain that she “began,
over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s sto-
ries for something she could use. […] The more she wrote, the less sure
she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt
naked and false” (6). Giving up her blog (financial security) and her rela-
tionship to Blaine (emotional stability), Ifemelu plans to go back to
Nigeria, which has become
where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in
without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. And, of
course, there was also Obinze. Her first love, her first lover, the only person
with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. (7–8)
Ifemelu uses metaphors of stasis and movement to justify her decision to

go back and leave her American life behind; she feels as if “layer after layer
of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled
her” (8), her relationship to Blaine resembles “being content in a house
but always sitting by the window and looking out” (9). Tranquillity and
sitting still seem to designate the ideal goal of what any migrant might
want to achieve: a sense of having arrived, of being able to securely settle
down. But for Ifemelu, these feelings have come to designate restriction
and suffocation and she longs to go back “home”. Princeton with its
unsettling calmness and cleanliness, that last station in a long series of
American spaces, seems to correspond to this discontent and she leaves it
to go to Trenton to have her hair braided in Mariama’s salon—and then
leaves America altogether in order to return to Nigeria. With this move-
ment “back” and a disregard of what every successful migration story
should entail, Americanah thus “challenges the conventions of the typical
immigrant novel, where no alternative to life in America is entertained, as
Ifemelu chooses to return home not under any kind of compulsion, but
just because she wants to be in Lagos” (Goyal 2014, xii). With this, as I
have argued above, Americanah belongs to a new wave of African dia-
sporic novels that in their narrative and affective economies refuse to give
priority to one world over another.
These novels re-conceptualise notions of migration which are usually
connected to the departure from an originary homeland and a destination
someplace else—a clear-cut trajectory of leaving and arriving in the West.
But in these new transnational texts, such clear-cut routes become less and
less clear-cut. They are instead marked by an oscillation between different
homes and homelands. Considering Ifemelu’s unusual return, Yogita
Goyal has pointed out that many readers have expressed a “sense of disbe-
lief that Ifemelu would choose to go back to Nigeria (and not under
duress of any kind)” (2014, xii). Within the narrative itself, Ifemelu is
confronted with the same bewildered reaction: “Everyone she had told
she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and she
said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear
on foreheads” (16). In a novel that focusses so explicitly on transnational
movements and hybrid spatiality, the return to Africa seems to ring
strangely static and stagnant. But instead of reading the return home as a
closure, short coming or even failure, in my opinion it is much more pro-
ductive to read it as a new paradigm in African diasporic fictions of the last
decade that have dealt with transnational, transcultural imaginaries in a
new and different way. In an essay on the motif of “home coming” in
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi and Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor,
Amy Rushton has astutely remarked that these new forms of narrating
Africa transnationally “have marked a move to stories concerning the
return to Africa, thus emphasising the importance of the continent” and
reaffirming “the idea of Africa as the locus of ‘home’” (2017, 46). Like in
Ghana Must Go, where the return to Ghana and Nigeria takes up an
important part of the novel, or in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing which swings
between the Gold Coast and America, Americanah lends equal impor-
tance to home and away—and therefore radically disrupts these binary
oppositions until home and away become entangled, interdependent and
mutually inclusive. The novel thus achieves what Achille Mbembe and
Sarah Nuttall heralded in their 2004 article “Writing the World from an
African Metropolis”: it produces an African space that is enlivened by its
“fundamental connection to an elsewhere” (351) and takes seriously “the
fact that Africa like, everywhere else, has its heres, its elsewheres, and its
interstices. […] Indeed, historically, the continent has been and still is a
60 J. LEETSCH
space of flows, of flux, of translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and

exit points” (351). Adichie produces a complex portrayal of Ifemelu’s
return to Africa and how she subsequently attempts to relocate herself.
This becomes quite evident when looking at how Ifemelu deals with com-
ing back to Lagos:
At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow buses full of
squashed limbs, the swearing hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements
on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls—PLUMBER CALL
080177777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadside like a taunt.
Commerce thrummed too defiantly. And the air was dense with exaggera-
tion, conversations full of overprotestations. One morning, a man’s body lay
on Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became
gasping boards. Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could
burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling,
falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange
familiar. (475)
If one reads this passage, the first paragraph of part seven, in direct con-
trast to the very first paragraph of the novel where Ifemelu describes
Princeton, one could argue that the novel clearly constructs a binary
opposition between orderly, clean and quiet West and hot, dirty and loud
Africa—however, what lies between these passages is a whole world of
travelling between disparate spaces, of fashioning home in the most
unlikely of all places and of recognising the importance of community and
relationality wherever one resides. It is then no surprise that Ifemelu’s
Lagos also becomes a place imbued with multiple meanings, multiple
belongings and an ever-complex interplay between roots and routes.
Her engagement with space is at first marked by how long she has been
gone: “She had grown up knowing all the bus stops and the side streets,
understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of
street hawkers. Now, she struggled to grasp the unspoken” (475). She has
lost a sense of being able to name and struggles to re-familiarise herself
with how her city is spelled: “Ifemelu stared out of the window, half listen-
ing, thinking how unpretty Lagos was, roads infested with potholes,
houses springing up unplanned like weeds. Of her jumble of feelings, she
recognized only confusion” (477). A sense of chaos and vibrancy prevails,
expressed though images of wild weeds and potholes that spread through-
out the metropolis. But Ifemelu also begins to fall into the “strange famil-
iar”. This term refuses the well-worn opposition between the strange and
the familiar and instead propagates their co-existence; as a site of conver-

gence and collision, it gives room to multi-local, multi-territorialised
belonging. As Kathryn Schulz has argued, “Adichie challenges the end
point of the journey” (2013, n. pag.). Experiences and trajectories beyond
national or territorial frames of identification, and the relations built along
the way, constitute the true focus of the novel. Just like with the hair salon
in Trenton, the ASA basement in Philadelphia, the online community of
happilykinkynappy.com or her blog Raceteenth, being at home in Lagos
means community and communality: “Ifemelu was laughing. She caught
herself in mid-laughter, and looked around her, a ship in the greying dis-
tance, her friends in their sunglasses, […]. She thought: I’m really home.
I’m home” (506). As the titular “Americanah”, the one who-has-been,
Ifemelu re-makes her home in the strange familiar.
The interplay between strangeness and familiarity, between home and
away, has been written into the very structure of the story: in a truly trans-
national fashion, Americanah never attempts to erase these troubling
oscillations but uses them to re-situate its migrant subjects and to sketch
out a complex and complicated space of belonging. In the last parts of the
novel, these differing parts finally come together as the protagonist returns
home and reunites with her lover. The unusual narrative of Ifemelu’s
return to Africa is thus combined with another, much more conventional
narrative: the romantic love story between the two main characters.
Before, the split between the two lovers had prompted the novel to cut
across nations and continents—now their reunion underlines strategies of
home building and particularly of coming home to Lagos. So while the
novel on the one hand undermines the narrative conventions of migrant
narratives, on the other hand it fully subscribes to another narrative con-
vention: that of the love story. Consequently, it produces an interesting
interplay between different narrative forms and formulas, undercutting
one while validating another. Up to now, I have only described the separa-
tion of the lovers and the desire between them which has played out in
various textual gaps and geographical interstices. However, to fully under-
stand Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s reunion in Lagos and what that reunion
does to the text, it is necessary to delineate the early stages of their rela-
tionship. From the moment they come to know each other, their love
story acquiesces to some of the most common conventions and tropes of
romance texts: “love at first sight” and “star-crossed lovers”. The former
becomes quite evident when looking at their first encounter when they are
still young and meet at the party of a mutual friend:
62 J. LEETSCH
Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends
sometimes enacted the stories, Ifemelu or Ranyinudo would play the man
and Ginika or Priye would play the woman—the man would grab the
woman, the woman would fight weakly, then collapse against him with shrill
moans—and then they would all burst out laughing. But in the filling-up
dance floor of Kayode’s party, she was jolted by a small truth in those
romances. It was indeed true that because of a male, your stomach could
tighten up and refuse to unknot itself, your body’s joints could unhinge,
your limbs fail to move to music, and all effortless things suddenly become
leaden. (69–70)
The “love at first sight” described here replaces superficial enactments of

romantic (and sexual) love between friends and introduces a kernel of
truth hidden beneath the garish covers of Mills and Boon romance novels.
The love between Ifemelu and Obinze will not only cause knots in her
stomach or unhinge her limbs, but also knot stories and spaces together
and unhinge spatial and temporal orders within the structural fabric of
Americanah. The romance between the two protagonists will write its
own story, far surpassing the genre conventions of Mills and Boon. What
follows this first meeting are accounts of how they become a couple and
move in together when they attend university in Nsukka. The love between
Ifemelu and Obinze needs of course to be seen as what it is: the kind of
heterosexual love that falls within normalising, regulating structures of
love and desire—but it is also one that brings ease and self-love: “She
rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often
feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was
at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size” (73). Even at these
early stages of romantic cliché, the episodes between the lovers are inter-
spersed with short narrative segments of Nigeria’s political situation, the
university strikes, Ifemelu’s father’s job loss and her family’s ensuing pov-
erty. Within the normative narrative frames of the heterosexual love story,
then, Adichie also explores and complicates other narratives such as depor-
tation, sexual trauma and political corruption at later stages of the novel.
Love, even in its most simple and conventional form, carries with it ghosts
and histories and, as I have shown via hooks, needs to be recognised as
fraught with the material, political implications and structural imbalances
tied up within it (hooks 2000, 93).
In light of this complicated synergy, it is interesting to note how Adichie
herself has repeatedly questioned the negative stereotypes connected to
the genre of the love story: “So, although I wanted to do much more than
a love story, a part of me wants to push back against the idea that love
stories are not important. I wanted to use a love story to talk about other
things. But really in the end, it’s just a love story” (2014b, n.p.). While
Americanah is “just a love story”, then, Adichie is fully aware of the norms
and conventions linked to the romance genre and attempts to subvert
them. I would argue that she actively uses the frame of the love story to
consciously unsettle or rile her readers as if to wilfully confront them with
their own reading conventions. Regarding the much-contested happy
ending of Americanah, she has said in an interview:
But yeah, I love the love story, I wanted to do that very much. But it’s a love
story that’s very much rooted in reality. It’s the kind of love story where
your inability to get a visa gets in the way of love. I loved the ending, for
example, which I hoped would annoy some people. It’s always a good thing
to annoy some people. But here’s the thing: the ending is me thinking, “You
know what? I want to have this lush, ridiculous thing happen, and it’s going
to happen!” (2013c, n. pag.)
Before the lovers get to have their happy ending though, they first need to
adhere to another classical trope of the romance narrative: “star-crossed
lovers”, that is lovers who are “thwarted by bad luck or adverse circum-
stances (originally considered to be a result of malign planetary influence)”
(“star-crossed”, OED). Before Ifemelu and Obinze get their “lush, ridicu-
lous” happy ending, as Adichie would say, they have to be separated from
each other—a separation which results in the transnational narrative fabric
I have delineated in prior sections of this chapter. The trope of the thwarted
lovers, then, is intertwined with a global narration about migration,
deportation and geographical displacement, lending new shades of mean-
ing to an age-old narrative convention and offering a different interpreta-
tion of how two lovers’ paths may cross and un-cross in the twenty-first
century.
When Ifemelu and Obinze finally meet again, their first encounter
resumes the trope of love at first sight, years later and after countless dis-
placements: “There was a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia or
stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her,
she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged”
(528). Their reunion echoes Ifemelu’s experience of corporeal disorienta-
tion from their first meeting: “She was flustered, and the new shrillness in
64 J. LEETSCH
her voice annoyed her. He was looking at her, an open unabashed looking,
and she would not hold his gaze. Her fingers were shaking of their own
accord, which was bad enough, she did not need to stare into his eyes,
both of them standing there, in the hot sun, in the fumes of traffic from
Awolowo Road” (528). Ifemelu’s sense of the “strange familiar” she expe-
riences on Lagos’ streets is echoed in how she perceives Obinze: “she had
not forgotten, but merely remembered anew” (528). The strange familiar
does not only define the geographical emplacement strategies enacted by
Ifemelu in her new-old hometown but also the affective, corporeal engage-
ment with her new-old lover: “He felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same
time” (541); “She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and
yet there was, also, a newness to their union: their bodies remembered and
did not remember” (551); “There was an awakening even in her nails, in
those parts of her body that had always been numb” (551). When Ifemelu
returns to Nigeria, she returns to Obinze; by returning to Obinze, she also
returns to Nigeria—her making sense of Lagos again directly corresponds
to making sense of Obinze again. Despite Obinze’s marriage to another
woman, they begin an affair: “she should be asking why he would not be
with his wife and child, and she should initiate a conversation about what
they were doing exactly, but they had a history, a connection thick as
twine” (537–538). Fully self-conscious of its narrative frames, the novel
announces that thus began the “days full of cliché” (553) in order to
introduce the chapters revolving around their clandestine meetings, din-
ner dates all over Lagos and weekend trips to surrounding suburban
hinterlands.
Again, however, Adichie reclaims the well-worn conventions of the love
story and renders them into something which holds generative potential.
The lover’s new-found intimacy gives Ifemelu opportunity to finally begin
the reparative process of healing trauma: the trauma of bodily violence
caused by tennis coach in Ardmore and the consecutive trauma of spatial
displacement and emotional dislocation. With Obinze, she is finally able to
give voice to her experience of sex work that had caused her to close her-
self off not only from her American surroundings, but especially from
Obinze and Nigeria:
She told him small details about the man’s office that were still fresh in her
mind, the stacks of sports magazines, the smell of damp, but when she got
to the part where he took her to his rooms, she said simply: ‘I took off my
clothes and did what he asked me to do. I couldn’t believe that I got wet. I
hated him. I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t
know, betrayed myself.’ She paused. ‘And you.’ (542)
When Obinze listens and understands, she is finally able to work through
her emotions. This time, she is not alone in a foreign country and belat-
edly, she experiences solace and compassion: “He took her hand in his,
both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient
silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe”
(543). This new silence has nothing to do with the silence that had pro-
pelled the story across nations and oceans but denotes connection and
closeness.
In truly dramatic, romantic fashion, this is not the final obstacle the
lovers have to overcome. To achieve the desired, legitimate goal of their
heterosexual and heteronormative love story, the happy ending, Obinze
needs to leave his wife Kosi and because they have a daughter, this is not
an easy decision. The readers follow the ensuing heartbreak in chapters
that once again alternate between Ifemelu and Obinze. It takes a while for
Obinze to arrive at his conclusion and in the meantime Ifemelu refuses to
wait for him. She creates a second blog, called The Small Redemptions of
Lagos, and quits her job at Zoe fashion magazine: “The pain of his absence
did not decrease with time; it seemed instead to sink deeper each day, to
roused in her even clearer memories. Still, she was at peace: to be home,
to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally,
spun herself fully into being” (586). Ifemelu has created her belonging on
her own terms, spinning herself into being and having fully arrived in
Nigeria:
She wrote of a fashion show she had attended, how the model had twirled
around in an ankara skirt, a vibrant swish of blues and greens, looking like a
haughty butterfly. She wrote of the woman on the street corner in Victoria
Island who joyously said, ‘Fine Aunty!’ when Ifemelu stopped to buy apples
and oranges. She wrote about the views from her bedroom window: a white
egret drooped on the compound wall, exhausted from heat. […] She wrote
about the announcers on radio stations, with their accents so fake and funny.
She wrote about the tendency of Nigerian women to give advice, sincere
advice dense with sanctimony. She wrote about the waterlogged neighbor-
hood crammed with zinc houses, their roofs like squashed hats, and of the
young women who lived there, fashionable and savvy in tight jeans, their
lives speckled stubbornly with hope. (585)
66 J. LEETSCH
These blog entries stand in stark contrast to her former American blog,
Raceteenth—they combine politics with the intricacies of the everyday and
seem to be filled with hope and warmth and shed light on Ifemelu’s Lagos
in a much more intimate way. I agree with Guarracino when she argues that
The Small Redemptions of Lagos offers a much more personal space for
Ifemelu’s self-expression—“blogging has now taken on a more emotional
and relational quality”, for example, when the blog “becomes a way to at
least imaginarily keep in touch with Obinze” (Guarracino 2014, 20): “She
wrote her blog posts wondering what he would make of them” (Americanah,
585). After months, Obinze comes back to her, and with this, the novel
finally offers the happy ending it had worked towards from its first page:
“And then, on a languorous Sunday evening, seven months since she had
last seen him, there Obinze was, at the door of her flat. She stared at him.
[…] He was holding a long sheet of paper dense with writing” (587–588).
He tells her everything she wants to hear; that he has left his wife, that he
will still care for his daughter, that he will not give up one her: “I want this
to happen. […] Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you
give this a chance’” (588). The significance of this final narrative and emo-
tional fulfilment lies in the fact that Ifemelu does not need it: she has found
her voice, her belonging and her place in Lagos. But still Adichie interlinks
these notions of belonging and longing, of being rooted geographically
and of reaching out emotionally. In light of the novel’s continuous entan-
glements between space and affect, it is important to note with which
phrase the novel closes, right after Obinze’s declaration. The final two
words, uttered by Ifemelu to Obinze who stands before her, are “Come in”
(588). In their inclusiveness and inward movement, they stand for integra-
tion and synthesis. “Come in” is meant not only in the spatial sense (please
enter this house) but also in an affective, emotive and sensual sense (please
come to me, join me). They indicate the crossing of a threshold and cannot
be read as finite or stagnant at all. By coming in, Obinze will come home,
Ifemelu will come home and the two will become each other’s home. The
romantic happy ending is thus inherently linked to an act of final emplace-
ment, creating a text that entangles the conventions of the love story with
the unconventional story of migration and return.
As a final argumentative step, I will now draw attention to how the text
of Americanah moves beyond this first happy ending in order to produce
a second happy ending. This second ending is connected to The Small
Redemptions of Lagos, the blog that Ifemelu creates once she is back in
Nigeria. This blog serves not only to show how she has arrived and has
built her own belonging within the story. It is also a blog that exists online,
beyond the fictional world of the novel; it can be accessed under the inter-
net address https://www.chimamanda.com/ifemelus-blog/. The fact
that this blog has been brought into the real world should of course be
understood as what it is: a marketing strategy employed during the pro-
motion of the novel. The blog is linked to Adichie’s official homepage
under the category “Ifemelu’s Blog” and managed by her publisher,
Alfred A. Knopf. The aesthetic of the “real-life” version of The Small
Redemptions of Lagos directly corresponds to its fictional counterpart, the
header image, for example, consists of a picture of an overgrown colonial
compound—just like the one opposite Ifemelu’s house in Lagos in the
novel (514). The blog can be read a meta-textual, self-referential continu-
ation of the novel, creatively highlighting “the intersections between tra-
ditionally published literature and the growing field of writing in the
digital sphere” (Guarracino 2014, 22). While I would fully subscribe to
this reading, I also want to argue that this blog can be read in a different
way and that its existence underlines the arguments I have made through-
out this chapter. The blog features entries from August 27, 2014, to
November 02, 2014. These entries are written by the first-person author-
figure Ifemelu and feature topics which range from hair and skin care (col-
lected under the category “The Aruidimma Centre”), fashion, lipstick,
sanitary pads and vaginal hygiene (“Style”), to Nigerian politics and global
matters such as Boko Haram, diseases like Ebola and the problems of
African infrastructure (“Problem and Solution”). This alone can be read as
a productive commentary on the discourses mentioned in the introduc-
tory section of this chapter, in which I have delineated how writers like
Selasi and Wainaina have warned against flattened representations of
Africa—the blog with its wildly diverse topics thus continues Americanah’s
project to portray an African reality that refuses to be narrowed down to
presubscribed notions perpetuated by Western readers. What can also be
found on this blog, however, is a subcategory titled “Ifem & Ceiling”, the
nicknames Ifemelu and Obinze use for each other throughout the book.
These blog entries continue to write the love story beyond the first happy
ending of the novel. With this, the novel pushes past its finished confines
and moves beyond the boundaries of the printed text.
The blog entries in the “Ifem & Ceiling” category write the love story
into the future, beyond the “Come in” of the novel. They often depict
small bonds and attachment points, written in the tongue-in-cheek way so
typical for Ifemelu’s narrative voice: “So, we support the same Charity. We
68 J. LEETSCH
started supporting the same Charity at about the same time without, of
course, knowing what the other was doing. #Lovenwantiti #truecompat-
ibility #mostromanticcoincidenceever” (“Ifem & Ceiling 7”). They also
describe the couple’s shared everyday life and are placed at a point in time
when their relationship is more established:
Ceiling and I have been spending a lot of time in Enugu. I love Enugu, the
sense of restfulness; it has a certain ambition about it—the mall, the new
roads—but it retains a small-town feel. Here, strangers still greet one
another. And I love this house. […]. The compound walls are draped in
purple bougainvillea. The yard is wide. It goes on forever, filled with trees
and bushes that bloom spiky red flowers. […] Yesterday, after a brief rain, we
sprayed OFF on our legs and arms, sat on that bench in the evening cool,
and ate boiled corn and ube. Bliss. (“Ifem & Ceiling 1”)
With this, the blog not only moves away from Lagos but also moves away
from the clichéd tropes and formulas of the romantic love story to describe
a more settled relationship. Regarding this more grown-up sense of love,
the entries also do not shy away from the conflicts and difficulties that
come with such a relationship:
Ceiling is different here in Enugu. He’s lighter, he jokes more, he is less

silent. But I sometimes see his face fall and I know he’s missing [his daugh-
ter] Buchi. […] he wants to bring Buchi to Enugu for a week or two, before
school starts. He called Kosi and before he could finish saying, “I want to
come and pick Buchi…” Kosi hung up on him. Then his phone began to
beep nonstop, text message after text message coming in. I read some of
them. So you now want to bring your child to a house where you are living
in sin with another woman and you have no shame, setting that kind of
example blablabla. Ceiling deleted the texts and did not reply. He said,
“She’s upset. I’ll call her later.” And I found myself getting very angry. Yes,
I like that Ceiling is so polite and all but he is over-indulgent with Kosi and
it pisses me the hell off. (“Ifem & Ceiling 2”)
Through these blog entries, Americanah’s love story moves out from its
confines between the covers of the book and through its presence in the
virtual space of the internet, reaches into the world. Thus, the blog out-
manoeuvres not only the normative formula of the love story, the readerly
desire (and the desire of the characters) for the happy ending but also its
textual, textural frames of reference as it defies attempts at control and
closure.
What to make then, of this doubling of the happy ending within the
love story offered by Americanah? The first version of the happy ending
consists of the words “come in”, which denote extreme placed-ness: there
is nothing more inclusive or intimate than “come in” as Ifemelu invites
Obinze into the interior of her home. The second ending extends not only
beyond the metropolis Lagos to Enugu’s hilly countryside but also beyond
the last words of the novel. It thus constitutes an expansion, a writing
forth of the love story through a blog that escapes the boundaries of the
novel. With these complex and multi-routed depictions of love and desire,
Americanah not only draws on what Wainaina had called taboo subjects
when writing about Africa: “ordinary domestic scenes, love between
Africans (unless a death is involved)” (2006, n.p.). It also extends this
taboo, plays with it, subverts it and celebrates it. As “just a love story”, it
is much more at the same time—despite its focus on the intimacy of the
love story, the novel can also be read as an ultimately open and connective
text that reaches out into the world.
With this, Americanah counteracts the harmful tendencies of what
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have described as follows:
Africa so often ends up epitomizing the intractable, the mute, the abject, or
the other-worldly. So overdetermined is the nature of this sign that it some-
times seems almost impossible to crack, to throw it open to the full spec-
trum of meanings and implications that other places and other human
experiences enjoy, provoke, and inhabit. The obstinacy with which scholars
[…] continue to describe Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a
failed and incomplete example of something else, perpetually underplays the
embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks.
(2004, 384; emphasis in original)
With Americanah, Adichie has created an Africa that is complex and nec-
essarily, inevitably, part of the world—it is, in fact, literature of the world;
one which, as Cheah and Nancy, respectively, have argued, not only spans
the world but also changes it and the people within it. As such, “it points
to the opening of […] worlds” and denotes “the real and ongoing process
of the world, a principle of change immanent to the world” (Cheah 2016,
210; emphasis in original). With her novel, Adichie has “thrown the world
open” and made it speak through compassionate and convivial portrayals
of love, longing and belonging that insistently move along global, trans-
national routes and simultaneously take root in localised forms of com-
munity and relationality.
70 J. LEETSCH
Notes
1. One of the most striking examples for this is the Nigerpolitan Club—a club
of expatriates Ifemelu joins when she returns to Nigeria. A tongue-in-cheek
reference to the concept of Afropolitanism, this club can be understood as a
group of elitist, bourgeois African returnees who complain about the lack of
vegetarian restaurants in Lagos or yearn for American things such as “low-
fat soy milk, NPR, fast internet” (519). In outlining this snobbism, Adichie
implicitly tackles the figure of Afropolitan. This term, developed by Taiye
Selasi (2005) and Achille Mbembe (2005, 2007, 2008), celebrates diasporic
movement and revels in the multiplicity of African identity. It has also come
to be harshly criticized as focusing only on a cosmopolitan African elite,
completely disregarding the lesser privileged. While I see the merit in under-
standing Americanah within the framework of Afropolitan literature, I feel
it too narrow a concept to encompass all its complexity.
2. In his The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes has suggested that “text
means tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a
product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning
(truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the
text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving” (1975, 64). One of
the etymological origins for the word “text” to which Barthes refers here is
the Latin textus: for tissue, texture or woven fabric (“text”, OED).
3. This framing reappears in some of the cover illustrations of Americanah’s
hard- and soft-cover editions. The 2013 Anchor Books edition, for example,
features four braids which wrap around the front and back cover, literally
embracing the story within the pages. For examples from other editions,
(i.e. Kenya and Brazil), see the author’s website.
4. The novel also applies this to the Nigerian spaces it narrates, not only when
Ifemelu talks about her mother’s beautiful full hair which she then cuts off
in a religious frenzy (49) but also when she accompanies her Aunty Uju to
a hair salon in Lagos as a child: “It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the dif-
ferent ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood. […] Aunty Uju
laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders:
Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be;
it never tangled” (93). The interplay of African and Western beauty ideals
with the materiality of Asian hair points towards the transnational politics at
work in these beauty rituals. For more on the global, economic entangle-
ments of hair, cf. Tarlo (2016).
5. The comparison between rhizome and cyberspace has been prevalent in
media and internet theory since at least the 1990s (cf. Wray 2006). For
further reading, and a problematisation of the link between internet net-
works and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizomatic, cf.
Coyne (2008).
6. I am grateful for the comments made by my colleague Kate Harlin at the

African Literature Association Annual Conference on “Africa and the World:
Literature, Politics, and Global Geographies” at Yale University, New Haven
(2017), during her talks on Adichie and our consecutive discussion for
pointing out to me some of these correlations.
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———. 2013c. “The Varieties of Blackness.” Interview with Aaron Bady. The
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Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER 3
London Lovers: Zadie Smith
Dis great polluted space […] the music of the world is here.
—Benjamin Zephaniah, “The London Breed” (2001, 84)
As we leave behind the lovers Ifemelu and Obinze and their happy ending
with extends beyond the confines of the text into the world, we turn to yet
another variant of thinking love through space and space through love,
another set of coordinates of longing and belonging. This chapter exam-
ines literary representations of London and the desires and romances
which roam its streets, sprawl through its communities. I take the city
space as it is mediated in fiction as an active, living archive for manifold
human relationships which play out on different planes—spatial, linguis-
tic, economic, cultural, architectural and affective ones. Since cultural
geographers like Henri Lefebvre (1974), Michel de Certeau ([1980]
1984) or Doreen Massey (1994, 2007) have suggested that space is politi-
cally and socially constructed, cities have undergone a reclassification pro-
cess—they are not seen as static “maps” anymore, but as performed spaces
that entangle behaviour, meaning, discourse, imagination and material
conditions. Cities function as a catalyst for cultural and emotional prac-
tices; as “new globalized networks of affiliation and sentiment” (Keith
2003, 58), they produce neighbourhoods, communities and homes which
figure as units of a relational, affective urban topography—and especially

Switzerland AG 2021
76 J. LEETSCH
those who have to move by necessity, namely, those that move within dia-
sporas, can take the city as a scaffold to creatively (de)construct their sense
of emplacement and belonging. This chapter traces contested engage-
ments with the global space of the city and the intimate and affective
relationships between the protagonists in Zadie Smith’s London trilogy.1
Taking up the thoughts developed in this book’s introduction and tested
in my discussion of Adichie’s novel, I want to expand further our under-
standing of how love, while so often presented as apolitical, is in fact
deeply inscribed into our socio-political realities and woven into broader
structural violences faced especially by black and brown women across the
globe—by taking the postcolonial metropolis London, the former heart of
the British Empire, as my object of analysis, I will shed light on continuous
political and ethical acts of questioning how assumptions about love and
intimacy are negotiated within the literary realm of Smith’s London nov-
els and how it might be possible to approach love as an unequivocal chance
to defy systems of power.
As the British Caribbean poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah states in
the quote which functions as this chapter’s epigraph, London is a “pol-
luted place”. In the poem from which this line is taken, “The London
Breed” (2001, 84), he delineates the megalopolis as filled with contradic-
tions, dirt and chaos; an “overcrowded place” (l. 17), but also full to the
brim with the “music of the world” (l. 5). Polluted here is taken to be not
necessarily a negative concept, but instead points towards a mélange, a
productive impurity generated by those who “came to here from every-
where” (l. 7) and which might question nationalist notions of purity, tra-
ditional values such as unity. Here, London becomes a multi-threaded
patchwork of over 2 million languages, fusing many different songs—
“The people here united will / Create a kind of London breed” (l. 31,
32). What I want to focus on in the following is this “London breed”,
composed not only by those perceived as unequivocally British, but also
by those generally termed other or outsider. London has a multi-faceted
history, and it is not only a place which as capital constituted the Empire,
but also a place which destabilised these notions of centrality and origin.
As Roger Luckhurst argues, “postcolonial London is […] understood as a
site saturated with the iconography and geography of imperial power, but
which has been transformed by the twin effects of the dismantlement of
empire and successive waves of migration from former colonies” (2005,
295). In this postcolonial city, many different histories palimpsestically live
next to and beneath each other. London is a city which has at its heart the
3 LONDON LOVERS: ZADIE SMITH 77
tensions and productive re-inscriptions that are constitutive for a diasporic

and postcolonial project of critique. Novels like Zadie Smith’s London
trilogy take back a city which has been lost many times—they are texts that
write against multi-layered processes, ones that have not just been happen-
ing since the Empire was erected and then dismantled but also more local-
ised and recent processes like the neo-liberal, capitalist privatisation which
has been quietly carrying on since the 1970s, with public spaces and inter-
ests sold off to private capital. Still, as I will argue, the city is constantly
being re-claimed, re-mapped and re-appropriated by contemporary post-
colonial literatures which resist both old and new colonialist tendencies.
I maintain that the cityscape of the postcolonial metropolis London can
offer contestations of (trans)national world formations, and I see the city
space as a testing ground for fashioning and furnishing African diasporic
identities. By turning to emotional geographies and urban emotions and
by tracing engagements with affective structures of love, desire, affiliation
and communality through Smith’s city imaginaries, I seek to fashion an
understanding of specifically urban diasporic belonging in the twenty-first
century. I will look at the ways in which emotions are taken out of place
and re-emplaced in response to diasporic life trajectories and thus put both
concepts of space and love under pressure. In the first section of this chap-
ter, titled “(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions”,
I will sketch a history of postcolonial London writing, with a special focus
on the city post-Windrush in order to be able to situate Smith’s London
novels in their historical, socio-political and literary context. Because
Zadie Smith so insistently foregrounds especially female urban experiences
in her work, I want to draw a line to her literary foremothers and forefa-
thers who also engaged in a project of recreating London according to
multi-faceted power relations. Taking Sam Selvon’s seminal novel The
Lonely Londoners (1956) and Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems
(1984) as my foils, I will discuss how Smith’s first London novel, White
Teeth, inscribes itself into—and subverts—its precursors through its pro-
tagonist Irie’s affective, corporeal engagement with London and the alter-
native love and family structures she manufactures. These comparative
positionings will form the historical and theoretical background for the
following discussions of NW and Swing Time. The second part of the
chapter, “The Affective Architecture of City and Text”, will examine
Smith’s second and most explicit London novel NW regarding its struc-
tural, performative textual rendering of the city. Here, I will focus on how
the materiality of the narrative channels different strategies of organising
78 J. LEETSCH
the city, such as the employment of Google Maps, postcodes, public trans-
port routes and circular and numerical structures. These will be linked to
the affective and relational encounters the text produces. The results are
alternative and emotive cartographies that forge the city as an inherently
shared communal space which, as such, offers ways of accessing migratory
and diasporic urban identity and affiliations. The third section of the chap-
ter, titled “Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere”, will then draw
together above arguments to shed light on the sexual, romantic, intimate
relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time, to examine
how city and love become entangled in a new understanding of postcolo-
nial, diasporic togetherness. Queer disruptions of heteronormative
romance (in NW) and ambivalent female friendships (in Swing Time) will
bring forth different renderings of relationality, community and neigh-
bourhood in the urban space. In this section, I will make fruitful the con-
cepts of “desire lines” and “flâneuserie” to re-evaluate Smith’s London
novels and to underline my argument that the novels constitute new ways
of loving and being loved in a global twenty-first-century world.
(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics

and Traditions
London has never stood still and over time has changed its face so many
times that one will lose count trying to list these changes. The city which
stands on the River Thames in the south east of Great Britain is a change-
ling and there exist many different incarnations of it. It is marked by diver-
gent histories of settlement and displacement, (re-)organisation,
destruction and rebuilding—necessary measures, for example, after the
Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, both events of great destruc-
tive force but at the same time enabling new developments in their after-
math, thus paving the way for the metropolis we know today. This
continuous evolution is not only mirrored in the city’s material realities, its
streets and architecture, but also in the imaginations linked to it. London,
as “both a real city and a place of the imagination, a symbolic construct
always already something other than that which its mere presence indi-
cated, needed [and still needs] a writing necessary to its paradoxes and
contradictions”, as Julian Wolfreys contends in Writing London (1998,
17). Many writers have tried to capture this shape-shifting figure: there is
an entire literary canon dedicated to London writings from the early
modern city comedies to today’s postmodern, postcolonial renderings of

the city: “The city, […] was [and still is] fundamentally a textual place, a
place of non-static intersections, weaves, interconnections, recurring traces
and remarkings” (18). London writing is never just a mere representation
of the city, but always a creative and imaginative production and perfor-
mance of it. It is another form of cartography—one that does not pretend
to reveal everything there is to know but one that intends to extend the
city beyond its geographical boundaries (cf. 13). London is not an a priori,
stable place but always constructed, fabricated and conceptualised. It is
both place and continuously “taking place”, as Julian Wolfreys has con-
vincingly argued: “[T]he city has meaning as unexpected event which
takes place constantly. The city is reformed with each encounter” (4–5).
What I want to pay attention to in the following is the “taking place”,
indeed the worlding (to return to) Pheng Cheah’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s
thinking), of the global metropolis London and the political, social and
imaginative possibilities attached to these rewritings of what once had
been termed the centre of the Empire. By doing so, I hope to attest to
how Smith’s texts wilfully re-negotiate oppositions between public and
private, global and intimate, and show how world-making is also always
the making of love, the creation of self- and other love.
Black London: City/Worlds

To be able to understand Zadie Smith’s London novels, it is of paramount
importance to ask how the city is affected by and in turn affects discursive
and material formations such as home and belonging. Postcolonial London
writing represents the capital but at the same time re-figures and re-
negotiates it. The metropolis turns into a worldly space where histories of
colonialism, migration, travel, diaspora and resettlement converge. A by
now famous passage on hybridity in White Teeth visualises this:
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has
been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in
the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish
pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a
basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last
names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass
exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. […]. Yet,
despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into
80 J. LEETSCH
each other’s lives with reasonable comfort […], despite all this, it is still hard
to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more
Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry
about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a
kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to
hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegena-
tion, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant
fears—dissolution, disappearance. (2000, 326; emphasis in original)
What White Teeth suggest here is an uneasy and slippery contact zone
which mediates cultural difference and cultural encounters; the novel por-
trays a city changed through the presence of others at its heart: “as Britain
withdrew from most of its colonies, the city that once possessed the world
began to contain a diasporic world that was increasingly taking possession
of it” (Ball 2004, n. pag.). Within the affective framework of White Teeth,
these converging histories are represented by the intimate links between
three families from different cultural, ethnic, geographical backgrounds:
the Iqbals—Samad and Alsana, first-generation Muslim Bangladeshi
migrants to London, and their twin sons Magid and Millat; the family of
the Englishman Archie Jones and his wife Clara Bowden (daughter of
first-generation Jamaican migrants, the Windrush generation) and their
daughter Irie; and the Chalfen family—Jewish Marcus and Irish Joyce and
their sons. All three families inhabit places marked by multi-faceted origins
and backgrounds of migration and travel. These spatial links to “else-
where” are structurally performed by the novel’s three narrative excur-
sions in its “Root Canal” chapters: one to India (the 1857 mutiny), one
to the Caribbean (a 1907 earthquake) and one to Eastern Europe (the
end of World War II in 1945). However, the novel not only makes visible
Britain’s (and Europe’s) colonial relationships to the Caribbean, to Asia
and to Africa but also reconfigures London—and in so doing re-
contextualises its metropolitan world.
London writings by authors like Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Hanif
Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Gautam Malkani and many
others2 critically reconfigure London as they understand it as a seat of
power, the headquarter of the Government, the locus from where the
Empire once forcibly unfolded. It can be regarded as the centrifugal point
around which the world revolved, around which the rest of the world was
imagined—at least from the point of view of the Western colonial powers.
As these London rewritings show, however, and as Simon Gikandi has
astutely noted, “Englishness was itself a product of the colonial culture

that it seemed to have created elsewhere” (1996, x), since it drew its
resources and energies from the colonies that supported it economically.
Or, in the words of Alsana in White Teeth: “Do you think anybody is
English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!” (2000a, 236). Because of this,
the seat of the empire was “less a place where England exert[ed] control
than the place where England los[t] command of its own narrative of
identity” (Baucom 1999, 3). One of the most striking examples for this
loss of control can be found in a quintessential British space within White
Teeth, the London pub O’Connell’s Pool House, which intermingles dif-
ferent cultural contexts so that the one-directional narrative of national
identity is wholly broken down: owned by an Iraqi family, it is a combina-
tion of “reproductions of George Stubb’s racehorse paintings, the framed
fragments of some foreign, Eastern script”, an “Irish flag and a map of the
Arab Emirates knotted together and hung from wall to wall” (2000, 183).
This description opens the chapter “Mitosis”—mitosis is a biological cell
process where one cell divides into daughter cells. Drawing on this bio-
logical process, White Teeth shows how an essential British space is divvied
up, twisting and turning notions of belonging and stranger-hood:
“O’Connell’s is no place for strangers”, instead it becomes a meeting place
for alternative families and affiliations (183). The capital as both centre
and extension of the nation thus inadvertently destabilises the supposedly
secure and solid demarcations of the latter, “city and nation are set at
odds” (McLeod 2004, 19) in productive ways.
One of the foundational literary examples describing this disturbance of
power lines can be found in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956),
one of White Teeth’s literary precursors. Selvon, an Indian Trinidadian
immigrant from the Caribbean, arrived in London in the 1950s, just a few
years after what has come to be seen as an event initiating large-scale
migrational movements from the former colonies to the heart of the
empire: the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush at the Tilbury Docks in
1948 with its 492 West Indian passengers. There are certain points in his-
tory that can be taken as markers of how power relations between the
Empire and its (former) colonies shifted fundamentally and how these
shifts reformed not only the political landscape but also spatial, social and
affective organisations. One of these notches in the course of history was
the arrival of the Windrush—“a moment paradoxically made possible by
the British Nationality Act of 1948, which was in turn largely catalysed by
Indian Independence in 1947” (Murdoch 2012, 6). It ushered in
82 J. LEETSCH
post-war immigration to the former capital of the Empire, constituted by

immigrants not only from the Caribbean but also from the African conti-
nent and South East Asia. With the Nationality Act, citizens from the
Commonwealth countries were officially instated as British subjects and
given full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. But suddenly these
people, which had been an integral and essential part of the Empire’s fab-
ric for so long, were “too close to home”, could not any longer be com-
fortably banned to the outskirts.
Exemplary for the racism and xenophobia directed at the migrants is
Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968), which depicted immi-
grants as “invading hordes who, with their peculiar practices and origins
and predilection for crime and moral turpitude, would never be able to
assimilate” (quoted in Favell 2001, 105), invoking paranoid notions of
“swamping” and “disease” and thus expressing a deep running anxiety
and racialised fear of the unknown. These violent rhetorical strategies of
othering would later be invoked by David Blunkett, who became Britain’s
Home Secretary in 2001, creatively reimagined by Adichie in Americanah
to underline her Nigerian protagonist’s troubled existence below the radar
of legal citizenship in London. The “unknown”, which for so long had
been a part of British identity, had now become visible and would eventu-
ally and against all odds “overtake, transform, and ultimately radicalise
concepts of ‘Britishness’” (Murdoch 2012, 7). While the arrival of the
Windrush cannot and should not stand for the whole history of migration
to Britain, it can nevertheless be taken as a symbol for the reassessment of
what it meant to belong in a postcolonial British society which allows
hyphenated identities.
While these large-scale immigration movements are often described as
a “reinvasion of the centre or, in the words of the Jamaican poet Louise
Bennett, ‘colonizin / Englan in reverse’” (Ball 2004, 4; quoting Bennett
[1957] 2012, 2726), it should be questioned if these terms are actually
useful. They are certainly effective in order to try and reset hierarchical
imbalances and righten the lopsided allocation of power, but I think it is
more productive to speak about continuous and multi-directional interac-
tions and interrelations; to not stay within a space of binaries and rigid
oppositions, but instead to recognise mutual—if hurtful—dependencies
and influences. Selvon’s seminal Black London text The Lonely Londoners
can be regarded as a model and founding text, a foil against and with
which all following postcolonial London texts can be made to work
(McLeod 2004; Innes 2002). And just as the Windrush with its Caribbean
passengers does not wholly represent migration and diaspora (from all
over the globe), Selvon as a writer from the Caribbean cannot fully repre-
sent all Black London literature. Instead, I want to take The Lonely
Londoners as an exemplary text for the imaginative, literary worlding of
the metropolis which also characterises Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, an
“authentic world-forming” that advocates habitable, hospitable worlds—
“a making of the world” (Nancy 2007, 1; emphasis in original). Selvon’s
worlding of the metropolis can be illustrated by two scenes from the novel,
one passage from the very beginning and one passage that is situated
towards the end of the text ([1956] 2006):
One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London,
with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur
as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses
Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and
Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from
Trinidad on the boat-train. (1)
The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, sun-
light on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it is and
where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on
Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is
my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived
in the great city of London, centre of the world. (133–134)
Both passages are deeply inscribed in acts of spatial urban cartography.

They trace movements between different versions of the city, between the
“not-London-at-all” (1) to the “London particular” (133). In Selvon’s
book, the foggy Dickensian London is at times replaced, at times supple-
mented, at times undermined by another London—a London of Notting
Hill,3 of the port, of trains, of the transitory spaces of the diaspora. This
other London opens the city up to the world. This opening-up also
becomes clear in how Selvon’s characters re-name the architecture of the
city and how routes are carefully reiterated, from Chepstow Road to
Westbourne Grove to Waterloo, from Waterloo to Charing Cross to
Piccadilly Circus—from margins to centre and the other way around.
These acts of naming and placing circumscribe different versions of the
city combined in one. As Susheila Nasta argues, this “represented a major
step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization”
(2006, x). What is more, the novel is steeped in the necessity to meet each
other. Communities and relationships are built as London becomes a place
84 J. LEETSCH
of contact. The novel takes up the loneliness of its Londoners, as the bleak
title suggests, and turns it into a narrative which humorously and tenderly
encounters many different voices: The Lonely Londoners deliberately rein-
vents London as an affective place of encounters. Reimaginations of
London such as by Selvon have generated modes of resistance that enable
new ways of living in and dealing with the metropolitan space of London.
I read Smith’s White Teeth and her subsequent London novels as con-
tinuations of this foundational Black London text as they perform similar
acts of worlding. They reconfigure hurtful structures and architectures
and engage in a “making of the world”. In White Teeth, this becomes
apparent when following a particular bus route along London’s streets:
And the 52 bus goes two ways. From the Willesden kaleidoscope, one can
catch it south like the children; through Kensal Rise, to Portobello, to
Knightsbridge, and watch the many colours shade off into the bright white
lights of town; or you can get it north, as Samad did; Willesden, Dollis Hill,
Harlesden, and watch with dread (if you are fearful like Samad, if all you
have learnt from the city is to cross the road at the sight of dark-skinned
men) as white fades to yellow fades to brown, and then Harlesden Clock
comes into view, standing like Queen Victoria’s statue in Kingston—a tall
white stone surrounded by black. (2000a, 164)
Tracing different shades of white, yellow, brown and black and subverting
notions of city centre and imperial centre, the bus as a transitory space of
travel slices not only through geographical London but also through many
different materialisations of world orders, old and new histories—exempli-
fied by the “white” Queen Victoria statue in “black” Kingston. As Rebecca
Dyer contends, White Teeth’s London narrative “uses such monuments to
Britain’s imperial age to draw attention to the wounds created by colonial-
ism, and she undercuts official British history and memorialization through
depictions of her character’s family histories, memories, and individual
acts of resistance” (2004, 83).4 The novel’s linear and non-linear narra-
tions, its linguistic pirouettes (“And who does he think he is? Mr Churchill-
gee?” laughed Alsana scornfully. “Original whitecliffsdover piesnmah
jellyeels royalvariety britishbulldog, heh” 2000, 231), its sometimes real-
ist, sometimes magical-realist multi-generational family saga, its stories
within stories and its histories within histories all these weave a complex
spatial and temporal tale of London. White Teeth’s metropolis is so deeply
inscribed into the history of the Empire and the history of the world, that
it offers an enworlded version of the city that can never be easy or simple
or clean. The very last sections of the novel make this abundantly clear:
The final space. A big room, one of many in the Perret institute. […] a cor-
porate place, a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain (this was the design
brief) used for the meetings of people who want to meet somewhere neutral
at the end of the twentieth century; […] in an emptiness, an uncontami-
nated cavity; the logical endpoint of a thousand years of spaces too crowded
and bloody. This one is pared down, sterilized, made new every day by a
Nigerian cleaning lady with an industrial Hoover and guarded through the
night by Mr De Winter, a Polish night watchman […] a new British room,
a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cul-
tural space space. (517–519)
However hard one tries for an empty, neutral space, spatiality always
remains relational, and as such attached to others, an “endless maze of
present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and
everybody’s old historical shit all over the place” (514). The “final” neu-
tral British space (a room in the Perret Institute situated in Central London
facing Trafalgar Square, in which one of White Teeth’s chaotic endings will
take place) is made clean and neutral by a Nigerian cleaning woman and is
guarded by a Polish watchman: the “new British room” is a room which
includes all the worldly others who have for a long time been forcefully
excluded.
Black and Female Urban Spaces

To tell you de truth
I don’t know really where I belaang
Yes, divided to de ocean
Divided to de bone
Wherever I hang me knickers—that’s my home.
—Grace Nichols, “Wherever I Hang” (1998, 3)
The “Final Space” in White Teeth can be taken as one of the prime exam-
ples for processes of worlding the metropolis through encounter and affili-
ation; these affiliations include the friendship between Samad Iqbal and
Archie Jones (one of the main structural connective devices of the novel)
or the supernatural link between the twins. It is interesting to note, how-
ever, that the final Central London space of the Perret Institute where the
86 J. LEETSCH
assumed ending takes place (Archie is shot, the mouse flees) is not the
proper final space of the novel. On the last pages, Smith opens up other
possible endings, other possible spaces—as she writes, “like the indepen-
dence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking
of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of a much longer
story” (2000a, 540). In the following, I want to hone in on one of the
novel’s central figures, Irie Jones, and her possible ending. Her relational
and gendered engagement with the city constitutes both a continuation
and subversion of city texts such as The Lonely Londoners, while her various
emplacements and embodiments offer new approaches to think female
urban space.
To showcase an explicitly black and female engagement with the met-
ropolitan urban space of London in White Teeth, I will investigate Irie
Jones’ configurations of spaces and subjectivities in the metropole in con-
versation with one of her conceptual, creative foremothers, the fat black
woman of Guyanese writer Grace Nichols’ poems. Together, the two
women articulate modes and nodes of love, intimacy, belonging and affili-
ation which rewrite “the social order to include a vision of new relational
possibilities which transgress ethnic, class and racial divisions as well as
family ties”, to use the words of Barbara Harlow (1987, 142; quoted in
McLeod 2004, 95). Irie is the daughter of “everyday Englishman” (2000a,
48) Archibald Jones and Clara Bowden, herself daughter of Hortense
Bowden, a first-generation immigrant from Jamaica. Irie is introduced as
a teenager, inhabiting a transitional and uncomfortable space. She feels
ugly, excluded. Her changing relation to London is marked by the devel-
oping engagement with her own corporeality. In the first chapter dedi-
cated to her, we meet her as follows: “Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was
big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation,
and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame,
loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas”; she is described as having
weight, “big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth” (265). She
believes that
she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and
thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight
which in turn required bottle-top spectacles in a light shade of pink, […]
And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept
her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her
stomach. She was all wrong. (268; emphasis in original)
This “wrongness” is inherently connected to her body, and her body in

turn is a materialisation of her origins as daughter of a white, English
father and mixed-race, Jamaican mother: “There was England, a gigantic
mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger
land” (266). Her spatial and cultural displacement results in bodily dis-
placement. This reads like a direct echo to another London woman 20
years earlier—a woman living in the poetry cycle The Fat Black Woman’s
Poems by Grace Nichols.
Nichols first poetry collection i is a long memoried woman (published in
1983) imagined the middle passage—the move from Africa to the
Caribbean—and focused especially on the lives of women who collectively
and individually experienced this trauma: “Child of the middle passage
womb / push / daughter of a vengeful Chi / she came / into the new
world / birth aching her pain / from one continent / to another” (1983,
6). With The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Nichols moves from the
Caribbean to Britain, just as she herself, born in Guyana in 1950, moved
to London in 1977. Together with writers such as Buchi Emecheta and
Beryl Gilroy before her, she is regarded as an important precursor for con-
temporary Black British women writing today (cf. Scafe 2015). The poems
in her collection can be seen as exemplary for the development of female
Black London writing as they express a struggle inherent to all the works
by postcolonial female writers in the metropolis, a struggle which is trans-
formed to create “a dynamic and confident sense of London as a resistant
space for black women” (McLeod 2004, 120). Emphasising the fat black
woman’s corporeality, the poems not only redefine European standards of
beauty, but also point out deeper-seated racial and gendered prejudices.
She encounters similar restrictions as Irie. In “The Fat Black Woman Goes
Shopping”, the speaker meets a world which is not cut out for her as she
searches for clothing that would fit her in the London streets: “Look at
the frozen thin mannequins / fixing her with grin / and the pretty face
sales gals / exchanging slimming glances / thinking she don’t notice”
(1984, 11). She is, however, unaffected by the hostility of the thin white
sale girls who stare at her and calmly returns the gaze as the poem ends
flippantly and self-assuredly. The poem places her body within the pre-
dominantly hostile space of the metropolis which she opposes with a sense
of being firmly placed, at home within her body. Similarly, “Invitation”
reclaims the female black body in the face of negative stereotypes, invok-
ing historical figures like Saartje Baartman (cf. DeCaires Narain 2004;
Sandhu 2003) and racial stereotypes of black women like the “mammy”
88 J. LEETSCH
or “Jemima” figure, and counteracts these harmful negative evocations

with non-Western images of beauty, sensuality, eroticism: “My breasts are
huge exciting / amnions of watermelon / your hands can’t cup / my
thighs are twin seals / fat slick pups” (Nichols 1984, 12). The fat black
woman imagines the female body as strength and resistance, as she opens
it to notions of self-assertive female desire and feminine rhythms.
The difference to Irie is clear: it is obvious that the fat black woman
defies her critics and feels at home both within her body and within the
city. Irie’s process is much slower—to feel confident and at home, she first
needs to encounter a number of different London spaces. One of the first
locations she enters is a decidedly feminine urban space which is essential
for many women of colour, the hair salon, where she tries to become
whiter, more English, by attempting to have her hair straightened. Like in
Adichie’s Americanah, the salon is a space marked by contentious com-
munity and lopsided power relations. In Smith, however, the salon offers
a much more pronounced focus on the dangers and violations linked to
black hair—here, hair is political, and has long started to burn, to para-
phrase Audre Lorde’s poem:
The female section of P.K.’s was a deathly thing. Here, the impossible desire
for straightness and ‘movement’ fought daily with the stubborn determina-
tion of the African follicle; here ammonia, hot combs, clips, pins and simple
fire had all been enlisted in the war and were doing their damnedest to beat
each curly hair into submission. (2000a, 275)
The salon is a place of pain and suffering, blood and fainting. Irie needs to
gain entry to it in order to transform her naturally curly hair into “[…]
straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-
through-able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe” (273). The result how-
ever, much like it was for Ifemelu, is “[D]ead. Dry. Splintered. Stiff. All
the spring gone. Like the hair of a cadaver as the moisture seeps away”
(276). The ammonia has made her scalp bleed and large chunks of her hair
fall out. The solution is a weave, made from someone else’s hair.5 In the
end, Irie’s own hair is damaged and hidden beneath straight dark red hair.
She wants to show her “new” hair, her new self, to Millat, whom she is in
love with. Instead, she encounters his lesbian cousin Neena with her girl-
friend Maxine and Millat’s mother Alsana, who, in this moment, consti-
tute an alternative family that gives her security—and sound, if harsh,
feminist advice. Though she does not want to admit it, she listens to them
and a few moments later “Irie stood, facing her own reflection, busy tear-
ing out somebody else’s hair with her bare hands”, turning a little bit into
the more confident, older fat black woman of Nichols’ poems. The group
of women around Irie displace her desire to please Millat and enable her
to engage in an act of self-acceptance, not self-destruction. Like in
Americanah, it is a community of other brown and black women who are
able to offer to our protagonist an alternative version of herself, of her
future—one marked by self-love, female solidarity and the displacement of
society’s desire for black women to conform.
Another formative London space Irie encounters is the family home of
the Chalfens:
She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their
Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that
the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way
of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky) […]. To Irie, the Chalfens were
more English than the English. (328; emphasis in original)
When she discovers the Chalfens’ extensive family tree, she is blinded by
the insight that her own history is concealed from her: “a long list of
parental hypocrisies and untruths […], secret histories, stories you never
got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumour you never unrav-
elled, which would be fine if every day was not littered with clues, and
suggestions” (379). This perceived lack of roots plays into one of the most
important metaphors the book employs, namely, that of teeth (such as in
the title’s white teeth, the chapter headings “Toothing Trouble”, “Root
Canals”, “Molars” and “Canines: The Ripping Teeth”). Irie wants to
become a dentist, to pull out teeth and pull out stories, too: to restore
them and rewrite them. Teeth function both as narrative device and as
historiographical metaphor—they become linked to place and placeless-
ness. Irie finds out that her mother, Clara, has false teeth and this causes
her to turn away from her mother towards her grandmother Hortense
(and her mother Ambrosia), who seems to have stronger links to one part
of her hybrid identity, the Caribbean.
As she flees to her grandmother and moves in with her, she comes into
contact with her Jamaican past and encounters old letters, photographs,
pictures—and in discovering her grandmother’s past, she in turn starts
reclaiming her own past as well:
90 J. LEETSCH
She laid claim to the past—her version of the past—aggressively, as if retriev-

ing misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to
her, her birth right, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X
marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found […] It just
seemed tiring and unnecessary all of a sudden, that struggle to force some-
thing out of the recalcitrant English soil. Why bother, when there was now
this other place? (400, 402; emphasis in original)
In moving into her grandmother’s house in Lambeth, she enters another

stage of engaging with both the London space around her and her own
history. As an alternative space to London, Jamaica becomes her imagi-
nary “homeland” (402), “with no complications, [n]o fictions, no myths,
no lies, no tangled webs” (402). However, in the same vein, she empha-
sises the fact that “[…] homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like
unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And
the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it
sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings” (402; empha-
sis in original). Here, we can again detect parallels to Grace Nichols’ fat
black woman. Geographically, the fat black woman inhabits another part
of the triangle produced by the transatlantic slave trade and can be
regarded as one of Irie’s historical, conceptual foremothers: she leaves the
Caribbean to come to Britain just as Irie’s grandmother had. Irie, how-
ever, desires the reverse; she wants to go “back” to Jamaica. Both the fat
black woman and Irie engage in specific and partly corresponding strate-
gies of hybrid world-making within the metropolis: if Irie’s London is
destabilised as she inserts into it her imaginary Caribbean homeland, the
fat black woman’s London is similarly marked by slippages and tensions.
The section “Back Home Contemplation” in The Fat Black Woman’s
Poems, for example, merges two places, London and Guyana, the here and
there, stating at the end of the poem that “of course / home is where the
heart lies” (1984, 28), arguing for a relational and affiliative sense of
belonging not necessarily tied to place. The fat black woman moves
through the streets of London and transforms them through her presence,
appropriating cultural stereotypes and localities at the same time.
Reconfiguring the city and its climate, her experience with England oscil-
lates meteorologically between the bleak London winter and the tropical
climates of her home islands. Doing so, she creates an alternative space
within the metropolis, a space that allows a worlded belonging. I contest
that these positionings can be read as a productive mirror to how Irie as a
twenty-first-century African diasporic subject fashions her own belongings

in London and beyond.
Both Nichols’ fat black woman and Smith’s Irie enact London as an
affective migrational site. Throughout these poetic renderings and the
connection between two black women, both London and Jamaica are
made complicated and more expansive; they “represent key moments of
resistance and affirmation, contesting the divisive, racialized resonances of
empire even as they articulate the familiar form and patterns of their [pos-
sible] Caribbean homes” (Murdoch 2007, 588). I would, however, also
argue that Smith’s novel goes a step further than Nichols’ poetry as it
offers many different homes. This is made clear on the last pages, as the
text provides Irie with yet another imaginary of love and the world:
Irie, Joshua and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea (for Irie and Joshua
become lovers in the end; you can only avoid your fate for so long), while
Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat
and Good Uncle Magid and feels free like Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of
paternal strings? (2000a, 541)
Towards the end of the novel, Irie sleeps with both Magid and Millat
within a short period of time—this not only constitutes Irie’s sexual awak-
ening but also produces a generative, genealogical gap; Irie will never be
able to determine the father of her baby: “Irie’s child can never be mapped
exactly or spoken of with any certainty” (527). Brought up by Irie and
Joshua with Magid and Millat as possible fathers, the baby represents a
notion of family that is not necessarily constituted by blood relation but by
affiliative and non-biological connections: it “not only connects the fami-
lies but also, for all the tensions between (and within) them, ensures their
continued connectedness in the future” (Perfect 2014, 82; emphasis in
original). In spatial terms, moreover, this possible ending imagines a future
placed outside of London, in the Caribbean, at the beach side. The narra-
tive thus invests Irie with agency to create a space in the future. Both
Hortense’s house and this possible ending function as two alternative
spaces to the London inhabited by the characters: one is placed within
London but dislocates the city through processes of memory and imagina-
tion and one is placed outside of the metropolis’ bounds.
Just as Grace Nichols’ fat black woman builds herself a home through
small acts of homing (like hanging up her knickers), her conceptual grand-
daughter Irie, as “a great-reinventor of herself, a great make-doer” (2000a,
92 J. LEETSCH
368), actively enacts another version of the world. She re-centres the
world around her individual experience and foregrounds her own sensual-
ity and sexuality, becoming a contemporary, updated version of Nichols’
self-assured, wilful fat black woman. Her unconventional family model
fosters an alternative sense of being placed, enabling her to break through
the geographical boundaries placed upon her. In allowing a simultaneity
of placement and displacement, White Teeth writes against the invisibility
of women in the city and resists a homogenous narrative of urban life:
both Smith and Nichols unlock “the remarkable transformative potential
of black women at large in London”, they “make room on their own
terms and in opposition to the determinants of racial, chauvinist and other
discourses which attempt to keep such women in their perceived place”
(McLeod 2004, 124). Irie’s alternative version to the nuclear family and
her kinship with the woman in Nichols’ poems, a female genealogy that
spans across time and place, reconsider colonial and patriarchal power rela-
tionships; indeed, such forms of alternative familial love and kin harbour
the potential to topple and then repair violent orders of (neo-)Empire.
What is more, this intergenerational connection not only links two fic-
tional women (one from a novel, one from a poem cycle) but also links
Smith’s text to other, African diasporic literary predecessors: the kinship
between Irie and the fat black woman extends to encompass also a kinship
between literary works and a conversation between authors who might be
separated by decades but who nevertheless generate a chorus singing into
existence another London. As I have argued before, bell hooks and others
have recognised the capacity of love as ultimately transformative of struc-
tures that underlie harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, racism,
inequality and heteronormative restriction: a black love politics “consti-
tutes a black feminist tradition deeply invested in […] crafting political
communities constituted by heterogeneity and variety, rather than homo-
geneity and fixity”, and it “engenders new publics, new forms of relation-
ality, even if tenuous and fleeting, marked by forms of collective sentiment”
(Nash 2013, 13; 14). Such a radical love politics—one which ultimately
comes to the forefront in White Teeth’s London and through its intertex-
tual communities to other black city texts—entails not only a reparative
practice of the self but also a communal, relational strategy for construct-
ing ethicopolitical imaginaries through fiction.
The Affective Architecture of City and Text

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and
another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and
back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera.
—Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind (2009, 41)
White Teeth is steeped in London’s architecture and uses its urban sur-
roundings to negotiate the imperial pasts and postcolonial, migratory
presents its characters move through—this ranges from Archie’s near sui-
cide in the non-place Cricklewood to the children’s fluid movements
around the city’s centres and peripheries, Samad’s extra-marital adven-
tures in North London or Irie’s experiences with specific (gendered)
urban interior spaces like the hair salon. Its London geographies are inti-
mately interlinked with the novel’s characters and their interpersonal rela-
tionships. Yet whereas White Teeth, as demonstrated above, tentatively
veers out into the world and leaves London to visit India, Eastern Europe
and the Caribbean, NW, Smith’s fourth novel, is very firmly rooted in
North-West London. It is Smith’s most explicit city novel and because of
that I will take it as the paradigmatic example for how Smith’s London
texts build a specific urban “architexture”6—a composite of urban archi-
tecture and text/texture or, more generally spoken, space and language.
These architextures are deeply connected to and concurrent with the nov-
el’s ethics and politics of love—it’s intimate, communal and affective
imaginaries. My main aim in this section is to examine how these affective
structures play together (in consonance or in discord) with the space of
the urban as it is performed by Smith’s novel.
The kind of London written, imagined and produced in NW traces one
specific slice of the metropolis. As indicated by the novel’s title, the post-
code for the North-West London area, the narrative is mainly set in
Willesden and Kilburn, which are part of the borrow of Brent and situated
between Wembley and Hampstead Heath. The novel’s characters—
Nathan Bogle, Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie De Angelis (neé
Keisha Blake) and Felix Cooper—all grew up together in Willesden on a
(fictional) council estate called Caldwell. Generally, the novel offers a curi-
ous mixture of real London places, landmarks and local curiosities (such as
the black Madonna at the Church of St. Mary), imagined locations such
as Brayton school or bus routes which do not exist and half-real, half-
fictional spaces like the housing project Caldwell with its five tower blocks,
94 J. LEETSCH
named after English philosophers (Smith, Hobbes, Bentham, Locke,

Russell), which echo the names of real tower blocks in Kilburn (called
Austen, Dickens and Fielding) (cf. Enright 2012). In the novel, NW is
called “a small place” (Smith 2012, 97)—but the world brought to life
through the text can be regarded as one possible microcosm of the
metropolis. What is produced here is a London fashioned by community,
neighbourhood and interlinked intimacies.
In Smith’s work, London is literally constructed on the page. The novel
as an urban text renders the experience of living in the metropolis into
aesthetic form—topography and typography, space and language become
intertwined in its architexture. As Wolfreys has argued, “‘London’ comes
to be seen to be integral to the shaping of narrative, determining and
mediating both the rhetoric which composes the narrative and the shape
which the narrative eventually assumes” (1998, 11). The city is not just a
“stage upon which the narrative is enacted” (12) but is embodied and
materialised in the textual and structural set-up of the novel itself. The
novel performs its urbanity; it writes and builds the city through experi-
ences of walking, reading and mapping. The text is sometimes structured
around London postcodes, such as in Felix’s part, “Guest”, which is
divided into three chapters—NW6, WI (Oxford Street/Regent Street),
and then NW6 again. This circularity captures movement on the public
transport and the travels to and fro a Londoner has to undertake to get
somewhere. Similarly, “Crossing” (a part of the novel dedicated to
Natalie/Keisha) is structured along different routes across North-West
London, from “Willesden Lane to Kilburn High Road”, “Shoot Up Hill to
Fortune Green”, “Hampstead to Archway”, reaching “Hampstead Heath”,
“The Corner of Hornsey Lane” and then “Hornsey Lane” (303–324,
emphases in original). Readers follow Natalie and Nathan on their walk,
tracing and interpreting the London neighbourhood together with the
characters. Some segments are numerically arranged, like Natalie’s first
section, “Host”, or Leah’s narrative, which is time and time again inter-
rupted by the number 37. Sometimes the words change font size and
spacing, or form into line breaks, calligrams or concrete poetry (28, 31,
36, 236, 315), thereby disrupting the unity of the visual surface of the
page. This inventive textuality, rendered through experimental forms of
typography and page layout, relocates representations of urban spatiality
into the texture of the novel. The three narrators, Leah, Felix and Natalie,
act not only as focalisers but also as localisers—their segments are charac-
terised by different approaches to inhabiting their London worlds. In the
following I will focus on two examples that show how the construction of
and engagement with space in the novel enable readers to pursue yet
another kind of mapping: one of relationships and kinship structures.
Leah and Felix can be seen as distorted mirrors of each other: Irish
English Leah is deeply implanted in NW, the Caldwell estate and Brayton
school. When we meet her, she is placed “in a hammock, in the garden of
a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides” (3). She was born in the estate,
can even see the room she was born in from her own backyard and still
lives there even though her husband, an Algerian Guadeloupian hair-
dresser called Michel, desperately wants to move on, move up, move away.
But “Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of city as
other people are to their families, or their countries” (6). Through her
fractured narration, we come to know that she is pregnant, but that she
does not want the child, that she does not want the change this would
entail: “For Leah, that way [motherhood] is not forward” (93). British
Caribbean Felix, who belongs to NW as firmly as Leah (“Felix, man, you
properly local”, 104; emphasis in original), can be read as one of the most
mobile characters in the novel—he is the only character who leaves NW
during narrative time; his mobility and fluidity is also expressed in the
structure of the narrative itself, as he knows none of the other characters
but nevertheless acts as connective tissue between all of them. His one-day
arc on August 27, 2010 (a time frame which echoes modernist city texts
like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses), radiates out
from the North-West London council estate and travels across London via
bus and tube, and each leg of his journey takes him to yet another encoun-
ter, be it a sociable or deadly one. Both Leah and Felix engage in what I
would call affective, performative mappings of the city which question
notions of control, stability and linearity.
Felix’s interactions on London streets are marked by relational perfor-
mances—they construct tentative urban conviviality and a transitory com-
munality that oscillates between feelings of estrangement and placed-ness:
Now Felix collided with a real live young man leaving a glass-walled video
emporium, walking backwards through the double doors while waving
goodbye to his friends still wrestling their joysticks. Felix touched the guy
gently on the elbows, and the stranger, with equal care, reached back and
held Felix where his waist met his back; they both laughed lightly and apolo-
gised, called each other ‘Boss’ before separating quickly, the stranger strid-
ing back towards Eros and Felix towards Soho. (138)
96 J. LEETSCH
A train barrelled past, knocking him into the seat he’d been heading for.
After a moment the two trains seemed to cruise together. He looked out
now at his counterpart, in the other train. Small woman, whom he would
have judged Jewish without being able to articulate any very precise reason
why: dark, pretty, smiling to herself, in a blue dress from the seventies—big
collar, tiny white bird print. She was frowning at his T-shirt. Trying to figure
it. He felt like it: he smiled! a broad smile that emphasized his dimples and
revealed three gold teeth. The girl’s little dark face pulled tight like a net
bag. Her train pulled ahead, then his did. (120)
These encounters are fleeting, but nevertheless intimate. Here, intimacy

does not play out in the romantic or sexual ways it had in White Teeth or
The Lonely Londoners, but in the small touches between strangers on
London streets and the underground. As Salman Rushdie argued in his
London novel, The Satanic Verses (1988): “The modern city is the locus
classicus of impossible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with
one another sit side by side upon the omnibus” (325). In the text of NW,
it is not the bus but the Tube that functions as a crucial social space of
encounters. These encounters constitute transitory moments: two path-
ways cross each other, briefly align and then separate. The London Tube
becomes one of the most important fix points in Felix’s story, just like for
Obinze in Americanah—Felix, however, takes a much more active part in
the act of travelling and creating community (even if it is to his detriment).
The map of the underground usually serves as orientation help for trav-
ellers, but in Felix’s case he re-signifies and re-interprets it to fit to his
particular London experience. The alternative cartography he establishes
can be put in conversation with the history of public transport in London
which reaches back to the creation of Greater London and urban planning
in the late nineteenth century. With the growing technological and indus-
trial modernisations, railways came to link inner and outer city and thus
produced connections between spaces hitherto thought of as separate (cf.
McLeod 2006). By establishing these new lines of connection, new com-
munities and relationalities emerged. The Tube came to be regarded as a
point of reference with which to approach the unfurling city space, the
first grammar available to Londoners to be able to make sense of the city.
The famous Tube map invented by Harry Beck at the beginning of the
twentieth century enabled Londoners to differently approach their metro-
politan spatiality. This map, however, is far from a true representation of
the city, it “eschewed any direct correlation with the layout of the city it
conceptualised”, “straightening the curves of the river and plotting the

cityscape onto a grid of horizontals, vertical, and diagonals” (Pike 2002,
104). It represents an abstract, aerial view of the city which tries to order,
standardise and normalise it. Central London is given much more room,
whereas the suburbs and outer peripheries of the city are reduced, distant.
When Felix interacts with the Tube and its map, he questions these
straightforward, simple oppositions between centre and margin. In fact,
he rewrites the map according to his own needs:
Felix inched deeper into the carriage. He gripped the safety rail. He consid-
ered the tube map. It did not express his reality. The centre was not ‘Oxford
Circus’ but the bright lights of Kilburn High Road. ‘Wimbledon’ was the
countryside, ‘Pimlico’ pure science fiction. He put his right index finger
over Pimlico’s blue bar. It was nowhere. Who lived there? Who even passed
through it? (165)
What Felix does here is to layer “his own de-centred Tube Map over the
official one, questioning its ability to say what is London, what its centre,
what its periphery” (Elkin 2015, n. pag.). He decentres the official centre
and centres that which is usually regarded as periphery, consequently
reworlding London in consonance with his own sense of direction and
orientation. He resists the mathematical, straight lines, and he also resists
the causality that is being narrated by the underground map. Whereas in
the early and mid-twentieth century, black and diasporic people as workers
on the Underground were hidden from the public eye below ground (cf.
McLeod 2006), here Felix as second-generation immigrant child actively
refashions London’s underground and overground structures. This pro-
ductivity and the connections he encounters on the Tube are reverted on
his last journey—turned into confrontation, aggression and, ultimately,
his death. Whereas the Tube had functioned as a space of connectedness,
both tying him to the town centre and tentatively tying him to another
passenger, later it is his willingness to engage with the social, relational
space of the Tube that will come to constitute his fatal mistake.
By helping a pregnant woman get a seat, he signs his own death war-
rant: “‘Sorry, could you ask your friend to move his feet?’ Felix took out
his earbuds. A white woman, hugely pregnant and sweating, stood over
him. ‘I’d like to sit down?’ she said. Felix looked at his motionless ‘friend’
opposite, and thought it beast to speak to the other one” (167). Felix had
been travelling alone, had established “a private space of his own, opening
98 J. LEETSCH
his legs wide and slouching” (165) when sitting down across from two
young black men obviously on drugs, “pupils enormous” (165). At the
very moment the woman asks him for help, he is brought into the public
space of Tube etiquette, brought into the small community of the car-
riage. The woman assumes the three men must be connected because of
their skin colour. She thus enforces a relationality based on physiognomic,
essentialist reasons and Felix is put in a confrontational situation. He asks
one of them to move his feet from the seat so that the woman can sit
down. A tense fight ensues as both refuse and Felix gives up his own seat:
“They were pulling into Kilburn Station. The carriage was silent, No one
looked—or they looked so quickly their glances were undetectable” (166).
In this instance, Felix “felt a great wave of approval, smothering and
unwanted, directed towards him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust
enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of
the carriage, from humanity” (168). A few moments after leaving the
tube, and walking towards his home, Felix is accosted by the two and they
stab him.
The two men (one of whom is Nathan Bogle, the fourth NW character
the novel revolves around, as we come to know later) kill him because he
betrayed them by siding with the woman, obeying to another collective
and dislocating their hierarchy in the public space of the tube7:
As he got back up on his knees he heard one of them say: ‘Big man on the
train. Ain’t the big man now.’ And instead of fear, a feeling of pity came over
him; he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered. […] He
turned once more towards the street. A breeze passed over the three of
them, filling their hoods and sending clouds of sycamore leaves spinning to
the pavement. A firm punch came to his side. Punch? The pain sliced to the
left, deep and down. Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. […]
Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which
Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to
accept the last soul in sight—a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran
with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got
there just in time, cried out: ‘Thank you!’ and let the doors fold neatly
behind her. (171)
Here, in Felix’s last encounter, the text sheds light on the construction of
a false sense of communality as put forth by the pregnant white woman: in
pitying the two youths, Felix, who himself belongs to the poverty-ridden
class in this corner of North-West London, refuses to attest to the
othering of black men that happens so often and instead advocates una-
nimity and a readiness to help others. The image of the three young men’s
hoodies filling with wind at the same time further underlines the fraught
connections and ties between black London youth, even in a moment of
great violence. What I find particularly interesting here is that Felix’s
death, and the feelings of grief and anxiety accompanying it, is paralleled
with the alive-ness of the girl in the yellow summer dress entering the bus,
moving forward or onwards into the city night. In his moment of death,
he does not exist as isolated and separate but is still connected to other city
dwellers. His tragic death echoes through the novel’s other narrative layers
and ultimately brings together the two estranged friends, Leah and Natalie.
Felix thus structurally, meta-narratively, and diegetically proffers encoun-
ters and connection points.
Another way of encountering the urban space of the postcolonial
metropolis is offered by a second instance of alternative, affective map-
ping. In the following, I would like to draw attention to an opposition
opened up by the novel regarding official cartographies of London and
the relational, emotional and sensory resistance to these mappings. In
Leah’s segment, “Visitation”, which traces her development and ends
with an encounter with a girl called Shar who has consistently haunted her
throughout, we follow her movements through London and are con-
fronted with a tension between perceived and prescribed ways of living the
postcolonial metropolis. Chapter 9 gives an account of one of her walks,
which mirrors the way Google Maps leads us through streets:
From A to B:
A. Yates Lane, London NW8, UK
B. Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK
Walking directions to Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK
Suggested routes
A5 47 Mins
2.4 Miles
A5 and Salusbury Rd 50 mins
2.5 Miles
A404/Harrow Rd 58 mins
2.8 miles
1. Turn left on Yates Lane 40 feet
2. Head south-west towards Edgware Rd 315 feet
[…]
100 J. LEETSCH
Destination will be on the left

Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK
These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construc-
tion projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ
from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must
obey all signs or notices regarding your route. (38, 39; emphasis in original)
The route suggested here very clearly moves from point to point, it lists
distances, temporal frameworks and purportedly reaches a stable destina-
tion—but only if you “obey all signs”, if you strictly follow the instruc-
tions. Deictic signs and names are set in cursive, as if to mark their authority.
Interesting here, however, is the side note that comes as a disclaimer to
Google Maps: unexpected events may cause conditions to differ, interrup-
tions may change the route dictated by Google Maps. In short, everyday
life may disturb your clear-cut path. The next chapter is called “From A to
B redux”. Written in the stream of consciousness style so typical for Leah’s
narration, it offers another, alternative version of the Google Maps direc-
tions—deeply entrenched in the visceral, noisy, sticky London mess, the
entrails of the metropolis:
From A to B redux:
Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus dead-
lock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk! Escapees from St
Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady wheeling herself in
a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, body sack, smoking.
[…] Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish,
News of the World. […] I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call
abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted
Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken. Everybody.
Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya. […] Birdsong! Low-down dirty
shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle.
Open-top, soft-top, drive-by, hip hop. […] Tudor, Modernist, post-war,
pre-war, stone pineapples, stone lions, stone eagles. Face east and dream of
Regent’s Park, of St. John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the
Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we
pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a
second language. […] Is it really only April? And they’re off! (40, 41;
emphasis in original)
Opposed to the clean and structured Google Map directions, this route
does not disregard the life and flesh of London. It is conscious of the eth-
nic and economic multi-directions of the city. In its multi-locality, it draws
attention to nationality, migrants, “calling home”, “facing east”, squinting
at Kilburn. Redux means something revived, resuscitated—and the city is
here actualised, brought to life. Leah’s walk and her sensory experience of
it constitutes a remaking and restaging of the city space. The description
of the route in its linguistic messiness, typographical crowdedness and
organic chaos literally fills in the empty white blanks of the anaemic Google
Map directions. In its focus on sense, perception and impression, NW’s
affective spatiality and relational architecture of the city stands in stark
contrast to a “neutral”, cartographic method. As a non-totalitarising ver-
sion of the panoptic and “comprehensive” official map, Leah’s walk resists
idealised, stylised and formalised (but essentially reductive) approaches to
space. The novel instead produces the map of a worlded London that
revokes the all-encompassing, dominant cartography of Google Maps or
city planning. As such, the novel strives to animate, shape and think into
existence other, alternative worlds. Its architextual, typographical wilful-
ness advocates forms of resistance and wilful intervention within literature:
literature that belongs to the world and literature that changes the world
through its imaginative and creative force.
NW thus forges new and creative cartographies for migrants who are
often prohibited from access to map-making processes. It illuminates the
fact that within the planned city there is also a lived one. Leah’s walk
“reads” between the lines and overwrites the directions offered by Google
Maps. She enacts her own London space through sensory perception and
embodied experience. The map of chapter 9 is not only replaced by the
affective sensory mapping in chapter 10, but hints at yet another hidden
meaning: when you actually go looking for the streets and routes described
in the Google Map, it becomes clear that while Bartlett Street is located in
South London (in Croydon—as far away from NW as you can get), Yates
Lane does not even exist in London. The novel thus enacts another form
of less obvious displacement, further undermining the authoritative map
offered by Google. Following the Google Maps directions and instruc-
tions would literally lead nowhere, and the geographical relation as
expressed by the miles and minutes cannot actually hold true, while the
alternative map leads right through the heart of NW. Smith’s London
worlds interrogate the easy, smooth and cosmopolitan image of the global
metropolis. Revealing a more fractured, localised sense of the city and as
102 J. LEETSCH
such questioning its neo-liberal, capitalist production of power structures,

Smith’s London shifts according and responding to relational, affective
structures: the sharing of space, the small touches between strangers and
the personal sensory experiences linked to the urban space. The city
becomes an inherently shared communal space which, as such, offers ways
of accessing urban identity and affiliations. What is performed in/through
NW is not only an affective mapping manufactured by the story’s charac-
ters, but also a text that in itself can be regarded as an affective mapping of
London—generated by multi-directional journeys, local encounters and
the small, fragile moments of contact and intersection.
Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere

In this chapter’s first section, I engaged with Zadie Smith’s now canonical
first novel White Teeth, and its embeddedness in a genealogy of postcolo-
nial London writing and scholarship, focussing on Irie Jones’ gendered,
familial relations to the urban space of the metropolis. To do so, I have
drawn on two of White Teeth’s literary precursors, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely
Londoners and Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, establishing
a connective, comparative reading of Smith’s first novel in her London
trilogy. I then moved on to NW, Smith’s most explicit London text, and
showed how its sensory cartography produces a London marked by multi-
locality, relational affects and encounters. In this third section I will con-
tinue my project of teasing out the possibilities and tensions that arise
when putting love and space, longing and belonging, together. I will con-
nect NW to Smith’s 2016 novel Swing Time in order to draw out further
the interplay of world building and love and desire in Smith’s oeuvre. As
these texts put to the forefront of their imaginaries love, desire and
romance, they at once activate a relational and affective writing of city
space and conceptualisations of love that are carefully attuned to the spaces
of the global present. By refusing old and tired conventions of love and
intimacy as private and secret, as relegated to the inside spaces of the
home, and by instead engaging in productive and affective world-makings
through the making of multitudinous loves, Smith is able to rearrange and
dislocate the world of twenty-first-century London.
Both NW and Swing Time have at their hearts the friendships between
two women—these friendships are complicated and contentious and the
love between Leah and Natalie in NW and between the narrator of Swing
Time and her childhood best friend displace other, more conventional
heteronormative relationships. The homosocial and tentatively queer

dynamics between these women lay bare love’s tendencies to hurt and flat-
ten. I argue that both texts draw our attention to how, as Sara Ahmed has
argued, love can turn into “a sign of respectable femininity, and of mater-
nal qualities narrated as the capacity to touch and be touched by others.
The reproduction of femininity is tied up with the reproduction of the
national ideal through the work of love” (Ahmed [2004] 2014, 124).
Indeed, love in both NW and Swing Time emerges not only as carrying
toxicity, hurt and discontent but also as one possible way to an alternative
community.
In NW, Natalie and Leah’s relationship is closely connected to the
North-West corner of London they both grew up in. In my reading of the
novel, I will consider how their spaces and desires overlap and overwrite
each other, laying bare the potentiality of a queer love story hidden
beneath a surface made from heteronormative marriages. In Swing Time,
the spatial relations are more complicated, as London and its neighbour-
hoods are expanded to reach into the world. Here, it is just one of the two
women who stays rooted to North-West London, whereas the other leaves
and comes back. These structures of departure and return will be con-
nected to the intensely intimate but problematic homosocial linkage
between the two friends. In order to substantiate my arguments in this
section, I will draw on two conceptual fields which link space and love:
one is the concept of the female flâneuse who fashions her urban sur-
roundings according to her own emotional, embodied needs (I will draw
on this concept in my reading of NW); the other is the concept of desire
lines or desire paths, a term usually employed to demarcate the beaten
paths people fashion if they need to cross where there is no “official” road
(I will draw on this in my discussions of Swing Time). Both terms, or tools,
will allow me to properly mine the spatial and affective movements of the
female protagonists in Smith’s novels. Reading together NW and Swing
Time as London texts and also as significant examples of the connection
between space and love, I want to tease out the possibilities they open up,
the spaces and interstices they produce ex-centrically, along the outlines of
this postcolonial city.
104 J. LEETSCH
Between Intimacy and Distance I: Female Friendship in NW

NW’s central friendship between Leah and Natalie is the foundation on
which the novel is built. Their complicated love for each other is woven
throughout the novel, even though both women are estranged from each
other when we enter the story. English Irish Leah has always stayed in NW
(despite a short stint at university) and we meet her on the very first page
locked in her backyard. Natalie De Angelis, who was born as a second-
generation Jamaican English immigrant with the name Keisha Blake, is
Leah’s counterpart—instead of settling, Natalie’s narrative is propelled
forward and outwards by a deep-seated desire to transcend her working-
class neighbourhood and to fashion herself as a successful lawyer; a feat she
accomplishes deceptively easily. The women’s spatial and emotional set-
ups could not be more different, yet their connection has them always
come back to each other. Keisha/Natalie’s story begins in the third part of
the novel and is narrated chronologically via small, numbered vignettes.
The very first vignette describes the beginning of her and Leah’s friend-
ship: she saves Leah from downing in their estate’s outdoor pool when
they are children. This marks the beginning of the two girls’ friendship
which constitutes not only a connection between two NW children but
also a connection which crosses other, political divides. Keisha and Leah
belong to two different immigrant groups, one African Caribbean and one
Irish. The moment Keisha saves Leah’s life, she reconciles disparate groups
which span the Caldwell estate. As Alberto Fernández Carbajal has pointed
out, “Keisha’s act manages to disturb, at least momentarily, the suspicion
between the African and Irish sectors of London’s migrant population”
(2014, 5). Their burgeoning friendship not only displaces racial, ethnical
boundaries and represents a multi-local, multi-directional London neigh-
bourhood, but also comes to displace and unsettle other relationships and
desires. This displacement opens the text to a queer reading and an alter-
native interpretation of female friendship and communality, displaying a
resistance to the normativity of longing and belonging. Their relationship
serves as an interruption of the text and all other relationships move
around it—both women’s marriages, for instance: Leah is married to
Michel (born to an illiterate Algerian mother and a father from Guadeloupe)
and Keisha/Natalie is married to Frank (son of a rich Italian woman and a
train guard from Trinidad). Both, however, defy the fixities that come
attached to heteronormative sexuality in different ways—and this defiance
is closely interlinked to their spatial engagements with London. In the fol-

lowing, I will trace how the novel both obscures and accentuates their
queer love story through an engagement with spatial acts such as walking
and through disruptions on the meta-textual level.
Even though Leah describes her marriage to Michel as sexually active,
she also hints towards other, non-heterosexual desires and earlier female
lovers. The main struggle Leah engages with is her desire for everything
to stay the same, dispended almost, and to escape Michel’s wish for chil-
dren. They had married because it “pleased Pauline [Leah’s mother]” and
“calmed the anxieties of Michel’s family” (23). But Leah does not want to
take the next step—a step Michel describes as a “natural” and logical step.
In doing so, she resists heteronormative notions of the nuclear family, the
“certain, perfectly obvious destination […]. She does not want to arrive”
(24). This resistance is supplemented by her expressions of fluid sexuality
which her physical, sexually driven marriage cannot completely fulfil.
Leah’s queer desires are connected to the number 37, which in both
Leah’s and Natalie’s chapters poses an interruption to chronology, logic
and sense-making processes. The number 37 first occurs in Leah’s seg-
ment when she encounters a girl called Shar who rings at her door and
scams her out of 30£ for a fictitious hospital trip. Leah and Shar, even
though they belong to quite different social strata within NW, went to
Brayton school together. This establishes a connection that will haunt
Leah throughout the remaining narrative. Leah feels attraction towards
Shar, whose body she observes secretly: “She watches Shar’s buttock’s rise
up and against her rolled-down jogging pants, and the little downy dip in
her back, pronounced, sweaty in the heat. The tiny waist opening out into
curves” (6). Later, she describes her in more overt terms:
Drawn to the wrong details. […] Breasts small and tight to her body. […] A
neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine,
something between boy and girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life
when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all
that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical. (42)
Shar, who lives on 37 Ridley Avenue, comes to serve as a trigger for Leah’s
memories of past relationships which are always connected to the number
37. Significantly, “this information is conveyed not only in chapter 37, but
also on page 37 [at least in the first edition of NW], which reveals that the
number 37 functions not only as a street number, but also as a disturbance
106 J. LEETSCH
on both the diegetic and the extradiegetic level of narration” (Pirker 2016,
70). The 23 numbered chapters of Leah’s segment are interspersed four
times by a chapter titled “37”, disrupting the narrative’s chronology and
textuality. All the “37”-chapters revolve around female friendship and
female attraction—each stands for a woman in Leah’s life and they mark
moments of importance and tension. Every “37”-chapter is additionally
linked to Shar, who appears and disappears around its edges in the chap-
ters embracing it. They thus not only interrupt the ordered flow of num-
bered chapters but also the orderly flow of heteronormative
relationality—they hint at queer unfixed desires at work within the text
and unfulfilled longings which are never fully spelled out, bringing back to
the surface Leah’s past erotic histories with unnamed lovers.
The first time Leah’s chaptered segment is interrupted by the number
37 (between chapters 11 and 12), she has just seen Shar on NW’s streets—
an event which causes her to think about a girl from her past: “Lying in
bed next to a girl she loved, discussing the number 37. Dylan singing. The
girl had the theory that 37 has a magic about it, we’re compelled towards
it. […] Watch for 37, the girl said. […] She once was a true love of mine.
Now that girl is married, too” (43). That the number 37 is a direct refer-
ence to Natalie, and that the girl Leah once loved and who is now married,
is, indeed, Natalie, can be extracted from the fact that the chapter 37 is in
turn completely excluded from Natalie’s chronologically numbered life
narration (195). Here, the missing 37th chapter demarcates the moment
in which Leah and Natalie stop being best friends when they are 16, and
Natalie’s mother Marcia pushes her towards Rodney, a Caribbean boy
from Church with whom Natalie would stay together throughout her last
school and first university years: “In Keisha Blake’s break with Leah
Hanwell we must admit that Marcia Blake spied an opportunity. The break
coincided with the problem of sex, which anyway could no longer be
ignored. […] Pushing Keisha Blake towards Rodney Banks was Mrs
Blake’s elegant solution” (194). The break between the girls thus opens a
space for a “normal” heterosexual relationship, approved by Natalie’s
mother, who can be read as a gatekeeper for heteronormativity. We never
fully understand what has caused the rupture between the two girls and
the missing 37th chapter in Natalie’s segment thus demarcates an empty
space which can be filled with interpretation and imagination.
The following three “37”-chapters in Leah’s section confirm these
interruptions and hidden desires. The second one, positioned between
chapters 15 and 16, describes Leah’s third abortion in present time and
the memories of her first two when she was younger: “Back then she was
nineteen, the university nurse organised everything. She sat with a kind
ex-lover in their summer skirts on the edge of the hospital beds, legs dan-
gling, like little girls scolded” (59). Having an abortion and not continu-
ing her and Michel’s possible familial future, she instead turns towards
memories and thoughts about lesbian love: “One of the advantages of
loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far
beyond the call of duty” (60). She is aware that she does not fulfil society’s
expectations and that she has become stuck in her relationship. In posing
the question of normality and abnormality, Leah oscillates between dissi-
dence and acquiescence. The third “37”-chapter, situated between chap-
ters 17 and 18, brings Leah to the black Madonna of Willesden who asks
her: “Did you hope for something else? Were you misinformed? Was there
more to it than that? Or less? If we give it a different name will the weight-
less sensation disappear? […] Who are you? […] Could things have been
differently arranged, in a different order, in a different place?” (76). The
black Madonna is later paralleled to Natalie and thus acts as a sign of what
could have been. The more 37s the text offers, the more we as readers
become aware of Leah’s dissatisfaction and her growing awareness of the
borders she has constructed around herself. The fourth and final
“37”-chapter (set after chapter 23) is located at a local pharmacy where
she is given the wrong packet of photographs, one which contains pictures
of Shar. This is also the last chapter in Leah’s segment, which returns,
again, to a woman—in this case to Shar, for whom she has been harbour-
ing attraction throughout the whole arc and who had reawakened her
queer desires and had prompted her memories of girls she had once loved
and perhaps still loves.
Whereas in the Leah segment there are allusions and hints towards her
suppressed desires and her wilful resistance against normative structures,
in Natalie’s sections these are much more hidden—in Leah’s part, the
number 37 is constantly intercepted and misplaced, in Natalie’s it is com-
pletely silenced. This silencing directly corresponds to how throughout
her life Natalie had attempted to hide her true identity, a fact that is indi-
cated by her name change from Keisha to Natalie. She is much more ada-
mant than Leah to subscribe to society’s expectations: with regard to
motherhood, Leah’s greatest refusal, Natalie “had no intention of being
made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her” (272).
This assimilation to normative and hegemonic structures is given expres-
sion by what she calls “drag”, the pretence of performing: “Daughter
108 J. LEETSCH
drag, Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor
drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But
when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what
would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic” (282).
Natalie’s different “drags” stand for disguises and the performances of
roles she thinks she needs to perform—all inauthentic, lacking perhaps.
One of the categories not included here is “friend” or “girlfriend”. Exactly
because of this non-mention, I think that Natalie and Leah’s relationship
lies also at the hidden heart of Natalie’s story. While she never directly
alludes to Leah as one of her desires, she enacts other ways of disrupting
the heteronormative family structures she finds herself in.
Like Leah, Natalie harbours alternative desires and acts on them.
Though she had allegedly left behind her London neighbourhood and the
identity of Keisha Blake so closely tied to this corner of the metropolis, she
nevertheless retains a link to both: with the online alias “KeishaNW” she
signs up to an adult pornographic website (www.adultswatchingadult.
com, 259; 266), where she offers herself for sexual encounters with other
users—“on the website she was what everyone was looking for” (265), a
“BF [Black Female] 18–35” (288). She becomes active on the website
around the same time she gives birth, therefore living two realities at once:
“Hidden behind the image of Spike [her son] was another window, of list-
ings” (275). In the moment in which she enters into what is expected of
her (motherhood, marriage, adulthood), she flees to chatrooms and alter-
native online worlds. Even though these sexual encounters almost always
stay unconsummated, she nevertheless travels all over London to visit the
people who respond to her listings. She goes to Finchley Road (vignette
174, Peach, peonies) where an old rich couple had invited her but then
runs away after ringing their doorbell. She goes to Camden (vignette 176,
Oblivion) where a skinny man and an Iranian girl, drug addicts in their
earlier twenties, want a three-some with her—after she watches TV with
them, she cannot bring herself to actually have sex with them. She goes to
Primrose Hill (vignette 180, All the mod cons) to the house of a rich and
beautiful African British couple who then become nervous and back out
of the “date”. She goes to Wembley (vignette 182, Love in the ruins)
where two shy young men wait for her and with one of whom she has sex
while the other one masturbates.
Inevitably, her husband Frank discovers her profile on the website.
Natalie, who had tried to escape the stifling encasement of her marriage
and kids and who had lived out her alternative desires in secret,
experiences her whole world crashing down around her when she is
exposed. But this violent interruption also poses a possibility: after fight-
ing with Frank, Natalie leaves their shared home to wander the streets of
NW. This street-walking constitutes a turning point in the fabric of
Natalie’s narrative. Through re-positioning herself in NW, she also man-
ages to re-position herself and her wilful desires. Natalie, whose displace-
ment and detachment had influenced all her decisions, becomes re-attached
both to NW and to Leah through acts of walking, through her flâneuserie.
In recent years, the female version of the flâneur, the flâneuse, has become
a conceptual feminist tool to think about as well as reshape narratives
about women and urban spatiality, closely connected to questions of
mobility and agency. The traditional topos of the flâneur has its origin in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when both Charles Baudelaire and
Walter Benjamin in his uncompleted study The Arcades Project stylised
him into the ultimate emblem of the male city walker. He is an obsessive
wanderer, who observes the urban world around him:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His
passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the
perfect flâneur, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the mul-
titude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and
the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at
home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain
hidden from the world. (Baudelaire [1863] 1964, 9)
While Baudelaire portrayed the flâneur as a dandy and a gentleman stroller

of urban streets, Benjamin posited him as playing an important role in
portraying, comprehending and defining the city (cf. Benjamin [1969]
1985, 35–66). To be at the centre and yet stay aloof and hidden in order
to observe was one of the key concepts of flânerie. The flâneur, however,
is not only a figure of skilled and suave urban observance and knowl-
edge—“a figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money
and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention” (Elkin 2016a,
3)—but also a marker for the gendered social and political configurations
of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolitan life.
As Deborah Longworth argues, “to loiter anonymously on the city
streets of the nineteenth-century metropolis was an all but exclusively
male luxury” (2015, n. pag). Women and their movements in public were
connoted differently; they either needed male protection or were regarded
110 J. LEETSCH
as loose women.8 By contrast, the male flâneur “as the embodiment of the
male gaze” (Wilson 1992, 98) could observe and consume these women,
as well as control and order the city which was predominantly read as
female, chaotic, sensual (cf. Dreyer and McDowall 2012, 32).9 The
flâneuse poses a counterpart to this. Closely aligned to the long history of
suppressed and hindered women walkers on city streets, the flâneuse sets
out to righten the lopsided distribution of power, to resist the exclusion of
women from urban spaces. In her seminal essay on “The Invisible Flâneuse:
Women and the Literature of Modernity” (1985), Janet Wolff contended
that “there is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is
that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the
nineteenth century” (45). Her initial statement that the flâneuse could
not exist has since been revised and revoked: there is a growing body of
feminist scholarship which traces the historical, social and imaginative pos-
sibilities of the female city walker. One of these critics is Lauren Elkin, who
has uncovered the radical, creative potential of movement for the flâneuse.
As she argues in her essay “Radical Flâneuserie”,
[t]he flâneuse is someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets,
investigating its dark corners, peering behind its facades, penetrating its
secret courtyards. Rather than wandering aimlessly, like the flâneur, the
most salient characteristic of the flâneuse is that she goes where she’s not
supposed to. (2016b, n. pag.)
Elkin and others speak of the flâneuse’s right “to organize (or disorganize)
space on [her] own terms” (2016a, 288). Whereas the topoi of flânerie
had been observance, control and distance, I suggest that the flâneuse
opens up other modes: not alienation but relationality and engagement
with the urban space. Female walking cannot remain detached, invisible,
anonymous—it is too deeply inscribed in gendered power relations, never
neutral, and as such poses a powerful tool to interrogate the pull between
private/public and wandering/settling; the flâneuse “goes where she’s
not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like
home and belonging are used against women” (2016a, 22; emphasis in
original). She offers alternative agencies and knowledges about the
metropolis, she is “attuned to the creative potential of the city” (23), and
thus generates a female convivial and connective flâneuserie.
In the moment of trauma and crisis, Natalie, as a black and female city
walker,10 takes to the streets of NW and experiences, as I will argue, her
own empowering flâneuserie. As she leaves their family home, “Frank de

Angelis asked his wife, Natalie Blake, where she was going. Where she
thought she was going. Where the fuck she was going. ‘Nowhere,’ said
Natalie Blake” (300). But this nowhere turns out to be her own affective
and relational NW and, in the end, leads her to Leah. The second to last
section of NW, called “Crossing”, details Natalie’s walk through her NW
neighbourhood.11 On the first leg of her walk, “Willesden Lane to Kilburn
High Road”, she tries to get as far away from her family home as possible,
walks by Caldwell and begins to climb the hill that leads from Willesden to
Highgate. On her route, she is interrupted by police cars which have
blocked Albert Road. As we know, this is where Felix’s murder has taken
place on the same day. Turning around, she attempts to find another route:
Walking was what she did now, walking was what she was. She was nothing
more or less than the phenomenon of walking. She had no name, no biog-
raphy, no characteristics. They had all fled into paradox. Certain physical
memories remained. She could feel the puffiness of her skin beneath her eyes
and the fact that her throat was sore from shouting and yelping. She had a
mark on her wrist where she had been gripped tightly. She put her hand into
her hair and knew it to be wild and everywhere and that in the midst of an
argument she had ripped a bit out at the right temple. She reached Caldwell’s
boundary wall. (304)
It is interesting to note that Frank and Natalie’s fight, of which she bears
the physical traces here, had been left out from the numbered vignettes in
the section prior—we only see the before (vignette 184, Caught) and after
(vignette 185 and the last one of this section, Onwards), the moment of
aggression and rupture is not shown (299). This mirrors how Natalie’s
Bildungsroman, which is how I would call these chronologically ordered
vignettes, had also left out her break-up with Leah. This represents the
perfection and order she had always wanted to project. The flâneuse sec-
tion “Crossing”, however, marks the moment when she lets herself feel
and move again. Reaching the boundary wall of the Caldwell estate, she
tries to climb over it and in the process encounters Nathan Bogle, who
seems fidgety and nervous (through many hints we come to know that he
was one of Felix’s murderers). Together with Nathan, Natalie climbs the
wall, crosses into Caldwell and continues her route across NW. This part
of her walk is characterised by hopelessness as she tries to place herself and
others in this slice of London, “due to a long process of neglect, almost as
112 J. LEETSCH
long as her life—she did not have the generative power to muster an alter-
native future” (307). The effort of trying to name both place and her
relation to it exhausts her (208). They walk through the cemetery, smok-
ing weed and then up “Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green” (313). The further
they walk, the more Natalie embeds herself into the city: “She couldn’t
resist this display of the textures of the world; white stone, green turf, red
rust, gray slate, brown shit. It was almost pleasant, strolling nowhere”
(314). As Molly Slavin argues, Natalie “becomes part of the city, layering
her map on top of the existing city geography rather than blazing through
it unheeded” (2015, 108). Walking via “Hampstead to Archway” (215),
they arrive at Hampstead Heath and then Hornsey Lane. Natalie says,
“this is where I was heading”, and what she means by that is the bridge
located there, a bridge where people kill themselves, “going
nowhere” (322):
The view was cross-hatched. St. Paul’s in one box. The Gherkin in another.
Half a Tree. Half a car. Cupolas, spires. Squares, rectangles, half moon, stars.
It was impossible to get any sense of the whole. From up here the bus lane
was a red gash through the city. The tower blocks were the only thing she
could see that made any sense, separated from each other, yet communicat-
ing. From this distance they had a logic, stone posts driven into an ancient
field, waiting for something to be laid on top of them, a statue, perhaps, or
a platform. (322–323)
This is where Natalie switches from “nowhere” to “NW”. From her posi-
tion, she cannot entirely make sense of the whole, and the only thing
anchoring her are the estate’s tower blocs: they have logic, they are placed
in communication—with each other, with herself. She re-centres herself in
NW, through her explorations of nowhere. Natalie’s gaze towards the city,
from up north, can be characterised as a panoptic gaze trying to grasp
Central London, observing the centre from her vantage point, but also as
surrender, giving in to the fracturedness and layers the city offers.
Dismantling hierarchies of urban space, she finally seems to be able to find
her own place.
Through her flâneuserie, she has arrived at a location where she sud-
denly finds and locates herself. As a black woman walking the city, she
continues the concept of radical relational flâneuserie, incorporating
migratory and diasporic identities which complexly inhabit not the centre
but the peripheries of the postcolonial metropolis. Natalie, who
throughout the novel pursues upward social mobility and is driven by the
desire to leave behind the marker of her name and her origin, returns to
her old neighbourhood. This return, however, does not constitute acqui-
escence or stasis, but a productive continuation of her search for an
authentic engagement with her surroundings. This altered relation to the
world of NW is underlined in a later scene, when she is on her way to Leah:
The bus came. Natalie sat with her forehead rumbling on the glass. The
Cock Tavern. McDonald’s. The old Woolworths. The betting shop. The
State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said these were fixed
coordinates to which she had to be forever faithful? How could she play
them false? Freedom was absolute and everywhere, constantly moving loca-
tion. (334)
Natalie’s flâneuserie—her attempts to play false, to find freedom—lays the

ground for her later encounter with Leah, which constitutes the novel’s
ending—and, in my opinion, a final opening of the text towards alterna-
tive sexual affiliations and desires.
The last scene of the novel does not constitute a happy ending like
Adichie’s Americanah, nor does it offer an explicitly erotic, romantic (if
open) ending like Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. Instead, it continues
the interrogation of static family and partnership structures that had
already been initiated by Smith’s first London novel, White Teeth. The very
last segment of the novel is called “Visitation”. Narrated by Natalie, it
links back to the very first part of the novel also called “Visitation” which
had then be narrated by Leah. Natalie finds herself on her way to Leah’s
house, after Michel calls her hysterically to tell her he has discovered
Leah’s birth control pills which she had been hiding from him. When
Natalie arrives, she joins Leah in her garden: “She tried to approach qui-
etly with her kids, but they were dragging on her, both too hot and crying,
slowing her down” (334). Michel takes them, so that Natalie can freely
move into Leah’s direction. Michel, who had always wanted children, a
desire thwarted by Leah, takes them from Natalie who offers them to him,
so that she instead can comfort his wife. While the two women’s conversa-
tions and interactions never explicitly point towards materialised desires
for each other, the novel still hints at a displacement or imbalance in the
heteronormative set-ups of both their lives. As Alberto Fernández Carbajal
has persuasively argued, “the centre of affective gravity in the novel’s clos-
ing shifts from a postcolonial disquisition of diasporic identities to Leah
114 J. LEETSCH
and Natalie’s renewed homosocial communion” (2014, 12). Their com-

munality produces a complicated and uneasy togetherness, without hus-
bands or children. They are brought together through the event that had
functioned as one of the novel’s main connective nodes, Felix’s murder.
On her walk with Nathan, Natalie had put one and one together and sus-
pects Nathan of the murder: “‘I think I know what happened in Albert
Road,’ said Natalie Blake. […] Through the glass doors they watched the
children spinning on the lawn. Leah found the number online, Natalie
dialled it. It was Keisha who did the talking” (337).
On the last page of the novel, their “two heads pressed together over a
handset” (337), they together call the police. Set apart from their partners
and families, they re-develop their bond and form a new relational affilia-
tion. Felix’s murder thus serves as a catalyst for both women’s collabora-
tive, conspiratorial bonding. We never find out if Nathan actually did
murder Felix—the text leaves this open and unresolved so that the reader
can “piece it together outside the novel’s bounds” (Fernández Carbajal
2014, 13). Similarly, the newly formed connection between the two
women is never fully spelled out; the text leaves them together in a tenta-
tive and unsettled stage of their relationship, but still firmly rooted in
Leah’s garden—the opposite of nowhere. The novel thus produces an
open ending which oscillates between queer and heterosexual desires,
never fully deciding on one. In doing so, it imagines a possible shared
future for Irish English Leah and British Caribbean Natalie. In my opin-
ion, NW constitutes a continuation of the open but generative ending of
White Teeth and offers the possibility of a queer reading which re-shuffles
configurations of the heteronormative institution of marriage and of het-
erosexual partnerships. As Keguro Macharia has shown, “[l]ove names a
condition and a possibility. Love does not transcend, efface, or mitigate
inequality. Instead, it is one of the conditions through which inequality is
lived” (2015, 72). Deeply informed by uncertainty, volatility and unstable,
insecure desires, the two women’s friendship enables us and them to rec-
ognise at least some of the inequalities they have lived through, address
the inequalities the novel negotiates via Felix’s death and points towards a
future possibility, for love to act as an “index for the production of inter-
personal and collective relationships, and to probe the political uses of
heteronormative duty” (72). By tracing both Leah’s and Natalie’s embod-
ied, enworlded engagements with their NW neighbourhoods, as well as
the routes they inscribe into the postcolonial metropolis, and by then leav-
ing the two them in a garden in the Caldwell estate, tenuously but
intimately linked, Zadie Smith’s NW revolves around the contested ques-

tion of how to be part of the world, of how to write one’s longing into
the world.
Between Intimacy and Distance II: Female Friendship

in Swing Time
Swing Time (2016a), Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, is initially rooted in the
same part of North-West London as White Teeth and NW. It forms a con-
tinuation of her prior London texts and at the same time subverts and
shifts the grounds upon which the other novels are built. Themes like
love, affiliation, community, belonging and home are taken up once again,
dusted off and rewritten. Like NW, Swing Time puts pronounced focus on
North-West London, but like White Teeth, it also moves away from the
space of the metropolis to travel to other parts of the world and therefore
problematises the urban space of London even more than both predeces-
sors. Whereas in White Teeth the historiographical movement back in time
through the themes of teeth and root canals structures the novel, and in
NW walking, public transport and cartography act as main practices to
fashion the city and its relationships, in Swing Time, it is rhythmic, musical
movements like dancing and swinging which can be regarded as the main
structural elements of the text. As I will show, certain dance scenes act as
important relational and affiliative nodes in a text that swings back and
forth between different spaces, bodies and chronologies.
The novel is divided into seven parts, framed by a prologue and an epi-
logue. The 14 chapters of part one, called “Early Days”, encompass the
unnamed, autodiegetic narrator’s childhood and her burgeoning friend-
ship with a girl called Tracey.12 Part two, “Early and Late”, oscillates
between scenes from the narrator’s childhood and her early twenties in the
1990s when she works at YTV (a substitute for MTV) and is then employed
by an international pop star called Aimee as a personal assistant. Part three
is called “Intermission”; set in her late twenties, it traces the narrator’s
time as a PA. Here, the novel sets up its main affective axis, an incident
between the narrator and Tracey when they are 22 years old which irrevo-
cably breaks their friendship (the reader is not told what this incident
entails, that gap is only filled much later). The title of part four, “Middle
Passage”, refers to multiple spatial and temporal displacements and thresh-
olds, one of which is the narrator’s stay in the Gambia to do Aimee’s char-
ity work. The narrative time of the narrator’s stays in Africa is consistently
116 J. LEETSCH
interspersed with memories of Tracey and the transitory period of their

adolescence. Part five, “Night and Day”, and part six, “Day and Night”,
continue to swing back and forth between the present and the past and
between the spaces of London, New York and the Gambia. They recount
important events and ruptures between the young women and the narra-
tor’s time at university, but they also develop the narrator’s estrangement
from Aimee. In the last, seventh part, called “Late Days”, the story
describes the narrator’s last months working for Aimee before she is
fired—the prologue, which is set in October 2008, had already hinted at
this, but now the reader discovers why she has fallen from grace. The epi-
logue fully returns to 2008 London, and like White Teeth and NW, offers
an open ending, attuned to possible, if uncertain, futures. In the following
I will trace how the novel complicates its two main spatial dimensions,
London and the Gambia, through the affective and relational desires its
narrative is permeated with. To do so, I will look at the narrator’s embod-
ied engagement with space and the women she encounters via a discussion
of movements such as dance, swinging and walking along desire lines.
The narrator’s life is entangled with the (her)stories of four women: her
mother, her childhood friend Tracey, her employer Aimee and her friend
Hawa. These women are connected to different spaces—her mother and
Tracey belong to London, Aimee represents New York and Hawa lives in
a rural village in the Gambia which the narrator visits multiple times in
Aimee’s stead to do charity work. Like White Teeth, Swing Time compli-
cates family relationships as the narrator’s family slowly breaks apart when
she is growing up. Her father stays forever single and her mother finds a
female partner. Like in NW, it is the intimate and problematic relationship
between women which sets the stage for the novel’s engagement with
both space and love. Mirroring NW, the story begins with a friendship
between two young girls from Willesden, connected by a chance encoun-
ter—this time at a community centre ballet class, held at the local
Estate’s church:
If all of the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at
ten a.m. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard,
each holding our mother’s hand. There were many other girls present but
for obvious reasons we noticed each other, the similarities and the differ-
ences, as girls will. Our shade of brown was exactly the same—as if one piece
of tan material had been cut to make us both—and our freckles gathered in
the same areas, we were of the same height. (9)
This moment marks the beginning of an intense and complicated friend-

ship. The two girls are instantly drawn towards each other. As the only two
mixed-race girls in the dance class and belonging to neighbouring housing
estates, they form an alliance: “there was always this mutual awareness, an
invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from
straying too deeply into relations with others” (16). Tracey’s father is
African Caribbean (in and out of prison, even though Tracey claims he is
away as a backup dancer for Michael Jackson), her mother white English
(described as tacky, aggressive and over-indulgent); the narrator’s father is
white English (a small, docile man working for the Post Office) and her
mother Jamaican-born (a harsh, politically minded feminist).13 These
shared backgrounds in the diasporic spaces of North-West London divided
by race and class are what bring the girls together in the dance class and
school playground and what keep them together throughout their adoles-
cence. Though their similarities bind them together, in a crucial way the
two dancers are different: whereas the narrator loves music and dance and
sings quite well, in the most important aspect she fails: she cannot dance.
Tracey, however, possesses a natural talent for rhythm and movement:
“Other girls had rhythm in their limbs, some had it in their hips or their
little backsides”, as the narrator observes,
but she had rhythm in individual ligaments, probably in individual cells.

Every movement was as sharp and precise as any child could hope to make
it, her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intri-
cate. Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially
creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her tech-
nique. I was—I am—in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time
to do everything. (26)
Both girls are profoundly jealous of each other, a fact which serves as one
of the main hinges of their emotional attachment. Their friendship seems
obsessive, at times toxic. As Gibson argues regarding this female affilia-
tion, Swing Time “savours the full palate of women’s intimacy: not solely
sweet but briny, bitter, tart by turns. Friendship […] has often occupied
the ground ceded by other interpersonal associations in Smith’s fiction.
Her latest novel, however, explores friendship’s outer bounds” (2017,
137–138). Tracey constitutes the narrator’s compass, and she lets herself
be stifled and oppressed by the energetic, egoistical other girl. She “speaks
of Tracey in infatuation’s idiom, ‘besotted’ with her almost at once, and
118 J. LEETSCH
eagerly recounts each ‘cooling-off,’ slight, and hiatus their relationship

endures” (138). Throughout the novel, the narrator will continue to
swing back to Tracey in North-West London like a magnet drawn to
iron—temporally, spatially, bodily and meta-textually as the chapters oscil-
late and alternate with each other. As Tracey continues with her training
to become a professional dancer, our narrator finishes school and attends
university in some unspecified coastal town; their relationship grows
fraught as they move further and further away from each other. It finally
fully breaks apart when Tracey, in a fit of malicious jealousy and anger,
accuses the narrator’s father of improper sexual behaviour—something the
narrator can never forgive. Still, Tracey remains a constant fix-point in the
narrator’s mind, disregarding which part of the world she inhabits.
Whereas in NW walking and cartography act as the novel’s main linking
devices, here it is another form of movement, dance, which produces the
story’s underlying mechanism. There is one particular dance scene I want
to draw on to showcase the two girls’ particular embodied relationality—
one which entails larger political questions of female black bodies’ agency
and empowerment that pervade the whole novel. When the two girls are
10 years old, they are invited to Lily Bingham’s birthday party, a white
middle-class affair where they are “the only black girls and aside from Lily
knew nobody there. At once Tracey became hostile” (76). They go to the
cinema and afterwards play at Lily’s house. The whole time, Tracey tries
to make trouble: “‘That’s enough, now,’ Lily’s mother kept mumbling,
but she couldn’t establish any authority, her own sense of embarrassment
seemed to stop her” (77). A disquieting sense of racial divides between
blackness and whiteness pervades the party, a sore spot which Tracey keeps
prodding. She goes as far as stealing “two lacy camisoles taken from Mrs
Bingham’s underwear drawer”, in order to “put on a show” (79):
We put the record on, we rehearsed. I knew there was something wrong,
that it wasn’t like any dance we’d done before, but I felt it was out of my
hands. […] She [Lily] pressed the button that said ‘Record’, and by doing
so put in motion a chain of cause and effect which, more than a quarter of a
century later, has come to feel like fate, would be almost impossible not to
consider as fate, but which—whatever you think of fate—can certainly and
rationally be said to have had one practical consequence: there’s no need for
me to describe the dance itself. But there were things not captured by the
camera. As we reached the final chorus—the moment where I am astride
Tracey, on that chair—this was also the moment that Lily Bingham’s mother
[…] opened her son’s bedroom door and saw us. That is why the footage
stops as abruptly as it does. She froze at the threshold, still as Lot’s wife.
Then she exploded. (80–81)
On the one hand, this scene showcases Tracey’s unruliness, her misbehav-
iour and the way she exploits her outsider status, pulling the narrator with
her. They dance to an Aimee song, a white woman closely modelled after
Madonna and the international popstar who will later become the narra-
tor’s employer. The dance, however, also symbolises the rules and oppres-
sive hierarchies imposed on black girls’ bodies. Regarded as uncouth and
overtly sexual, their behaviour is read as improper and deviant in compari-
son to the other orderly, innocent white girls at the party. Examining the
scene, it becomes apparent that the two black girls are doing nothing
more than experiment with their bodies, rehearsing a dance scene from a
provocative music video by a popstar they both love. Essentially, the shared
dance creates a safe space of belonging for two girls who are different from
the other girls at the party; a shared sense of home in an inhospitable
London neighbourhood. The scene, however, will come back to haunt the
narrator decades later towards the end of the novel, when she is fired by
Aimee for having an (admittedly dispassionate) affair with Lamin, a
Senegalese man working for Aimee in the Gambia.14 In the wake of the
ensuing press drama, Tracey anonymously leaks the video tape of their
dance, with the threatening message: “Now everyone knows who you
really are” (5). The resurfaced tape of the dance sequence functions as a
rupture, as a way of demeaning and shaming the black girl’s/woman’s
body and her potential sexuality.
Throughout the novel, the narrator traces the histories of various black
dancers and the racial, gendered obstacles they encounter—from Michael
Jackson to Jeni Le Gon and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (who are put in
opposition to music hall minstrels or Fred Astaire in blackface).15 Questions
of corporeality and movement become tied to freedom and power, the
ability to move is connected to dancers who tried to dance across bound-
aries. Jeni Le Gon (1916–2012), one of the first African American women
to establish a successful solo career in tap dancing and who becomes both
our narrator’s and Tracey’s childhood obsession, exemplifies this. As
Suzanne Scafe has explained,
120 J. LEETSCH
Le Gon was [Bill “Bojangles”] Robinson’s first African American dance

partner in Hooray for Love (1935) but was consistently overlooked for parts
in big productions such as Easter Parade (1948) or Broadway Melody
(1936). In the latter, despite being used to choreograph the lead female
role, she was dropped from the cast (Hill 2010, 124–5). In the novel, the
girls watch Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937), where Le Gon performs solo
alongside a blackface Eddie Cantor […]. In this film, as in many others, she
was consigned, according to the cast list, to a “speciality spot”, defined as
such because it could be neatly excised from the plot when the movie was
played in the American South. (2019, 109)
In Swing Time, black dancing bodies are plucked out of time, their exis-
tence ruptured and disjointed, and are repositioned in turn through two
young black girls who enthusiastically dance them back into the present,
thus “demonstrating history’s repetitions, and mapping progress as recur-
sive rather than linear” (111). In and through these historical black (and
female) dancers, as Greenidge argues, “Smith suggests, exists another
way—a way to play with time, to move with time, to recognize all of the
incongruities and historical rhymes of the last century and this strange,
destabilizing new one, and to respond by turning it all into a dance”
(2017, 198). In a similar way, the continuous movement of dancing and
swinging in Swing Time is connected to various spatial borders and tem-
poral thresholds the narrator crosses. Her and Tracey’s shared dance at
Lily Bingham’s 10th birthday party in Willesden, then, constitutes an ele-
ment of the novel’s underlying deep structure, but also points to the sub-
versive, disruptive power of the black female body in movement and
accompanying discourses of shame and agency, connecting two black girls
in North-West London to a worldly community of other black dancers.
When we start reading Swing Time, we find the protagonist stranded in
London, returned after working for Aimee with whom she had jetted
around the world. Besides Tracey, Aimee is the other woman responsible
for the narrator’s movement, here not of the dancing kind, but entailing
travels all over the globe. Swing Time metronomically swings back and
forth in time and space, and large portions of it leave England to either
play in the States, on a plane, or in a rural village in the forever unnamed
West-African country,16 where Aimee has set out to do charity work by
opening a girls’ school. Tracing the narrator’s ties to different women, the
novel zigzags across a quarter century, from the narrator’s first dance class
at age 7 to the aforementioned career-ending scandal that takes place in
2008. After this dramatic incident, the narrator is sent back to London,
fallen from grace. Here, I want to focus on a London scene from the
novel’s prologue, set right after the narrator has returned:
I walked out into the city. It was a perfect autumnal afternoon, chill but
bright, under certain trees there was a shedding of golden leaves. I walked
past the cricket ground and the mosque, past Madame Tussauds, up Goodge
Street and down Tottenham Court Road, through Trafalgar Square, and
found myself finally in Embankment, and then crossing the bridge. I
thought—as I often think as I cross that bridge—of two young men, stu-
dents, who were walking over it very late one night when they were mugged
and thrown over the railing, into the Thames. One lived and one died. […]
Thinking of him, I kept to the right-hand side of the bridge, by the railway
line, and avoided looking at the water. (2–3)
The spatial engagement with the centre of London seems uncertain,

marked by an avoidance, a refusal. The bright golden autumn day of the
glorious city centre (we are brought along the scenic route) is deeply
problematised by the narrator’s thoughts of racial crime and death. This is
very different from how she moved and danced in Willesden where she
grew up with Tracey. It points towards a sense of instability and estrange-
ment the narrator experiences, having just returned to her home city after
years abroad but not feeling particularly at home, or grounded. This spa-
tial, emotional displacement is symbolised by the way she moves across the
bridge and engages with the space of the metropolis. She avoids looking
and clings to the bannisters almost as if afraid of becoming unmoored and
falling herself.
In another of the novel’s sections, titled “Middle Passage”, the narra-
tor’s fraught relationship to the idea of home becomes even clearer. The
chapters collected under this section alternate her puberty in Willesden
and the work she does in the rural Gambian village. The term “middle
passage” marks both the transitory space of growing up, of growing out
of girlhood into womanhood, but also pinpoints her arrival in Africa and
her self-conscious search for the roots of her mother’s Caribbean heritage
and the history of slavery that stretches across the ocean. This double
movement parallels the urban space of London with her awkwardly felt
displacement in the Gambia. As Suzanne Scafe has succinctly argued,
“[a]ll black diasporic identifications are, in this novel, provisional, uncer-
tain, and contradictory. The scenes set in the Gambia intersect those in
122 J. LEETSCH
London or New York and are used to trouble unexamined assumptions of

an African, home, origin, roots, or claims to what Saidiya Hartman (2008)
refers to as a singular ‘we’” (2019, 105). Here, spaces of belonging are
simultaneously re- and displaced: city and village, land and ocean, centre
and periphery. These contested and unstable belongings become painfully
apparent when the narrator visits Kunta Kinteh, an island in the Gambian
river from where the slave ships left to cross the Atlantic:
I wanted to see at last, with my own eyes, the shore from which the ships
had left, carrying their cargo of humans, destined for my mother’s island,
and then on to the Americas and Britain, bearing the sugar and the cotton,
before turning back again, a triangle that had produced—among its num-
berless consequences—my own existence. (177)
All paths lead back here, my mother had always told me, but now I was here,
in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional
place. […] I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely
gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere. (316)
Experiencing the starting point of the slave trade’s middle passage across
the Atlantic, the narrator cannot place herself inside her own history.
Roots and routes which lead back in time are obstructed, complicated.
This spatial and temporal displacement recalls the disruptive trauma of the
middle passage. As Smith herself has noted in an interview with Jeffrey
Eugenides, “it just seemed to me that what was done to black people,
historically, was to take them out of the time of their life. That’s what fun-
damentally happened. We had a life in one place and it would have contin-
ued and who knows what would have happened—nobody knows” (Smith
2016b, n. pag.). The only way the narrator of Swing Time can connect to
the African country and the people living there is through encounter-
ing dance.
There are two scenes which illuminate this relocation, both of body and
in time. The first scene occurs when the narrator has just arrived in the
Gambia, opening the “Middle Passage” section:
The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankurang. But in the moment I
didn’t know who or what it was: a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s
height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping
leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now
dances down the street. A large gang of boys trailed behind it in the red
dust, and a phalanx of women, with palm leaves in their hands—their moth-
ers, I assumed. […] Whatever was coming towards us was dancing to
rhythms reggae never approaches. Beats so fast, so complex, that you had to
think about them—or see them expressed through the body of a dancer—to
understand what you were hearing. […] There was only the present
moment, only the dance. (163, 164)
The euphoria, the entanglement of the people dancing on the streets,

displaces the narrator’s worries and sense of un-belonging. “I thought:
here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life” (165). She learns that the
kankurang comes for the boys, a dancer who acts as transitory figure, “a
threshold, between youth and maturity, wards off evil spirits and is the
guarantor of order and justice and continuity between and within his peo-
ple. He is a guide who leads the young through their difficult middle pas-
sage” (166). The middle passage from youth to adulthood is paralleled
with the narrator’s own middle passage (“I wondered about the girls.
Who comes for the girls?” 166) as well as her search for her mother’s
ancestors’ middle passage. The second connective dance scene happens
much later in time, when she has been to the Gambia several times. This
is set towards the end of the novel, when there is a dance in the Gambian
village’s centre and all non-Africans are invited to join the dance and
music circle:
Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and
it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. […] I still
had no idea about dance, only instincts. I watched them for a minute, the
two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the
multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood
between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There
were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the
drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements
of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through
everything. (417)
This scene is diametrically opposed to the first Gambian dance performed

by the kankurang. Here, she does not observe a masculine ritual danced
by men and boys—instead she joins a circle of female dancers and connects
to them and their corporeality through dancing herself. Her friend Hawa
afterwards tells her that “even though you are a white girl, you dance like
you are a black” (417). The narrator’s very first dance together with
124 J. LEETSCH
Tracey in London at Lily Bingham’s birthday party had underlined her

difference to the other white girls. Here, she is initially thought of as simi-
larly other, as white and European, but the dance initiates a tentative tran-
sition, a makeshift movement towards belonging elsewhere.
Through these two dances, one she observes and one she performs, she
experiences a “different kind of history from [her] mother’s, the kind that
is barely written down—that is felt” (101). These embodied dance scenes
are continuously replaced by visceral memories of her and Tracey’s friend-
ship. Tracey, who instead of becoming the successful dancer she always
hoped to be, ends up living in the same council estate they grew up in,
with no job and four children. Tracey is thus forever linked to that part of
North-West London. She roots the narrator to London, binds her to the
community and neighbourhood, and this connection fashions the novel’s
anatomy, its flesh and bones. After she has been fired from her job as
Aimee’s assistant, the narrator returns to London. Here, she discovers that
her mother had to go to the hospice as she slowly loses her battle with
cancer. She also discovers that Tracey had sent abusive emails to her
mother, who at the time acted as the local council’s representative in
Willesden. Having come back, after all this time—and after all the swing-
ing back and forth the text has generated between the 2008 prologue and
the 2008 epilogue—we now encounter a changed engagement with
London’s urban space. I argue that there are two equally important end-
ings to Swing Time, both connected to the city and to the affective, inter-
personal relations it is saturated with:
I was settling into the idea that I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry
any longer, I would not be on the next plane. […] Everything that after-
noon felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happen-
ing in the next few days or even the next few hours—a new feeling. […]
Afterwards, he wanted to get on the tube, at Waterloo, it was the best stop
for me, too, but instead I left him and chose the bridge. Ignoring both bar-
riers, walking straight down the centre, over the river, until I reached the
other side. (450)
This bridge scene, the last paragraph before the epilogue begins, demar-
cates a radical shift in how the narrator moves through the city. Whereas
in the first bridge scene in the prologue the narrator was plagued by an
instability, an inability to ground herself, here she leaves her male compan-
ion at the Tube station and walks straight down the centre of the bridge,
ignoring the barriers until she has crossed to the other side. This crossing
can be described as a self-empowered act of movement, of certainty—and
its straight-forwardness poses a complete antithesis to the movements of
swinging on which the novel had hitherto been built. This, for me, consti-
tutes the first ending of the novel: a changed engagement with the urban-
ity of London which she only now can fully grasp after having spent time
away, swinging back and forth, in New York and in the Gambia.
The second ending is closely tied to Tracey and a similar form of
movement:
The next day, I took a morning walk around the barren perimeter of
Tiverton Rec, the wind whipping through the caged fence, carrying away
sticks thrown wide for dogs, and found myself walking on, in the opposite
direction from the flat and past the station that would have taken me to the
hospice. My mother died at twelve minutes past ten, just as I turned into
Willesden Lane […] Tracey’s tower came into view, above the horse chest-
nuts, and with it reality. […] Impatient, I left the path and crossed diago-
nally through the grass, heading for the covered walkway. She was right
above me, on her balcony, in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the
air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing. (453)
This is the very last scene of the novel, and it offers a complex interweav-
ing of affect and space: instead of walking through the centre of London
like before, the narrator has returned “home”, to Willesden in North-
West London. Again, what we find here is a straight line, crossing diago-
nally through space. The destination is not the other bank of the river,
however, but Tracey. This form of walking, this impatient crossing through
grass where there is no “official” road, is called “desire line” or “desire
path”. A term usually employed in urban planning discourse, it defines
paths which emerge when shortcuts are being fashioned regardless of for-
mal pathways: “the term ‘desire line’ originates from the field of urban
planning and has been around for almost a hundred years. A desire line
normally refers to a worn path showing where people naturally walk”
(Myhill 2004, n. pag.):
Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi
(beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant
trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine
lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere
people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes
they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to
126 J. LEETSCH
be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence

of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the
words of one academic journal, they ‘record collective disobedience.’ Others
believe that they reveal the inherent flaws in a city’s design—the places
where paths ought to have been built, rather than where they were built.
For this reason, desire lines infuriate some landscape architects and enrap-
ture others.” (Moor 2017, n. pag.)
Desire lines record a “collective disobedience” as they cut through space

and make a path where there was none before. Penetrating beyond official
routes, cemented streets and designated roads, desire lines defy authority
and embark on off-limit areas: just like desire often veers off the trodden
paths. In Sara Ahmed’s words: “[people] deviate from the paths they are
supposed to follow. Deviation leaves its own marks on the ground, which
can help generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected
ways. Such lines are indeed traces of desire” (2006, 20). Like Natalie/
Keisha, who climbs over a wall to enter Caldwell estate and who cuts right
through the heart of NW, the narrator in Swing Time “leaves the path”.
Instead of obeying to societal rules (going to see her dying mother in
hospital), she seeks her desire in another form of affiliation and connection.
Even though the two women have been long estranged, and their rela-
tionship is irrevocably broken, Tracey is still what the narrator most longs
for. Depicted on her balcony, in midst of her children, she turns and
dances. Ending with the last word “dancing” and the light and carefree
image of a woman in her morning gown with her hands in the air, the text
finally reveals what had always formed its emotional core: Tracey. The nar-
rator’s mother’s statement, “you know where you came from and where
you’re going” (31), which has echoed hollowly throughout the entirety of
the novel, is given new meaning here. Whilst I would argue that the nar-
rator still does not know where she is from and where she is going, she has
ultimately come a lot closer to finding out where some of her roots lie and
where her future routes might take her. Movements of dancing, swinging
and wilfully walked desire lines connect here to particular female embod-
ied engagements with spaces and affects. The love that interlinks the nar-
rator with Tracey and which had, throughout the novel, propelled the text
forward is here uneasily spelled out, materialised. The city of London acts
as both starting point and point of return for this love and marks a com-
plicated belonging, a problematic and haunted belonging, but belonging
nonetheless.
I want to return here to Lauren Berlant, who in her work on love, as I

have shown in this book’s introduction, queries the usefulness and validity
of thinking with and through love. As she argues, love has “been floated
by so many as a solution—literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dis-
solution—to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community”
(2011, 685). If we think love as a force which propels us forward along
uncharted desire lines, love also contains something messy: “If love is
force, though, it is a mess-making force […]. Such a process does not
clean up the world well” (685). Love is a force that not only repairs and
restores but also has the potential to be unruly and potentially destructive,
to “make a mess” of the world. Berlant ascertains that her scepticism does
not necessarily suggest that thinking of love as a powerful force is futile:
“these arguments do not mean that love is a useless concept—its […] util-
ity is that love allows one to want something, to want a world, amid the
noise of the ambivalence and anxieties about having and losing” (687).
What lies at the heart of Berlant’s criticism, and what also lies at the heart
of Zadie Smith’s articulations of love and friendship in Swing Time’s
world-makings and its protagonist’s desire (lines), is that love allows us to
“want a world”, to imagine “the affective dimensions that it would take to
(re)build a world” (ibid.)—however messy and untidy such a world
might be.
Like NW, Swing Time ends in the estates, with a fraught, frail connec-
tion between two female second-generation immigrants who have found
an arduous sense of affiliation in their city. Like White Teeth, Swing Time
is initially very firmly rooted in the urban metropolitan space of North-
West London, but from there spins out into the world. These parallels and
differences to Smith’s earlier novels shed light on the fact that Swing Time
has London as only one possible centre and from there connects translo-
cally to other places in the world, deliberately confusing boundaries of the
local in an effort to capture the increasingly complicated nature of African
diasporic identities, both place-based and mobile, rooted and uprooted.
Through the narrator’s intimate and tactile connection to her friend
Tracey, Swing Time’s London becomes an open and relational space of
connections and community—London-but-not-quite-London, a space
which imagines multi-routed homes and points towards the productive
potential of negotiating nationhood and neighbourhood.
128 J. LEETSCH
“Daringly Imagine an Alternative City”

The affective and emotional geographies that Zadie Smith’s London nov-
els perform make visible how such literary cities have the potential to pro-
ductively and creatively reimagine the world. They “re-place” their city
spaces in performative acts of worlding: Smith’s texts produce stories of
community and connection, however troubled, that splay out over North-
West London and into the rest of the world, both delineating what it
means to live in a global metropolis such as London and simultaneously
rewriting the former heart of the empire according to fractious yet fertile
identity conceptions. As Paul Gilroy argued in his 1999 opening address
for the London: Postcolonial City conference, we need “to inquire into the
possibility of moving beyond and beneath the old colonial drama into
more forward-looking and assertive stances” (68). He calls for a “new
position”, a “dissenting place”, in order to form “novel ways of compre-
hending and figuring our humanity and of making, and writing London’s
history” (68). In Smith’s novels, the city is enacted as a space that has at
its heart multiple and intersecting narratives of desire, love and friendship;
as such, they respond to Gilroy’s call for re-figuring humanity, attempting
to rebuild from the ground up a “nation divided by accents and post-
codes” (Smith 2009, 251). Novels like White Teeth, NW and Swing Time
intervene, critique, contest—they register the city, and especially London,
as a site of struggle for power, for self-empowerment and for the right to
belong. John McLeod formulates postcolonial London novels as “a way of
regarding the metropolitan culture as it foregrounds the subaltern agency
and activities of those who have struggled to settle owing to the architec-
ture of power which creates mappings of the city in terms of officious
‘place’” (2004, 15). By prioritising notions of agency and activity and by
positing postcolonial London writings as a strategy of cultural, discursive
and imaginative production, McLeod outlines the reconfigurations of a
struggle that is experienced by those other to the centre. Postcolonial
London writings like Smith’s London trilogy can “cursive in which divi-
sive tensions are effectively re-sited, and progressive, transformative kinds
of social and cultural relationships are imagined” (16; emphasis added).
These fictions are motors of change and bring to light a new way of under-
standing the city, as non-English but all-the-more-English. Offering dis-
sent and resistance, they write against hegemonic structures, not only
within the city but also within the world—via everyday practices of
space-making, of community-building, of creating relational interpersonal

connections.
In this chapter, I have focused on the novels’ affective cores which con-
sist of different creative resistances and productive defiances of and in love:
In White Teeth, Irie Jones gradually fashions her own embodied and
enworlded London which is paralleled by the possible space of Jamaica as
she forms an alternative family that does not conform to normative roman-
tic conventions. NW has at its heart the queer relationship between two
women which is brought to the surface by their multi-directional affective
encounters and their routes through the city. Swing Time features a friend-
ship that acts as the centre of a story that swings back and forth between
different time frames and the spaces of London and West-Africa—an inti-
mate friendship that in its intensity re-directs the world of its narrator. As
Henri Lefebvre has argued in “The Right to the City” in Writings on
Cities, the urban and its many cultural performances are marked by “simul-
taneity and encounter”, and as this “place of encounters, focus of com-
munication and information, the urban becomes what is always was: place
of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities
and constraints, the moment of play and the unpredictable” (1996, 129;
emphasis in original). In Smith’s London trilogy, the city as ultimate space
of desire and encounter is turned into a tool to negotiate global, diasporic
worlds—and to imagine possible worlds that are open, unpredictable, rela-
tional, liveable and hospitable.
Notes
1. Smith’s London trilogy is formed by her first novel White Teeth (2000), by
NW (2012) and by her fifth novel, the London-but-not-quite-London
novel Swing Time (2016). Because the middle novel, NW, deals with the
postcolonial metropolis London in the most explicit way, it will constitute
one of this chapter’s main focal points, but I will constantly draw parallels
to its younger and older siblings.
2. For an overview of the modern history of Black London writing—from
Jean Rhys’ early London texts in the 1930s to the first Windrush genera-
tion writers like Selvon, Lammings, and Gilroy via Chaudhury, Ghose, or
Markandaya, to Desai, Aidoo, Emecheta, Ghosh, Kureishi, Bandele,
Evaristo, Syal, Adebayo and so on—see Murdoch, Creolizing the Metropole:
Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2012); Sandhu,
London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003); or
Okokon, Black Londoners 1880–1990 (1998).
130 J. LEETSCH
3. Notting Hill in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the main areas where
immigrants from the Caribbean settled and bore no resemblance to today’s
posh West London panache—the only remnant of that time is the now
commercialised Notting Hill Carnival, an event originally meant to cele-
brate difference and Caribbean culture.
4. Smith herself is very conscious of the many palimpsestic historical layers
that London’s architecture and monuments display; of Trafalgar Square
she says in an interview for Tate: The Art Magazine: “Trafalgar Square is
this wonderful tiny version of what we were. It’s so elegiac to me to stand
there and see South Africa House and all these places we once owned and
now we only have streets. Jamaica Street, Jewry Street—you can see that
everywhere. The sun never used to set on us and it rises and sets in one day
on the square. It’s so humbling. If you are facing Nelson, there’s a Henry
Havelock statue on the left. You never notice him. This man was respon-
sible for the deaths of thousands of Indian people. His most famous crime
was forcing a group of people in a village to lick up a square metre of blood
of their relatives he’d killed. On the back of the statue it says something
about Englishmen never forgetting, but Trafalgar Square is a monument
to our ability to forget everything about our history” (2000b, 41).
5. Irie’s weave is the product of another interesting encounter the novel’s
London spaces proffer—an encounter constituting both economical
exchange and shared female solidarity. Her hairdresser sends her to a shop
next door, owned by an Indian woman, who sells natural hair weaves.
When Irie enters, a South Asian girl desperately attempts to sell her own
hair—and Irie ends up with it, because it is the shade of dark brown/red
sleek hair she desires. Again, I’d like to reference Emma Tarlo’s
Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair (2016) for more context.
6. I am borrowing this term from Henri Lefebvre’s work in The Production of
Space, where he posits that “it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-
textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings
and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is
set down, as part of a particular production of space” ([1974] 2003, 118).
7. As Lauren Elkin points out, “significantly, this [Felix’s murder] happens at
a bus stop, in an echo of the 1993 knifing of Stephen Lawrence, in South
London” (2015, n. pag.), thus producing a historical connection to other
black victims on London’s streets.
8. As Lauren Elkin argues, “before the twentieth century, women did not
have the freedom to wander idly through the streets of Paris. The only
women with the freedom to circulate (and a limited freedom at that) were
the streetwalkers and ragpickers; Baudelaire’s mysterious and alluring pas-
sante, immortalized in his poem ‘To a (Female) Passer-By’, is assumed to
have been a woman of the night. Even the word flâneuse doesn’t techni-
cally exist in French, except, according to an 1877 dictionary entry, to

designate a kind of lounge chair” (2016b, n. pag.).
9. For more extensive and layered discussion on the interrelation of gender
and male and female city walkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
see, for example, Dreyer and McDowall (2012); D’Souza and McDonough
(2006); Parsons (2000).
10. One scholar who has examined the relationship between flânerie/flâneuse-
rie and postcolonial, diasporic identities is Isabel Carrera Suárez in her
2015 essay “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism”—
while certainly constituting an important first step towards a theorization
of postcolonial flâneuserie, the article only skims the surface of this field in
its exploration of texts by Simone Lazaroo, Hsu-Ming Teo and Dionne
Brand. Another, more productive exploration is Jenni Ramone’s article on
“Sweet-Talker, Street-Walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in
Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women” (2012). Cf. also Ortega, “The
Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca’” (2007).
11. Just like there exist many online cartography projects which trace the
London routes of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses
through Dublin, there are also a few projects that have produced a Google
Map of Natalie/Keisha’s walk (cf. Toth 2016). As we have seen above,
however, these maps cannot fully grasp the emotional, affective dimension
of walking through the city.
12. This is the first novel Smith has written from a homodiegetic first-person
point of view. Swing Time constructs a memoir-like text, which self-
reflexively “channels the propulsive, addictive, discursive mode of the
novel-memoir hybrid that has lately been in fashion” (Schwartz 2016, n.
pag.). Through narratorial hints, it becomes clear that the text is presented
as being constructed, ostensibly written as we read it: “It strikes me now
that if I want to watch this same clip—as I did a few minutes ago, just
before writing this—[…]” (56). This leads to an often unsettling reading
experience, as the narrative oscillates between the intimacy of a first-person
account and the narrator’s often cool and distanced approach to her
own story.
13. For an astute and engaging reading of the relationship between the narra-
tor and her Black feminist activist mother, see Scafe 2019.
14. It is important to note here that while the narrator seems to be hetero-
sexual, she mentions men in general, and her relationships to them in par-
ticular, only very fleetingly. Her mind and her body are only ever really
engaged in relation to other women, be it Aimee, Tracey, her mother or
Hawa. Cf. a scene in the novel in which the narrator goes on a date with a
man and they watch a West End musical play—once Tracey enters the
132 J. LEETSCH
stage, she completely ignores him, to the point where he becomes angry
and aggressive and leaves (353–362): “and the longer I spoke the clearer I
saw and understood […]—that only one thing had happened in London,
really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen
her” (144).
15. George Stevens’ 1936 musical comedy film Swing Time, which features
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, gives the novel its title: towards the begin-
ning of the storyline, the narrator re-watches it; her beloved childhood
memory of it is jarred when she realises that Astaire dances in blackface.
Swing Time the novel thus not only engages in the act of temporally and
spatially swinging back and forth but also in morally swinging between
multiple, antagonistic stances on blackness, racial oppression and
empowerment.
16. The text never names the country, but through geographical hints, the
readers can trace and map the Gambia. In leaving it nameless, the novel
points towards the hypocrisy of Aimee’s charity work—where African
countries remain interchangeable and are only used in order to advance
Aimee’s own reputation.
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CHAPTER 4
Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi
White is for Witching has a sharp personality, and I think it’s in a way
an unlikeable book, because it talks about racism and eating disorders
and hauntings. It’s a book that doesn’t want to be read, in some way.
—Helen Oyeyemi, “The Professionally Haunted Life of Helen
Oyeyemi” (2014b, n. pag.)
Helen Oyeyemi is, as Kate Webb has pointed out, “one of our most adept
demythologizers, teasing out the loose ends of old stories to see what
room there may be for new interpretations” (2014, n. pag.). All her stories
play with genre conventions and reconstruct the foundations of both
Western and African storytelling by subverting fairy tales, folk tales and
mythology. Concerning these rewritings, Oyeyemi herself has said in an
interview with Hazlitt: “I’m here to mess up all the good fairy tales”
(2014a, n. pag.). In her plays, short stories and novels, Oyeyemi takes nar-
rative foils to then twist them into something unfamiliar—gleefully toying
with traditions and norms. Her work not only unsettles genre and story-
telling conventions but is, just like the novels by Chimamanda Adichie and
Zadie Smith discussed in previous chapters, especially attuned to the com-
plexities of African diasporic belonging as it flickers between different geo-
graphical spaces and affective positionings. In all of her works, be it her
first novel which she wrote while still at school, her plays which were

Switzerland AG 2021
138 J. LEETSCH
performed when she was studying at Cambridge or her more recent short
story collections, Oyeyemi irreverently engages in mess-making: turning
upside-down known, worn stories in order to reposition them in a twenty-
first century marked by hybridity and mobility. As Buckley and Ilott argue,
her works can be positioned “at the margins of histories, locations, and
genres” and as such defamiliarise “the mundane through richly symbolic,
intertextual and haunting narratives that work to undermine rather than
confirm accepted ways of knowing or being” (2017, 1). Oyeyemi’s writ-
ing engages in practices of re-mixing, re-interpreting and re-locating the
world—a world which under her pen turns both more unrecognisable and
more accessible as it is carefully, meticulously prised open.
I would argue that these practices are nowhere more visible than in
Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching (2009a). Here, some of the
most prevalent narrative foils of Gothic literature, Yoruba mythology,
European fairy tales and Caribbean folklore are intertwined. This mixture
is then turned into a fragmented narrative of longing and belonging in
contemporary Britain: a love story between the novel’s two female pro-
tagonists, black Ore and white Miranda. White is for Witching is a difficult
text—as Oyeyemi notes in the interview excerpt I have used for this chap-
ter’s epigraph, it is “an unlikeable book” that “doesn’t want to be read”
(2014b, n. pag.): it revolves around motifs of death, ghosts, eating disor-
der and mental illness and addresses in a frank manner discourses around
racism, xenophobia, nationalism and the harm they can do. The novel is
narrated from alternating perspectives and twists around the fate of one of
its protagonist, Miranda Silver, in a splintered, non-linear way. Miranda
suffers from a disorder called “pica”, an eating disorder characterised by
the desire for non-nutritive substances, such as paper, hair, stones, paint,
metal, plastic, glass—or, in Miranda’s case, chalk (“pika”, OED).
Coincidentally, the story is set on the coast of South East England, near
the city of Dover. The English countryside and its coastline constitute an
important foundation for the tensions the novels work with and the white
chalk cliffs of Dover will become one of the central motifs for the story.
The other crucial spatial component the novel sets up is the interior space
of the Silver family home, the haunted house on 29 Barton Road at the
edges of Dover: a malevolent, sentient structure that harbours racist senti-
ments and attempts to destroy everyone it perceives as “other”.
With this chapter, then, the spatial scale of this book further decreases
as we move from transnational movements across the globe (Adichie) and
the bustle of the postcolonial metropolis (Smith) to the English
4 LONGING ELSEWHERE: HELEN OYEYEMI 139
countryside and the interior, domestic space of the house. This move
allows me to illuminate yet another facet of love- and world-making, and
to draw out of the shadows and into the light the possible connectivities
that arise when putting together the two, and to tease out the (produc-
tive) disruptions that emerge when literary texts and poetic performances
from the African diaspora merge their love stories with geographical, spa-
tial set-ups of our contemporary political world. As I will show, by rewrit-
ing the essentially gothic trope of the haunted house and connecting it to
the white cliffs of Dover, White is for Witching plays with notions of both
“home” and “homeland”. Significantly, this revision of the haunted house
narrative is closely connected to another gothic topos: the vampire. The
vampire and adjacent themes of consumption, deviant sexuality and sub-
versive desire are folded into the queer love story the novel tells. What
Oyeyemi does, however, is to add to the Western concept of vampiric
desire the African Caribbean folklore character of the soucouyant. In then
distorting both figures, Oyeyemi radically unsettles distinctions between
self and other. In Miranda, the white protagonist of White is for Witching
who is ultimately bound to the haunted house, vampire and soucouyant
figure merge into one—producing different kinds of appetite: for chalk,
for blood, for women. Throughout this chapter, I will argue that Miranda’s
desire for Ore, and Ore’s reciprocal desire for Miranda, generates a love
story that ultimately revises the racist, exclusionary tendencies of the
nation as embodied by the haunted house. Love, here, much as it did in
Adichie’s and Smith’s text, comes to signify a transformative, productive
site for rerouting potentially harmful structures of colonial and neo-
colonial oppression and restriction. The queer love between the two girls
turns into, as Chela Sandoval would say in concert with bell hooks,
“another kind of love, a synchronic process that punctures through tradi-
tional, older narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being” (2000, 142),
and one that moves us beyond what is safe and known.
The following analyses will again utilise a tripartite format to trace the
entanglements of world- and love-making in a novel that propels its gothic
antecedents into the postcolonial space of contemporary Britain. The first
section of this chapter, titled “Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The
Postcolonial Gothic”, will revolve around the layered constructions of
space in White is for Witching. I will trace the histories of the haunted
house on which Oyeyemi draws by paying special attention to the literary
precursors that most explicitly inform Oyeyemi’s revisions. In my discus-
sions of White is for Witching’s haunted house, 29 Barton Road, I will
140 J. LEETSCH
draw on Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which makes and un-makes the
home and which I will re-evaluate by taking into account its postcolonial
continuations via Homi Bhabha’s notion of the worldly “unhomely”.
These re-evaluations show how the house, the home and the homeland
are destabilised by the peculiar unhomeliness of the novel’s postcolonial
gothic engagement with space. The second section, titled “Textual
Strategies of Narrating Home/land”, will look at how the novel performs
its own textuality. Similar to the textual and textural transnational tactics
employed by Americanah or the urban mappings performed by Zadie
Smith’s London novels, Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is a text that self-
consciously displays its own materiality and intertextuality. I will examine
how the novel evolves from merely depicting a house that haunts to actu-
ally becoming a haunted/haunting text through employing modes of
non-linearity, circularity and fragmentation. The third section, titled
“Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love”, will engage with
the novel’s imaginaries of love. Here, I will probe and mine the second
gothic stock concept the novel puts forth, the figure of the vampire and,
closely connected, the desire for consuming the other. Drawing on the
literary archives Oyeyemi works with, I will show how the novel sets up its
very own queer vampiric love story—a love story that refuses to adhere to
old world orders and instead advocates for the potential of a new world
that refuses to participate in the persecution of difference. In being made
queer and being made unhomely, both love and world, respectively, breach
their restrictive boundaries in a novel that tries its hardest to long for
worlds and desires elsewhere.
Haunted House, Haunted Homeland:

The Postcolonial Gothic
Habitation is in itself a form of haunting, whether that’s a tribe that settles
on a particular piece of land, a family in a home or the mind in the body.
[…] But our structures can make monsters of us. We’re all ghosts in the
societal machine, moving through the world carrying with us ancestors, lin-
guistic frameworks and the results of decisions made by governments long
before we were born.
—Helen Oyeyemi, “Helen Oyeyemi on Haunted House Novels”
(2012, n. pag.)
Oyeyemi is a writer who expertly draws together wildly differing storytell-

ing conventions and cultural figurations. With White is for Witching, she
has created a convoluted and ultimately fragmented rewriting of some of
gothic literature’s most important narrative themes. She adds to these
Western frames of reference stories stemming from Nigerian Yoruba cul-
ture, African Caribbean mythology and the contemporary political reali-
ties of diasporic Britain. Regarding this hybrid form of mixing, her novel
can be classified as belonging to the genre of postcolonial gothic. As
Tabish Khair posits, “the gothic and the postcolonial are obviously linked
by a common preoccupation with the Other, and aspects of Otherness”
(2015, 3). Scholars of the postcolonial gothic have, in fact, argued that
from its very beginnings on, the gothic has invariably been imbued with
the hierarchies of Empire and imperialism. The gothic is, at its heart,
about the frightening other that cannot be understood and is so frighten-
ing precisely because of that:
The gothic, at least in its literary form, shakes up and problematises tired
ways of perceiving and expressing normality by disrupting the everyday
world of residual compliance. It disturbs, upsets, ironises and parodises our
deeply held beliefs and our safe but constraining narratives of, among oth-
ers, progress, identity, power, family, safety and love. (Wisker 2016, 2)
In a similar vein, Julie Hakim Azzam demonstrates that the gothic is the
narrative mode by “which Britain frightened itself about cultural degen-
eration, the loss of racial or cultural purity, the racial other, sexual subver-
sion and the threat that colonial-era usurpation and violence might one
day ‘return’” (2007, v). By the end of the eighteenth century, “gothic
writers were quick to realise that Britain’s growing empire could provide a
vast source of frightening ‘others’ who would, as replacements for the vil-
lainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and vari-
ety to the genre” (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 229). With the inclusion of
these others, “a new sort of darkness of race, landscape, erotic desire and
despair—enters the Gothic genre” (ibid.), both stabilising and destabilis-
ing the expanding nation.
From the very start, then, the gothic was implicated in the colonial
project of building nation and empire Postcolonial writers, such as Jean
Rhys or Jamaica Kincaid, have since powerfully questioned these hege-
monic origins of the genre and its implications in questions of selfhood,
nationhood and belonging. The postcolonial gothic literatures that were
142 J. LEETSCH
and are still being created let those others which have always been a part
of the gothic finally articulate themselves. It could even be argued that the
postcolonial and the gothic are mutually dependent, since “they […] are
haunted by the ghosts of those who were hidden and silenced in the colo-
nial and imperial past” (Wisker 2007, 402), each writing the other.
Postcolonial variations of the gothic, such as White is for Witching, thus
take up a narrative form that pays attention to how borders are shored up
and how distinction between home and not-home are maintained. In re-
evaluating the gothic terrain and its thematic markers, White is for Witching
responds to politics concerned with nationality, security and legitimacy.
In contrast to many other postcolonial gothic fictions, however,
Oyeyemi’s novel does not locate the postcolonial gothic abroad—it writes
it into the foundations of Great Britain, locates it at the geographical point
of the border (the coastline of Dover) and sets it within the domestic space
of the house, the haunted home of the nation. Adding to this book’s
archive of worlded, worldly spaces imagined by African diasporic women
authors yet another node or variant, in the following I will examine an
array of some of the novel’s most important precursor stories of haunted
houses to then delve into an analysis of how the space of the haunted
house in White is for Witching destabilises its gothic origins. In paying
attention to these strategies of destabilisation, I aim to position Oyeyemi’s
novel as an example of how new, hybrid forms of writing can combine the
gothic and the postcolonial in order to haunt exclusionary constructs of
home and of homeland to give way to other, alternative forms of world-
and love-making.
The Haunted House: Floor Plans and Foundations

Julie Hakim Azzam notes that “British gothic has always been interested
in architecture, homes, and other spaces and dwellings such as haunted
houses, torture chambers, jail cells, courthouses, abbeys, monasteries, and
decrepit castles” (Azzam 2007, 3–4). This becomes evident when looking
at one of the first gothic fictions produced in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century: in 1764, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto
(1764), the first novel to bear the subtitle “A Gothic Story”. The novel
blends realistic storytelling elements with the supernatural. It relates the
history of Manfred, the prince of Otranto, who strives to secure the epon-
ymous castle for his descendants in the face of a mysterious curse. The
novel’s main spatial setting, the castle and all its secret sub-spaces, would
set the stage for many elements that were to become stock characteristics
of gothic fiction—the past invading the present, the dark times of the
middle ages penetrating eighteenth-century assertions of ratio, enlighten-
ment and progress. Regarding the historical time frame of the beginnings
of the gothic genre, Fred Botting argues that the middle of the eighteenth
century saw the ascendancy of “reason, science, commerce and bourgeois
values” and the transformation of “patterns of knowledge (empiricism
rather than religion), production (commerce and manufacture rather than
agriculture), social organisation (city rather than country) and political
power (representative democracy rather than monarchy)” (2014, 3).
Emerging as a reaction to these developments, gothic texts wilfully retain
“traces of instability where further disorientations, ambivalence and dislo-
cations can arise” (3). The gothic is inherently unstable and fluid and is
marked by tensions and transgressions; it brings to light, in the words of
Jack Halberstam, “a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries
and their collapse” (1995, 23). This notion of dislocation and collapse can
directly be applied to depictions of space, setting and architecture in these
fictions.
Spaces that are beyond “reason, law and civilised authority” (ibid.) act
as stand-ins for irrational fears and societal anxieties. The topographies of
old and disorderly castle ruins, dissolving family mansions, dark and dank
dungeons, hidden corridors and wild and hostile naturescapes become
blueprints for these anxieties, displaying “an unease and instability in the
imagined unity of self, home or society, hauntings that suggest loss or guilt
or threat” (3). The depictions of the space of the castle in Walpole’s novel
makes this quite clear: The place is described as a “long labyrinth of dark-
ness” (Walpole [1764] 2004, 61) in which “now and then some blasts of
wind […] shook the doors she [Isabella] had passed, and which grating on
the rusty hinges were re-echoed” (ibid.). Walpole’s castle needs to be read
as the architectural mirror of its heroine’s plights, her terrors and confu-
sion playing out in dark labyrinthine underground spaces that are set apart
from the conventions and moral codes of society outside. It also hints at
the very structure of the gothic novel itself which interweaves light and
dark, reason and irrationality, morality and perversion, sanity and supersti-
tion. As Sue Chaplin has argued, the gothic and its spaces “respond in
certain diverse yet recognisable ways to the conflicts and anxieties of its
historical moment”, which is “characterised especially by its capacity to
represent individual and societal traumas” (2011, 4). These fictions thus
144 J. LEETSCH
offer a productive way of formulating an experience of profound disloca-

tion, alienation and despair.
As the gothic moves into the nineteenth century, there is also a shift in
the depiction of gothic spaces: “Instead of castles in foreign lands, the
Gothic came to England and lingers in the streets and homes, decreasing
the distance between the reader and events of the texts and making the
texts more unnerving” (Smith 2007, 4). Not only does the geographical
setting move to Britain, the interior space also moves “closer to home”.
The castle, by definition the seat of nobility, gradually gives way to the
house as a site where “fears and anxieties returned in the present. These
anxieties varied according to diverse changes: political revolution, indus-
trialisation, urbanisation, shifts in sexual and domestic organisation, and
scientific discovery” (Botting 2014, 2). The haunted house stands for
notions of unrest and disquiet on a seemingly smaller, more domestic and
familial scale. It conjoins, as Botting puts it, “ideas of home and prison,
protection and fear” (4). One of the most famous examples for this par-
ticular linkage of the familiar and the unfamiliar is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) which constitutes one of the key sources
for Oyeyemi’s haunted house story. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is not
only about the fall of a dynasty but also about the quintessential haunted
house narrative. Its narrator encounters a typically gothic space, reminis-
cent of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: “bleak walls”, “vacant eye-like win-
dows”, “rank sedges” and “decayed trees” ([1839] 1982, 134). The
interior of the house, entered “through many dark and intricate passages”
(136), displays a similarly dark atmosphere: the dwelling not only incorpo-
rates the typical spatial properties of gothic fiction but also encompasses
the psychological anxieties and the sense of dislocation so paradigmatic of
the genre. The home is perceived as haunted, as unfamiliar. At the end of
the story, the feeling of unfamiliarity climaxes in the destruction of the
house, via a crack that literally breaks apart the architectural home of fam-
ily, the family itself, and renders illegible any sense of familiarity.
The feeling of the home-ly which morphs into the un-home-ly evokes
the concept of the uncanny, as developed by Freud in his essay on “The
Uncanny”. Freud’s definition of the uncanny, because it is the negation of
the word for “home” (un-heimlich), inscribes the home as “site and/or
source of terror” (Michlin 2012, n. pag.). The uncanny is not merely
frightening, though, but “goes back to what was once well known and had
long been familiar” (Freud [1919] 2003, 124). It is all that was intended
“to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” (132). The
idea of the home as comforting is turned upside down by the gothic

topography of the haunted house. As Julian Wolfreys remarks, haunting
“displaces us in those places where we feel most secure, most notably in
our homes, in the domestic scene. Indeed, haunting is nothing other than
the destabilization of the domestic scene, as that place where we appar-
ently confirm our identity, our sense of being, where we feel most at home
with ourselves” (2002, 5). The nightmarish haunted house as gothic set-
ting is terrifying exactly because the home/house is supposed to be safe
and secure. In an essay published in La Clé des Langues, from which this
section’s epigraph is taken, Helen Oyeyemi has articulated her own inter-
est in the topos of the haunted house. In the essay, she draws attention to
how the home, the homely and the unhomely become interwoven. She
uses two texts which revolve around female inhabitants of a house to trace
the way the home can constitute a haunting that entails more than the
geographical location of the house itself—a haunting that stems from cul-
tural displacements. Oyeyemi is, firstly, interested in Shirley Jackson’s
1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, which features
Eleanor Vance, a young woman who herself seems to become haunted—
not only by the horror house but also by society around her, which is
uncannily distilled into the dark interior of the home. As Oyeyemi notes,
our structures can make monsters of us. We’re all ghosts in the societal
machine, moving through the world carrying with us ancestors, linguistic
frameworks and the results of decisions made by governments long before
we were born. […] No wonder we so often frighten each other, no wonder
we sometimes look into the eyes of people we’ve ‘known’ for decades and
see an abyss. (2012, n. pag.)
In Oyeyemi’s interpretation of Jackson’s novel, Hill House, which, “not

sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within” ([1959]
1987, 1), is filled to its roof with the hauntings that arise from restrictive
historical, political and social structures: “hauntings are inevitable, insofar
as the past is potent and present wherever human beings live or have lived”
(Oyeyemi 2012, n. pag.). The second fictional woman Oyeyemi examines
in this essay is Laura Fairlie in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860).
Again, she draws the connection from how the spatial trope of the haunted
house connects to other, deeper-seated societal hauntings. In Oyeyemi’s
words, Collins
146 J. LEETSCH
causes Laura Fairlie to vanish from her own home and be replaced with
someone else who looks like her and is assumed to be her because she lives
at Limmeridge House and… who is Laura Fairlie, if not the woman who
lives at Limmeridge House? The true Laura languishes in an insane asylum,
doubtful of her own identity, with no one to help or believe her. Home is
her anchor, but also her prison. (ibid.)
In using the example of two women (three, if we count in Laura’s double,

Anne Catherick) who are haunted by their surroundings, and in turn come
to embody these hauntings, Oyeyemi shows how the intimate space of the
home needs to be taken into account within broader ideological frames of
sexuality and gender. Concerning these links between femininity, gender
and the domestic in stories of haunted houses, Andrew Hock Soon Ng has
argued that such fictions expose
the patriarchal structure embedded within the domicile, which, as such,

becomes symbolic of entrapment and subjugation. What constitutes the pri-
vate space in many traditional Gothic narratives […] is tantamount to the
limitation of freedom and agency afforded to the female subject as she is
confined to the house apparently in order to protect her innocence but is, in
truth, fundamentally meant to subordinate her to male dominance and con-
trol. (2015, 4)
This notion of subordination and the possibilities to refute such oppres-

sion take shape in two other haunted house fictions which I posit as
important foils for Oyeyemi’s novel and which I will trace in the following,
before turning to my analysis of White is for Witching.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
features a female protagonist entangled with the discourses of femininity
in the late nineteenth century and appropriates the gothic mode to narrate
her descent into “madness”. Here, female trauma is inevitably interwoven
with space and the interior of the house can be seen as one of the decisive
factors in the events that unfold: at the beginning of the unnamed pro-
tagonist’s illness/story, she and her husband move into a stereotypical
gothic space. The narrative self-reflectively points towards the traditions of
gothic femininity and the symbolisation of enclosed spaces (Perkins
Gilman [1892] 1993, 98). The protagonist, similar to Charlotte Brontë’s
Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, is confined to the upper part of the house, an
unused nursery. Of note here are the parallels drawn between space, femi-
ninity and motherhood as well as the alignment of domesticity and
imprisonment. As Anne Williams has argued, “the madwoman […] dwells

within the house itself” and is as such dangerous and thus needs to be
controlled (1995, 8). The concept of the gothic space of the haunted
house here is turned into a metaphor for the woman haunted by patriarchy
and official medical discourse, an imprisoning ideology that defines her as
mad: “The old, patriarchal gothic space that at the beginning of the nar-
rative harks back to the eighteenth-century gothic romances of Ann
Radcliffe (ancestral hall, hereditary estate) becomes in Gilman’s fin de
siècle female gothic a site of trauma in which the medical man replaces the
aristocratic tyrant as the persecutor of women” (Chaplin 2011, 221). But
in a narrative slant, the trauma turns upon the traumatiser via the materi-
alisation of the “madwoman in the attic”. As Perkins Gilman’s protagonist
becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper of her room, the story desta-
bilises its narrative of female discipline when she becomes the woman in
the wallpaper, when she herself becomes the walls surrounding her and
one with the house—an ultimately rebellious act that will be echoed in
White is for Witching. Interestingly, the ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper”
consists of the woman’s husband fainting at the sight of her, appropriating
the pathological behaviour usually ascribed to “hysterical” women at the
time. The ending turns around the contemporary medical, psychiatric dis-
course and offers a text forever haunted by the creeping, crawling
woman-in-the-walls.
This connection between trauma and space within the home is also
negotiated in a twentieth-century haunted house narrative: Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This novel is another crucial precursor for
Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching as it intertwines notions of gender and
race, national trauma and belonging, within the hostile space of the
haunted home. Beloved re-remembers the trauma of slavery by creating
the possessed house on 124 Bluestone Road as a living, breathing charac-
ter. Echoing Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Morrison’s house is
not simply haunted, but seemingly haunts itself: “The first thing we learn
about the modern Haunted House is that it is alive. It is not just inhabited
by some ghostly presence, as Otranto was: rather, the force that lurks in it
is part of the house itself […] The house in modern terror fiction is not a
haunted but a haunting house” (Aguirre 1990, 190; emphasis in origi-
nal). In Beloved, Sethe, a former slave, had to kill her first-born daughter
in order to escape her slave masters. This dead daughter returns as a ghost
to haunt her in her new family home. As Andrew Smith has noted, “ghosts
are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our
148 J. LEETSCH
culture” (2007, 153). The female ghost which takes possession of the
house in Morrison’s novel probes deeply into the violent history of slavery
in the United States: “Beloved pictures American history as a haunted
house, from which slavery’s legacy of grief and horror cannot be exor-
cised” (Goddu 2007, 63–64). The novel depicts a house that entraps not
only its protagonists but also an unspeakable past—the house is estab-
lished as a location of trauma where memory and identity converge and
Beloved’s ghost acts as a materialisation of this. Morrison also opens up
the possibility to overcome this trauma by expelling the poltergeist from
the house in a collective ritual enacted by the black community surround-
ing Sethe: while “the succubus of the dead baby’s ghost is a lived presence
of the harmful, corrosive internalisation of response to the experience of
slavery[, h]er exorcism opens up the opportunity for recovering of both
community and selfhood” (Wisker 2016, 91).
Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison feature women who
refuse to be put in their place, within the interior of the house and within
the societal structures trying to tame them. These texts attempt to envi-
sion what happens when what is hidden surfaces, when restrictive and
violent histories re-emerge. In doing so, both texts, just as their successor
White is for Witching, creatively imagine alternative worlds that give room
to voices usually muted. As Oyeyemi notes in her essay on haunted houses,
“after all, this is how us ghosts operate; inhabiting, haunting, endlessly
imagining other homes and other hauntings” (2012, n. pag.). Oyeyemi’s
own imagining of other homes and other hauntings in White is for Witching
is deeply indebted not only to the Eurocentric gothic narrative traditions
I have traced above by way of Walpole and Poe but also to those versions
of the haunted house which encompass complex notions of gender and
race as offered by Perkins Gilman and Morrison.
Unlocking the Unwelcome House: The Home and the Unhomely

in White Is for Witching
Must the novel be a house? What kind of narrative can house unfree people?
Is the novel a house where the unhomely can live?
—Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home” (1992, 142)
The motif of the haunted house has been complicated by many narratives
following its inception in gothic fiction in the eighteenth century. These
texts demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct and convert the
foundations of this trope and to make the house more spacious to accom-
modate different kinds of hauntings. The haunted, haunting house func-
tions to make visible distorted and continually changing states of being at
home and of feeling unhomely. Oyeyemi’s haunted house in White is for
Witching continues the project of extending the history of this topos and
places it firmly into the tradition of postcolonial, feminist rewritings of the
gothic; as she has said in an interview, “I think the story’s … very know-
ing … As I was writing it, it very much knew about itself, especially with
the element of the house. It knew about other stories that had come
before it, that were like it” (Oyeyemi 2009b, n. pag.). By re-evaluating the
topos, Oyeyemi has written a novel that is deeply connected to its gothic
literary predecessors but at the same time addresses contemporary, postco-
lonial questions pertaining to global dynamics of exclusion and inclusion.
I would argue, in fact, that Oyeyemi dismantles the haunted house narra-
tive and builds it up again, brick by brick, but with shifted, altered founda-
tions. In White is for Witching, the haunted house on 29 Barton Road is
not only an architectural structure but gains its own distinctive voice and
personality—it acts as one of the novel’s autodiegetic narrators and is
imbued with a volatile and hostile consciousness.
The novel’s haunted house is introduced as the Silver family home—
the Silver family consists of Lily and Luc, the parents, and Miranda and
Elliot, their teenage twins. 29 Barton Road is an old house on the coast
near Dover that belonged to Lily’s grandmother. From the very start, it is
clear that the architecture of 29 Barton Road plays on characteristically
gothic elements, reminiscent of Walpole or Poe: “From the outside the
windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they
were there to let air or light in”, and on the inside the house consists of
“the dusty marble mantelpiece” and a floor “so crazily checked that none
could walk in a straight line in there”, it contains a “steep winding stair-
case with the gnarled banister” as well as trapdoors and hidden shelters
(17–18). The house is also geographically embedded into an unmistakably
gothic context, situated next to a forgotten graveyard with unnamed
graves (17). As the Silver family makes the transition from city (London)
to country (Dover), Luc opens the house as a guest house. As a Bed and
Breakfast, the house represents a very conventional English space. At the
same time, it precariously balances the line between opposites: it is a hybrid
space in-between family home and public sphere, a home away from
home. Inside-outside, home-other, these are the main axes around which
the postcolonial gothic text of White is for Witching revolves via the home
150 J. LEETSCH
turned hostile. When Lily, the twins’ mother and heiress of the house, dies
on a photography mission in Port-au-Prince in Haiti when Eliot and
Miranda are 16, the haunted house awakens. With this awakening, the
guest house turns out to be the opposite of hospitable.
As Derrida has noted in Of Hospitality, “the Latin ‘hostis’ means ‘guest’
but also ‘enemy’”—and “hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home”
(2000, 157). The house is haunted by the ghosts of Lily’s maternal family
line (her mother Jennifer, her grandmother Anna) and thus brought to life
takes on a distinct voice and personality which in turn haunts its own
inhabitants. Miranda, the last living female Silver family member, is slowly
turned into a monster, a sort of stand-in or vessel for the house and its
ghosts, and she is forced to carry out the house’s violent will as it tries to
expel and kill everyone it perceives as other, non-white and non-English.
Regarding these linkages between inside and outside which are implicated
in the politics of home and belonging, Rosemary Marangoly George
reminds us that “homes and nations are defined in the stances of confron-
tation with what is considered ‘not-home,’ with the foreign, with distance.
Thus, for instance, it is in the heyday of British imperialism that England
gets defined as ‘Home’ in opposition to ‘The Empire’ which belongs to
the English but is not England” (1996, 4). Accentuating the house both
as home and as not-home, as interior space and representative of the
nation, the novel unveils an inherently transgressive, unhomely moment.
The haunted house in White is for Witching becomes a place where differ-
ent notions of identity and belonging collide, jostle and displace each other.
To make these implications clearer, at this point I want to refer to Homi
Bhabha’s continuation of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, both
in his essay on “The World and the Home” (1992) and in his seminal
work The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha transfers Freud’s uncanny
to the English signifier of “unhomely” to point towards the specific condi-
tion of the one who moves, the one who is not at home: the migrant. For
Bhabha, unhomeliness becomes “the condition of extra-territorial and
cross-cultural initiations”, “the ‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic colonial and
post-colonial condition” ([1994] 2004, 13). The unhomely becomes a
way of being in the world and of experiencing the world. In adding to
Freud’s psychoanalytical project, Bhabha expands the term to apply to
distinctly diasporic identificatory processes—much as White is for Witching
expands the eighteenth-century gothic trope of the haunted house to
address specific contemporary discourses and unspoken histories of migra-
tion, diaspora and forced relocation and exclusion. In “The World and the
Home”, Bhabha suggests that “the intimate recesses of the domestic space
become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement
the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily,
the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a
vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (1992, 141). When the inte-
rior, private and domestic space of 29 Barton Road in White is for Witching
turns into a monstrous space that haunts, tortures and violates its “for-
eign” visitors, the novel opens up a conversation about processes of other-
ing and of selfing as the home/familiar and the unhomely/unfamiliar are
continuously pitted against each other. Whereas classical haunted house
texts often resolve these tensions, however, White is for Witching does not
and produces a more flexible negotiation of these oppositions. The novel
shows how resistance against the deathly, deadening violence enacted by
the haunted house becomes possible: a resistance performed not only by
the text’s African diasporic black female characters but also by the white
protagonist who is technically complicit in the house’s violence. Bhabha
has argued that “[i]n the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes
visible” (1992, 141), and this chapter shows how Oyeyemi’s White is for
Witching runs along the same fault lines and makes visible and possible
other worlds, other loves.
The house’s development into a haunting space is closely connected to
the female genealogies of the Silver women. Chronologically speaking, the
first of these women is Anna Good, Miranda’s great-grandmother, and she
is responsible for the creation of the house—this becomes evident in a pas-
sage narrated by the house itself where it describes its awakening:
One evening she pattered around inside me, […], and she dragged all my
windows open […]. I cried and cried for an hour or so, unable to bear the
sound of my voice, so shrill and pleading, but unable to stop the will of the
wind wheeling through me, cold in my insides. […] Anna Good, you are
long gone now, except when I resurrect you to play in my puppet show […]
I will tell you the truth because you are no trouble to me at all. Indeed, you
are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that
I am. (23–24)
This process of giving life, of birthing the hostile haunted house, is initi-
ated when Anna’s husband Andrew is killed in the Second World War.
Anna’s consequential grief and trauma create the haunted house, prod it
awake: “Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven
152 J. LEETSCH
itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware” (118).
Anna is described as the embodiment of the pure, white English female
subject, materialised in the figure of Britannia:
White was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected
her feeling that she was not clean. […] At school, her gymnastics class had
been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been
picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash
and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girl’s bodies. She was
Britannia. […] Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who
didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrass-
ing and dangerous. […] She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia
become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted
it so that anything they were not part of was bad. (115–116)
Anna, who is clad in white as Mother Britain and literally rides on top of
other women’s bodies, embodies the nation’s ideals of white supremacy
and purity. Anna’s initial patriotism is turned into xenophobia when her
husband never returns home from the war: “‘I hate them,’ she said.
‘Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty … dirty killers. He should have stayed
here with me’” (118). In the figure of Anna Good, or the Good Lady as
she is called throughout the novel, Oyeyemi turns the angel in the house,
the mother of the nation, into a monstrous being that in turn creates the
haunted space of 29 Barton Road which tries to protect her (and the con-
tinued existence of the family line):
I [29 Barton Road] curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her.
I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic
window to jump. […] She had bought some rat poison the week before, and
though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep
into my recesses. Just in case. She was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers
at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady. (118)
With the house’s transformation as a result of Anna’s phobia, Oyeyemi

plays with how women were (and still are) constructed as the keepers and
breeders of the nation. In her work on the representation of race and
whiteness, Radhika Mohanram claims that
what made the British woman the innermost, the purest, was precisely that
she was also the boundary, the space of dilution, making the outer into the
inner. At the very moment the British woman played the role of the essential
and constitutive of Britishness, she undermined it by showing her potential/
ability to contaminate it. Thus, contamination was at the very heart, the very
core of white Britishness. (2007, 34; emphasis in original)
Anna’s fear of not being pure enough, and the house’s consecutive disgust
by everything not white, results in the house acting as a gatekeeper for this
unattainable ideal of whiteness for future generations of Silver women.
The past haunts the present—the event of Andrew’s death and the hate
it arouses in Anna for everyone non-English comes to inhabit the present
of Miranda’s world. The house’s monstrosity travels along the female line
of the Silver family, eventually to be broken down by Miranda and Ore’s
love. Before that, however, the house attempts to govern every movement
of its female inhabitants, tightly controlling and disciplining them.
Miranda’s twin brother Eliot says of their grandmother Jennifer, that she
“was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report
cards bound with pink ribbon), and she’d run off with someone dashing
and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s
dad had been” (71). From the house we learn the truth:
Jennifer Silver lived quite long. She didn’t die until 1994. A reason why Lily
never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a
curtain away. […]. Jennifer really meant to abandon her daughter, and how
could I allow that? Jennifer was going to walk away from Anna and Lily in
broad daylight. […] I opened up for her. That is to say, I unlocked a door in
her bedroom that she had not seen before […] When she was safely down
the new passageway, I closed the door behind her. […] Don’t feel sorry for
Jennifer. Why should you? She lived long and relatively well, and she was
kept safe from those fears and doubt peculiar to her times. She was safe from
the war that sickened what it touched from miles away […] the pictures of
Phnom Penh burning. (83–85)
The house takes up the role of the keeper of order, of keeping together the
family as it will not let Jennifer leave with someone “foreign”. This pas-
sage, which the house narrates itself, shows how it changes and twists its
own interior spaces to create a hostile environment. Miranda’s mother
Lily, however, escapes the ordering principle of the house—much as
Miranda later will also attempt to: she not only marries French Luc
Dufresne but also travels around the world as a photographer until she
meets her tragic end in Haiti: “The twins were sixteen and a half when
154 J. LEETSCH
their mother died. She was shot in Port-au-Prince; gunfire sprayed into
the queue at a voting station. […] Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned
not to go to Haiti. I had warned her. Why do people go to these places,
these places that are not for them?” (8). Ultimately, the house loses its
tight grip on the women it houses because they strive to seek their homes
elsewhere, in places “that are not for them”. These examples show not
only how the house changes its architecture and acts like a living, sentient
being but also how it attempts to manipulate the lives and stories of its
inhabitants. Some have to be kept out, some have to be kept in and some
are only allowed limited access to the interior space that is the home.
Especially foreign guest and employees are tortured and then expelled.
The house haunts in altering its architectural structure, forcing away some
and then later capturing and literally ingesting others: “We are on the
inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have any-
one else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company,
probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he
is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so
eventually I make them leave” (118).
One of the characters who repeatedly attempts to resist the house’s
violence is the housekeeper Sade. The Nigerian Yoruba immigrant with
ritual scars on her face is the one who keeps the house; “as far as it can be
kept”, she says (209). Even though she is black and the house repeatedly
tries to choke, mutilate and kill her, she carves out her own space inside of
it within the feminine, maternal space of the kitchen and consequently
saves those non-white guests the house attempts to hunt down. She is
both inside and outside and tries to keep the house in check through her
Yoruba magic. One of these instances of “trying to keep the house” occurs
when it tries to kill her with a poisoned apple, a clear reference to “Snow
White”, toxic femininity and Westernised beauty ideals. When the house
attempts to feed the apple to Sade, she first tries to refuse the food by
pretending to be dead: “The African woman looked at the apple and (this
had not at all been accounted for) her heart stopped beating. It was some
sort of trick, for I was certain that the woman was still alive” (138–139).
Then, however, Sade bites into the apple so that the other black house
guests held hostage by the house can escape. As a means of resistance,
Sade counters the house’s insidious magic with her own. As Helen
Cousin’s suggests, Sade is “associated with the novel’s title, through the
witchery known as aje, a type of benevolent Yoruba witchcraft with aspects
symbolic of maternal protection, and for whom ‘the hue of spiritual
transcendence is white’” (Cousins 2012, 50; quoting Washington 2005,

29). Recognising this, the house tries to rally against her: “Juju is not
enough to protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I’ll
turn sugar bitter for you. I’ll take your very shield and crack it on your
head. White is for witching, so ti gbo? White is for witching, Sade goodbye”
(175; emphasis in original). But in the end, Sade’s form of white (as in
benevolent) witching will help defeat the house’s horror.
The climax of the houses’ vicious hauntings occurs when Ore visits
Dover to see her girlfriend Miranda: from the very beginning on, Ore
(British-Nigerian, but adopted by a white British family) experiences the
Silver family home as not-home, as strange and frighteningly bewildering
(206). She is unable to orient herself in the inner spaces of 29 Barton
Road. Whereas the house depresses its floors for Miranda and makes
angles of descent to help her walk, it hinders Ore wherever she
attempts to go:
I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don’t know how, found myself
still in the bathroom. […]. But when I tried to pass through the door again
I was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I’d turned my head
to fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which
was meant to be arranged into an L […]. But the doors had changed posi-
tions. […] None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I
inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too,
unsure where they would take me. (216–217)
When Ore asks Sade if there is something wrong with the house, she sim-
ply replies: “It is a monster” (212) and tells her to go home. Later, back
in her rooms, Ore takes a shower and when she dries herself with a white
towel, where it touches her skin it is stained a dark black:
The towel girl in the mirror was drying herself with—I frowned and looked
at my towel. Where it had touched me it was striped with black liquid, as
dense as paint.
(don’t scream)
there were shreds of hard skin in it. There was hair suspended in it. ‘The
black’s coming off,’ someone outside the bathroom door commented. Then
they whistled ‘Rule, Britannia’ and laughed. Bri-tons never-never-never shall
be slaves. My skin stung. (214; emphasis in original)
156 J. LEETSCH
In forcing Ore to shed her skin, to rub off her blackness, the house and its
ghosts replicate an imperial violence that is inextricably bound to a physi-
ognomic schema which clearly categorises and devalues human beings
regarding their appearance. As the house attempts to ultimately other her,
it reveals its ideological stance which regards “Ore’s difference and iden-
tity [as] inextricably connected to her skin and the action of erasing her
skin is seen as the negation of her being. […] This is the drama that the
white matriarchs re-enact by identifying Ore according to a ‘racial epider-
mal schema’ that taxonomizes human bodies according to the colour of
their skin” (Stephanou 2014, 1253). Ore as the black Other is marked as
different, foreign and toxic to a British identity constructed as “pure”.
This also shows when the house first learns of her and Miranda’s
relationship:
‘I’m in love,’ Miranda whispered, once she was hidden. We saw who she
meant. The squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts, the reek of
fluids from the seam between her legs. The skin. The skin.
(is it all right to say how much I like this
the way our skin looks together)
Anna was shocked. Jennifer was shocked. Lily was impassive. Disgusting.
These are the things that happen while you’re not looking, when you’re not
keeping careful watch. When clear water moves unseen, a taint creeps into
it—moss, or algae, salt, even. It becomes foul, undrinkable. It joins the
sea. (194)
The house and its ghosts make unmistakably clear that Ore is not welcome
here, ultimately attempting to murder her. The way the house positions
Ore as “foul” and “reeking” here can be linked to arguments Sara Ahmed
has made in Strange Encounters, where she suggests that “the economy of
xenophobia—the production of the stranger’s body as an impossible and
phobic object—involves, not just reading the stranger’s body as dirt and
filth, but the re-forming of the contours of the body-at-home” (2000,
54). However, identity is not only “skin deep” (Stephanou 2014, 1253),
and the house’s attempts to unhome Ore in ridding her of her skin fail.
Several attempts to kill her are made, by the house, its ghosts and also by
Miranda (who at this point has almost yielded to the house’s powers), but
Ore manages to escape after an odyssey of horror through the house which
has turned itself into a labyrinth: it is the Yoruba housekeeper Sade who
helps to save Ore, their shared status as not-white establishing a point of

connection:
Outside the room, the floor had gone

(where is the floor?)
I fell down […] Below someone threw their hands out and white flew from
their fingertips. Someone red and silver, the spirit in the flame. I bounced. I
couldn’t see anything. Then I could, through white squares. I was in a net.
Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me. I was crying like a new-
born. (230–231)
The white net of cloth that Sade had been knitting earlier in the novel
(120) catches Ore and enables her to leave Dover forever. It is no coinci-
dence that Sade’s magic talisman that saves Ore is white—as the title of the
novel indicated, white is for witching, and here Yoruba witching counters
the racism of the haunted house. In the end, it is the two black main char-
acters of the novel who rally against the restrictive norms proposed by
the house.
Throughout the entire novel, Ore refuses not only to be othered by the
house but also to be “homed” by others. Adopted by a white British
working-class family because her biological mother suffered from post-
natal depression, she refuses to be defined as either or, as being at home or
not-at-home: “I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am” (157). At
Cambridge, the age-old British institution of education and elitism, Ore
places herself while also recognising that she cannot be fully placed, that
she cannot simply blend into her surroundings:
Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said, You don’t belong
here. Again and again, over textbooks and plates of mush in Hall, I gritted
my teeth and said, Yes I do. Everyone else seems to blend into the architec-
ture. (157, emphasis in original)
During the course of the novel, we learn of her other un/homing strate-
gies: she fights against her white cousins’ racism, fuelled by BNP pam-
phlets and an openly nationalistic rhetoric (201), but she also declines the
attempts of a fellow Nigerian-British student to invite her to the Nigeria
Society in Cambridge (149). When she struggles against the house, and
against Miranda, she forces herself to not give in: “I concentrated on mak-
ing myself colourfast, on not changing under her tongue. I know what I
158 J. LEETSCH
look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea
of a girl that I woke into each morning” (228–229). As Bhabha has noted
in his work on the unhomely, “to be unhomed is not to be homeless”
([1994] 2004, 13). In wilful acts of self-identification, Ore chooses her
home on her own terms and escapes clear-cut spatial designations. I agree
with Stephanou who posits Ore’s identificatory processes as “not fixed,
but mobile, transgressing boundaries, never taking on fully the limitations
of either a Nigerian or British identity, always creating interconnections”
(2014, 1249–1250). In doing so, she also changes the order of the world
she inhabits: as Bhabha would say, “the unhomely is the shock of recogni-
tion of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” (141).
Renegotiating its spaces of Englishness, White is for Witching produces its
diasporic Black British character not as the subject of a nation state but as
an individual and self-empowered agent which seeks belonging in a place
that is both world and home.
The antithesis to Ore is Miranda’s relationship to the home, she is
treated with obsessive tenderness: “I [29 Barton Road] would save
Miranda even if I had to break her” (194). Miranda’s position as the last
of the Silver women is only underlined by the fact that Miranda’s birthy-
ear, 1982, is also the year of the Falklands War. As Amy K. King points
out, this war can be described as “Britain’s last-ditch effort to hang on to
its empire” (2013, 63). The connection to this historical event explains
the house’s increasing desperation to “save” her/the Empire. But because
Miranda is disobedient, because she loves whom she is not supposed to,
the house finally so completely binds her to itself that she is literally inte-
grated into the space of the house, being eaten into the walls and beneath
the floorboards, disappearing into the innards of the building and the
earth it is built upon: “It was in trapdoor-room that she fell, and the house
caught her” (239). Miranda must stay inside for Ore to be able to leave—
this constitutes both the ending of the novel and its beginning. The very
first words of the novel consist of Ore’s narration: “Miranda Silver is in
Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house. Her throat is blocked
with a slice of apple (to stop her speaking words that may betray her) / her
ears are filled with earth / (to keep her from hearing sounds that will con-
fuse her) / her eyes are closed” (1). This account is supplemented by the
house’s own:
Miranda is at home
(homesick, home sick)
Miranda can’t come in today Miranda has a condition called pica she has
eaten a great deal of chalk—she really can’t help herself—she has been very
ill—Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out inside a
wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica she is stretched out inside a
wall […]
She has wronged
me I will not allow her to live
try a different way: (3–4; emphases in original)
Miranda is punished for her love for someone deemed other and “dirty”
by the house. She is disciplined by being ingested into the house, becom-
ing one with its chalky, earthly foundations on the white cliffs of Dover.
The guest house as the beginning, ending and centre of the story is thus
caught up within the paradox of welcome and deathly rejection, a home
becoming the most hostile space possible.
In the novel, the policing of the home’s borders turns into the securing
of worldly, national borders. It is no coincidence that the novel is set in
Kent, in the town of Dover. From the very start, Dover and its white chalk
cliffs point towards the novel’s main concerns: borders and their transgres-
sion, the insidious desire to maintain and guard the shores of England. As
Bhabha has observed, the “‘deep’ nation” is “crafted in chalk and lime-
stone”, attempting to maintain a “forever England” ([1994] 2004, 243).
Dover, however, is geographically positioned as a vulnerable liminal space
between land and sea, its chalky cliffs acting as the door to England, and
it serves one of the main arrival points for immigrants (those “others” that
have to be kept out). By entangling this specific setting of countryside and
coastlines of Great Britain with the Bed and Breakfast hostel-tuned-hostile,
the novel consciously refers to the fact that prior to the establishment of
“detention centres” in the UK, many local rooming houses and hotels in
seaside towns like Dover were utilised by the government to house asylum
seekers awaiting processing. This unavoidably led to tensions and was
taken up accordingly by right-wing nationalist movements. As Les
Back argues,
it is the small provincial towns on the [British] coast like Margate, Dover
and Hastings that have become the centre of concern about illegal immigra-
tion and asylum. These towns which occupy a special location in the national
imaginary […] have become the new frontier for the defenders of exclusive
national culture and ‘rights for whites’. (2006, 35)
160 J. LEETSCH
This role of Dover is also negotiated within the story, when Sade the
housekeeper, herself a Nigerian immigrant and proud of her passport,
talks of Dover as a key to a door that is locked: “Didn’t they call Dover the
key to England […] Key to a locked gate, throughout both world wars,
and even before. It’s still fighting” (107). Another allusion to Dover’s role
as fortress and gatekeeper is made when the lyrics of Vera Lynn’s 1942
World War II song “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of
Dover” waft through the novel to haunt Miranda (194); a patriotic song
meant to welcome back those fighting for England in the war. Ironically,
though, bluebirds are non-migratory birds not native to the UK; a fact
that sheds light on the hypocrisy of British nationalism (Hislop 2007).
The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at work within the gothic haunted
house on the white cliffs of Dover show how White is for Witching’s spatial
and ideological structures are mirrored on a broader scale in postcolonial
discourses of the twenty-first century and its migrant “crisis”. As Sarah
Ilott argues, the guest house which imprisons and tortures those perceived
as foreign reflects “Britain’s duplicitous stances on immigration and asy-
lum”, and with that the Silver household becomes “a microcosm for
British border politics” (2015, 61–62). In other words,
[t]he Kentish setting of White is for Witching is used to reflect a broader

cultural malaise associated with xenophobic fears of a threat to the national
body politic in terms of intrusion of the racial Other. It allows for the explo-
ration of the interconnected political and theoretical questions of hospital-
ity, the foreigner, and the border that are central constructions of Britishness.
(Buckley and Ilott 2017, 6)
What is more, the novel in my opinion also successfully subverts these

politics of the border. White is for Witching not only “does the business of
the nation” (Strehle 2008, 1) but also produces national and diasporic
subjects which inherently destabilise the boundaries of homeland and
empire. The house as home turning unhomely becomes an interior space
which holds the exterior, a space where critical discourses about nation-
hood and belonging emerge and jostle against each other. In giving room
to these crosscurrents, White is for Witching and its fictional haunted house
criticises and “effectively unsettles home and homeland” (3). By featuring
black and white female characters who fight against the house’s mon-
strous, deadly intentions, the novel offers the possibility of Bhabha’s
unhomely—of bringing the world into the home and the home into
the world.
Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/Land

Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a homeland.
—Mahmoud Darwish, “What is Lost” ([2006] 2011, 15)
As has become quite obvious, Helen Oyeyemi’s novel haunts both home
and homeland. In the following, I want to focus on yet another aspect
which expresses such unhomely hauntings in a different way: the material-
ity of text itself. The text of White is for Witching is haunted by many
ghosts. Some of these are ghosts intertextual in nature, whereas others
consist of formal, typographical anomalies. What all these ghosts have in
common is that they mirror the unruly interior space of 29 Barton Road,
creating an unstable text that seemingly haunts its readers. These ghosts,
however, can also be read as materialisations that are attuned to the entan-
glements and affiliations created by specifically female voices and feminist,
postcolonial approaches to genre and textuality. Like I did in my analyses
of Adichie’s Americanah and Zadie Smith’s London novels, such an
exploration enables me to mine the rich and powerful potential of litera-
ture to be of and in the world and allows me to thoroughly explore the
potential of Oyeyemi’s literary imagination to want a world, while revel-
ling in all its messiness, ruptures and tensions that often run slant to canon
and convention.
Taking the cue from this section’s opening epigraph by Mahmoud
Darwish, I want to examine the meta-fictional, generic, narratological and
typographical tactics the novel employs to show how it generates a text
that offers alternatives to both home and homeland as represented by 29
Barton Road—alternatives rooted in an inherently relational desire. As the
novel’s white and black female characters, who strip themselves of the
restrictive, harmful constraints of the house, show, words and imagination
can rebuild houses and worlds. White is for Witching continues the project
of writing homely and unhomely belonging anew, its narration both vali-
dating and undermining entities of nation and home. It is a novel that
sheds light on how the dissolution of borders and their consecutive re-
drawing offers a counterproposal to the harmful and violent homeland the
house represents. In the following, I examine in how far the text of the
novel performs its own displacements through housing ghosts of cultural,
literary references that haunt the main body of the text; how it unsettles
and crosses cultural boundaries through its disruptive narrative and typo-
graphical form and how through these crossings, productive potential of
creating new worlds arises.
162 J. LEETSCH
In a first step, I want to hunt a few of the intertextual ghosts that per-
vade Oyeyemi’s novel. I have already spent some time on the conceptual
archives of gothic fictions in my discussions on the haunted house for-
mula, and I will return to the novel’s literary predecessors in my analyses
of the queer vampire love story at the heart of White is for Witching, but
for now I want to concentrate on some of the other explicit cultural allu-
sions to be found within the narration itself. These allusions are most
often employed as either ironic, self-reflexive nods to the web of cultural
references influencing the novel or they hint at the construction of specifi-
cally female and postcolonial versions of the gothic. Combining ghostly
echoes and allusions which initially seem disparate, but which come to
gain deeper meaning on closer inspection, the text engages in continuous
efforts to re-mix and re-shuffle, for example, when alluding to black musi-
cal traditions via Ella Fitzgerald. Her song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” is played
by Miranda at the beginning of the narrative. Fitzgerald’s song is based on
an old nursery rhyme which she “extended and embellished […] into a
jazz piece that was her breakthrough hit with the Chick Webb Orchestra
in 1938. It has since become a jazz standard” (Baldin and Studwell 2000,
35). In the novel, the song is first and foremost connected to Miranda’s
illness and her slow descend into madness. It appears in the section where
we meet Miranda who has just discharged herself from the clinic and has
returned home:
She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch
grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across
the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed
play three times before she realized there was nothing wrong with it, it
played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whis-
pering a tisket a tasket. She gritted her teeth. She needed the sound of the
watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. (34)
Fighting against succumbing to the house’s influence, Miranda tries to

suppress the memory of her dead mother—as represented by the sounds
of the watch—with the help of Fitzgerald’s song. Later on, when Miranda
has gone to Cambridge and has escaped the house at least for a short
while, the song is connected to her and Ore’s love story:
Ore was so stark in her mind that Miranda bypassed her name; she didn’t so
much think of Ore as think her. […] Ore had a gap between her front teeth
and wore her jumpers too big so that the neck slipped down on one side and
bared her shoulder and the strap of her vest. Now Ore had kissed her. She
had tasted Ore’s mouth. A tisket, a tasket … momentarily, she wondered
what the goodlady would have to say about that. (170; emphasis in original)
“A-Tisket, A-Tasket” takes on differing meanings, but seems to be inher-

ently linked to Miranda’s emotional struggles and affective encounters
with other women. In this context, it is interesting to look at the song’s
origins as a nursery rhyme. According to Brewster, the rhyme originated
in the Americas: “A-tisket a-tasket / A green and yellow basket / I wrote
a letter to my love / And on the way I dropped it, / I dropped it, I
dropped it, / And on the way I dropped it. / A little boy he picked it up
/ And put it in his pocket” (1976, 82). In some variants, the second line
is replaced by “I lost my yellow basket”. In other variants, the last lines
consist of “A little girl picked it up / And put it in her pocket” (ibid.). In
nineteenth-century England, rhymes used in the same game showcased
slightly different expressions:
I lost my supper, last night, / And the night before, / And if I do this night,
/ I never will no more. / I sent a letter to my love, / I carried water in my
glove, / And by the way I dropped it, I did so, I did so: / I had a little dog
that said bow-wow! / I had a little cat that said meow-meow! / Shan’t bite
you, shan’t bite you, / Shall bite you. / I dropt it, I dropt it, / And by the
way I lost it. (cf. Northall 1892, 364)
This English version clearly runs parallel to the novel’s representation of

Miranda’s mental state and eating disorder with the lines “I lost my sup-
per” and “And by the way I lost it” (ibid.). It also hints towards her vam-
piric desires with the sentences “Shan’t bite you, shan’t bite you, / Shall
bite you” (ibid.). Oyeyemi thus connects these old nursery rhymes with
the jazz version sung by Ella Fitzgerald which almost imperceptibly weaves
throughout the novel and accompanies Miranda’s story in ghostly echoes.
Fitzgerald’s version focusses on the girl that finds the basket (and the love
letters that are being sent) which in turn foreshadows Miranda and Ore’s
complicated love story. With these complex layerings, White is for Witching
uses Western convention of storytelling, canon and rhyme to then connect
them to a black artist within the frame of Miranda and Ore’s love story.
Via Ella Fitzgerald’s classic, then, the text is opened up to other trajecto-
ries and cultural connections outside of the narrow space of England and
English homes.
164 J. LEETSCH
Another ghost that weaves together different cultural contexts is the

epigraph positioned at the beginning of the novel. As Genette argues,
paratexts are “more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is,
rather, a threshold, or […] a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the
possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (1997, 1–2). It is “a
zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of
transaction” (1, emphasis in original). In White is for Witching, this posi-
tion of the threshold, between outside and inside of the text/house, is
inhabited by four lines from a sonnet written by the African American poet
Gwendolyn Brooks, titled “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell”
([1945] 2005):
I hold my honey and I store my bread

In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from Hell. (1587)
This poem is part of a series of 12 “soldier sonnets”, titled “Gay Chaps at

the Bar”. These sonnets focus on letters Brooks received from her brother
and other soldiers telling her “what’s going on at the front” during World
War II (Brooks 1970, 10). As Duncan points out, in these poems Brooks
manages to shed light on the turmoil black American soldiers have felt—
patriotically defending a nation that at the same time was imbued with
racial segregation (cf. 2010). The sonnet “my dreams, my works, must
wait till after hell” acts as “paranormal paratext”, as Bianca Tredennick
fittingly notes (2015, 171). It is consciously left incomplete, so that the
following text body of the novel supplies the missing fifth and sixth lines,
which are: “I am very hungry. I am incomplete. / And none can tell me
when I may dine again” (Brooks [1945] 2005, 1587). As Tredennick
argues, “what is present in the text, then, is the spectral trace of what is
absent, those marginalized lines that are really the central ones” (2015,
172). The metaphors of food and hunger employed by Brooks foreshadow
Miranda’s pica as well as the vampire/soucouyant story line in conjunc-
tion with the notions of consumption, sex and desire in Miranda and Ore’s
love story. The novel answers to Brooks as it fills in the gap left by the
incomplete sonnet at its threshold. The epigraph, then, can be regarded as
a ghostly spectre haunting the main body of the text. At the same time,
the poem—in describing the specific historical situation, trauma and
anguish of African American men leaving for and then returning from
war—provides a counterpart analogous to the story of Miranda’s grand-

mother, Anna Silver, who loses her husband in the same war and imbues
the house with her subsequent trauma-turned-racism. The ghostly epi-
graph as paratext which is situated at points of thresholds then engages in
processes of transition and transaction, as Genette would have it: the very
first words of the novel already open up the text to counter-arguments and
expand its geographical terrain to encompass experiences other than white
British ones.
After the epigraph, a frame narrative introduces the main characters
narrating the text: Ore, Eliot, 29 Barton Road and Miranda. This intro-
duction is posited before the main plot of the novel begins and consists of
a quasi-theatrical staging of an interplay of questions and answers. This
whole section remains unintelligible up until the point the readers have
finished the novel and return to the beginning. The effect of these ques-
tions is inherently unsettling as it hints at the interlinked fates of the Silver
women who have been ingested or controlled by the house and who in
turn rebelled and paid with their deaths. These questions are answered in
differing and overlapping ways by three of the novel’s characters: Ore,
Eliot and 29 Barton Road, who are all first-person narrators. These answers
can be read as conflicting, antithetic and offering multiple solutions at
once which, in turn, only leads to more questions. This frame narrative
then functions as an exposition that points towards “the very porous bor-
ders of this novel, where the text seems always excessive and uncanny,
overrunning the boundaries that are meant to define and confine it”
(Tredennick 2015, 173). Having finished White is for Witching, “readers
must re-read the opening after turning the final page in order to place that
question-and-answer section where it chronologically belongs” (175);
beginning and end become interchangeable and upset linear chronologi-
cal reading habits. Any notion of closure evoked by Ore’s last words in the
novel, “Now I have said all that I know” (232), is misleading as her clos-
ing statement is belied by the very first words of the novel on page one.
The beginning uncannily metamorphoses into the ending, and the other
way around—creating a haunted text that goes in circles.
These textual strategies pose questions pertaining to reliability and nar-
rative authority. Throughout the novel, readers are confronted with abrupt
switches from one perspective to another, when narrators interrupt and
contradict each other—often mid-sentence. These shifts are sometimes
signalled only by a line break and sometimes not signalled at all. In this
way, 29 Barton Road haunts on yet another level: as one of three
166 J. LEETSCH
first-person narrators, its voice is woven through the story as it alternates

with Ore, Elliot and Miranda. As Juliann Fleenor argues regarding narra-
tive instability and complexity in gothic fiction, “the narrative structure is
usually one of multiple narrators. Epistolary novels or narrations within
narrations are used […]. The struggle with the absolute is so threatening
that even the narration must be questionable” (1983, 12). This is a marker
not only for the gothic but also for the postmodern, as Bianca Tredennick
suggests, “where such protean forms merge into self-referentiality, self-
consciousness, and metafiction” (2015, 168). With the house as one of its
main narrators, White is for Witching undermines the human stories it tells
and manages to radically unsettle narrative conventions within the space of
the haunted house/text. Many gothic fictions incorporate prefaces and
assurances by often unreliable narrators who assert the authenticity and
authority of the presented narrative. These editorial and authorial fictions
are either embedded into the paratext or can be found woven into the
main text of the story. In displaying the same structural slippages, White is
for Witching continues the tradition of the inherently monstrous narrative
strategies of the gothic which showcased “what other forms of writing
often conceal: untrustworthiness, a slippery relationship to the truth”
(Chaplin 2011, 182). This unsettling slipperiness is paradigmatically
exemplified by the ending of White is for Witching when the house asks:
“Who do you believe? Well? Is it the black girl? Or Eliot? Or me? Our talk
depends upon the fact that you weren’t there and you don’t know what
happened. At the very least I hope you take Eliot with a pinch of salt. He
is a terrible liar” (226). White is for Witching disorients its readers who
themselves then turn into gothic victims “racing through various textual
labyrinths in search of a ‘truth’ that never quite comes into view” (Chaplin
2011, 195), haunted by the ghosts of xenophobia.
As a postcolonial gothic text that ultimately attempts to exorcise the
racist haunted house, the novel excels in making the house’s ghosts all-
pervasive and almost uncontainable. It essentially transgresses the bound-
aries of the text to speak directly to the reader: “I am here, reading with
you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home
[…]—I tell where you are. Don’t turn to look back at me. I am only tan-
gible when you don’t look” (73). The monstrous interior of the home
unsettles boundaries and threatens stability, linearity and familiarity. The
haunting, disorientating nature of the text also reveals itself in how the
novel’s typography and layout on the page play with these shifting
foundations: this is signalled by switches in font, line breaks or unconven-

tional formats. The way in which the letters are arranged on the page mir-
rors the fluid architecture of 29 Barton Street, and in leaving spaces blank
and showcasing ruptures within the page layout, the typography reflects
the interrupted and subverted spaces of the story. One example along
which these disruptions can be traced are the “bridge words” Oyeyemi
employs throughout the novel—these bridge words consist of single
words, which stand alone and which link disparate sections, locations and
dimensions with each other. These words act “as textual points in which
the narratives converge” and they are “suggestive of the text’s motifs of
transition, time, and racial difference” in that they “generate moments of
temporal and spatial indeterminacy in which events on either side of the
textual ‘bridge’ are forced to collide” (Din-Kariuki 2017, 65). The
employment of these linking words can be regarded as a meta-textual,
meta-spatial intervention, produced by a text that resists any form of inter-
pretative closure.
Similar to the postmodern haunted house novel House of Leaves by
Mark Z. Danielewski (2000), White is for Witching mirrors its house’s
movements on meta-textual levels: “Just as the house indefinitely expands,
deconstructs and reconstructs itself, without its exterior dimensions
changing at all, so the text keeps expanding and deconstructing itself”
(Michlin 2012, n. pag.). In House of Leaves, there is a discrepancy between
inside and outside and the house starts to grow and to arrange its rooms
all on its own, an explicit parallel to the way the house in White is for
Witching behaves. In House of Leaves, the “layout on the page suddenly
matches the meaning of the text, in calligrammatic style” (ibid.). For
instance, a narrowing corridor is materialised by increasingly small “blocks”
or tunnels of words in the middle of an otherwise blank page, the words
themselves “squeezed out of shape” (Michlin 2012, n. pag.; Danielewski
2000, 433–460). Similarly, in White is for Witching the page layout indi-
cates shifts in space and narration. Blanks and stand-alone words link from
one room to another, from one narrator to another. One of these shifts
can be found in a passage which showcases one of the house’s first attacks
on whom it perceives as “other”:
She [Miranda] lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With curtains
drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc
downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whirr of
the lift
168 J. LEETSCH
broke down that night, No one knew what time. The timing became impor-
tant when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the
morning. (35)
As the lift stops between the flights of the house to incarcerate the young
girl Deme, the daughter of the Azerbaijani gardener who helps Luc with
the Bed and Breakfast, the story also temporarily becomes stuck between
different levels of narration. “The effect of this startling device is to visu-
ally and formally mimic the house’s monstrous architecture, as Oyeyemi’s
‘the lift’ bridges the space between the real and the monstrous. […] ‘The
lift’, floating in the middle of the page, is suggestive of being lost in the
interstices, like an elevator caught between floors” (Tredennick 2015,
178). This narrative device visually mimics the haunted house’s architec-
ture that changes at will, but often also signals the switch between differ-
ent narrators. The trope of the haunted house and the ghostly (inter)
textuality of its manifestation on the page speak of the performative nature
of White is for Witching’s narrative, shedding light on silences, gaps and
erasures.
As Monica Michlin argues, “the haunted house motif has become prev-
alent in contemporary postmodern narratives staging the ‘haunted self’ of
survivors of trauma”, playing on “circularity and repetition, blanks and
blackouts, fragmentation and incoherence” (2012, n. pag.). The haunted
house in Oyeyemi becomes such a signifier of “cultural haunting” (Brogan
1998, 4), of a national and colonial trauma that seeks its way outside. In
displaying a text that haunts just as it alters its architecture and evokes
many different ghosts, White is for Witching transports trauma onto
the page:
It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea,
one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the
Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at
any moment […] Miranda had known the address of the detention centre
before she had come, she knew that the place was called the Citadel, but she
had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had re-imagined the
building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that
would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western
Heights if it was
white
was the colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her
feeling that she was not clean. (115)
Here, the bridge word “white” complicates self/other binaries as it links

two incompatible dimensions together, destabilising these opposition in
an in-between space which complicates centre and margin, inside (house,
Anna) and outside (cliffs, immigrants) not only on a thematic but also on
a typographical level. As Brenda Cooper points out, this particular linkage
points towards the different notions of home and unhome the novel oscil-
lates between: “we see it [the word “white”] act as a portal between the
harsh, contemporary political realities of race where illegal immigrants are
housed in detention centres, and the terrifying psychological realities of
Miranda’s haunting by her weird, gothic, and ghostly ancestors” (2014,
85). Significantly, in this instance the word white, despite its harmful
implications, still enables communication, connection and transaction. In
performatively displaying its own “raw” materiality, then, the text of White
is for Witching exemplarily brings into the open hidden trauma—and in
revealing these hauntings, it paves the way for imagining other homes,
other lands and other worlds.
Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love

To the jaded eye, all vampires seem alike, but they are wonderful in their
versatility. Some come to life in moonlight, others are killed by the sun;
some pierce with their eyes, others with fangs; some are reactionary, others
are rebels; but all are disturbingly close to the mortals they prey on. I can
think of no other monsters who are so receptive. Vampires are neither inhu-
man nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they
should be. […] They inhere in our most intimate relationships; they are also
hideous invaders of the normal.
—Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995, 6)
By examining one of White is for Witching’s gothic key tropes, the haunted
house as unhomely home, I have shown how the novel offers alternative
ways of performing home, nation and empire. It is now time to fully turn
to my second category of analysis, love, and to the second gothic element
the novel puts forth: the vampire. The figure of the vampire as a monster
from the gothic repository, and especially the hybrid vampire as narrated
by Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, combines different discourses and
ideas. It is an inherently liminal figure: as undead, it is always already posi-
tioned between life and death, therefore managing to shed light on soci-
ety’s processes of drawing borders and delineating what is orderly and
170 J. LEETSCH
appropriate and what is not. As Gina Wisker argues, “vampires are the
ultimate Gothic creatures, a living dead contradiction to vehicle the angst,
desires and fears of whatever time, place and cultural context produces
them. […] Their liminality is a cultural index of unease, dis-ease and
apprehension” (2016, 157). It is no surprise then that the vampire is often
used as a metaphor of (reverse) colonialism, invasion and usurpation: the
vampire can function as a signpost for negotiations of race, of self and
other, of a threatening difference that needs to be contained. Vampires,
however, are positioned not only as exotically other but often as erotically
other as well: in fact, as bloodsuckers and cannibalistic figures, they raise
questions about consumption and disintegration, about seduction and
desire—“they project what we desire and what disgusts us” (ibid.).
An erotic and transgressive spectre, the vampire manages to disturb
heteronormative stabilities to coax into existence alternative schemes of
longing—a strategy of particular interest in relation to the love story
between Ore and Miranda. Imagined as both sexually and racially other,
narratives of these vampiric monsters serve as a rich sourcebook from
which the narrative of White is for Witching gathers its particular diasporic
approach. The following arguments will outline the vampiric archive
Oyeyemi draws upon. To illuminate the novel’s palimpsestic process of
rewriting the vampire, I will examine the origins of the vampire as well as
its non-Western variations, especially the African Caribbean folklore of the
soucouyant, which plays an important role in White is for Witching. Like
the haunted house, the figure of the vampire is renegotiated by the narra-
tive to serve as a focal point around which the text is able to build a cri-
tique which is influenced by a diasporic understanding of the world.
Whereas the novel piles up different ideas of space and spatiality around
the haunted house, through the vampire figure it can reconsider concepts
of hegemonic and heteronormative love and desire, creating an ultimately
other, queer sort of belonging.
The vampire in White is for Witching is embodied by Miranda, who falls
in love with Ore. Adding to an already multi-layered vampire archive,
Oyeyemi complicates her narrative further as she focuses on the love story
between the two protagonists. The vampiric monster as we traditionally
know it destroys its object of desire by draining their blood; in other
words, feeding on the living essence of its victim is what constitutes the
vampire. While these processes of destruction and death are not com-
pletely banned from the novel, they are partially substituted by a renego-
tiation of vampiric relationality and requited desire. In the novel, vampire
and gothic heroine, which are both unstable categories, fall in love and
become intertwined; the borders between them are blurred in a reparative
reiteration of harmful, (neo)colonial and violently nationalistic discourses.
Ore and Miranda’s love story radically questions the patterns of repelling
the fearful other, instead offering up a different narrative of being-
together: as bell hooks argued in All About Love, “when we choose to love
we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation” and
that “the choice to love is a choice to connect” (2000, 93). In hooks’
thinking, and, as I will show, in Oyeyemi’s work, love is conceptualised as
a direct challenge, a force to bring forth social change and repair centuries
of harmful subjugation of society’s others.
To make clearer White is for Witching’s contribution to the vampiric
archive and the way it uses this gothic monster to scrutinise heteronorma-
tive and Eurocentric practices of world- and of love-making, in the follow-
ing I endeavour to sketch the European and non-European origins of the
figure of the vampire. These are, firstly, grounded in a particular national-
istic and colonialist background and, secondly, shore up assumption about
gender, sexuality and partnership through the principle of consumption,
which entails both gastronomical consumption as well as erotic, sexual
consumption. The discourses surrounding race and sexuality, and more
specifically those pertaining to Englishness and queerness, will serve as the
basis for the main argumentative strands my discussion of Ore and
Miranda’s love story will revolve around. Two very canonically white and
Western texts, the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) and the novella
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (1872), will be used as starting
points for my analysis. Especially because they are deeply embedded into
the traditional Eurocentric canon of vampire texts and inscribed into
Europe’s cultural understanding of this particular trope, it is important to
question them, adapt and utilise their readings in contrast to other ver-
sions and other truths. In adding to her novel the African Caribbean con-
cept of the soucouyant, a skin-shedding, soul-eating monster inhabiting
the former margins of the colonies, Oyeyemi unsettles the European and
Anglo-American gothic origins of the vampire figure. The soucouyant acts
as a subversive factor disturbing the Western canonical texts upon which
White is for Witching is partially build, confirming Jack Halberstam’s argu-
ment that gothic texts (and even more so postcolonial gothic texts) mark
transgressions and turn inside-out norms, rules and orders (cf. Skin
Shows, 1995).
172 J. LEETSCH
White Is for Witching’s Vampiric Ancestry

Since its beginnings, Gothic fiction has constantly reinvented itself accord-
ing to the historical conditions it finds itself in, “morphing and mutating
itself into new and disparate incarnations as the context requires”, as
Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien remark (2015, 1). Regarding
the canonical Western catalogue of gothic narratives, in Great Britain the
gothic and its league of monsters return towards the end of the nineteenth
century, addressing yet new and different societal anxieties. As Botting
notes, “it was in the context of Victorian science, society and culture that
their [the monsters’] fictional power was possible, associated with anxiet-
ies about the stability of the social and domestic order and the effects of
economic and scientific rationality” (2014, 88). Especially the deviant,
degenerate nature of humanity itself served as the main impetus for a
newly flourishing gothic literature in the wake of Victorianism with its
“reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality […] respectable
by day and pleasure-seeking by night” (89). The discourses of medicine,
physiology, criminology, neurology and psychiatry strove to discipline by
introducing regulatory and pathologising mechanisms into society but in
fact only heightened anxieties pertaining to depravity and cultural degen-
eration. Jack Halberstam explains that the “[g]othic infiltrates the
Victorian novel as a symptomatic moment in which boundaries between
good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and
deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the
narrative itself”, it is “a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the
deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure
can be known” (1995, 2). Just like the gothic trope of the haunted house,
the figure of the vampire in gothic fictions not only is present to evoke
terror but also has deeper societal meanings that emerge when looking
closer at its construction: the vampire who drinks human blood and its
close relative, the cannibal who eats human flesh, are highly evocative fan-
tasies and as such have always been used to delineate historically specific
fears, anxieties and subversions, crossing “the boundaries that separated
the healthy and respectable domestic life of the Victorian middle classes
from the nocturnal worlds of moral corruption and sexual depravity”
(Botting 2014, 90).
As Höglund and Khair note in their introduction to Transnational and
Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, “[t]he vampire has always been a travel-
ler” (2013, 1). As traveller and shape shifter, the vampire stands for
concepts related to movement, such as migration and invasion. The figure

of the vampire is imbued with the fear of pollution from without, and its
origins in European imagination are often “explained as fears of the
Plague, [and] thought, since the Middle Ages, to have emanated from the
East. Dracula’s principal companions and alternative forms—rats, wolves
and bats—were associated with disease” (Botting 2014, 95). The vampire,
like no other gothic monster, marks the terrors of racial encounter so
prevalent in the gothic. John Stagg’s “The Vampyre” (1810), John
Polidori’s Byronian The Vampyre (1819) or James Malcom Rymer’s
Varney the Vampire (1845–1847), some of the first vampiric figures
appearing in fiction, have marked the beginnings of imagining the vampire
in Western thought, but no other vampire has shaped our understanding
of the threatening, sensual monster more than Count Dracula in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.
Dracula is characterised as a mysterious, outlandish and “Eastern” type
of monster that originates in the gothic elsewhere-setting of Transylvania,
a place where “oriental” Ottoman, Slavic and Balkan influences merge
together, and that poses a grave threat to the Western world as it makes its
way into Great Britain. With this narrative, Stoker reflects prevalent
Victorian fears of the foreign other who penetrates not only England’s
borders but also its bodies. But there is more to this than the mere fear of
invasion: in “the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own
imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms” (Arata 1990, 623),
and England is made alien to itself. At a time when British world power
and global influence declined, the Empire saw itself confronted with its
own (failed) colonial strategies. This decline was marked by “the loss of
overseas markets for British goods, […] the increasing unrest in British
colonies and possessions, the growing domestic uneasiness over the moral-
ity of imperialism” (622). This all combined “erode[d] Victorian confi-
dence in the inevitability of British progress and hegemony” (ibid.). In its
attempts to stabilise its increasingly unstable national identity, the Empire
tried to repel the other in order to fortify Britishness within. Yet in admit-
ting otherness, the Empire itself becomes other. It lies in the innate mean-
ing of the word monster (from Latin “monstrum”, “portent, prodigy,
monstrous creature” and the base of “monere”, “to warn”, cf. “monster”
OED) to expose that which should remain hidden. The monster, thus,
becomes a potent device to reveal exactly those power structures which
created monstrosity in the first place. As China Miéville has succinctly
argued in his “Theses on Monsters”, “[e]pochs throw up the monsters
174 J. LEETSCH
they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them” (2012, n.

pag.). Stoker’s Dracula offers a paradigmatic example of the unnatural
and monstrous exotic other which threatens to overthrow and consume
the self/the nation, exposing the insecurity and xenophobia at work in
Victorian society. Interestingly, as Elleke Boehmer astutely notes in
“Empire’s Vampires”, the spatiality of the text of Stoker’s Dracula negoti-
ates these fears and anxieties also on a meta-level: in producing “a many-
leaved narrative reportage, Stoker’s novel attempts finally to allay its
concerns about excessive expansion by structurally boxing in the at-first
strangely ubiquitous Count” (2013, vii–viii). It is no wonder, then, that
the ending of Dracula strives to see the excessive vampire expelled, killed,
pushed out of the narrative and ultimately punished for his unrightful
penetration of British borders/bodies. Here, the similarities to White is for
Witching’s discussions of national space-building strategies and discourses
of belonging and expulsion become abundantly clear.
As we have repeatedly seen in gothic and post-gothic texts, the other
has to be banned from the story’s centre. Underlining this, Christopher
Craft has argued that a gothic text “first invites or admits a monster, then
entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration,
until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the
disruption that he/she/it brings” (1984, 107). This act of banishment,
however, sometimes remains unsuccessful like in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818), where the monstrous creature lurks at the centre of
the story and then emerges through layers of narrative levels to finally, in
the end, escape its textual prison on a floating sheet of ice and disappear
into the dark. Neither does Dracula manage to completely contain its
monster(s)—its monstrosity lives forth through the female characters
who, even though either killed or redeemed, leave behind a feeling of
disorder and unease. Dracula articulates anxieties pertaining not only to
space, nation and home but also to gender and sexuality. The story negoti-
ates new constructs of masculinity and femininity, such as the figure of the
“New Woman” or the figure of the “homosexual” which became more
prominent during the late nineteenth century in public discourse (cf.
Richardson and Willis, 2002). It is a novel that is not only scared of geo-
graphical invasion but also of the instability of gender norms. It overtly
links sexual transgression to monstrosity and vampirism; a connection that
becomes clear when examining Dracula’s three brides. Lucy Westenra,
one of the two female (and English) protagonists, “once bitten, becomes
openly voluptuous and frank about her sexual desires” (Horner and
Zlosnik 2014, 63); the act of preying on little children on Hampstead

Heath during the night constitutes an absolute antithesis to ideal Victorian
womanhood and as such aggressively contradicts the demure, chaste and
obedient femininity of the angel in the house: “Finally, only a stake
through the heart, with all the phallic connotations that carries, can render
her dead, rather than undead, and restore her to the quiet passivity far
more appropriate to Victorian ideas of femininity” (63). Mina Murray
Harker, the second female character in Dracula, is both a prototype of the
loyal and pure Victorian wife-to-be and of the New Woman. She is a
schoolteacher who asserts her voice through writing and collecting the
journals, letters and newspaper clippings the epistolary novel is constructed
of. When she is bitten (in a quasi-romantic, sexual act enforced by the
Count), she is turned into a liminal being, flickering between vampiric and
human states and (in)voluntarily acts as mediator between monstrosity
and normality. Finally, when Dracula is killed at the end of the novel, Mina
is freed from his curse and is able to re-enter society as the angel in the
house, seemingly redeeming herself in giving birth to a son, seven years
after the events. But a permanent mark on her forehead remains as a
reminder of her former transgressions which are thus forever engraved
onto her body (Stoker [1897] 1997, 317; 326).
With these negotiations of (transgressive, dangerous, perverse) gender
and sexuality in connection to vampirism, Dracula cites another vampiric
text: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella Carmilla was in many ways
a precedent text for Dracula, though Stoker changed the vampire’s place
of origin as well as its sex. Carmilla was first published as a serial in the
literary magazine The Dark Blue (1871–1872). Le Fanu’s monster is a
female vampire who embodies various aspects of cultural difference, her
vampiric threat portrayed as implicitly sexual: “the shape-shifting Carmilla/
Mircalla/Millarca tries to seduce Laura, a virginal 27-year-old who lives in
an Austrian Schloss with her widowed father” (Horner and Zlosnik 2014,
65). The novella is “generally accepted as the first lesbian vampire story in
prose fiction” (ibid.) and therefore another crucial source text for White is
for Witching’s queer love story. Carmilla’s vampiric seduction condenses
various contemporary anxieties concerning unregulated female sexuality
and especially female homoeroticism. The vampire’s beauty is corrupt, and
her appearance, actions and speech are often strange and incomprehensi-
ble to her victim. Carmilla is constructed in terms of not only irresistible
erotic power but also profound cultural otherness:
176 J. LEETSCH
Sometimes […] my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand

and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again […] breathing so
fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like
the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-
powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips trav-
elled along my cheek in kisses; […], leaving me trembling. […] [S]he would
press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses
gently glow upon my cheek. Her agitations and her language were unintel-
ligible to me. (Le Fanu [1872] 2004, 90; 104)
Carmilla the vampire seduces innocent Laura, her femininity perceived as

dark and animal-like, which is only underlined by her ability to turn into a
large black cat. Her threatening otherness is only reinforced by her
“unnatural” desire for other women. But instead of being able to explore
this alternative desire further, just like the women in Dracula Carmilla is
ultimately subjected to male patriarchal dominance and killed in order to
save Laura who then returns to her now “cleansed” domestic space of
femininity: “Laura’s susceptibility to Carmilla’s disturbing charms is finally
interrupted by the reassertion of a male order of meaning and sexual dif-
ferentiation” (Botting 2014, 94).
While critics like Fred Botting describe these attempts of banning the
monster from the text/from society, other scholars have re-read the
novella in order to explore more multi-faceted and disruptive cultural con-
structions of gender and same-sex desire which escape the text’s boundar-
ies and position it as an important foil for many queer vampire narratives
to come. Paulina Palmer’s analysis of Gothic lesbian fictions, and predomi-
nantly of Carmilla, for example, leads her to conclude that their authors
“portray the lesbian vampire as a signifier of an alternative economy of
sexual pleasure which is more emotionally intense and fulfilling than its
heterosexual counterpart” (2007, 203; see also 1999). In a more recent
exploration, Gina Wisker has shown that the figure of the vampire as
“archetypal seducer, villain, a seductively voracious and devouring femi-
vore has been reappropriated, reconfigured and rescripted” (2016, 158).
Naming female writers such as “Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, Pat Califia,
Jeanne Kalogridis, Jewelle Gomez, Sherry Gottlieb and a host of others”,
Wisker sheds light on how the vampire has been rewritten by twentieth-
century and contemporary women writers to serve as a vehicle to “chal-
lenge the conventions of horror, of female victims and sexually voracious
monsters” and how they “revive and reinterpret the vampire to their own
radical ends” (ibid.). Instead of constructing their female characters as

weak, vulnerable, gullible and latently corrupted as has been done in his-
torical, traditional vampire fictions like Dracula or Carmilla, these new
approaches enact and celebrate often queer female vampire stories that
“represent the celebration of sexual energies, the challenging of conven-
tional constraints, roles and agency” (163). Keeping in mind these femi-
nist, queer reimaginations of the vampire, I will now turn to White is for
Witching’s particular re-embodiment of the female vampire and its queer
love story.
Wilful Consumption and Monstrous Encounters

Both Dracula and Carmilla constitute important narrative foils upon
which White is for Witching builds its own vampiric love story. It takes its
cues from these familiar and canonical tales of consumption, expulsion and
desire, but subverts known narratives as it deftly switches around the con-
notations heaped around the vampire. White is for Witching does not just
simply reverse the story of a dark and exotic (female) other who preys on
the white English virginal maiden but plays with the gaps opened up by
this reversal. If in Dracula and Carmilla the reader is—at least ostensi-
bly—left with a tidy solution, with everything in its “proper” place, in
White is for Witching no such security can be achieved. This textual, nar-
ratological and ideological insecurity stems mostly from the love story
between Ore and Miranda. In the following I will examine the construc-
tion of this love story and how it plays into discourses of vampiric relation-
ality and affect, of sexual as well as gastronomical desire, hunger and
consumption. Ultimately, as I will show, the love story between the two
girls makes visible, and thus graspable, understandable and manageable,
the dangerous paradoxes inherent to love. To return to Sara Ahmed, who
in her writing about the complexities of love as they relate to human expe-
rience, has explained: while “love may be crucial to the pursuit of happi-
ness, love also makes the subject vulnerable, exposed to, and dependent
upon another, who in ‘not being myself’, threatens to take away the pos-
sibility of love” ([2004] 2014, 125). In Ore and Miranda’s love story,
these dangers and threats are negotiated, carefully examined and, in the
end, wilfully challenged.
Vampiric subjectivity in White is for Witching is embodied by Miranda
who becomes an amalgam of many familiar European vampire figures.
Throughout the course of the novel, the pica she has inherited from her
178 J. LEETSCH
great-grandmother, grandmother and mother turns into something

darker—a desire for human flesh and blood. Her initial consumption of
chalk, the earthly foundations of the white cliffs of Dover which signify
English purity, turns into the desire to pray on those perceived as other,
those who should be kept out. We see this in a dream-like episode, where
Miranda joins her naked female ancestors whose lips have been sewn shut
sitting around a table:
They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their
parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom.
Miranda could see their tongues writhing. […] The long table was made of
pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes. […]
Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined
hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything
that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices
and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk
and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what
was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her
own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth
inside her. (126–127)
Miranda’s pica, the desire to eat something that is not food such as chalk
or plastic, is turned into the desire for something entirely perverse—“She
knew, but she couldn’t say it” (127): the flesh and blood of other humans.
Her vampiric transformation becomes even clearer later on in the narra-
tive, when she literally grows fangs: “There was a cloud on the moon, and
two slick punctures in her lips. […] When she opened her mouth her teeth
lifted, then sliced her bottom lip again. […] What am I?” (236). But even
though we see different vampiric precursors assembled in Miranda, the
novel cannot be pinned down as a conventional vampire tale. The reason
for that is not only that it refuses to accept the conventional patterns that
come with vampire stories but also that it adds a non-Western concept to
its repertoire of bloodsucking figures: the soucouyant. This African
Caribbean vampire figure manages to both combine and critique the love/
world-making strategies employed by the two white Eurocentric fictions
delineated above. It serves as a tactic to speak to and against the European
concept of the vampire and consequently provides the foundations for
Ore and Miranda’s love story.
In my characterisation of the soucouyant, I rely on the research of
Meredith M. Gadsby in Sucking Salt (2006) and Giselle Liza Anatol in
Things that Fly in the Night (2015), who have both examined this figure in
depth and with great acuity: the soucouyant is a Caribbean shape shifter, a
“succubus, or female spirit [who] sheds her skin at night and flies about
sucking the blood of children and careless travellers” (Gadsby 2006, 67).
It is a creature that “could be found in a variety of cultures: Jamaicans and
Gyanese might call her Old Hige or simply a hag; in Suriname, one could
be drained by an asema; Haitians sometimes refer to volant or loogaroo; a
St. Lucian might tell you about gens-gagée” (Anatol 2015, x; emphases in
original). Genealogically, it can be defined as “a construction based on
both Victorian-era vampire mythology […] and on pre-existing Akan [an
ethnic group in Ghana] folklore of the obayfo” (Gadsby 2006, 67). The
soucouyant is a hybrid monster, a gothic immigrant which travelled aboard
slave ships from Africa via the Caribbean into the collective imagination of
those colonised and those that colonised. It is not only a traditional fairy
tale character similar to the Western concept of the witch or vampire but
also “a fitting metaphor for the workings of (neo-)colonialism that con-
demn the poor and dispossessed” (Rudd 2010, 51). Its diasporic trajec-
tory points towards a literally “life-draining” colonial past and the tortuous
European exploitation/consumption of the slaves. Joan Dayan sees the
construction of this particular female monster as a “surfeit or remnant of
an institution that turned humans into things, beats or mongrels”
(1998, 258).
The soucouyant originated in lore and oral traditions which vocalised
but also violated female monster figures. Like the monstrous mermaid
figure Mami Wata, the soucouyant’s fate was often fabricated as a punitive
measure in order to put rebellious and transgressive female figures in their
places and to function as a control mechanism for unruly sexualities. The
soucouyant flies at night to hunt her prey, but to do that she has to rid
herself of her worldly skin, hatching from it as a ball of fire to inhabit the
night as a dispossessed spirit and to invade the homes of those whose
soul/blood she wants to suck. When the sun rises, the soucouyant, like the
vampire, needs to return into her skin which she has hidden to lead her
human life during the day. As Anatol argues with regard to the gender
troubles the soucouyant evokes,
[u]nlike the “good” woman who marries, is faithful, bears and nurtures
children, and anchors the domestic space, the soucouyant of conventional
tales is a woman who satiates her individual physical needs (including the
sexual desires associated with bloodsucking). She is all the more frightening
180 J. LEETSCH
for completely abandoning her physical body, rather than embracing its
alleged limitations (physical weakness) and purposes (childbirth). She is not
just a potential source of danger to individual subjects; she is an active agent
in society’s destruction. (2009, n. pag.)
Echoing the containing tactics of the other two vampire texts discussed
above, the female monster figure is tortured and finally killed, for the
world order to return to its normal state. In Ore’s words in White is for
Witching, the story goes like this: “Find her skin and treat it with pepper
and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her
power, and if she is unable to re-enter her body by sunrise, she cannot live.
Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it
should” (147–148). Or, as Gadsby observes, “the woman is robbed of her
sensuality and sexuality via the violence done to her skin” (2006, 68).
But numerous re-interpretations and reiterations of the soucouyant
myth offer yet another position: the policing of sexuality and race is met
with a narrative of resistance. In “Transforming the Skin-Shedding
Soucouyant”, Giselle Anatol argues that the soucouyant can be read as a
form of female agency in Caribbean literature (2000). Like Mami Wata,
who lures male suitors under water, the soucouyant asserts herself against
male dominance, figuring as a “symbol of female sexual identity and inde-
pendence […] challenging patriarchal control of women’s bodies”
(Gadsby 2006, 66). Because of that, she has to be punished by being
poisoned with salt—salt that also stands for the salt water the African slaves
travelled through to meet their fates as subjugated, objectified beings.
Taking into account these interdependencies of race and gender, White is
for Witching suggests yet another rewriting of the soucouyant to shed
light on its recalcitrant potential as a shifting signifier. The novel offers
various and not necessarily overlapping approaches, employing both
European vampiric figures and African Caribbean soucouyant folklore to
interrogate national identity and gender norms.
As readers, we encounter the idea of the soucouyant first and foremost
intertextually. Our first confrontation with her is through Ore’s engage-
ment with “her favourite story” (147): “As always, the soucouyant seemed
more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so
you couldn’t decide if she was a monster” (148). Ore’s knowledge and
understanding of this monster figure are informed by an ambiguous stance
that recognises an “old woman whose only interaction with other people
was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is
a double danger—there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of

becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to
me?” (155). Significantly, when Ore searches for titles on the soucouyant
in the Cambridge library, she finds not books but Miranda, the vampire-
soucouyant of White is for Witching: “After a listless half-hour flipping
through critical essays on Dracula, I went in search of the likeliest looking
soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda
at a desk beside a staircase in one of the wings” (155). Adding yet another
layer to the novel’s self-conscious reflection of its own textuality/fictional-
ity, Miranda’s name, a reference to Prospero’s daughter in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, hints also at a “structuring myth for writing on and from the
Caribbean” (Stephanou 2014, 1246). In alluding to The Tempest, the text
also alludes to its unruly cannibal-monster Caliban and his absent witch-
mother Sycorax, using the trope of otherness and monstrosity as an anchor
for criticising the colonial project.1 But simultaneously, the name used for
Miranda and used by Miranda to describe (her own) monstrosity is not the
proper name of soucouyant but another, very English name: the “good-
lady”—derived from Anna Good, the contorted angel of the
(haunted) house.
Miranda is both European vampire and Caribbean soucouyant. The
first instance she awakes as a monster and haunts Dover is at the stroke of
midnight as indicated by her dead mother’s watch which still runs on
Haitian time (34). The novel thus interweaves the African Caribbean folk-
tale as embodied by white Miranda (explicitly hinting at Western appro-
priations of black femininity) with Ore whose skin comes off but who also
carries salt and pepper with her to keep 29 Barton Road’s evil energies at
bay. The epidermal violation Ore undergoes in the haunted house mirrors
the aspect of skin shedding and subsequently the violence done to her skin
in the original lore of the female and racially other soucouyant monster
figure. At the same time, she is the one who ultimately manages to defeat
soucouyant-vampire Miranda:
I’m not brave. I remembered the salt I had in both pockets, and the pepper
of the wickedest kind wrapped in plastic. I coated my hands in salt. I crum-
bled pepper in my palms. I stepped into the lift and, expecting to touch
nothing, I tore at the little girl’s face until Miranda’s came through. Miranda
struck at me, spitting and hissing. I said, ‘Oh God, oh my God, sorry, I’m
sorry, oh my God,’ over and over, but kept her pinned against the back of
the lift, both my hands around her throat. […] Kill the soucouyant, salt and
pepper. (228–229)
182 J. LEETSCH
In rubbing salt and pepper all over herself and over Miranda, she in turn
sheds Miranda’s first layer of skin, so that beneath the soucouyant the girl
appears. But there is yet another layer and yet another girl beneath:
Miranda was in the corner with her arms folded around her knees. […] I
didn’t speak to her. If I was going to help her I shouldn’t speak to her. I
knelt beside her and rested my hands on her head. She tensed, and I cracked
her open like a bad nut with a glutinous shell. She split, and cleanly, from
head to toe. There was another girl inside her, the girl from the photograph,
all long straight hair and pretty pearlescence. This other girl wailed, ‘No no,
why did you do this? Put me back in.’ She gathered the halves of her shed
skin and tried to fit them back together across herself. (229–230)
In this way, the novel constantly rephrases both positive and negative
incarnations of the soucouyant—the powerful witch who transgresses her
bodily boundaries competes with the constrictions of a vampiric corpore-
ality which is bound to skin or to coffins. The strength of the text and also
the confusion it evokes lie in Oyeyemi’s tactic of employing various differ-
ing plot strands, in laying different myths and tales over each other, in
having discourses overwrite and superimpose each other. While both the
soucouyant and the vampire have at their heart consumption and the
desire to suck life, they stem from completely different cultural contexts.
Yet, they are united within the figure of Miranda, whose whiteness and
whose witching fluctuate constantly.
As white soucouyant-vampire Miranda and Black British Ore fall in
love, processes of killing, destruction, suffering and othering are made
queer as the two female protagonists find connection points—by touching
skin to skin, by sharing their bodies and by their sharing meals. As I have
shown above, in the African Caribbean diaspora the figure of the vampire
serves to stage “the nightmarish consumption of the bodies of the colo-
nized and to interrogate the relations of consumption between white and
black bodies” (Stephanou 2014, 1245). White is for Witching transfers
these power relations to a contemporary British society where the sou-
couyant “crosses borders, linking memories of a colonial past to a present
which still struggles to shed its white supremacist ideology and which still
revolves around unnatural consumption” (ibid.). In focussing on a love
story and on articulations of female queer desire, the novel manages to
renegotiate these processes of othering. Miranda is a female vampire figure
who inhabits a space characterised by its complex queer affects and subjec-
tivities. She breaks with the limits of traditional Western constructs of
femininity, thus resisting one of the foundational texts the novel works
with, the lesbian novella Carmilla. In retelling and partially refusing
Carmilla’s structural set-up (the expulsion of the queer female vampire
from the text), White is for Witching renegotiates the specific nineteenth-
century sexology embraced by the novella and also by Stoker’s Dracula,
namely, the framing of lesbians as “being possessed by a monstrous sexual-
ity that led inevitably to madness and/or death” (Gray 2015, 133). The
lovers Ore and Miranda radically upset the formula of European gothic
genre structures and stereotypes that have become buried under endless
reiterations of the Dracula or Carmilla narrative, which submits its female
figures to patriarchal control mechanisms. What I find interesting in this
context of rewriting is Helen Cousin’s suggestion that once Ore and
Miranda become lovers, they “step into gothic roles” (2012, 54). They
then overturn these gothic roles, instead producing a postcolonial gothic
love story that wriggles free of suffocating racial and gender-normative
stereotypes: “In Ore as female victim […] blackness and Englishness
become conjoined. However, Ore is not only the female victim to
Miranda’s sexual predation; the text later establishes Ore as a gothic hero
[sic]—a role also typically taken by an English character” (ibid.). This
installs Ore as an English “insider” in terms of the archetypes of gothic. By
insisting on her blackness, any attempts of restoring an Englishness that
excludes the non-white are refuted. Miranda, who early on in their rela-
tionship is described by Ore as “one of those Gothic victims, the child
woman who is too pretty and good for this world and ends up dying of
tuberculosis or grief—a sweet heart-shaped face and a river of blue-black
hair” (162), is turned into her own photo negative, and Ore, the black
female character traditionally ascribed to be the monstrous perpetrator,
turns out to be the English heroine of the story.
This reversal, however, is further complicated by the fact that “victim”
and “vampire” fall in love, therefore destabilising conventional routes of
narration and of consumption. Ore is neither sexualised as exotic nor
depicted as dangerous dark other, and while white Miranda incorporates
racist monstrosity, she simultaneously shows a wilful resistance to it. The
text plays with different sorts of desire and allure as different kinds of
appetites are mingled. When Ore and Miranda meet in Cambridge,
Miranda has stepped away from the house and its harmful influence. The
section of Ore and Miranda’s love story in the second half of the novel
goes almost uninterrupted by the house’s voice and instead focuses on the
two girls and their growing entanglement (143–192). It is important to
184 J. LEETSCH
note here that it is Ore who identifies as lesbian and who consciously and
self-assertively describes her desires: she thinks back to her first romantic
and sexual experiences with her school friend Cat (153), and the novel
also shows her being interested in Tijuana, another girl from Dover, before
she meets Miranda (159). When Miranda and Ore spend more time
together, it is Ore who first thinks about kissing her (163). Before they do,
though, they share a meal during one of their nightly walks:
We knelt down on our coats, nibbling olives—now I remember there were

olives—then sat cross-legged for the sandwiches and pie, then lay down with
the chocolate and the apples. I’d never been so hungry […] We were both
very rude. We lay facing each other, eating like mad, each stuffing cheese fast
and hard, as if to prevent the other from getting more than their share. (164)
This passage is interesting because it is Ore who says she is hungry and
because Miranda is willingly eating proper food when she usually only
ingests plastic and chalk. Their shared meal implies an act of community,
the blurring of boundaries between vampire and victim already noticeable:
“Rather than rejecting the Other in an act of Kristevan abjection that
would serve to delineate her sense of self, Miri’s relationship with Ore is
described almost entirely in terms of consumption, prioritising incorpora-
tion over distinction” (Ilott 2015, 65). As Ilott has noted, Tamar Heller
and Patricia Moran claim that “appetite can function as a form of voice”
(2003, 26) and I would argue that Miranda and Ore’s shared act of eating
not only foreshadows their sexual and romantic relationship but speaks of
the potential of food as a shifting ground between reparative counter-
discourse and harmful processes of “absorption, assimilation, incorpora-
tion, erasure, eating up the other” (Githire 2010, 858). As Githire states
in “The Empire Bites Back”, the trope of food can operate “as a tool for
cultural resistance and the articulation of diasporic identity” (858).
However, eating and not-eating in postcolonial texts (as in Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions) can also point towards violence.
Conscious of these potentially violent discourses, White is for Witching
highlights the connection between Miranda’s eating disorder (her desire
for chalk) and vampirism (her desire for blood) and interweaves discus-
sions of forceful inclusion and exclusion with corporeal sensuality and
longing. It is no coincidence that Miranda, when she first meets Ore when
they both interview for a place at Cambridge, has brought with her onyx
to nibble on:
Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wan-
dered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. […] She
had a pocketful of onyx chips
(properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of
onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feelings out of you)
and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue.
[…] She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area
outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned. […]
The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school
uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic
bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of
rich ink. (51)
Onyx is believed to have the healing property, as Katie Burton points out,
to “remove spirit possession” and “supports going on alone” (2017, 81;
referencing Stein 2008, 146) and thus points towards Miranda’s “desire
to expel the goodlady from within herself” (2017, 81). This, then, fore-
shadows potentially reparative habits of consumption employed by
Miranda and Ore together later on in the novel. In offering up these dif-
ferent kinds of appetites and desires, Oyeyemi joins contemporary dia-
sporic women writers such as Lindsey Collen, Ntozake Shange, Andrea
Levy or Toni Morrison whose “use of metaphors of food, eating, diges-
tion, and related tropes frame and critique continuing relations of domi-
nation and control” (Githire 2014, 1).
Hunger and gastronomical consumption mirror the erotic desire
Miranda and Ore feel for each other. While at first Ore seems to be the
active one, pursuing the relationship, it is Miranda who starts draining and
consuming her once they bring their relationship to a more visceral, erotic
level. Ore realises that she grows thinner and more tired, finding “spiky
new angles” on her hips, “eating and eating in [her] room with the doors
closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s
lectures overlapped with [her] free time” (185). Looking at one of the
passages when the two girls share one bed, it becomes clear, however, how
Miranda struggles with the conflicting desires she finds within herself:
Miranda had lain by Ore, smelling her, running her nose over the other
girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred,
laying a trail of glossy red lip prints. Ore’s smell was raw and fungal as it
tangled in the hair between her legs. It turned into a blandly sweet smell,
like milk, at her navel, melted into spice in the creases of her elbows, then
186 J. LEETSCH
cocoa at her neck. Miranda had needed Ore open. Her head had spun with
the desire to taste. She lay her head against Ore’s chest and heard Ore’s
heart. The beat was ponderous. Like an oyster, living quietly in its serving-
dish shell. This heart barely moved. Miranda could have taken it, she knew
she could. Ore would hardly have felt it. […] Then came the recoil—
would I really?
and she’d bitten her own wrist, to test the idea of Ore not feeling a thing.
Beneath her teeth the skin of her wrist bulged, trying to move the veins
away from the pressure, trying to protect them. (191)
Here, Miranda’s growing vampiric longings become both more pro-

nounced and at the same time more controlled by her—she consciously
reflects her desires and tries to act against them: “Behave yourself, she
wrote. Eat. […] Manage your consumption” (191), and “Ore is not food.
I think I am a monster” (192). As Miranda ponders consuming Ore,
“turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss” (191), she calls her thoughts
into question and instead turns the violence against herself: “would I
really? and she’d bitten her own wrist” (191). Miranda hovers between
bite and kiss, signified by the glossy red lipstick and/or blood marks she
leaves on Ore’s skin. She is always about to cross a border, but actually
never leaves the in-between of skin on skin, never bites Ore. What could
be violent, murderous, greedy and sinister is turned around by Miranda
herself who constantly hesitates to do what she really wants to do. With
this indecisiveness and the will to protect Ore, she goes against bell hooks’
assumption in “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” “that the Other
will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (1992, 39). Instead, love and
desire become transgressive, “acting as a critical intervention challenging
and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance
[…] countering the terrorizing force of the status quo that makes identity
fixed, static, a condition of containment and death” (22). Miranda sub-
verts the vampire story in not having it reach its bloody and deadly end-
ing, giving way instead to alternative modes of affirmation and affiliation.
Appetite actually turns into a love story—a queer love story, in which
consumption is expanded to not only mean the violent and exploitative
consumption of the other’s blood to live, but a deliberate rehabilitation of
formerly harmful dynamics. Through these ethics of love and compassion,
White is for Witching offers alternative appetites: kisses instead of bloody
bites; cheese, chips and chocolate instead of chalk.
Queer scholars like Sara Ahmed and Keguro Macharia have repeatedly
described love in terms of stickiness—as messy, leaky, slippery and gluey
(cf. Ahmed [2004] 2014). This is interesting insofar as these attributes
characterise love as managing to both hold and let go. It amasses affects,
emotions, bodies and other entanglements which “stick together”
(Macharia 2015, 72) but it also displays fluidity and openness: “Love
names a condition and a possibility” (ibid.), creating an alternative hierar-
chy of self and other. Its elasticity unfurls the potential to negotiate:
“[l]ove does not transcend, efface, or mitigate inequality. Instead, it is one
of the conditions through which inequality is lived”, always keeping open
“the possibility of a radical politics” (ibid.). As seen in my discussion of
Miranda and Ore’s intimate meeting points, it becomes clear that they are
marked by communality, by skin-on-skin encounters and gastronomical
entanglements: “I kissed her, and she kissed me back and we were like that
until we gasped for air and laughed at each other, her eyelashes scraping
my cheek so when I blinked they felt like my own. […] Is it all right to say
how much I like this? The way our skin looks together” (167). By shed-
ding light on unity and difference at the same time, the text does not
attempt to “transcend” inequality but rather brings it into a space for
discussion; it unpacks patterns of knowing and being in the world via a
queer love story. Queer is always what is at odds with the regular and
dominant, it works vis-à-vis the normative. Sara Ahmed has defined it as
“odd, strange, unseemly, disturbed, disturbing. […] an oblique or slant-
wise relation to a straight world” (2016, n. pag.). Queerness, and espe-
cially queer love, makes “room for bodies that do not obey commands;
that do not move in straight lines; that lose their balance” (ibid.). Mirroring
this, White is for Witching’s two queer female bodies lose their balance
once they return to the haunted house: “In her bed, we pulled her covers
up to our chins and lay quietly, careful not to bump each other with the
sharp parts of ourselves, the elbows and the knees, until our bodies had
warmed each other. […] As we kissed I became aware of something leav-
ing me” (213). This passage where part of Ore’s “soul” is being sucked by
soucouyant Miranda delineates the disturbing connection between the
two girls, the toxic potential of their relationship. Later in the night, they
both sleepwalk and almost kill each other, Ore trying to defend herself
with a kitchen knife and Miranda-as-vampire attacking her with scissors.
Their queer relationality veers into deathly terrain, but as soon as they
recognise each other they pull back: “We touched each other’s faces in the
dark, trying to be sure” (217). I argue that even though the house now
188 J. LEETSCH
seeks to control Miranda/kill Ore, their love for each other can be read as
resistance. For in the end, Miranda kills herself so that Ore can be free—
ultimately undermining the architecture of both White is for Witching’s
un/homely space and its vampiric Ur-texts. Queer love here serves as a
methodology to unpack normative, harmful iterations of power struc-
tures, such as represented by the nationalist, racist house. Love can facili-
tate a formation of practices which understand “aslant” strategies for
imagining self and other. White soucouyant-vampire Miranda and Black
British Ore radically unsettle the roles traditionally ascribed to them
through their shared desire for each other, thus re-ordering their narratives.
Ore and Miranda’s disobedience acts against the violent and traumatic
family line the house tries to enforce. Miranda’s turning towards Ore
means turning away from the house’s wishes for a “pure” genealogy,
therefore going against the notion of an “untainted” English nuclear fam-
ily. With her death, she not only interrupts family structures that focus on
reproduction but also the house’s tyrannical rule. As Jack Halberstam
makes clear in The Queer Art of Failure (2011),
success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific

forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation. […]
Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undo-
ing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more coop-
erative, more surprising ways of being in the world. (2–3)
In unmaking the home as offered by the house, Miranda and Ore’s love
story struggles against the ordering structures the house tries to imple-
ment. The house represents the paranoid nation state and its delusional
ideas of pureness, stability and norm. Ore and Miranda act against this,
refusing to accept the house’s limitations, its control over their futures:
“She was just some girl crying because something stood between her and
another girl and said, no. The goodlady said it couldn’t be. How did she
dare?” (233). Miranda and Ore’s queer love fights against the straight line
of matrilineal succession of monstrous women prying on others (Good
Anna, Jennifer, Lily), refuting the idea of an essential mother land:
“Miranda Silver was not, could not be herself plus all her mothers” (233).
Miranda exchanges the destructive family defined by maternal origins for
another kind of female community, a queer love. This romantic and erotic
companionship interrupts the notion of women exploiting others and of
women acting as guardians for the home/the nation and instead pursues
an alternative model of female desire. It is interesting, then, that Miranda
kills herself with the watch batteries Ore had given her to keep her mother
Lily’s watch running—literally halting the temporal order of normativity,
cutting the tether to a violent dominating chronology (237). This mirrors
the way Halberstam critiques what he calls “reproductive temporality”,
instead proposing “queer time” and “alternative temporalities”, where
“futures can be imagined according to logistics that lie outside of those
paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, repro-
duction” (2005, 4). Miranda “goes down” against the good lady who is
the house who is herself, choosing her death “as the only way to fight the
soucouyant” (1). She dies incorporated into the house without having bit-
ten Ore or having continued the female Silver family line—in other words:
without having fulfilled her role as vampire, without having fulfilled her
role as a woman. Love and desire become a space of disobedience.
Unhappy Endings and Impossible Communities

“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her.
“Gets away from what, though?”
“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy
at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere
secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”
“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”
“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be
free. Now. Please begin.”
—Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (2009a, 169)
In keeping with Halberstam’s call for queer failures, the novel fails to pro-
vide a happy ending. The consequences of this “failure” are twofold:
firstly, it critically undermines the fundamental formulaic architecture of
the love story, and secondly, it poses an ambiguous interruption to the
novel’s vampiric source texts. As a postcolonial, diasporic text, White is for
Witching not only refuses to conform to the staple of writing normative
love but also alludes to the potentially hurtful dynamics of love between
“coloniser” and “colonised” (displayed in both Dracula and Carmilla).
As discussed in Chap. 2, in Adichie’s Americanah one happy ending dis-
places another happy ending: the (heterosexual) relationship of Ifemelu
and Obinze and their reunion in Lagos, Nigeria, undercuts ossified con-
ceptions of “leaving” and of “coming home” in postcolonial identity nar-
rations. Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, discussed in Chap. 3, tentatively
190 J. LEETSCH
tests out the limits and promises of a homosocial, homoerotic love that
runs counter to norms and conventions, as all three novels end on a hope-
ful if tenuous note. In White is for Witching, the failure of a queer happy
ending (in itself queer) radically reconsiders such notions. Ore and
Miranda’s longings, especially because they are not fulfilled or concluded
in any way, constitute a different belonging. Miranda’s decision to surren-
der herself defeats the house and simultaneously enables Ore to escape,
she is “the girl who gets away”; Ore escapes the house and she escapes the
text, she “runs off the page altogether” and therefore achieves an open
ending full of potential and possibility. The black female character who
was supposed to die, supposed to be consumed by the white vampire,
turns out to be the heroine of the postcolonial gothic novel. She is able to
emerge from the text as a new hybrid form of heroine. She is not a casualty
but a survivor with agency and desires.
An example for Ore’s agential independence can be found in her self-
assertiveness against Miranda-the-vampire who has replaced Miranda-the-
lover in the final pages of the novel—an important passage I want to quote
here again: “I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not changing
under her tongue. I know what I look like. The Ore I signed onto paper
in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning.
Arms, stay with me. Stomach, hold your inner twists” (229). This is a
crucial statement, because Ore does everything in her power to stay in
control of her body and her movements, refusing to be changed by
Miranda or the monstrous house. Miranda, in turn, functions as a sign-
post, pointing the way to an alternative path: she vanishes (into the house/
the text) so that something new can emerge. Both Miranda’s and Ore’s
femininity in this context becomes closely tied to—but ultimately resists—
nationalistic discourses as it constantly oscillates between autonomy and
dependency. As Gayatri Gopinath has observed, femininity and woman-
hood are often used “as primary markers of an essential, inviolable com-
munal identity or tradition” (2003, 138). In her work, she illuminates the
different possibilities of how gender constructs may reveal the ways in
which “the nation is constructed in terms of familial and domestic meta-
phors, where ‘the woman’ is enshrined as both the symbolic centre and
boundary marker of the nation as ‘home’ and ‘family’” (138). Applied to
the non-happy ending of the novel, Miranda is being domesticated—in
the most literal sense of the word, she is internalised by the house. She
returns to the inner, domestic space of often restricted femininity. On the
one hand, she is punished for her transgressions, but on the other hand,
because she has chosen her ending herself, she displays agency and self-
control against all odds. As she writes in her last postcard to Ore: “I’m
sorry for everything. I am going down against her [the goodlady]” (234,
emphases in original). Because of this self-sacrifice, Ore can free herself of
the house, can become home-less. And in this homelessness lies power. As
Homi Bhabha has argued in his article “Halfway House” in which he takes
a poem by Toni Morrison called “Whose House is This?” (1992) as his
jumping off point, “[h]ome may not be where the heart is, nor even the
hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement that becomes the necessary
space of engagement; it may represent a desire for accommodation marked
by an attitude of deep ambivalence toward one’s location. Home may be
a mode of living made into a metaphor of survival” (1997, 11). For Ore,
neither the heart nor the hearth offer the belonging she ultimately desires
and she consequently has to find another home-in-the-world.
Through Ore and Miranda’s queer desires, then, home is destroyed as
it is taken away from the house and comes to signify a more open fluid
diasporic space of communality. Significant in this process is one of the
other female companionships the novel offers: the friendship between
Sade the housekeeper and Ore, which I have until now only briefly touched
upon but which adds another layer to White is for Witching’s articulation
of alternative world- and love-making strategies. While Ore and Miranda
occupy the queer romantic, erotic end of the spectrum of love, Ore and
Sade enter into an almost mother-daughter-like relationship or, better per-
haps, sisterhood. Sade not only provides Ore with the means to defeat the
soucouyant when she gives her copious amounts of salt and the hottest
pepper (212–213) but also helps her to finally escape the haunted house.
As a black house-keeper she is resented by 29 Barton Road and it repeat-
edly tries to kill her, as I have outlined above. But she survives, too, and
after Ore flees, she hands in her resignation; in the note she leaves for Luc
she advises him that he “should stop trying to keep this place open, that it
just won’t work. That it’s … ill-favoured” (234). As I have shown, Sade
helps Ore escape by witching in white—she knits a net out of white wool
to catch Ore when she falls and prevents her from being swallowed up by
the house. Sade’s Yoruba magic lets her appear in fire red and silver almost
like another benevolent form of the soucouyant, “the spirit in the flame”
(231), while the white net bunches around Ore to catch her like an
embrace:
192 J. LEETSCH
When I opened my eyes, I was in the room that had nothing in it but the
white fireplace. I saw, through gauze, a figure walking towards me. […].
Sade. I didn’t move. With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this
after all. ‘Oh, lazy,’ she said. She put a hand to my forehead, rumpling the
net against it, then she put a hand to my chest, then she put a hand to my
stomach. I sat up, still in the net. It was knotted at the top, but I couldn’t
see how. I sat in a huge white bag, like a stork’s delivery. Sade looked at me
through the net. […] ‘Stand up and it will unravel. Goodbye.’ (231)
The net Sade has woven, in what can be described as an inherently female
strategy that denotes connectivity and relationality, enables the other black
woman to escape the house. In its final pages, the novel thus wilfully ques-
tions conceptions of origin or roots and instead points to other ways of
“making” community:
The forming of a community through the shared experience of not being

fully at home—of having inhabited another space—presupposes an absence
of a shared terrain: the forming of communities makes apparent the lack of
a common identity that would allow its form to take one form. But this lack
becomes reinscribed as the pre-condition of an act of making. (Ahmed
2000, 94; emphasis in original)
With the question “Do you think I belong to you?” which Sade asks of
Ore, the text makes abundantly clear that traditional ways of belonging to
each other, of longing for each other, are futile. Instead, we need to find
other, alternative homes; we need to recognise diasporic home as “a space
of differences rather than home-as-sameness” (Fortier 2003, 132).
Figurations and imaginations of love and a shared world can usefully be
brought to bear upon one another in order to interrogate constructions of
national and diasporic identities from positions of canonical and ethnic
marginality. I have argued that the novel White is for Witching as a postco-
lonial gothic text re-signifies worlds and love by different means. The
monstrous space of the gothic haunted house is made problematic through
uncanny and unhomely negotiations of home and home/land. Nation
and its discontents are mediated through a multi-layered and multi-routed
narrative that haunts its own structures. In its queerness, the monstrous
love between vampire-soucouyant Miranda and Black British Ore func-
tions as an instrument to interrogate the desire for consuming the other
romantically, sexually and gastronomically. Ultimately, the queer love
story with its monstrous spatial set-up of the haunted house and its
diasporic vampiric monstrosity as put forth by the novel inhabits the

potential of meaning-making. As Jack Halberstam and China Miéville
have remarked, “monsters are meaning machines” (Halberstam 1995, 21):
Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity,

they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something,
and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreduc-
ible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the
one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the
other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing. (Miéville 2012, 1)
Instead of seeing “the negative of human” be replaced by “the invention

of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual”, as Halberstam
has argued in Skin Shows (21), White is for Witching has its gothic monsters
(both the haunted house and Miranda) encounter love. These encounters
enable the novel to give way to meaning-making processes of interpreta-
tion, translation and transmission. As a consequence, it continuously
moves in-between the tension of longing and belonging, creating a post-
colonial, diasporic text that seeks possible, inhabitable worlds elsewhere.
Note
1. With this, White is for Witching steps into a long row of postcolonial rewrit-
ings of the play, such as Frantz Fanon with Black Skin, White Masks (1952),
George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Edward Kamau
Brathwaite’s poetry volume Islands (1969), Aimé Cesaire’s A Tempest:
Adaptions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by a Negro Theatre (1969) or Marina
Warner’s Indigo (1992). There is even a tiny self-conscious nod to the early
modern play as it comes up in one of Miranda’s university courses (168). In
fact, both girls echo Shakespearean women: Ore was originally supposed to
be called Rose which, with her surname Lind (148), would have conjured
As You Like It’s Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s most wilful heroines who
transcends her textual confines in the play’s epilogue.
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CHAPTER 5
Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire

and Shailja Patel
I had no nation now but the imagination.

—Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” ([1979] 1986, 350)
This book has moved from discussing passages between the continents of
Africa, America and Europe in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah to the
enworlded spaces of the postcolonial metropolis in Zadie Smith’s London
trilogy to the countryside and the tension between domesticity and nation-
building within the interior space of the house in Helen Oyeyemi’s White
is for Witching. Paying tribute to these movements and scales, this chapter
will once more reach out, extend the scale and expand my arguments to
encompass innovative textures of worlds and love in the works of two
contemporary African diasporic poets, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel. This
expansion plays out on different planes: I will move to the wide-open,
fluid water space of the ocean, discuss worldly trajectories of travelling
texts and trace the notion of connective and collective love and care in
both poets’ works. With this chapter and one more rendition of imagining
love as powerful feminist tool I hope to add to a twenty-first-century proj-
ect of engaging with literature across the world: to show how black dia-
sporic women authors wrangle with the frames of the private, personal,
intimate and vulnerable—all while bearing the marks of twenty-first-
century diasporic displacement and political turmoil and to recognise the

Switzerland AG 2021
200 J. LEETSCH
capacity of love as ultimately transformative of structures that underlie

harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, racism, inequality and het-
eronormative restriction. A radical love-ethics as expressed by writers like
Adichie, Smith, Oyeyemi, and, too, by Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel,
entails not only a reparative practice of the self but a communal, relational
strategy for constructing political communities.
Shire and Patel, while speaking from different positions and producing
texts that stylistically and aesthetically differ greatly from one another,
stem from similar geographical backgrounds. Both writers are from East
Africa, both writers have migrated to the West—Warsan Shire was born in
Kenya to Somali parents and grew up in the UK before moving to the US;
Shailja Patel was born and raised in Kenya as a third-generation South
Asian African by parents with Indian Gujarati heritage and was educated
in the UK and the US. Even though their cultural backstories are written
from different locations (one from India, one from Somalia) and their
diasporic movements do not necessarily overlap (as a student in the 1990s,
Patel spent some time in York before moving to California, whereas Shire
grew up in London from 1989 onwards and has recently moved to Los
Angeles), their writings nevertheless share a common core. Both poets
give voice to those displaced by the effects of colonialism and Empire,
unflinchingly showing the entangled histories of war, slavery and inden-
ture: the forced removal from homes, the destruction of nations and the
flight across oceans. The predominantly female voices Patel and Shire
imagine in their poetry talk of physical and psychological wounds that are
very much alike. These wounds bear witness to being made vulnerable and
being made inhuman, and they can be read as a testimony to how black
women are oftentimes being placed outside moral codes of empathy
and care.
In reading both poets alongside each other, this chapter establishes
another node in the net of contemporary African diasporic women writers
who engage with the violent and traumatic heritage of colonialism. Having
discussed contact zones which originated from West Africa (Adichie,
Oyeyemi) and the Caribbean (Smith), East Africa becomes another posi-
tion in my explorations, constituting a different point of departure from
where the writers speak and towards where they look. Somalia and Kenya
are situated at the Horn of Africa and on the Swahili coast; both are part
of the African coastline of the Indian Ocean—a littoral and liminal posi-
tion which connects them not only inwards to other African countries but
also outwards across the sea to South East Asia (Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan),
5 OPENING WOR(L)DS: WARSAN SHIRE AND SHAILJA PATEL 201
to Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia and via the Red Sea to Egypt and the
Mediterranean. These points of contact towards West and East, North and
South, make for a different set-up of positionalities and relationalities. Just
like in the works of the other authors I have discussed so far, it is not
merely the one-directional trajectory from one (African) country of origin
to the (Western) destination, but the multiple flows between the two,
which are of importance in Shire’s and Patel’s writings. Crediting the mul-
tiple dependencies and exchanges that arise from Kenya and Somalia’s
location on the East African coast in their poetic works, both Shire and
Patel trace the movements of women who are or have been implicated in
the violent structures of colonialism and neo-imperialism—but they also
uncover the multi-layered tactics of resistance against oppression employed
by these same women who give voice to their trauma, who do not hesitate
to lay bare their wounds. These acts of witnessing and confession create
new lines of allegiance, while at the same time attending to the complexi-
ties of history and politics.
Turning away from the novel form towards the fluidity of contempo-
rary, experimental poetry, this thematic chapter also endeavours to open
up my study in terms of genre. By incorporating textual structures which
are non-linear, shorter and more fragmented, the experience of violent
displacement and mass migration is simultaneously worded and worlded,
brought into existence by language. Warsan Shire’s work can be classified
as narrative prose-poetry, published in three poetry chapbooks called
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), Our Men Do Not Belong to
Us (2014) and Her Blue Body (2015). These poems of witness move in
circles around non-traditional female genealogies and burrow for the par-
tially destroyed roots of family trees. Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010) can
best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it is a conglomeration of
poetry, pictures, letters and female historiography which in its entirety
constitutes the textualised materialisation of a spoken-word theatre and
dance performance. By adopting poetic forms that push at their boundar-
ies in order to give voice to the trauma of diaspora and displacement, both
Shire and Patel depart from conventional narrative forms and disrupt
genre classifications. Through the medium of poetry, they cast doubt on
sharply drawn boundaries of self and other, centres and peripheries. As
Shabine, the narrator of Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight”,
remarks in the epigraph I have chosen for this chapter, poetic imagination
may serve as a creative and generative replacement of territorially restricted
belonging. Echoing Shabine’s struggles when he states, “either I am
202 J. LEETSCH
nobody, or I’m a nation” (Walcott [1979] 1986, 346)—an opposition he

resolves through creativity, language and poetry—Shire’s and Patel’s
poetic works provide a similar solution: they imagine alternatives to the
failed state of war-ridden Somalia and to the violent histories of expulsion
and violence in Kenya. By regarding Shire’s and Patel’s work as “poetry
that reconceives and remaps widely disparate geo-cultural spaces and his-
tories in relation to one another” (Ramazani 2007, 200), this chapter
seeks to draw out affiliations which, just like Shabine’s maritime travels,
stretch out across the water into the world.
As with my other chapters, I am employing a tripartite structure which
examines configurations of space, textuality and love in Shire’s and Patel’s
poetry. To illuminate the two poets’ differences and convergences, both
writing into the world from East African positionings, I will read their
works as entangled accounts of diaspora, trauma and female resistance.
Having already discussed transcontinental shifts, urban encounters and
haunted houses, the last figuration of space to be examined here is consti-
tuted by the watery space of the ocean. While neither poet employs the
aquatic space of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, they sail along other, less
exposed watery passages, which are, however, no less fraught with the
politics of survival. In Patel’s work, the crossing from South Asia to East
Africa via the Indian Ocean constitutes one of the most important trajec-
tories, whereas in Shire the watery spaces of the Northern Indian Ocean
(the Arabian and Red Seas) and the Mediterranean Sea carry and swallow
Somali refugees on their way to Europe. These different oceanic spaces
stand for death and trauma as well as for generative new beginnings and
the fluid possibilities of diaspora. The first section of this chapter will
examine how the sea figures as a spatial, political and poetic reservoir for
the affective encounters in the works of Shire and Patel. Through mapping
their writings within the intersecting networks of continents and oceans, I
show how in employing oceanic routes, both poets reclaim histories and
connections overwritten by the violent machinations of Empire. Engaging
with scholarship on the complexities of the Indian Ocean and the refugee
corpo- and cartographies of the Mediterranean, I will delineate the multi-
layered transoceanic poetics Shire and Patel create.
In the next section on form, genre and textuality, the space of the ocean
will be supplemented by other quasi-spatial configurations—the digital
space of the internet in Shire’s case and the performative space of the stage
in Patel’s. Here, I examine how the experimental poetic formations of
both writers mirror the movements of migration and displacement
experienced by those inhabiting their poems. Warsan Shire chronicles fam-

ily histories and female genealogies through recording stories on her
Dictaphone. Turning them into poetry—and thus following Somali poetry
traditions—and then publishing them mainly online, she enables these
histories to take new diasporic roots in cyberspace. Shailja Patel’s Migritude
was originally a stage show, which performatively lives forth in a text that
has not only travelled through the world itself, but which incorporates
these journeys meta-textually. In giving space to broken voices, to non-
linear and fragmented stories and to the interrupted routes of those flee-
ing from violence, both Shire and Patel create experimental texts that
literally and metaphorically travel the globe.
The figurations of love considered in this chapter will both echo the
different notions of love discussed hitherto and expand them to include
more collective and connective models. In Chimamanda Adichie’s
Americanah, the heteronormative, heterosexual romance between a man
and a woman takes centre stage. Zadie Smith’s London novels showcase
non-heteronormative family constructions (White Teeth), concealed
homoerotic desires between two women (NW) and obsessive female
friendships (Swing Time). Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching has at its
heart fully spelled-out erotic desires between the two female protagonists
of a queer love story. In Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s poetry, all these
differing formations of love re-appear. My main focus point, however, will
be the recuperative, reparative work of love undertaken by both poets.
Speaking from positions of trauma (both directly experienced and indi-
rectly transmitted) and mediating this trauma through storytelling, their
poetic texts create what I will term ethical communities of care which not
only reconstruct female suffering but also generate reparation. Both Shire
and Patel take the female experience of displacement as a starting point for
their explorations of love, desire and sexuality. Their poems contain love
stories that delineate the intimate, if often destructive love between part-
ners, as well as the more wide-reaching love between generations of fami-
lies; both poets, for example, lend special importance to primarily female
family relations such as between mother and daughter. But when Shire
talks about sisterhoods that arise from the shared experience of female
genital mutilation, or when Patel describes the tenuous connection
between women who are survivors of rape, love also comes to mean some-
thing more collective. Bearing witness to (her)stories of sexual violence
which leaves its traces in, on and through bodies, they give words and
worlds to trauma and thus produce a collective, communal and deeply
204 J. LEETSCH
complicated notion of love that moves across the water. I contend that
these formations of cross-oceanic female community and empathetic kin-
ship encompass what Achille Mbembe has called a “vast network of affini-
ties” (2001, 16)—affinities that throughout this book I have repeatedly
brought to light. By ending my explorations of how love-making and
world-making are intimately connected in the diasporic writings of con-
temporary women writers with a chapter on poetry, water spaces and
transoceanic notions of collective love, I hope to not set a full stop to what
I have discussed so far, but to continue this discussion and let it escape,
flow, spiral outwards—just as both poets open up worlds through their
narratives.
Watery Failures, Watery Potentials:

Transoceanic Poetics
Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to
lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls
and chains […] Navigating the green splendour of the sea […] still brings to
mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps, with
their punctuation of scarcely corroded balls […] The entire ocean makes
one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and
chains gone green.
Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge.
This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of
exchange.
—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997, 6; 8)
As the Martinique philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant posits, the

experience of the “abyss” of the ocean, caused by the Atlantic slave trade
and the thousands of deaths in its wake, not only elicits pain and suffering
but also harbours the tentative beginnings of exchange and relation. When
he speaks of the depths of the sea which reveal the violent histories of
slavery, he argues that the ocean is not silent or opaque but that it wilfully
resists from below those ordering principles implemented by structures of
colonialism and oppression mapped onto its surface. The ocean is not
aqua nullius, yet to be charted and deciphered, but has for a long time
been imbued with histories of empire and suffering: in Glissant’s oeuvre,
aquatic surfaces (slave ships) and submarine spaces (“these balls and chains
gone green”) form a web of transformative relationalities which makes
possible the creative and generative enunciation of a liveable Antillean
space. The ocean as an enabling site of so many exchanges becomes a

deeply connective, affective space that in its watery fluidity diffracts simple
categorisation. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that
the sea is conceptually linked to human origins and exploring these fluid
histories offers an alternative to the rigid ethnic genealogies of colonialism
and nationalism. In other words, the ocean’s perpetual movement is radi-
cally decentering […]. Focusing on seascape rather than landscape as the
fluid space of historical production allows us to complicate the nation-state,
which encodes a rigid hierarchy of race, class, gender, religion and ethnicity
for its representative subjects. (2007, 21)
Both Glissant and DeLoughrey answer to and develop further Paul

Gilroy’s contestations in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (1993), which is now regarded as one of the most important
theoretical approaches to what is called the Middle Passage—the transi-
tory Atlantic water space between Africa, Europe and the Americas and
Caribbean islands. Developing work done by C.L.R. James (1992),
Marcus Rediker (1987) and James Clifford (1988) before him, Gilroy
argued for the “shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges” in
which “the movements of black people—not only as commodities but
engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citi-
zenship—provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality,
location, identity and historical memory” (1993, 16). Gilroy was one of
the first scholars to conceptualise the ocean as a space imbued with mean-
ing and as such created an important intervention in discourses about the
relations emerging from colonialism. He formulated a new paradigm that
posits a counter-culture to Eurocentric notions of modernity, rationality
and progress, whilst implicating Africa, the Caribbean, North and South
America into the processes of these modern, capitalist world systems. He
argued for the black Atlantic as a “unit of analysis”, producing “an explic-
itly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15). The traumatic dia-
sporic experience across the Atlantic waters brought death and sorrow,
yes, but also an emergence of transnational and intercultural voices which
arose despite the terrors of colonialism and the commodification of human
beings. Looking at the emergence of a specifically black culture via an
engagement with the works of musicians, artists and writers, Gilroy not
only explored the full dimensions and depths of the slave trade, but also
brought to light the potential of resistance, the manifold voices talking
206 J. LEETSCH
and singing back to their slavery past, to the Middle Passage, to the transit
across the ocean as well as to notions of originary homelands.1
While the ocean serves as an agent of colonial violence, it may also con-
tain stories of resistance and empowerment. Without negating enforced
dispersals and traumatic losses, the watery space of the ocean offers “new
forms of solidarity and affective kinship” (Klein and Mackenthun 2004,
2). Such kinship and solidarity form the core of my discussions through-
out this chapter, and it is with a conception of oceanic space as connective
and transitory that I will trace Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s work as it
stretches across the ocean. As Shire and Patel both write from and through
their positions on the East African coast, the Atlantic waters of the Middle
Passage—while they function as important historical and cultural scaffold-
ing for contemporary African diasporic writing—are transposed by the
aquatic universe of the Indian Ocean with its different regional shores and
multi-directional waterways. Turning away from the overarching spectre
of the African American, Caribbean and African British Atlantic diaspora
of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and moving to another watery space of
contact, means to explore the complexities of African diaspora even fur-
ther than this book has done so far. By mapping diasporic movements
from the postcolony into the world from a different vantage point, Patel’s
and Shire’s works pluralise simple East-West or South-North relations.
Such pluralisation has been at the heart of the engagement with the
Indian Ocean for centuries. The trade system that crossed it linked Africa
to multiple coastlines and continents from the thirteenth century onwards,
long before the enforced movements brought about by slavery and later
indentured labour. The Indian Ocean composes a vital space of encoun-
ters between Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East—crossings which,
unlike those Atlantic routes deeply imbued with violence and death, were
historically composed of both free and forced migration, of both volun-
tary trade and slavery (cf. Jayasuriya and Pankhurst 2003, 7). As Isabel
Hofmeyr argues, “the Indian Ocean—home to the world’s oldest trans-
oceanic long-distance trading system—folds together old diasporas […]
with a range of Western imperial formations, including those of Portugal,
Holland, Britain, and the United States” (2010, 722). As a thoroughly
worldly space, the Indian Ocean
obliges us to extend our axes of investigation. It requires us to relativize the

Atlantic, which has become normative, especially in slavery and African
Diaspora Studies. […] At every turn the Indian Ocean complicates binaries,
moving us away from the simplicities of the resistant local and the dominat-
ing global and toward a historically deep archive of competing universal-
isms. (722)
Like Hofmeyr, many scholars have conceived the Indian Ocean as a politi-
cal and cultural network (Kearney 2004; Pearson 2003; Vergès 2003;
McPherson 1993; Toussaint 1966). This is echoed in literary and poetic
writings about this global oceanic space, ranging from South Asian authors
such as, most prominently, Amitav Ghosh, to writers in the African Asian
diaspora like M. G. Vassanji, to East and South African writing by
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nadifa Mohamed, Mia Couto, Praba Moodley,
Nuruddin Farah, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o or Aziz Hassim and to island litera-
ture, written by authors like Lindsey Collen, Khal Torabully or Ananda
Devi from Mauritius. What I will focus on in the following, however, are
the poetic renditions of two specifically located transoceanic trajectories—
one reaching from India to Kenya and the other from Somalia to the
Mediterranean. Shailja Patel thematises the crossing over the Indian Ocean
from India to East Africa and finally to Europe and the US, whereas in
Warsan Shire the East African diaspora connects via the Northern Indian
Ocean (Arabian Sea, Red Sea) first to Northern Africa and the Middle East
and then from there via the Mediterranean to (Southern) Europe. In both
poets’ works, what I term watery failures and watery potentials feature in
important, if very different ways. While Shire’s poems are steeped in water,
and more specifically the ocean imagery of traumatic refugee itineraries,
Patel’s work is marked by the ocean in a more abstract sense. Her poetry
is also informed by an oceanic passage, but instead of transcribing this into
metaphors and storytelling, her text itself constitutes a passage between
South East Asia and Africa, weaving a material connection across the water.
“Her Body is a Flooding Home”: Transoceanic Refugee

Geocorpographies in Warsan Shire’s Poetry
Warsan Shire published her first poetry chapbook Teaching My Mother
How To Give Birth with flipped eye publishing in 2011; this debut was fol-
lowed by a second collection called Our Men Do Not Belong To Us (2014)
and another chapbook called Her Blue Body in 2015, which consists of
work originating from her time as the first Young Poet Laureate for
London. Her work has also been published in Wasafiri, Magma, Poetry
Review and in the anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Her first full
208 J. LEETSCH
collection, to be titled Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, is

expected in 2022. Born in Kenya to Somali parents, but having grown up
in London, her work tries to contain the messiness of diasporic belonging
while oscillating seamlessly between verse and prose-poetry. Her mostly
female, black and Muslim speakers forever struggle to find a home—but
that does not stop them from trying, again and again. Raised by immi-
grants and refugees in Harlesden in North-West London, Shire calls her-
self a “build up” of many different things—“cultures, countries,
languages”—“writing about here [England], writing about Somalia”
(Shire 2013a, n. pag.). Her particular diasporic experience is marked by an
uncanny shuttling between home and away: “The mundane is made
strange, and vice versa: watching my mum listening to old Somali songs
on an iPad; having conversations where she tells me ‘I don’t want to be
buried here, I’d rather you take my body home,’ and then me googling
the link ‘taking a dead body abroad’” (ibid.). Shire’s solution is to not
settle on either end of the scale, but to consciously strive for the in-
between: “I was always trying to build towards making home in the in-
between, or the otherness, or the elsewhere—the third space that people
talk about—trying to feel comfortable in the fact that you are constantly
exiled from all the cultures and all the countries that you think you belong
to” (ibid.). Shire is a skilled cartographer not only of geographical dis-
placement but also of bodily trauma, mapping out the effects of the Somali
civil war that is part of her life:
I’m from Somalia where there has been a war going on for my entire life. I
grew up with a lot of horror in the backdrop—a lot of terrible things that
have happened to people who are really close to me, and to my country, and
to my parents; so it’s in the home and it’s even in you, it’s on your skin and
it’s in your memories and your childhood. And my relatives and my friends
and my mother’s friends have experienced things that you can’t imagine,
and they’ve put on this jacket of resiliency and a dark humour. (Ibid.)
Her work can best be described as a mixture of East African storytelling,

quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age memoir, testimonial and confes-
sional poetry, documentary and fragmentary family genealogy. Writing
across temporal, spatial and corporeal boundaries, Shire’s voices emerge as
vulnerable yet strong, as haunted yet grounded; they interweave stories of
contemporary diasporic womanhood with the memories of generations of
female migrants moving between Africa and Europe. Their national,
international and transnational trajectories open up new spaces for negoti-

ating reparative forms of worlding and homing.
The poems, which circle around trauma and processes of healing that
trauma, are written in prose style; they rarely rhyme, and they materialise
on the page as “graphic story-poems” (Taylor 2015, 379). They are multi-
placed and multi-voiced, taking root in Somalia, Kenya and Great Britain
only to then take off along dispersed routes to other places, such as Russia
or Italy, thereby also tracing Somalia’s colonial past. In almost all of Shire’s
poems, the experience of migration and diaspora figures in various ways,
with geographical displacement almost always playing out on and in the
female body. These traumatic interlinkages become most clearly spelled
out when Shire’s poems move within or around the watery spaces of the
ocean. One of Shire’s most widely read prose-poems is called “Conversations
About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”. In 2015 and 2016, the poem
went viral and was used by media outlets to critically draw attention to the
rising hostility towards “foreigners” connected to the so-called refugee
crisis which has been increasingly medialised over the last years. The poem
was and is still being used as an antidote to the growing representation of
refugees as spectacle and threat, as it gives voice to those refugee subjects
made silent and inhuman by Western paranoia and xenophobia. It begins
with the following often quoted sentences:
Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue
against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the
day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the
school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? […] No one
leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. (Shire 2011a, 24–27, l.1–7)
The poem traces the story of its speaker from an unspecified East African
country2 and her escape route via other African countries, across the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, to Europe with its deportation cen-
tres: “They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The
Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the
city of Rome with no jacket” (l.12–14). In mapping the desert, the ocean
and the European city, the poem does not propose a clear-cut trajectory—
the very end of the poem takes up the metaphor from the beginning with
the lines: “I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is
disappearing […] and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my
home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side” (l. 23–24, l.
210 J. LEETSCH
40–41). It is certainly no coincidence that Shire opens and closes the

poem with this image of the shark which signifies the deathly danger of the
watery passage from Somalia to Europe via the Gulf of Aden, a waterway
which connects the Arabian and then the Red Sea of the Northern Indian
Ocean with the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. By repeating this
metaphor, the ocean passage is used to turn around teleological direction-
ality: the refugee has tried to escape, but has somehow landed back at the
beginning—a movement made even more poignant by the knowledge
that parts of today’s territory of Somalia had once been an Italian colony;
the image of Somali refugees arriving in Rome “with no jacket”, then,
draws attention to the colonial power structures from which the Somali
civil war originated.
Utilising this circularity, the narrator who presumably takes up stories
heard at the deportation centre, speaks of death, rape, shame and trauma—
and the ocean figures as the epitome of these refuge experiences as an
affective space filled with fear and hope simultaneously: “I hope the jour-
ney meant more than miles / because all of my children are in the water.
I thought the sea was safer / than the land” (l. 14–16). Shire extends the
water imagery even further in a later version of “Conversations About
Home (at the Deportation Centre)”, called simply “Home”, which was
published online:
[…] you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
[…] and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans. (2017, 00:43–00:50; 02:03–02:20)3
Via the metaphor of home as the mouth of a shark, Shire imbues the trau-
matic watery passage on boats across the world with life, however danger-
ous, tenuous and fragile it may be. This is also underlined by the fact that
“home” is turned into a personification, chasing, haunting and command-
ing those who flee. What follows is similarly made graspable as a space of
trauma and of hope through the materialised transoceanic passage which
is first physically experienced (“crawl”, “wade”) as well as then commu-

nally narrated by the survivors (through the conversations at the deporta-
tion centre).
In giving voice to these forced transoceanic trajectories, Shire offers a
re-mapping of the globe through diasporic movements. Rewriting the
world order proposed by Western governments, Shire’s poetry endeavours
to cross borders and open up pathways that have been closed off to those
undesirable from a Western perspective. Shedding light on the ocean
routes across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the poems point
towards the dehumanising hierarchies at work in our era of global capital-
ism: “Look at all these borders, / foaming at the mouth with bodies bro-
ken and desperate” (l.18–19). For refugees, water becomes a deadly space
as boats are stopped or sunk, borders protected, nations secured. This is
especially relevant in a Europe marked by resurgent nationalism and Euro-
scepticism which goes hand in hand with stricter, and oftentimes deadly,
border controls. Shire exemplifies this in “Conversations About Home”
when she parallels the trauma of the ocean passage with the experiences of
those who survive and reach the coast but who consequently have lost
their language and identity: “I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my
mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue,
or another language. […] I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport
hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget” (l. 7–11). The
official document of belonging, the passport—and, closely connected to
that, the name, the language and the identity of the passport bearer—are
destroyed in an act of wilful self-effacement. Shire’s poetic rendition lays
bare not only the trauma of forceful displacement but also “the absurdities
of documentation that have such unquestioned legitimacy in the Western
architecture of border and boundary, admission and exclusion” (Zakaria
2016, n. pag.; cf. also Mbembe 2017, 22).
Having crossed the ocean, the refugees and asylum-seekers are denied
subject-hood. Checkpoints, border controls, and deportation centres pin-
point towards other, larger structures of nation-building such as the pro-
duction and control of outsiders and the international global politics of
discipline and capital they are embedded in; they figure as “a series of
spatiolegal and spatiotemporal manoeuvres” which “draw and redraw
lines in the sea, producing spaces of exception in the form of migration
exclusion zones, offshore holding areas, temporally agile borders and
other geographies of shifting sovereignty designed to block transnational
subaltern bodies on the move” (Perera 2013, 25). The ocean and its
212 J. LEETSCH
shorelines—here both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea—are

utilised as an extension for these disciplinary and deathly tactics. As Iain
Chambers argues, the Mediterranean which had once been
a body of water that provided the principal gateway between Europe, Asia,
and Africa, establishing many of the premises and practices of occidental
modernity, has been shut down. Any reopening depends on European lar-
gesse or, rather, on European needs and the revival of a mare nostrum.
Sedimented in this sea, sustained, as though in solution, are histories, inter-
twined narrations that have increasingly been veiled behind the homoge-
nous screen of occidental conceit. (2010, 679; emphasis in original)
Referring to the fact that today the Mediterranean is coded very differ-
ently, he points out how “legal passage on its waters, restricted to military,
mercantile, and tourist traffic, usually moves along the latitudes, while
south-north traffic, when not composed of authorized foodstuffs for the
European Union, is largely illegal” (678). However, despite all Western
efforts to fashion the historically open and multi-directional space of the
Mediterranean into a barricaded space, poetry like Shire’s defies any
attempts to hermetically seal off certain areas and creates connections
through voicing the horrors of civil war and human suffering which does
not stop at the geographical or imagined borders between Europe and
Africa. Through creating poetry that bears witness to the failures and pos-
sibilities of transoceanic trajectories across the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean, Shire enacts new spatial and affective materialities, which
generate “embodied countergeographies and relations” (Perera 2013, 59).
These oceanic countergeographies are always closely connected to cor-
poreality and physical intimacies. Hinted at already in the gendered vio-
lence so vividly described in “Conversations About Home”, in Shire’s
poetry it is especially the female body which is used as a way to articulate
the trauma of displacement. The poem “My Foreign Wife is Dying and
Does Not Want to Be Touched” (2011a, 30), for example, connects the
refugee’s transoceanic passage with female suffering by using imagery
repeatedly referring to water:
My wife is a ship docking from war.

The doctor maps out her body in ink,
holding up her breast with two fingers, explains
what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep
the nipple. Her body is a flooding home.
We are afraid. We want to know

what the water will take away from us. (l. 1–7)
Through images of ships docking from war and of drowning, the watery
in-between space of the dangerous passage between countries is trans-
ferred onto the cancer-ridden female body. The physicality of exile is
embodied by graphic inscriptions on the female body that reveal a particu-
lar cartography of dislocation: “I think of all the images she must carry in
her body, / how the memory hardens into a tumour” (l. 24–25). In
“Ugly” (2011a, 31) this intimate relationality between body, trauma and
space becomes even clearer. Here, a girl “carries whole cities in her belly.
/ As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her. / She was splintered wood and
sea water. / She reminded them of the war” (l. 1–6). The speaker asks the
girl’s mother “Why did you not warn her, / hold her like a rotting boat?”
(l. 15–16) and warns that
if she is covered in continents

if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
What man wants to lie down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?
Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear. (l. 18–28)
Through the stylistic device of reverse personification, chremamorphism,

the girl’s body becomes a conglomeration of the civil war, the flight
across the ocean and the horrors of colonialism: her body is continent,
colony, island, city, boat and water all at once. These oceanic refugee
“geocorpographies”, a term coined by Joseph Pugliese, “bring into
focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within
the geopolitics of race, war and empire” (2007, 1). But despite or per-
haps even because of this, as the very last line of the poem indicates, the
girl becomes a citizen of the world, an enworlded subject: “But God, /
doesn’t she wear / the world well” (l. 30–32). This shows that the
female body acts as a carrier of trauma. Porous but simultaneously resil-
ient, female corporeality becomes a fabric woven by colonial histories, by
214 J. LEETSCH
stories of rape, intrusion and dislocation—but at the same time, it indi-

cates a degree of self-empowerment and self-actualisation as the girl
wears the world like clothes on her body.
The ocean in these poems not only is a contested space, utilised to
secure and reinstate nation-state borders and demarcations, to exert even
more control and undermine human rights in the seemingly unchartered
territories of the ocean, but also offers transformative potential. In
“Grandfather’s Hands” (2011a), a poem about generations worth of dis-
placements, this becomes even more evident as the ocean is corporeally
materialised, written on the body, in an act of reparative re-interpretation.
The traumatic space of the oceanic passage is not only re-lived but also
creatively re-named:
Your grandmother […]

circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share,
which part they would leave alone. […]
She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named the ocean after herself. […]
Your grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other’s bodies,
claiming whole countries
with their mouths. (11, l. 1, 3–8, 19–23)
The salt water of the sea is replaced by human fluids; spit is used to draw
countries and borders on each other’s bodies. In the case of Somali refu-
gees, who are stateless people, the physical geography of an originary
homeland becomes inaccessible and even impossible, the desire to belong
is inscribed onto the body. The mapping of bodies through sensuality and
ownership becomes simultaneously a claiming of an imaginary geography,
of home and be/longing. The ocean which is the connection between
Somalia and elsewhere constitutes an empty or negative space of trauma
which is then reconfigured through tender acts of touch and renaming,
thus giving voice to the refugee experience of flight and insularity. As
Perera argues, “despite being the site of dire warnings and ‘wishful sink-
ing’ stories”, the ocean is
a space in which other ontologies, geographies, poetics and politics are

mobilised, set in play, enacted and resignified […]. Through motley, evolv-
ing tactics […] refugees re-world the oceans, seascapes and border geogra-
phies through which they move, engendering new expressive, creative and
communicative forms in response to previously unimaginable terrors and
blockages. (Perera 2013, 66; emphasis added)
Via her transoceanic poetics, Warsan Shire offers an alternative story of

fleeing home and shows how those made meaningless by Western nation-
states and colonial ideologies “[rechart] the geographies of nation and
citizenship through which they move”, how they “[inscribe] new corpo-
graphies across the invisible lines in the sea” (67). Refugee narratives inev-
itably escape the ordering principles of nation-state and border control,
rupturing the confines drawn around them to reach out across the water
and into the world. Without negating the sea as space of violent rupture,
Shire’s poetry similarly imbues what has always been seen as a space of
death and termination with alternative meaning, invested with possibilities
and potential, if fraught, futures. As my analysis of especially female expe-
riences of refuge (in “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation
Centre)”), female resistance to the trauma of refuge (in “Ugly”) and
female rewriting and re-signifying of refugee trajectories (in “Grandfather’s
Hands”) has shown, Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a
deathly space but also as generative, as it offers up the possibilities of pas-
sage and movement, however violent and dangerous they may be. The
poems which trace the itineraries of their Somali characters across the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean shed light on the reparative poten-
tial of water, and with their focus on relationality and affect privilege “a
politics of coalition-building, solidarity and resistance among groups con-
nected by historical and contemporary experiences of confinement and
terror at sea” (Perera 2013, 55). Through intimate corporeal acts, through
tentative connectivity and through affiliation networks, Shire’s female
voices reconfigure the ocean space through their transoceanic trajectories.
Indeed, in these poems, spatial imaginaries are activated to advocate for an
ethicopolitically minded practice of living in the world.
216 J. LEETSCH
“Kala Pani, or Crossing the Dark Waters”: Shailja Patel’s

Migritude and Indian Ocean Trajectories
In Shailja Patel’s work, the ocean does not figure as an almost visceral
spectre, like it does in Warsan Shire’s poetry. It is, however, just as deeply
interwoven with corporeal materialities and interpersonal relationships.
Migritude is a text that could not exist without the Indian Ocean and the
complex networks and multi-directional travel routes it implies. The text
encompasses the Indian Ocean as a transitory place, it traces the history of
South Asian migration across the ocean and describes the treatment of
migratory Indians in Kenya, to then follow their routes to Europe and the
US. Shailja Patel grew up in Kenya as the daughter of second-generation
West-Indian Gujarati migrants at a time of political upheaval during the
rule of Daniel Toroitich arap Moi (1978–2002), a decade after Kenya’s
independence in 1963, and a few years after Idi Amin, “the villain of her
childhood” (Patel, 78), had seized power in Kenya’s neighbouring coun-
try Uganda and expelled Uganda’s 80,000 Asians in 1971. She wrote
Migritude as a spoken-word one-woman theatre show, to be performed
on stage. At the heart of the show lies a suitcase full of saris that Patel
inherited from her mother and that form the fundamental fabric of
Migritude—“through them, she reveals an inheritance of emotions, of
histories bound up in journeys from India to Kenya to the United States.
The sari, a piece of cloth, binds continents and families” (iii–iv). I will
come back to this later in the chapter, but for now I want to concentrate
on the 2010 Kaya Press edition of the book that arose from the show, the
materialised text of Migritude—“an experimental mix of autobiography,
history, poetry, testimony, letters, and drawings based on a theatrical per-
formance by the same name” (Kulbaga 2016, 76). It is not only the story
of Patel’s own diasporic movements across the world intertwined with her
family’s transoceanic migration stories which go back many generations
and visit many places (moving from Gujarat to Nairobi; from Nairobi to
London; from London to San Francisco and then back to Nairobi) but
also one possible narrative of the South Asian diaspora in general: it is
“political history told through personal story” (Patel, 128). In that sense,
as Vijay Prashad argues in his foreword to Migritude, “Speaking of Saris”,
“three cross-continental migrations shape her story: the early 20th cen-
tury march of South Asians to East Africa; the mass expulsion and emigra-
tion of East African Indians to the Global North from the 1970s onwards;
and finally, Shailja’s own emigration out of Kenya—first to the United
Kingdom and, eventually, to California” (iii). Migritude is divided into

four parts. The first one is eponymously called “Migritude” and consti-
tutes the core of the book—it consists of a prelude and poems divided
chronologically and geographically into two chapters, the first under the
heading “Nairobi, Kenya (1972–1989)” and the second under the head-
ing “United Kingdom & United States (1990–2004)”. This is followed
by “Notes” and a section called “What came out of the suitcase”. The
second part of the book is titled “Shadow Book” and repeats all headings,
subheadings and poem titles from the first part. Far from being a mere
repetition, however, this part consists of meta-textual reflections on the
process of creating of the performance and on the storytelling of Migritude.
It is a personalised, autobiographical commentary on the social, political
and personal circumstances which form the background of the poems.
(On the table of contents page, this “shadow book” is marked by a rever-
sal of the black and white print.) The third part is called “The Making and
Other Poems” and consists of nine more poems which spin the themes of
“Migritude” further. The fourth part titled “The Journey” consists of a
Migritude timeline, as well as two interviews with Patel.
The term “migritude” was coined by Patel as a conglomeration of the
words “migrant” and “attitude”, to give voice to women and migrants
“who speak unapologetically, fiercely, lyrically, for themselves” (143).
With this self-fashioning, she counters dominant narratives which mute
the trauma of those East African and African Asian subjects forcibly dis-
placed under the rule of Idi Amin in Uganda, confined to labour camps,
raped by colonial intruders in Kenya or killed in the US “war on terror”.
The word also evokes two other concepts which try to counter oppressive
master narratives in the same vein: Négritude and Coolitude. Négritude
was an anti-colonialist, anti-racist movement and an activist as well as the-
oretical framework for black self-empowerment. It was developed by
Francophone thinkers in the black diaspora during the first decades of the
twentieth century, such as the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire or Léopold
Sédar Senghor. Giving evidence to the violent but also empowering prop-
erties of language, Négritude appropriated the derogatory terms “niger”
and “nègre” which were used as racist denominations for people of African
descent. The terms were deliberately taken back, revalorised and reimag-
ined as a resistance strategy.4
Migritude is, however, not only indebted to Négritude but also to
another concept‚ called Coolitude, which is deeply inscribed into the
Indian Ocean passage as it draws on the existence of the “coolies”, (mainly
218 J. LEETSCH
Indian) Asian indentured workers shipped to Africa and the Caribbean. It

was put forward by the Mauritian poet and cultural theorist Khal Torabully
in the 1980s: it is the “ethical, poetic, and poetologic attempt to formu-
late a vision for the future, which, relying on the principle of including
those who have been excluded from history and its futures, reflects and
revises historical and current processes of globalisation” (Ette 2017, 112).
Giving voice to the historically muted, the concept reconfigures a term of
abuse, turning it against those using it violently as a tactic of linguistic as
well as cultural self-affirmation and empowerment. Torabully created a
“poetics of global migration” (13) which is voiced in his 1992 poetry col-
lection and founding text of Coolitude, Cale d’Etoiles—Coolitude:
Coolitude, setting the first stone of my memory of all memory, my language

of all languages, my part of the unknown, laid down by many bodies and
many stories in my genes and on my islands. […] It is the song of my love
for the ocean and for travel, the Odyssey still unwritten by my sea-faring
people […] and my deckhands will speak for those who erased the borders
to expand the land of mankind. (Torabully 1992, 7; emphasis in original)
The routes of migrant workers and indentured labourers create a web that
spans across oceans and continents, connecting India, China and Oceania
to African and European shores. For him, the coolie is “the one who is
without the text of his/her voyage” (ibid., 71) and ultimately the one who
needs to write the story of his/her passage or crossing.
Taking up this definition, Isabel Hofmeyr posits that “the central motif
of Coolitude is the voyage, which becomes the site of trauma and loss”
(2007, 9). The ocean crossing enables ways of making legible the erased
experiences of indenture. In the light of such shuttling between legibility
and intelligibility, Véronique Bragard has argued that Coolitude
relies on the nightmare transoceanic journey of Coolies, as both a historical

migration and a metonymy of cultural encounters. The crossing of the Kala
Pani [‘black water’] constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and
culturally stifling situations. By making the crossing central, Coolitude
avoids any essentialism and connection with an idealized Mother India,
which is clearly left behind. (1998, 104; emphasis in original)
Kala pani means dark or black waters and refers to the religious restriction
of crossing the sea in Hindu Indian culture, especially for high-caste
Hindus (cf. DeLoughrey 2011, 71). This taboo arises from the notion
that by leaving the shores of the subcontinent, one would be cut off from
the regenerating and healing waters of the Ganges, therefore ending one’s
reincarnation cycle. For the majority of Indians who made these journeys,
then, this crossing also meant the breaking of family and social ties: “as a
term it powerfully encodes the dissolution and even negation of identity
beyond national soil or […] motherland” (71). The coolies’ water passage
thus is marked by trauma, disappearance, disconnection and isolation, but
as Torabully argues, Coolitude also “posits an encounter, an exchange of
histories, of poetics or visions of the world, between those of African
descent and of Indian descent, without excluding other sources” (Carter
and Torabully 2002, 150). I argue that Shailja Patel’s performance and
the text of Migritude is deeply indebted to these non-essentialist records
of crossing the water and of transoceanic routes, unquestionably continu-
ing the themes of not only Glissant’s Poetics of Relation but also the inter-
connective notion of the ocean as a lived and storied world found in Shire’s
poetry. The oceanic space in Patel does not figure through stylistic devices,
metaphors and poetic imageries such as they proliferate in Shire’s poems,
but it is similarly inscribed onto and into the female body. Describing the
violence women experience when crossing, settling and fleeing, she states:
“Our bodies are our first homes. If we are not safe in our bodies, we are
always homeless” (2014, n. pag.). In Migritude, the female traveller across
the seas, so often made invisible, rewrites herself into visibility.
When reading Patel, however, it becomes clear that it is not the cutting
of family ties so prevalent in notions of the kala pani taboo which is at the
forefront of her writing and thinking, but the renewed knotting and weav-
ing of these relationalities across the ocean, across countries, times and
histories. The trauma of the oceanic passage as well as the trauma of arrival
on the African coast is made visible by female voices who generate connec-
tion and relation through embodied encounters:
But Mummy, look.

I am forging a ship of glittering songs
to sail your jewels in,
staking a masthead of verbs
from which to fly your saris!
This work that filigrees and inlays
all your legacies,
that snakes across borders,
dodges visa controls,
this
is my intention. (“Born to a Law”, 62)
220 J. LEETSCH
Migritude is a “tapestry of poetry, history, politics, packed into a suitcase,

embedded in [Patel’s] body, rolled out into the theatre. An accounting of
Empire enacted on the bodies of women” (96). This accounting takes two
routes which both trace the transoceanic, transcontinental routes of
Migritude’s women, be they the diasporic East African Asians of Patel’s
generation, or the Indian grandparents and elders who made the journey
across the Indian Ocean. One route is an intertextual and multi-lingual
one: the book is wrought with Gujarati proverbs which are displayed in
their original language and then translated: “Raat thodi ne vesh jaja, the
proverb I grew up on. The night is short and our garments change. Meaning:
Don’t put down roots. Don’t get too comfortable. By dawn, we may be
on the move, forced to reinvent ourselves in order to survive” (10, empha-
sis in original). Indian language and literature as such reach across the
ocean and connect to the lived realities of the Indian East African diaspora.
It transforms the East African home and makes it more porous, more
inclusive of varied identity constructs and multi-placed concepts of belong-
ing. The poem “Dreaming in Gujarati”, for example, delineates not only
the violence but also the power inherent to multi-lingual existences:
Listen:
my father speaks Urdu
language of dancing peacocks
rosewater fountains
even its curses are beautiful.
He speaks Hindi
suave and melodic
earthy Punjabi
salty-rich as saag paneer
coastal Swahili
laced with Arabic
he speaks Gujarati
solid ancestral pride.
Five languages, five different worlds […]. (52)
Yet, Patel also describes English which has given her “words that don’t
exist in Gujarati”, such as “Self-expression / Individual / Lesbian” (51,
emphasis in original). Oscillating between mother tongue and other
tongue, she positions herself as a woman who does not fit into one lan-
guage—and pays tribute to the complex and queer struggle of feminine
survival, all while armed with a “shaved head, combat boots” (51). The
proverbs and other Gujarati expressions scattered throughout Migritude

and their immediate translations point towards how the transoceanic
crossing has not completely resulted in isolation and loss but instead pro-
liferates in a multi-lingual and multi-directional belonging that bridges
India and Africa.
The other route which hints at the transoceanic trajectories across the
Indian Ocean is fashioned along paratextual pathways, using illustrations
and graphic art to keep alive the connection across the kala pani. They
add visual layers of meaning to the already multi-nodal text of Migritude.
The most obvious of these visual graphic markers of the transoceanic pas-
sage can be found in the reproduction of seascape etchings, tellingly posi-
tioned at the beginning of “Part I: Nairobi, Kenya 1972–1989” (9) and
“Part II: United Kingdom and United States 1990–2004” (31) as visual
chapter introductions: the first image shows two shorelines with a large
body of water between them, which I interpret as the Indian Ocean.
Across the water, two figures are stood opposite each other, looking at
each other. Linking to the linguistic and literary interconnectivity described
above, the picture is subtitled with the already mentioned Gujarati prov-
erb “Raat thodi ne vesg jaja. The night is short and our garments change”
(9, emphasis in original), expressing the unsettling experience of (forced)
migration across oceans and continents. This picture of the sea thus intro-
duces Patel’s ruminations on various experiences of migritude and bears
witness to the trauma (and potential relational possibilities) of kala pani.
The second picture found at the beginning of Part II shows an open water
space. Instead of the link between two countries (India and Kenya) implied
in the first picture which introduces the Kenyan part, the second part
moves to the UK and the US. The picture of the open ocean, without any
geographical markers such as shorelines and without the inclusion of
human bodies, implies a much more open and fluid concept of diaspora—
one which has moved from the perceived safety of a grounded geographi-
cal belonging and the fixity of coast lines into a wide-open space of travel
and migration. This second water passage then leaves the one-way direc-
tionality of kala pani or the Middle Passage behind and promises multi-
routed possibility and futurity: this is again underlined by the Gujarati
proverb below the picture which says: “Jagia tyanthi savar. Whenever you
wake up, that’s when your morning begins” (31).
Less discernible than these pictures are the other graphical allusions
referring to the transoceanic crossing. Referencing not only the personal
migration story of Patel and her family but also the century-long diasporic
222 J. LEETSCH
trade routes across the Indian Ocean, the ambi and its graphic representa-
tions become the literal fabric holding together text, narrative and belong-
ing. The “Prelude” describes the history of ambi, the Punjab word for
“mango” which also denotes the teardrop-shaped motif used in fabric
weaving, now more commonly known as paisley:
It began as a teardrop in Babylon. […] The boteh. Stylized rendition of the

date-palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art,
until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled
the rage of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as the Empire rose. Some
historians claim it travelled to Mughal courts from Victorian England […].
But a legend in Kashmir calls it the footprint of the goddess Parvati. (4)
This poetic description of the etymological and mythical origins of the

ambi is mirrored by a historical timeline at the end of the book which
starts with the sixth-century BCE records of the “earliest depiction of the
boteh / ambi / paisley motif in Central Asia”, followed by the 800–1500
“flourishing Indian Ocean Trade between inland African Kingdoms, East
African Coast, Arabian Peninsulas, India, and SE Asia”, in turn followed
by the advent of colonialism in 1600, when the “British East India
Company awarded charter trade to India” (129). With the help of the
ambi pattern, Patel describes not only transcultural exchange and trans-
oceanic trade, but also the horrors of the Empire. She delineates how the
British shut down fabric production in Iraq and India, selling the cloth on
their own market for much higher profit “weighed with an 80% duty”, and
how they “hunted down the terrified weavers, chopped off their index
fingers and thumbs” in order to “force India to buy British cloth” (5).
Never content with one-sided narratives, Patel also describes how ambi
became paisley, demonstrating how the British Empire annexed the Vale
of Kashmir and sold it to the Maharaj Gulab Singh for one million pounds,
who in turn agreed to “present annually to the British Government” not
only 1 horse, 12 shawl of goats, but also 3 pairs of Cashmere shawls (6).
Kashmiri shawls, patterned with ambi, were then taken to Britain where
they were regarded as luxury good, weaving “their way through the
dreams of Victorian wives like the footprint of a goddess no one dared to
imagine” (6). This account is paralleled with a description of the poor
working conditions faced by the weavers in the Scottish village Paisley,
who “to keep their index fingers and thumbs” “learned how to churn out
imitation ambi, on imitation Kashmiri shawls” (6–7).
Tracing these developments and showing how Kashmiri became cash-

mere, mosuleen muslin and ambi paisley (and how a hundred years later,
“chai became a beverage invented in California”, 7), Patel makes visible
how history is erased and then re-materialised, how it travels across the
ocean and across continents, only to then arrive at the very saris Patel
constructs her own show out of. The “material and affective legacy of the
sari” (Kulbaga 2016, 76) as a traditionally female garment brings to light
the experiences of those usually muted: the saris evoke the trade routes of
Empires, but also the specifically gendered stories connected to displace-
ment and diaspora, “the voices of women from within the bootprint of
Empire” (Patel, 95). The woven, ambi-patterned fabric of the saris can be
read as a symbol of the oceanic passage as they voyage across the Indian
Ocean from India to Africa to Europe and America, and as they are con-
tinuously connected to female narratives throughout the book: “The saris
in Migritude as word materialised—yes. They are the circulation of global
capital, of histories erased. And in the making of the show, I also experi-
enced them as generative—tellers of stories, texts in themselves, palimp-
sests of art, weaving, culture, trade, Empire” (2015, n. pag.).
As argued above, then, Migritude is not steeped in ocean imagery and
spatiality as much as Shire’s poems are, but itself constitutes a passage
between South East Asia and Africa, a connection between India and
Kenya made possible by the transoceanic trajectory of kala pani. The sea
is engaged with in a meta-textual way, the text itself recreating the connec-
tive and relational properties of the watery space of the Indian Ocean. This
becomes perhaps most evident when looking at how the text is described
by Patel herself, evoking notions of oceans and shores. About the concep-
tual set-up of the Shadow Book she says: “Any piece of writing is necessarily
the gestalt of a sea of ideas, influences and encounters. This Shadow Book
is a collection of shells and seaweed from the shoreline. It makes no
attempt to be a comprehensive narrative of the making of Migritude”
(74). Whereas Migritude is the ocean, the Shadow Book is shells and sea-
weed from the shoreline (the surplus of the ocean), which conceptually
frames the water. Embedding the poems in Migritude within a global his-
tory of Empire, textile trade and the multi-directional network of the
Indian Ocean, Shailja Patel creates textual and material encounters which
span across the water and imagine a world alternative to all-encompassing,
accumulative structures of capitalist globalisation, ultimately “disrupting
and resisting the calculations of globalization” (Cheah 2016, 9).
224 J. LEETSCH
Bridging Oceans
As the analysis of a selection of poems and textual fragments from Shailja
Patel’s Migritude and Warsan Shire’s poetry collections has shown,
through focusing on the failures and potential of water spaces alike, both
poets create a distinctive transoceanic poetic that sheds light on systems of
diaspora and refuge and on the networks of national and global institu-
tions that regulate the movement of people. Harking back to my discus-
sion of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of
Relation, I argue that the works of both poets, even though originating
from different cultural and political places on the East African coast, share
an intimate engagement with women and their multi-directional, rela-
tional transoceanic trajectories. In reading them together and in highlight-
ing the interconnections that span across the water body of the Indian
Ocean, I suggest that even though the poets’ East African positionings
cannot be equated, they nevertheless share an oceanic poetics that is
marked by affective encounters and the voicing of specifically female
trauma. This takes shape along the refugee trajectories from the Horn of
Africa across the Northern Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean in Shire,
and in the crossing of the dark waters from India to East Africa in Patel.
Through excavating colonial histories and neo-colonial realities in the
water, they intricately interweave the materiality of the ocean with their
poetic work. By engaging in this activity that can be likened to dredging,
they rewrite the ocean which is commonly regarded as a male domain:
In western imaginaries from Homer to Conrad, the sea is overwhelmingly

the domain of masculine endeavour. […] The ocean is the vast, capricious,
unknowable element upon which men cast themselves. […] [It] signifies as
a borderless domain wherein the cast-away and the sailor, as white, heroic,
masculinised figures, exemplify and assert the moral attributes of imperial
racial virtue, to end by making for themselves new homes and new worlds,
at the end of their voyaging. (Perera 2013, 60)
By decidedly not casting the ocean as borderless, but instead shedding

light on the harmful construction and then the reparative re-casting of
these borders, both poets build their own waterways, below and above the
waves. As Peter Hulme has pointed out, “the heroic sailor or lone Crusoe
figure of colonial discourse, as adventurer or castaway, obscures the his-
torical figures of entire communities who were rendered cast away, dis-
persed and dispossesses by colonial violence” (Hulme 2004, 187–201).
Through their poetry, Shire and Patel write the “obscure” and dispos-
sessed female diasporic subject back into the oceanic narrative and resist
the normative and oppressive attempts to dehumanise those fleeing unliv-
eable homelands or navigating new shores, as they inscribe national and
personal histories into the water space of the oceanic passage. In giving
voice to the historical and contemporary experiences of specifically femi-
nine transoceanic migration and refuge, their work produces a counter-
space to dissolution, displacements and dispersal. Like the novels by
Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi discussed in previous chapters, which, to
varying degrees, temperatures and success, engaged in similar work, this
shows the potential inherent to shared futures in a globalised world and
acts as a harbinger of new possibilities and agency. Bridging oceans, while
never disregarding the deathly and traumatic in-between water space,
both poets tie their diasporic female voices back to lost homelands and
simultaneously sail them towards new worlds.
Travelling Texts: Performative Poetry Online

and on Stage
Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel both activate the space of the ocean to
articulate specifically gendered, relational experiences of refuge and dias-
pora. The deeply traumatic event of crossing the water is interwoven with
the struggle for emancipation, citizenship and identity and gives room to
a generative enunciation of a more liveable world. The ocean offers alter-
native stories of survival and arrival. In the following, I will show how
these various transoceanic encounters can be further expanded when
examining how Shire’s poems and Patel’s Migritude travel across the
world and create spaces that function as direct extensions of their watery
beginnings. I endeavour to shed light on how the transoceanic politics and
poetics examined above can be utilised to understand the creation, recep-
tion and dissemination of both poets’ works across the globe. Thinking
further the intimate encounters arising from their transoceanic trajecto-
ries, I argue that the nature of how their texts travel can be discussed in the
same terms of interactivity and connectiveness. Much as I did in my chap-
ters on Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi, in this section I will look at the genre
traditions both poets’ works are indebted to, and at the alternative, perfor-
mative worlds their poetry generates online and on stage through trans-
medial processes.
226 J. LEETSCH
Digital Diasporas and Dictaphones

Warsan Shire’s poetry has been published widely, in anthologies on con-
temporary African poetry, in academic journals rooted in postcolonial and
diaspora studies such as Wasafiri and in Shire’s own chapbooks published
by flipped eye. The place where her poetry is most widely shared and read,
however, is the internet. Not only is Shire herself active on various social
media platforms such as Twitter or Tumblr and publishes fragments of her
poetry there herself but even more so do her many followers spread her
work through hashtags, shares and reposts. In the twenty-first century, the
internet has become a space for young poets to reach a global, connected
audience—one that is on the one hand exceptionally attuned to their sub-
ject matters (in Shire’s case young women of colour), and on the other
hand one that is generated by the digital equivalent of “word-of-mouth”,
that is, links, shares, likes and various algorithms. The internet constitutes
a space of reaction and response that is much more open and fluid than
traditional means of publishing and disseminating literary works. The
openness and connectivity inherent to the digital space of the internet is
especially interesting when talking about work like Shire’s which touches
upon trauma, suffering and the horrors of war, displacement and violence.
The watery spaces of connection and the transoceanic bridges built within
her narratives of refuge, escape and survival travel along digital routes that
are similarly marked by interconnectivity and a notion of sharing, voicing
and speaking out. The following discussions place Shire’s contemporary
diasporic poetry in relation to Somalia’s long-standing poetry tradition
and examine the ways her poetry takes up these oral traditions and how it
works around and with them to create something new that reaches across
genres and generations. Following from there, I will show how the online
spaces through which her texts travel constitute a world that overlaps with
the transoceanic routes narrated in her poems.
Somalia has always been a “nation of poets”, not least because of the
“extensive use of verse in social intercourse” (Johnson 1993, 1383).
Poetry in Somalia remains not within the realm of arts separated from
socio-political realities, it has always been a tool for expressing social prob-
lems and political dissent: “Somali poetic tradition employs poetry for
discussing politics, expressing love, sending secret messages, conducting
family and clan business, and bantering between the sexes” (ibid.; cf. also
Andrzejewski 2011). As the scholar Said Samatar explains, a Somali poet
is expected to play a role in supporting his clan, “to defend their rights in
clan disputes, to defend their honour and prestige against the attacks of
rival poets, to immortalize their fame and to act on the whole as a spokes-
man for them” (1982, 56). In a society that is made up of mainly nomadic
people and that is still characterised by a predominantly oral culture,
poetry is utilised as an archive for memory and history. It functions as one
of the most important media not only to transmit and archive knowledge
but also to instigate change and to transfigure the world.
Somali poetry is intricately classified and categorised: the buraanbur as
a specific female verse form, for example, pertains to spaces traditionally
connoted as feminine such as the domestic sphere, childbirth and child
rearing or marital affairs, but is also used as a powerful enunciative medium
to criticise politics and social issues. Among the more contemporary forms
of Somali poetry counts the heello, which has become more widely used
post-independence: it is recited by both men and women and “[m]odelled
first on Indian, then European song modes, it is lyric in nature and accom-
panied by European musical instruments” (Johnson 1993, 1383). The
topics found in the heello are “similar to those assigned to the gabay,
along with many others considered too frivolous for classical verse. The
heello is complex in structure; hence its composition tends to be similar to
that of the gabay. Diffusion is accomplished by means of radio and tape
recorder as well as oral memory” (ibid.). Generally, in post-independence
Somalia, cassettes and other means of recording and transmitting voices
have played a major role in disseminating poetry—channelling the perfor-
mative oral traditions of Somalia into new modern experiences. Taking up
this notion of communication via radio and tape recordings, Afrax argues
that today new configurations of oral traditions proliferate as more mod-
ern technological means are increasingly being utilised: “the dominant
method of transmission used by post-independence Somali poets is one
that may be seen as located somewhere between orality and writing, in the
sense that orality, writing and modern technology are blended, with a
gradual increase in the use of writing” (2013, 278). Contemporary Somali
poetry, then, is a hybrid conglomeration of traditional forms of orality and
orature and modern communication such as recordings, radio, writing
and new technologies.
Both the traditional female verse form of the buraanbur and the strategy
of archiving and disseminating information through either direct oral mem-
ory or through indirect oral and written transmission can be fruitfully applied
to Shire’s contemporary poetry. Her work expands these important strands
of Somali poetry tradition to apply them to a diasporic world of
228 J. LEETSCH
displacement and global communities. In various interviews, Shire has stated

that she uses updated strategies of oral transmission to create her poetry:
“Most of the poems I write where the character is named are based on a real
person. But I won’t use their real names unless they want me to. And my
family […] tell me, ‘I have a new story for you’, and I’ll get my Dictaphone
and record it, so I can stay as true as possible to the story before I make it
into a poem” (Shire 2013a, n. pag.). By using her Dictaphone and recording
the stories her family and extended family members tell her, she preserves
layers of memory and cultural legacy: “it’s being able to tell the stories of
those people, especially refugees and immigrants, that otherwise wouldn’t
be told, or they’ll be told really inaccurately. And I don’t want to write vic-
tims, or martyrs, or vacuous stereotypes” (ibid.).
Taking up the stories others tell her, and mediating them through her
own voice and poetic renditions, she not only follows in the footsteps of
traditional oral Somali poets but also refashions them into a more modern
collection of remembrance and preservation: “It’s always been evident to
me from a very young age that the voices of the community I come from
are fragmented, subdued in different ways. […] I love the idea of being
able to take on another person’s voice and being able to share something”
(ibid.). That she consciously engages with traditional Somali forms of
transmitting stories becomes clear when she talks about her family’s tactics
of sharing stories, poetry and experiences in the diaspora:
When my mum first moved I remember she’d get these cassettes in the post,
which were letters read aloud. “How are you?” “Yes, I’m okay.” But there’d
also be loads and loads of poems. […] My mum and dad had so many tapes,
and they still do. In my family, if you sent a cassette to somebody it would
be, like, praising them […]. Poetry is so integral to Somali culture that it’s
not high culture. My mum still writes little poems on the back of bus tickets.
You don’t have to be literate, even. (Shire 2013b, n. pag.)
Having grown up as the daughter of Somali refugees in the UK, and hav-
ing experienced these different forms of diasporic communication via
recordings and tape cassettes, Shire pays tribute to the oral forms of poetic
performance so important to Somali culture, but she also updates them,
intertwines them with her own media and forms of expression: some of
her poetry, for example, can only be accessed via the online music platform
Bandcamp, where she has uploaded some poems as voice recordings (this
digital album is called warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being
lonely), 2012b). Half oral, half written, half memory, half fiction, Shire’s
trans-media poetry constitutes a continuation of Somali traditions as she
transmits her own and her family’s voices and enables them to reach a
broader audience:
Them being able to tell me, and then me writing it, it’s cathartic, being able
to share their stories […]. Sometimes I’m telling other people’s stories to
remove stigma and taboo, so that they don’t have to feel ashamed; some-
times you use yourself as an example. […] These are other people’s memo-
ries that I’m paying tribute to, and celebrating, making sure they are
archived, a part of history. (Shire 2013a, n. pag.)
Addressing topics like forced and voluntary exile and refuge, she not only
acts as a spokesperson for her own clan but also criticises, just as Somali
poet-politicians would, her society’s norms and rules and the mechanics of
othering and oppression. Positioned in-between Europe, the US and East
Africa, her poetic recitations speak for the Somali diaspora in a loud and
clear voice.
This outspokenness about formerly taboo topics concerning not only
the refugee crisis but also specifically female suffering, sexual violence and
trauma mirrors the subversive resistance politics embedded in the tradition
of the buraanbur. As outlined above, the buraanbur is a classical Somali
verse form spoken or sung by women. It is not only concerned with the
traditionally female sphere of the family and the domestic but has also
been used to express political dissent (cf. Jama 1994). As Jama points out,
however, traditionally women’s poetry would not be recited by male
speakers: “women perform their poetry before their female family mem-
bers, relatives, or friends, who may memorize it and recite it, probably to
other female friends” (192).5 As women were not allowed to travel alone,
and thus could not disseminate their own poetry throughout the country,
it ran the risk of disappearing as it could not enter national memory via
oral transmission. This has changed only with the use of media such as
cassettes and other means of recording stories: “women artists have ben-
efited from alternative modes of publication, some of which have not been
available in the past. Among these are circulation through audio tape and
radio transmission, as well as public performances to large audiences
(made available due to the circumstances of the civil war and the resultant
refugee situation)” (187). As a powerful medium used by women through-
out Somalia and Greater Somalia, the buraanbur has since acted as a tool
230 J. LEETSCH
to share specifically female experiences and as modus of resistance against

colonial and patriarchal oppression simultaneously. The buraanbur verses
“convey messages in which people express their daily problems, desires,
and aspirations, grievances, and protests against any form of oppression
and subjugation. […] Poems […] were powerful instruments in mobiliz-
ing constituencies against the colonial authorities” (Hasan et al. 1995,
175). Especially throughout the struggle for independence and during the
following oppressive regime of Siad Barre, female voices rose to the fore-
front of political activism. What is interesting about the buraanbur is that
it is a form of poetry spoken by women for women, but never in an isolat-
ing way or with a simple one-directionality in mind. The buraanbur is
always orientated towards building a community: it is addressed to fellow
women but also outwards and beyond that circle to encompass the wider
world (cf. Hasan et al. 1995, 174).
Warsan Shire’s poetry constitutes, I argue, a contemporary continua-
tion of the buraanbur, interactively sharing female experiences of diaspora
and displacement with other women. For example, Shire’s poem “The
Birth Name” belongs to her most widely shared pieces online. Originally
posted on Shire’s Tumblr, it has since been deleted, but lives forth through
thousands of re-shares and traces in digital archives and on blogs; it reads:
“Give your daughters difficult names / Give your daughters names that
command the full use of tongue / My name makes you want to tell me the
truth / My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce
it right” (2011b). Speaking to other displaced women with equally “dif-
ficult names” who then transmit the poem further, Shire knits a web of
encounters that stretches across the (virtual) world. Even though the orig-
inal poem does not exist anymore, it has created solidarity amongst those
who only trust each other to not mispronounce their names. The com-
munity in this case has moved beyond the borders of nations and has
spread across the globe, intimately connected through the online space of
the internet and social media.
Andoni Alonso and Pedro J. Oiarzabal argue that the internet “is
becoming the new harbour for contemporary immigrants. For many, the
Internet is the first window or point of informational entry into their new
destination, prior to physical arrival, as well as a new interactive link back
to their homelands” (2010, 2). Referring to Benedict Anderson’s notion
of imagined communities, they show that cyberspace, “the communal
space digitally created by the interconnection of millions of computerized
machines and people” (ibid.), has become
the virtual home for many diverse and dispersed communities across the
globe. It is another space to reconnect with fellow natives around the world
as well as with those remaining at home. It is a new space of hopes, desires,
dreams, frustrations, and beginnings. (Ibid.)
As I have suggested above, Warsan Shire’s poetry can be situated in a space

that lies in-between oral forms of communication and written poetry, one
that on the one hand conserves Somali poetry traditions and on the other
hand radically revises them. The voices that arise from various states of
refuge, flight and displacement are given another connective and enuncia-
tive platform as they are published mainly online by Shire. Her online and
offline work which falls across different media (sound, music, photogra-
phy, print) not simply imagines a (national) community, but actively and
collectively takes part in constructing a community through exchange and
connection in a networked medium that is generally not centrally con-
trolled or disseminated from above.6 This notion of connectivity and com-
munity building takes up the notion of the “connective migrant” developed
by Dana Diminescu, who argues that the old-fashioned definition
of the migrant based on different forms of rupture considered to be funda-

mental and radical runs into trouble. Alternatively, another organizing prin-
ciple emerges: mobility and connectivity provide a set of variables for
defining the 21st-century migrant. […] Yesterday the motto was: immigrate
and cut your roots; today it would be: circulate and keep in touch. This
evolution seems to mark a new era in the history of migrations: the age of
the connected migrant. (2008, 568)
While not negating the violent displacements experienced by many migra-

tory, diasporic subjects, Diminescu points towards a new connective para-
digm emerging in a twenty-first century that is characterised by innovative
information technologies, new ways to connect between home and host
lands, and advanced forms of communication that allow for “keeping in
touch” in more intimate and circulatory ways through an everyday “cul-
ture of bonds” (567). I argue, then, that the epitome of the connected
migrant living in a connected diaspora can be found in Shire’s work as it
creates new worlds that incorporate many different geographical contexts,
facilitating an exchange that actively crosses political borders. Underlining
this, Victoria Bernal has argued that “diasporas online may invent new
forms of citizenship, community and political practices” (2005, 669). In
232 J. LEETSCH
recording and re-medialising her family’s stories about the trauma of war
and dislocation and in voicing the transoceanic refugee trajectories towards
Europe in her poetry, Shire not only refers to the violent material histories
of uprooting and oppression, but by transmitting them to online spaces
and by making them available to the digital diaspora, her poetry generates
spaces of participation and emancipation which themselves contribute to
new forms of belonging which cross continents and oceans.
Unfoldings: On Page, on Stage

Just as Warsan Shire’s poems create connections—geographically by recre-
ating refugee trajectories across the ocean, virtually by transporting her
Somali family’s oral testimonies into the online spaces of the digital dias-
pora—Shailja Patel’s Migritude expands the kala pani, the transoceanic
passage over the Indian Ocean, and travels across the world. Whereas in
above discussions of Shire’s poetry as a communal digital space I have
focussed on traditional oral poetry traditions and their transmission via
newly emerging media, in the following I will focus on processes of com-
munity building which are enacted via performance, via visual strategies
and via the physicality of Patel’s stage show. Migritude can be regarded as
a text that not only words watery travels, but that through its textile,
material indebtedness to the violent histories of colonisation produces
alternative spaces that further the notion of transoceanic connectivity and
encounter. The book version of Migritude can be seen as a self-referential
text, as a narrated materialisation of the crossing over the Indian Ocean.
Patel herself has said about the Kaya edition that it “was a demanding
exercise in finding the form to fit the content, which was originally created
for theatre” (2015, n. pag.). In creating a book “that embedded the per-
formance script into a larger multi-part narrative”, she has transformed
her stage performance to fit between the covers of a book, one that is
replete with visual and paratextual layers (ibid.). In her initial one-woman
show, Patel carried a suitcase full of saris and stories across the world—and
the book contains the textualisd version of that, playing intricately with its
theatrical origins through the “paratextual apparatus” (Bady 2014, n.
pag.) by including, for example, the Shadow Book. Migritude the book
produces an essentially performative text that takes recourse to the actual
performance of the show. I now want to reverse this approach and exam-
ine the original spoken-word stage show which constitutes the living, but
ultimately absent, heart of Migritude.
Migritude premiered in 2006 as “a 90-minute theatre show complete

with set, choreography, dance, soundscape, and visuals” in Berkeley,
California (Vadde 2016, 223). It has since travelled across the world, with
Patel giving performances in Italy, Zanzibar, Austria, Sweden and Kenya,
among other places. With these global trajectories, the travelling show
hints at the circulation processes and migratory multi-directionality con-
tained within its performance as Patel unpacks a suitcase full of saris to
address her own personal stories of Asian East African belonging, while
simultaneously tracing the historical legacies of colonialism. Just as the
textualised version of Migritude cannot be pinned down as it exceeds
generic boundaries, the stage show cannot be likened to traditional the-
atre. Stemming from a background of slam poetry herself, Patel describes
the show as “part of an evolving form. It’s text-based, not quite poetry,
not traditional staged theatre linked by narrator, but we also have a dancer
who collaborated on the work. I’m drawing on all these different genres”
(Patel 2006, n. pag.). What brings the story of Migritude to life is the
physicality and materiality of the actor’s and dancer’s bodies—the perfor-
mativity of the migrant body on stage makes graspable how memory and
history are mediated through bodies. To this end, Patel has worked with
the dancer Parijat Desai (founder of the dance company PDDC), who
“creatively bridges movements from bharatanatyam, yoga, jazz, modern
dance, and martial arts with her study of the histories of colonization and
global interconnections” (Katrak 2011, 181). According to contemporary
dance scholar Katrak, Desai’s “inventive choreography brings together
Indian and Western dance vocabularies, aesthetics, and cultures, and con-
veys them using music and visual art” (184). Patel herself says of this col-
laboration: “Working with her, I caught a tiny glimpse of the vocabulary
of dance. How the distance of arm from torso, the amount of energy in a
leg, are physical text that the audience reads without even knowing that
they’re reading it” (86).
The materiality of the body on the stage and of the affective embodied
experience connected to that can also be found in Patel’s description of
moving on the stage, how she experiences rhythm and how energy is
transmitted:
Parijat’s feet open the performance of Migritude. When the show begins,
I’m lying on the stage. I can feel the vibrations—the force and precision of
her footwork—under my body. The feet of the goddess, drumming the
world into being. A fellow artist, Robert Karimi, called it the rhythm that set
234 J. LEETSCH
out heartbeats for the rest of the show. Da-DAH-da-da-da-DAH-da-da-da-

DAH! Four beats of the ankle bells. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. Da-DAH-da-
da-da-DAH-da-da-da-DAH! The end of the footbeats is my cue to open
my eyes and begin. (75, 76; emphasis in original)
The possibilities of that corporeal performance, the embodied voice and

the materialised body map the terrain covered by the story of centuries of
displacement and migration. In Patel’s show, performativity can be seen as
a strategy of not only survival but also connection and community, of not
only claiming voice but also claiming voice together. The stage here acts
as a physical site of cultural production and identity construction but also
as a site for the interaction with a life audience, creating an intimate
encounter: “Theatre is relationship. A body in front of other bodies.
Unfiltered, unedited, unmanipulated. In real time. If I screw up on stage,
everyone participates in the moment” (85). In the following I will outline
the physical, material and visual methods employed in the stage show
Migritude which point towards the relational potential inherent to the
performance of the female diasporic body on stage.
Next to the genre-crossing combination of poetry, theatre and dance,
the most important aspect of Migritude’s stage show are the saris. I have
already examined how the narration of the saris and their woven ambi-
patterned fabric hint at the colonial and postcolonial effects and affects of
Empire and how they represent the Indian Ocean trade and the global
routes of colonialism. I will now extend this discussion to incorporate the
saris’ affective materiality on stage where Shailja Patel physically engages
with the cloth of the sari to construct her show, where, in other words, she
literally unfolds her tales by unfolding the saris from the trousseau given
to her by her mother. The physical presence of the cloths on stage build
the foundation for how they are described in the textualised version as
visceral, almost palpable objects. In the chapter “What Came Out of the
Suitcase” these detailed and tactile descriptions of the 17 saris (which cor-
respond to the 17 parts of the show/book) focus not only on shades of
colour but also on the textures, patterns, the saris’ geographical origins
and the specificities of their making. When used on stage, the material of
the saris partakes in telling the various different stories of Migritude—
influencing movement, emotion and engagement between performer and
audience.
The actions performed with these materials are folding and unfolding,
wrapping and unwrapping, hanging, snapping and gathering. One of such
instances of embodied affective use can be found during the first part of
the show, “Idi Amin”, which delineates Amin’s violent expulsion of Asians
from Uganda during the 1970s, an event which influenced Patel’s life in
neighbouring Kenya. Patel interweaves this history with the story of how
women would hide their family’s treasures within the folds of their saris,
“respected because they wore and guarded the family’s wealth” (11). She
then interlinks this with an account of how during the expulsion soldiers
would drag off a woman from her husband and child, now no longer pro-
tected by her dress or her jewellery. Straight after, Patel describes how
secret documents declassified in 2001 show that the West funded Amin’s
military coup which “overthrew Uganda’s democratically elected govern-
ment” because apparently, as British Foreign Office documents state, he
was regarded as “a man we can do business with” (11, emphasis in origi-
nal). In the show, Patel configures these overlappings through performing
with and through the sari cloth: “When I reveal that Britain, Israel, and
the US sponsored Amin’s coup, I’m unwrapping the sari I put on at the
start of the piece. I gather it in folds as it comes off my body. Shake the
folds together with a snap. Hang the sari firmly on a bar as I say, ‘A man
we can do business with’” (78–79; emphasis in original). Through playing
with the sari, she materialises the violent history of oppression of Asians in
East Africa. She unwraps it from her body, undressing herself to represent
a woman’s vulnerability; she gathers it in folds just as the man on the train
gathers his child on his arms as his wife is taken away; she shakes the folds
together with a snap as if to echo the sudden violence and then she hangs
it firmly on a bar when she repeats the phrases from the British documents
to signal the end of the sari, the death of the woman, the fate of the Asians
expelled from their homes. In self-assertively taking control over the fabric
of the sari, Patel reorganises how history is told, affectively and empathi-
cally from a diasporic female African Asian perspective.
As can be seen not only from my analysis but also from the only video
that exists of one of Migritude’s performances, the story Patel is telling is
continuously expressed through the movement of fabric in the perfor-
mance. She packs and unpacks the saris into and from her red suitcase, the
ultimate epitome of travel (Patel 2007, 00:10–00:50, 03:29–03:38).
Snatching and tossing, folding and unfolding the clothes (01:58–03:00,
05:55–06:18), she reconstructs and deconstructs personal and political
histories of displacement and migration. In chapter 10, “The Sky Has Not
Changed Colour” (2010, 44–48), which revolves around Maasai rape vic-
tims of British soldiers in military training camps in Kenya through
236 J. LEETSCH
alternating poetry with survivor testimonies, she at first wanted to “turn

her back to the audience while speaking of the violation” (88) but then
developed a choreography with the dancer Parijat Desai:
Parijat and I enter lying flat on our backs, pushing ourselves across the stage
with our feet while pulling a length of black cloth with us. The black cloth
becomes a river, a demarcation of space and time […] The fabric had to be
folded just so at the start in order to unfold evenly into a long line. […] At
May the redness overtake them, I pick up the river cloth and begin to loop it
around my elbow and shoulder. Pull the energy tighter and tighter, bind the
curse into its vortex. (88–89; emphasis in original)
Trailing, pulling and looping the black cloth, Patel constructs a narrative
that runs parallel to the survivor testimonies narrated in the scene, and by
finally bringing body and cloth together, she not only expresses the corpo-
real violence of sexual violation but also speaks a curse against the assail-
ants in a powerful performance of anger and retribution. In the same
scene, this physical mediation of story becomes evident in yet another
example. She describes the stereotyping Western perception of African
cultures, like the Maasai culture: “They are the noble savages, staring out
from coffee table books. Africa Adorned. The Last Nomads. Backdrops
and extras for Vogue fashion shoots. Stock ingredients for tourist bro-
chures. The Maasai are a global brand” (45). During the performance, she
rips out pages from a tourist photo book of the Maasai and hands them to
the audience (89). She physically rips apart the vacuous stereotypes repre-
sented in the glossy coffee table book while describing the rapes of Maasai
women by British soldiers, with over 650 allegations covering 35 years,
from 1965 to 2001.
Patel’s strategy here does not merely break the fourth wall, it implicates
the audience into what she has been showing them. By letting the materi-
ality of the saris and the ripped pages spill over the stage into the space of
the audience, she not only articulates a warning and a critique but also
creatively engages in an act of sharing. This sharing of history, memories
and stories transcends the stage and moves into the room inhabited by the
audience who then no longer merely consume the performance but them-
selves become part of it. This is perhaps most evident when looking at the
end of the show:
In the finale of the show, the audience has finally earned the right to see the
saris in all their splendour. Because they’ve engaged with the violence and
violation beneath. Sat through the unbearable and absorbed it. Listened to
the voices of women from within the bootprint of Empire. They’ve paid for
the experience of beauty, sensuality—and they understand the cost. I open
the suitcase fully, shake out the twin set of khangas from Zanzibar—black
and white, with ambi patterns—and spread them on the floor. Unpack the
saris onto them, one by one. Show off the borders and embroidery. I toss
the bright green georgette in the air—one of my favourite moments in the
show. Trace the silver zari on the heavy chocolate silk. Hold the softest san-
dalwood Mysore silk to my face and inhale. Wrap the turquoise blue around
me. (95–96)
The audience is finally allowed to see the complete set of saris, whereas
before they had only gotten bits and pieces. Generously spreading the saris
across the stage floor and thus sharing them with the audience, Patel not
only constructs a personal connection between herself and the people in
the room but also creates a textile connection that reaches from the weav-
ers whose hands were chopped off in nineteenth-century India, to the
survivors of rape in twentieth-century Kenya, and into the present. Sharing
both material and histories with the audience, Patel engages in an act of
community building. Describing her performances as “interactive co-
creation of the stage” (86), she points towards the fact that the themes she
engages with are not static, self-contained or one-directional. With
Migritude, then, she has initiated the formation of an intimate commu-
nity, not only within the small theatre where the initial Berkeley perfor-
mance was staged but also all over the world. This notion of interaction,
connectivity and conversation is not only privy to the performances but
also echoed in the multi-modal text of the book. As Aarthi Vadde argues,
these additions extend “the idea of collaboration […] wherein many par-
ticipate in the ‘journey’ of the work by entering into it at different points
in its life, from conception to performance to translation. Those who enter
into its life also crucially extend that life, making the model for the pro-
duction of Migritude more evolutionary than stationary” (2016, 225).
The materiality of the text Migritude in its Kaya Press edition with its
paratextual, visual and intermedial layers constitutes a continuation of the
affective embodied materiality of the stage show which is replete with
dance, movement and the multi-layered, multi-coloured cloth of the saris.
Both text and stage performance taken together, intertwined as they are as
238 J. LEETSCH
different medialisations of the same story, create a migritudinal, migratory

poetics which extends the transoceanic kala pani passage and the trade
routes across the Indian Ocean to reach around the world, following
Patel’s own diasporic movements as well as the text’s routes through dif-
ferent media.
What I hope has become clear in the discussions of the aesthetic, for-
mal, textual and generic crossings generated by Shire’s and Patel’s works
is that their poetry is a travelling one—one that incorporates movement
but one that also enacts this movement. The texts seem to continually
transform, develop and disseminate along digital or performative paths. In
both Shire and Patel, we are confronted with re-mediations which con-
tinue the transoceanic passages contained within the narratives of dias-
pora, migration and refuge. The ocean as ultimate connective medium
made of water returns in texts that themselves connect via various media
and medialisations across the world. Through conjoining different media
and different textualities as well as through extending their works beyond
their generic conventions, both poets articulate the fraught intimacies
between Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe in a worldly, world-making
space decidedly marked by notions of communality and conviviality.
Wording the Wound: Connective

and Collective Love
Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound. But the thing about
open wounds is that, well, you aren’t ignoring it. You’re healing; the fresh
air can get to it. It’s honest. You aren’t hiding who you are. You aren’t rot-
ting. People can give you advice on how to heal without scarring badly. But
on the other hand there are some people who’ll feel uncomfortable around
you. Some will even point and laugh. But we all have wounds. Warsan Shire,
Interview with Well & Often (2012a, n. pag.)
I amplify and valorise the care economies that sustain and repair the bodies
on the street, suture the wounds and regenerate the worlds destroyed
by warfare.
—Shailja Patel, Interview with Wasafiri (2015, n. pag.)
I have ended my analyses of the ocean space and the quasi-spatial configu-
rations of the internet and the stage with the contention that connectivity,
collectivity and community lie at the forefront of Warsan Shire’s and
Shailja Patel’s work. I will now further develop these ideas and align them
with my examinations of the multi-layered formations of love and desire

discussed throughout this book. In every chapter, I related world-making
strategies to the structures of love and desire in order to productively
trouble both concepts. In Adichie’s Americanah, the transnational
romance story between Ifemelu and Obinze moved back and forth
between Africa, America and Europe to then not only arrive in Lagos but
also at a happy (if conventional) ending, while Zadie Smith’s postcolonial
London gave space to affective urban relationships such as non-
heteronormative families and tentative, contested homosexual/homo-
social female friendships, whereas in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching
the haunted house not only contained dangerous stories about the nation
but also the wilful, foundation-shattering queer love story between
Miranda and Ore. Such connections between love- and world-making
return in Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s poetry as they both speak out
about the specifically female experiences of displacement that can only be
approached through notions of the relational, the empathetic and the
affective. Both articulate the need for a deeply human interconnectedness
posited against the horrors and suffering caused by geographical and cor-
poreal dislocations and ruptures. In the following, I will connect the sex-
ual, romantic and familial encounters depicted in both poet’s work to my
discussions in prior chapters and argue for a new mode of transoceanic
love: one that is marked by a more interconnective, reparative approach.
To outline this connective notion of love at work in both poet’s ocean-
crossing works, I will utilise tools offered by cultural trauma studies and
resultant notions of “bearing witness” and practices of “taking care”.
The very principle lying at the heart of discourses about trauma is the
recognition that trauma “is manifested in the impossibility of knowing and
communicating the traumatic event or experience” (Ganteau and Onega
2014, 2). As Ruth Leys states, “trauma was originally the term for a surgi-
cal wound, conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective
envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic global reaction in the
entire organism” (2000, 19). Trauma not only denotes a rupturing of
surface or outer layer but also has more far-reaching and widespread impli-
cations, ultimately disrupting any logical narration of the self and the
world around it. The after-effects of this initial wound reverberate both
into the present and future while rendering ungraspable the past event,
and often result in loops of traumatic repetition and repression. This
inability to recognise what has happened is initially mirrored in the
inability to narrativise the traumatic event; but as cultural trauma studies
240 J. LEETSCH
have shown, “literary and cultural texts have increasingly become privi-
leged spaces for the representation of individual and collective traumas
[…], arguably providing a means of transforming traumatic memories into
narrative memories” (Andermahr and Pellicer-Ortín 2013, 2). The poten-
tial inherent to trauma narratives lies in the fact that they paradoxically and
perplexingly give voice to something that cannot stay below the surface,
that breaks out of its silent encasement and ruptures the skin. Or, in the
words of Leslie Jamison in her essay collection The Empathy Exams:
“Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries” (2014, 5).
Trauma is neither silent nor confined. It crosses boundaries and makes
itself heard and acknowledged. To narrativise trauma means to work
through it—to acknowledge both the collective trauma which “often
correlates with moments of historical crisis (in our age, the two world
wars, the Holocaust, the horrors of colonisation and its aftermath, the
spectre of terrorism)” and the less overt “individual and structural trau-
mas associated with patriarchal ideology, unmitigated capitalism and glo-
balisation” (Ganteau and Onega 2014, 1). I am interested in exactly this
activity of giving words (and worlds) to experiences of trauma which, I
argue, happens in comparable ways in the poems by Shire and Patel.
Through engaging in intimate as well as collective processes of witness-
ing and listening, they turn into language often unspoken histories and
unarticulated memories. As I have shown throughout this chapter, such
acts of articulation may take many different forms: recording voices on
Dictaphones, folding and unfolding cloth on a stage and engaging with
the pasts and presents of East African countries via transoceanic channels
of communication. Literature has come to be “one of the privileged loci
of testimony, being endowed with the power of saying/complementing
what other types of narratives, including history, cannot say” (3). My
contention for the following discussion is that in saying what cannot be
said, a process of reparation and regeneration is initiated—one that is
deeply embedded in the poetic and affective work done by Patel and Shire.
As can be seen in the epigraphs I have used for this subchapter, both
poets actively engage in the work of giving words to trauma: Shire speaks
of the open wound which needs to be exposed in order for it to heal, Patel
of attending to violated bodies and stitching up wounds. Exemplary for
these acts of reparation through witnessing is the way both poets reiterate
sexual trauma and the mutilation of especially female bodies, paying atten-
tion to the various wounds caused by harmful gendered and racialised
practices. Shire’s poem “Mermaids” (2015a, 13), for example, deals with
female genital mutilation and its cultural, religious implications. This topic
gives rise to an articulation of the intimate and complicated relation

between femininity and violence:
Sometimes it’s tucked into itself,

sewn up
like the lips of a prisoner.
After the procedure, the girl learns
how to walk again, mermaid with new legs
soft knees buckling under new sinless body.
Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says,
If your mother survived it, you can.
Cut, cut, cut.
But Mother, did you truly survive it?
The carving, the warm blade against
your inner thigh. Silencing
the devil’s tongue between your legs.
On an episode of America’s Next Top Model
the contestants huddle around Amina after her
confession
touching her arm
with concern
for her pleasure
Asking questions: Can you even feel
anything down there? The camera zooms in
on a Georgia O’Keefe painting.
[…]
(13, 14; emphases in original)
Interweaving the depiction of violent patriarchal family structures with a

critique of Western perception of “Africa”, Shire creates a multi-layered
picture of contemporary Somali society—she also, however, pays painstak-
ing attention to the trauma of the corporeal act of genital mutilation itself
(“Cut, cut, cut. […] The carving, the warm blade against / your inner
thigh”)7 and how the girl lives with it afterwards: “How to walk again,
mermaid with new legs”. What is of utmost importance here, I think, are
the last two lines of Shire’s poem:
Two girls lie in bed beside each other holding mirrors

under the mouths of their skirts,
comparing wounds.
(14)
242 J. LEETSCH
These lines make two girls out of the solitary one, creating an interper-
sonal connection and underlining the importance of female solidarity and
empathy. Comparing wounds, two girls who have experienced the same
trauma, learn to look at each other and at themselves through mirrors.
They shed the shameful shroud of silence, which is symbolised by the lift-
ing of their skirts, literally articulating their wounds by opening “the
mouths of their skirts”. They share with each other their mutilated bodies
and consequently also strategies to deal with these new bodies—through
a feminine support system. Paying attention to their wounds, the girls
enter a process of healing.
In Migritude, Shailja Patel similarly bears witness to the wounds caused
by the violence brought upon women’s bodies. I have already outlined
some of these acts of affective, ethical witnessing above, but this process of
not hiding the open wound becomes perhaps even clearer in one of the
first poems in the book, called “History Lesson” (15), which juxtaposes
the official national and implicitly nationalist history of Kenya taught in
school against the unofficial oral testimonies (or herstories) of female rape
survivors considered too shameful to be included into the history books:
Less than twenty years before I was born, there was a gulag in my country,
I knew nothing of it until 2006. This is the history I learned in school
(Standard Three to Standard Five, Hospital Hill Primary School, Nairobi)
[…] This is the history we didn’t learn. […] This is the history we read. […]
This is the history we didn’t read. Oral testimonies from women who sur-
vived the camps.
The white officers had no shame. They would rape

women in full view of everyone. Swing women by the
hair. Put women in sacks, douse in paraffin, set alight.
They burned us with cigarette butts. Forced us to walk on
hot coals.
They put cayenne pepper and water in our vaginas.
Petrol and water in our vaginas. Forced in with a bottle
pushed by a boot. (15–18; emphases in original)
Like Shire, Patel does not shy away from the embodied realities of sexual
violence against women—their suffering gives voice to the trauma of rape
and mutilation. Again, the cloth of the sari is utilised to make visible this
trauma: “The crimson sari shaped the choreography of this piece. Told me
it wanted to be knotted for the oral testimonies of the women in the
camps. Each knot a dead child. When I lay the knotted sari in a circle, then
gather it up in my arms, it feels like a part of my own body. I hang it on
the bar on the stage: a glowing rope of knots, a testament to children
killed by Empire” (80). Like Shire, who does not isolate the girl in
“Mermaids” but creates sisterhood, Patel initiates solidarity in materially
connecting individual oral testimonies through the cloth of the blood-red
sari (“each knot a dead child”) which first becomes a circle and then part
of her own body. Both poets create testimonies—testimonies of the
wounds women have to endure, caused by both black and white men. But
in uncovering the wound, they also let fresh air get to it and prevent it
from rotting.
While being conscious of the important work of bearing witness to the
difficult overlaps between sexualised and racialised violence both poets so
intricately engage in, I also want to argue that Shire and Patel extend the
female experiences they both describe beyond an attention to wounds,
violence and hurt, to more positively connoted female sexualities and
female desires. Both poets portray the female body, which continuously
resists attempts to make it unreadable through sexual violence and instead
pronounces its own agency. This embodied resistance is materialised in the
texts through the depiction of female characters who wilfully engage in
self-empowered erotic acts of love and desire. Trauma does not become
the one defining element of the girls and women depicted in the poems;
reparation may also take shape in acts of self-love and erotic love, brought
to light and into language in many different ways throughout Shire’s and
Patel’s work.
That being said, however, there is also another strategy connected to
female sexuality and desire to be found in both poets—one that differs
greatly from the way love was being imagined in the novels discussed
throughout the previous chapters of this book. The laying bare, suturing
and then healing of wounds is frequently impelled by outright rejections
of sexual, erotic and often heteronormative love. At a 2014 event at the
Southbank Centre Festival of Love (part of the biennial Poetry International
Festival, which was set up by Ted Hughes in 1967) where poets presented
the world’s 50 best love poems, Shire tellingly read her poem “For women
who are difficult to love” (Knowles 2014, n. pag.):
you are a horse running alone

and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
244 J. LEETSCH
to a burning house […]

you dizzy him, you are unbearable […]
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake […]
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love. (2012b, 6, 00:00–01:56)
Here, a woman is spun into being who is volatile and terrifying, who does
not fit within normative understandings of femininity and who rejects
romance. Another woman who similarly rattles the cage of the desirable
female subject through acts of refusal and resistance can be found in
Shire’s poem “House” (2015a), where the female body becomes a maze
for male lovers to lose themselves in, to be locked in and never let out again:
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes, the men—they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men—they come with hammers.
Nin soo joog laga waayo, soo jiifso aa laga helaa,8
I said Stop, I said No and he did not listen. (19, emphasis in original)
Following what is clearly an account of sexual violence and coercion, Shire

describes what may happen to these men who do not listen, in a powerful
reversal of the practice of female genital mutilation (carried out by men on
helpless women): “Perhaps she has a plan, perhaps she takes him back to
hers / only for him to wake up hours later in a bathtub full of ice, / with
a dry mouth, looking down at his new, neat procedure” (19). The speaker
of the poem goes on to liken her body to a building that traps men:
The bigger my body is, the more locked rooms there are, the more men
come with keys. Anwar didn’t push it all the way in, I still think about what
he could have opened up inside of me. Basil came and hesitated at the door
for three years. Johnny with the blue eyes came with a bag of tools he had
used on other women: one hairpin, a bottle of bleach, a switchblade and a
jar of Vaseline. Yusuf called out God’s name through the keyhole and no
one answered. Some begged, some climbed the side of my body looking for
a window, some said they were on their way and did not come. […] I should
tell you about my first love who found a trapdoor under my left breast nine
years ago, fell in and hasn’t been seen since. Every now and then I feel some-
thing crawling up my thigh. He should make himself known. I’d probably
let him out. I hope he hasn’t bumped in to [sic] the others, the missing boys
from small towns, with pleasant mothers, who did bad things and got lost in
the maze of my hair. I treat them well enough, a slice of bread, if they’re
lucky a piece of fruit. Except for Johnny with the blue eyes, who picked my
locks and crawled in. Silly boy chained to the basement of my fears, I play
music to drown him out. (20)
While “House” can be read as a metaphor for sex and sexual violence, it
also clearly denotes the female body as both fortress that cannot be entered
and a maze in which to get lost and starve to death—forceful and danger-
ous imageries which reject any notion of submissiveness and passivity.
Through these intricate depictions of fractious female bodies, Shire pro-
duces corporealities that resist the trauma and silencing which so often
seems to be the only possibility for Somali women. As Pratt and Rosner
argue, “the body, injured imaginatively and actually, testifies to historical
violence, but it is also a site to resist coercive and deforming forces and a
place for self-actualization or, at the least, a place from which to negotiate
with social norms” (2012, 10). Shire’s poems focus on women’s relation-
ship to their own and other female bodies without necessarily including
romance or erotic love and sometimes even outright rejecting them: “At
parties I point to my body and say This is where love comes to die. Welcome,
come in, make yourself at home. Everyone laughs; they think I’m joking”
(“The House”, 21; emphasis in original). The body is where love itself
comes to die, thus denoting an autonomy from restrictive forms of desire
and sexuality that demand obedience and pliancy.
In Shailja Patel’s poetry, sexuality is not as overtly discussed as in Shire,
but we can nevertheless find similar attempts to define female agency and
to articulate sovereignty from traditional and essentialist concepts of love
and romance: in fact, the very reason for why Migritude even exists can be
traced to Patel’s refusal to conform to heteronormative conventions of
love and marriage. The trousseau of saris and jewellery, which constitutes
the foundation for Migritude, is bequeathed to her when her mother
realises that she will never marry. In the poem “Born to a Law”, Patel
246 J. LEETSCH
defines the meaning of her trousseau: “Trousseau. / The wealth a woman

takes / when she leaves the home of her parents. / Etymology: Old
French. / From trousse—/ bundle—and trousser—/ to tie up” (61).
Instead of being tied up in the bond of marriage and moving into the
home of a husband, she has moved out into the world. As Kulbaga argues,
“in Migritude, the sari comes to evoke a number of associations: norma-
tive patriarchal constructions of women and marriage; maternal invest-
ment in a daughter’s nonnormative life path; a queer feminist aesthetic
and politics” (2016, 77). Patel’s non-normative sexuality is only hinted at
in the text, for example, in “Dreaming in Gujarati” when one of the words
Gujarati cannot give her is “lesbian” (51) and she turns away from the idea
of motherhood and reproduction (“The children in my dreams / speak
Gujarati / turn their trusting faces to the sun / say to me / care for us
nurture us / in my dreams I shudder and I run”, 50; emphasis in original)
or when her mother talks about her “sexual experimentation and adven-
tures” (60) in one of the sections narrated by her. What can be said for
certain, however, is that Patel not only traces female resistances but that
she herself, through the act of performing and writing Migritude, gives
voice to her own autobiographical struggle for emancipation and freedom.
In “Swore I’d Never Wear Clothes I Couldn’t Run or Fight In”, she
reconfigures what for her constitutes first and foremost the restrictive
meaning of the sari to include other versions of femininity as well:
As a child, I knew of women strangled in their saris.

Women doused in paraffin and burned in their saris.
Saris made you vulnerable. A walking target. Saris made
you weak.
No one told me about women who went into battle—in
their saris.
Worked the fields—in their saris.
Why didn’t anyone tell me about women who laboured
on construction sites in their saris? (21)
The saris not only stand for weakness and vulnerability but can also be
read as resistance, denoting a persistent and resilient strength as they wrap
around women who disobediently evade restrictive gendered norms in
order to run, battle and work. Patel’s resistance to normative concepts of
romance and desire can also be traced in her reaction to another gift she
receives from her mother, the mangal sutra. A kind of necklace which is
usually tied around the bride’s neck by the groom at Hindu weddings is
given to her instead by her mother. In one of her letters included in
Migritude, Patel’s mother explains her actions:
Yes, I know, a mangal sutra necklace is normally given to a woman by her

husband. However, both your sisters, Shruti and Sneha, each have a mangal
sutra now. You know we have always treated all three of you equally. Since
you have stubbornly refused to get married, it seems your mangal sutra has
to come from your mother instead of your husband! (59–60)
Recognising the fact that her daughter Shailja refuses to integrate into
heteronormative structures such as marriage, her mother gives her the
mangal sutra herself, thus consciously displacing male influence and recon-
figuring it through alternative female connections. Patel herself says of the
mangal sutra tradition and her mother’s actions: “As a teenage feminist, I
put mangal sutras in the same category as wedding rings: a symbol of
bondage, something that branded a woman as chattel. Moveable property.
When my mother gave me one, I was stunned. It meant: Your chosen path
is no less serious, no less worthy of ceremonial recognition, than your sisters’
marriages” (92, 93; emphasis in original). Here, the ultimate symbol of
heterosexual marriage is turned around, “queered”, and denotes now not
the intimate connection between husband and wife, but the equally inti-
mate female connection between mother and daughter, pointing towards
familial, relational support and a showcasing of empathy. Patel continues:
I couldn’t have imagined breaking the rule that mangal sutras were only for
married women. That they could only be given to a woman by her husband.
In this act, my mother showed me up as the traditionalist. Appointed herself
the revolutionary. Her gift showed me that […] the mangal sutra could be
a blueprint for a creative life. An activist life. My life. Intention. Declaration.
Execution. (93)
While heterosexual love is not directly displaced by homosexual love (like

in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching or, to a lesser extent, in Zadie
Smith’s London novels), a queer replacement takes place nevertheless—
exploring mother-daughter relationships and familial love, which then
evolves to include other women as well: “Part of what Migritude brings
out is what it means to be a woman in an empire, what happens to mothers
248 J. LEETSCH
and daughters, and then my own journey, how I came into my own body,
to my relationship to femininity, to saris, what it means to be a woman in
the world” (2006, n. pag.). I agree with Kulbaga, who states that the
mangal sutra as well as the trousseau of saris evoke “a feminist archive of
value earned other-wise, through careful attention to material histories
and legacies and through the labour (poetic, psychic, familial) of world-
reconstruction after violence” (2016, 77). The possibly queer resignifica-
tion of restrictive and normative sexuality goes hand in hand with a
self-assured constitution of female self-hood and female relationality in
order to counter gendered and racialised violence. Patel herself says of this
reparative potential: “I’m thinking deeply about writing that imagines and
nurtures ethical life—life-affirming writing, writing against the splitting
and dehumanisation that surrounds us” (2015, n. pag.). Patel not only
articulates the overcoming of violence and trauma but even more so points
towards the power inherent to empathetic and sympathetic female rela-
tionships proliferating throughout the pages of Migritude.
These structures of affect that decidedly focus not on romantic or erotic
love can also be found in Shire who similarly traces love that is not con-
fined to only two people, but that spreads through families and family-like
communities. As Kameelah Janan Rasheed states, Shire’s “poetry carries
the energy of multiple women, the depth of many generations, and the
weight of many lives lived” (Shire 2012a, n. pag.). This becomes most
apparent in the poem “Tea with Our Grandmothers” (2011a) in which
Shire follows multi-branched female family genealogies:
The morning your habooba died

I thought of my ayeeyo, the woman
I was named after, Warsan Baraka,
skin dark like tamarind flesh
who died grinding cardamom […]
Or my mother’s mother, Noura
with the honeyed laugh, who
broke cinnamon barks between
her palms, […] with broken
Swahili and stubborn Italian […]
and Doris, the mother of your
English rose, named after
the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys
the Welsh in your blood, from the land
of Cymry, your grandmother who

dreams of clotted cream in her tea
through the swell of diabetes […]
then your habooba Al Sura,
[…], with three lines on
each cheek, a tally of surviving
the woman who cooled your tea
pouring it […], until the steam
would rise like a ghost. (33)
This poem traces not only the feelings between two lovers united in
mourning, but through an act of relational remembrance pursues whole
generations of female family members: the grandmothers Warsan, Noura,
Doris and Al Sura are intricately interwoven through a play with meta-
phors and images of tea—honey, cardamom, clotted cream, cinnamon,
cooling the tea. This produces a tenuous connection to other spaces
(Sudan, Somalia, Wales) and other times, crossing generational and geo-
graphical borders. Shire herself argues that her poetry works as “geneal-
ogy, preserving the names of the women came before me [sic]. To connect,
honour, to confront. It differs with each family member, with my grand-
mother I would record our conversations, to serve as witness to her life, to
sit at her feet in reverence” (2015b, n. pag.). This notion of family-
building and of deeply affective, affectionate love is mirrored in the titles
of both her poetry collections: Her Blue Body references one of Shire’s best
friends, Yosra El-Essawy, who died of cancer and to whose memory a lot
of the poems in the pamphlet are implicitly dedicated, and Teaching My
Mother How to Give Birth is a direct translation from a Somali proverb in
which the children assume that they are much wiser than their parents
(Shire 2016, n. pag.). The very idea of a daughter teaching her mother
how to give birth indicates a chronology turned on its head, and, as I
would argue, hints at strategies of care and empathy that escape usual
ordering principles whilst possibly repairing generational and inher-
ited trauma.
Regarding the relationship to her parents, and especially her mother,
Shire has said: “Her experience with having me and her introduction into
womanhood and motherhood […] and the themes of adolescence and
sisterhood and being a woman […]; the poems are around that” (ibid.).
Significantly, the mother-daughter relationship is invoked from the very
beginning with the collection’s epigraph which quotes Audre Lorde:
250 J. LEETSCH
“Mother, loosen my tongue or adorn me with a lighter burden”. The

poem from which this line is taken is titled “Call” and can be read as exem-
plary of both Shire’s and Patel’s construction of cross-generational, cross-
oceanic female archives of memory, solidarity and love. In “Call”, Lorde
evokes a number of different women, mythical and historical: “Aido
Hwedo”,9 “she who scrubs the Capitol toilets”, “gnarled Harriet”, “the
young guerrilla”, “Thandi Modise—winged girl of Soweto”, “fire-
tongued Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete”, “Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou
Hamer / Assata Shakur and Yaa Asanteva / my mother and Winnie
Mandela / are singing in my throat” ([1986] 2000, 1015–1017). All
these different women, deities and political activists are summoned while
“on worn kitchen stools and tables / we are piecing our weapons together
/ scraps of different histories” (1015). As Sagri Dhairyam argues, the
poem as a collective chorus of voices calls up “representations of lost his-
tories, of nameless victims to oppression, of material and specific divini-
ties” in order to rewrite “aporias of discourse that allow oppression to be
repeated in different contexts” (1992, 247). The poem asserts Lorde’s
membership in a community of struggle and black female power which
stretches from past to modern times and which traces the legacies of
women activists through matrilineal orders. In using this as her epigraph
for Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth, Shire “loosens her tongue” and
consciously places herself and her poetry in Audre Lorde’s tradition of
female solidarity—continually foregrounding female desire, female con-
nectedness and female world rebuilding.
Transoceanic Communities of Care

The work by Shire and Patel is filled with a plethora of female relation-
ships: mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, friends and cousins; a
more explicit and encompassing continuation of the communities and kin-
ship structures I discussed in Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi, these women
as imagined by Shire and Patel constitute a female community that not
only extends across generations and across disparate spaces but also
extends traditional notions of love as being restricted to couples or iso-
lated twosomes. Creating multi-perspectival, multi-tonal layers of affect,
the poems in Migritude and the collections by Shire evoke a sense of a
compassionate commonality and community. In this last section, I want to
argue that Shire and Patel engage in something that I term “taking care”;
an affective and ethical strategy of looking out for each other across oceans.
Drawing on Geraldine Pratt’s and Victoria Rosner’s work on the intercon-

nectedness of the global and the intimate, I want to assess the work of
reparation undertaken by both Shire and Patel as a worlded, diasporic
feminist practice of creating communities of care. Notions of care first
came to the forefront of feminist discourse when a so-called ethics of care
was developed as a specifically feminist methodology in the second half of
the twentieth century. It foregrounds practices of empathy and compas-
sion in interpersonal relationships, as conceptualised amongst others by
American ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982). While accused
of conforming to binary gender oppositions and relegating women to the
restricted spaces of carers, the ideas put forth by Gilligan have been taken
on and developed into a more critical ethics of relationality by intersec-
tional and queer feminists, emphasising an ethics “rooted in receptivity,
relatedness, and responsiveness” (Noddings 1984, 2). Pratt and Rosner
have rightly argued that often, and especially when it comes to specifically
female engagement with intimacy and global processes of displacement,
“we tend to associate care with proximity, and we have few conceptual
tools for imagining geographies of care beyond the familial or national
community” (2012, 12). I posit that the poems by the two East African
writers provide exactly those tools for imagining love and care that reaches
across borders—be they borders of the nuclear family, the nation-state or
even boundaries of continents demarcated by shore- and coastlines. In
wording the wound, in even wilfully and often aggressively wielding the
wound, the poems act as healing agents for the trauma of exile and suffer-
ing. They make possible the thinking of a global collective solidarity. Of
course, one could argue that the naive “fantasy of an unearned global sis-
terhood is well and truly dead” (17) in a neo-liberal globalised world that
is still marked by immense power hierarchies and the suffering of those on
the wrong end of that hierarchy. But, as Pratt and Rosner rightly go on to
explain, “aspirations to global solidarity and universal norms are not
[dead], and they involve new ways of thinking of both the global and the
intimate” (ibid.). The vulnerability and suffering witnessed and then
turned into poetry by Shire and Patel does exactly that. It creates an
awareness and an inherently ethical engagement with death, wounds and
violation as it shows women fighting against oppression and caring for
each other. The love described and generated in Shire and Patel’s works
does different things—for one, it takes up the empowering and reparative
notions of erotic and romantic entanglements described in the African
diasporic novels I have analysed throughout this book, but it also expands
252 J. LEETSCH
these to include other, more collective and connective models of love.

What I have repeatedly found in my readings are bonds of affection and
affiliation that are not purely sexual or erotic nor merely familial but that
in their inclusive intimacy repair trauma as they spin transoceanic commu-
nities of care.
These communities of care that arise from witnessing trauma and
wounds gesture towards notions of an ethical engagement with others.
They showcase a “commitment to building rather than assuming solidar-
ity” (Pratt and Rosner, 2012, 18), a building (and rebuilding) that comes
to light in poetic works that reconstruct the troubled trajectories of
migrants and refugees in a world of colonialism and globalisation. They
articulate responsibility by focussing on feminist acts of care that are deeply
rooted in discourses of repair and regeneration: “unlike the sentimental-
ized models of [colonial] parental care and protection sanctioned by the
neoliberal state”, these acts of care “prioritize those most violently affected
by both state power and the interarticulation of bio- and geo-politics:
migrants, women and queers of color, black and brown bodies considered
disposable and erased or made to disappear” (Kulbaga 2016, 77–78). This
parallels what Judith Butler has recently argued for in her work on precari-
ous, ungrievable lives and a global ethics of political and personal obliga-
tions. In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? she states that ungrievable
lives are “those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they
already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from
the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are lost
and destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed” (2010, xix). An ungrievable
life “is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it
has never counted as a life at all” (38). Thinking about resultant notions
of who counts a human and whose lives count as lives, she arrives at the
conclusion that “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially griev-
able, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation,
underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to
violence and death” (25). But in the telling of stories that revolve around
these lives usually made unreadable and ungrievable may lie the potential
to win back the ability to grieve and mourn for those made other to us.
When we engage with affects such as grief, rage, love and passion as they
are worded in stories of suffering, we may find a way to community and
empathy: these stories “tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport
us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes
fatally, irreversibly” (Undoing Gender 2004, 20). In my opinion, the
connection between voicing trauma and the creation of empathy and sys-
tems of care and solidarity lies at the forefront of Warsan Shire’s and Shailja
Patel’s poetry. The auto/fictional collaborative testimonies provided in
their poems not only create communities within the poetic works but
through their collaborative character but also open themselves up to the
reader, providing access to traumatic histories and ultimately producing to
possibility of an ethical engagement across cultures.
The stories told in Migritude and Teaching My Mother How to Give
Birth and Her Blue Body make possible an empathetic engagement with
cultural differences, across national boundaries. Empathy, of course, is
“the affective act of seeing from another’s perspective and imaginatively
experiencing her thoughts, emotions and predicaments” (Pedwell 2016,
5) and consequently related to a capacity to acknowledge others humanely
and ethically. Importantly however, as Leslie Jamison shows regarding its
etymology, it also “comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and
pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter
another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigra-
tion and customs, border crossing by way of query” (2014, 6). As I have
argued throughout this chapter, border crossing is the foundational prin-
ciple of Shire’s and Patel’s poetry. Expressing a plurality of geographical,
historical and emotional alignments, the poems replace Western-dominated
world orders as they take off from the liminal space of the East African
coast line to then spread across the ocean, along refugee itineraries through
the Northern Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean or directly across the
kala pani to Asia and back again, constantly intermingling departure and
arrival. By focussing on the watery routes of the Indian Ocean, the poems
thus deeply unsettle the territorial logic of nation-states and belonging.
Shire’s and Patel’s transoceanic routes assuredly rewrite the ocean as an
open space of possibility, imagining shared and liveable futures. The poems
can also aesthetically, formally and generically be regarded as works of
border crossing, as they are deeply collaborative. As open and participa-
tory archives of memory, they are not written by one person but consist of
a communal conglomeration of different perspectives and stories. They
are mobile texts which move through multiple spaces and exist in multiple
media formats: on stage, as digital album, as printed text or as Tumblr
post. The vivid (after)lives of the texts themselves points towards the
establishment of circuits of interconnectedness and interdependency.
Through travelling with these diasporic, migritudinal texts, we as readers
are being implicated, become part of the communities of care opened up
254 J. LEETSCH
by Shire and Patel. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has declared in Feminism

Without Borders, “in these very fragmented times it is both very difficult to
build these alliances and also never more important to do so” (2003,
250). Through engaging with the poetic imaginations of these two poets,
we are invited to cross borders and enter into a relational space of solidar-
ity—a generous and participatory invitation that reaches across the ocean
and in doing so attests to the importance of transnational, transoceanic
coalitions which transcend divisions of race, class and gender.
Notes
1. For all its invaluable insights, Gilroy’s concept has also rightfully been criti-
cised for disregarding Africa as the point of origin for these migratory move-
ments, for universalising and oversimplifying the experience of the Middle
Passage and for not looking beyond the Anglo-centric, African American
world (Zeleza 2005). While attuned to the complexities of race and class, it
also fails to pay attention to its own gender hierarchies and androcentrism.
2. Shire herself has described the origin points of the poem in an interview
with The Guardian. According to the article by Bausells and Shearlaw, she
wrote it “after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled
troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. The
group gave a ‘warm’ welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the aban-
doned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as
cold and cramped. The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped
to his death off the roof. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the
harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: ‘I wrote the
poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived
around grief and trauma in that way’” (Bausells and Shearlaw 2015, n. pag.).
3. As there is no definite version of “Home” available online, I am using a
voice recording of Shire herself reading the poem, incorporated into a
YouTube video, as my reference (Shire 2017).
4. Patel herself says about her indebtedness to Négritude poets: “When I
coined the term I was looking for a word that would draw from the legacy
and traditions of Négritude that reclaimed and celebrated African cultures,
black cultures around the world as powerful and central in their own right.
[…] I wanted to claim that same power for migrant cultures” (Patel 2013,
n. pag.).
5. In an interview, Warsan Shire was asked the following about the gendered
specificities of the buraanbur: “Somalis are famed for their poetry. Buraanbur
is a huge part of our dhaqan, and is always done by women. Do you have
any thoughts on why the poetry of Somali women has largely stayed in the
arena of buraanbur, or has not received the same level of canonization that
many male poets have received?” She just drily answered: “Patriarchy”
(2015b, n. pag.).
6. Still, we should avoid idealistic notions of ultimate borderlessness and infi-
nite connectivity online. The internet is not a land of unlimited possibility;
it is subject to systems of control, censorship and oppression just as the non-
virtual world. In addition, the internet, or better the access to it, points
towards systems of privilege, wealth, development and economic neo-
colonial oppression where many countries in the Global South do not yet
have access to the Internet: “Digital connectedness does not come as a uto-
pian alternative to histories of dislocation, rejection and expulsion. Digital
technologies have allowed people to stay connected in cheaper and faster
ways, but it has also created new divides linked not only to questions of
access, literacy and competence in using new media technologies but also to
the medium-specific affordances that they allow. Furthermore, the use of
digital technologies has created new forms of surveillance, bordering and
monitoring access […]” (Leurs and Ponzanesi 2014, 7).
7. It is important to note that the attention paid to the corporeal act of vio-
lence and pain, the “cutting”, is also displayed in how the poem is organised
on the page. The words “Cut, cut, cut”, for example, stand alone and thus
graphically draw attention to themselves as they cut across the page and cre-
ate rupture.
8. A Somali proverb which may be roughly translated as “He who does not
hear the word ‘Stop’ will hear the words ‘Lie down’”, that is, those who will
not listen to warnings will get themselves into trouble (cf. Kapchits
2002, 26).
9. According to Lorde’s own note, Aido Hwedo is “the Rainbow serpent, a
representation of all ancient deities who must be worshipped but whose
names and faces have been lost in time” ([1986] 2000, 1015).
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CHAPTER 6
Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”
Freedom and love are doing words. They are we-forming, we-sustaining
words. Their conjoined impulse is toward making collective living more
possible and more pleasurable.
—Keguro Macharia, “Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love”
(2016, n. pag.)
I am writing this conclusion at a time when the US Government under

Donald Trump interns what it perceives as illegal immigrants at the US/
Mexican border and separates small children from their families, incarcer-
ates them in cages and has no reasonable strategy in place to ever reunite
these children with their parents—unless the parents claim their criminal
status as illegal under the conservative party’s “zero tolerance” border
policy to be then swiftly deported back to where they came from. I am
writing this at a time when in Europe the borders are being more and
more forcibly closed off against those seeking asylum and safety—just now
the German government is grasping at straws to placate the growing xeno-
phobia and ultra-right-wing voices raising up throughout the nation, and
Italy and Malta fight over which respective port should receive a cargo
ship, paradoxically named Lifeline, with exhausted, traumatised and sick
refugees on board which has been denied entry for days. The political
landscape worldwide, of which these are just two instances, is deeply

Switzerland AG 2021
262 J. LEETSCH
influenced by spatial thinking about borders and boundaries, a thinking

imbued with paranoia, hate and rigid mindsets of exclusion and inclusion.
As Gloria E. Anzaldúa has argued in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza, borders are violence. They constitute the place where violence is
enacted, where worlds clash against each other:
The […] border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third
World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemor-
rhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—
a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and
unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow
strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place
created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a con-
stant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
(1987, 3; emphasis in original)
Anzaldúa’s remarks from the late 1980s offer a fitting starting point to the
conclusion of this project, returning us full circle to a twenty-first-century
political, cultural and social climate that reveals deep-seated anxieties
about boundaries, anxieties that surface through the language of conta-
gion and purity with its dark undercurrents of fear of that which is other.
But what happens when, against all odds, the crossing of these borders is
imagined? When the logics of the border are subverted and turned upside
down? What happens when we extend empathy, and love, towards those
constructed as forbidden and dangerous? When we create “lifelines” that
hold? In my concluding remarks, then, I would like to revisit the question
I first posited in my introduction, when I asked what (im)possible worlds
and (im)possible loves might look like. Throughout this study, both space
and love, longing and belonging, have emerged as verbs, not nouns—
“doing words” as Keguro Macharia so fittingly notes in his discussions of
the political vernaculars of love and freedom in a recent The New Inquiry
essay (2016, n. pag.; emphasis in original). The spaces constructed and the
loves materialised in the texts by contemporary African diasporic women
writers discussed here have opened up possible and still unexplored new
pathways, they have wilfully engaged in processes of imagining be/
longing-together, being-with-another.
As has become clear throughout my chapters, all five authors creatively
intertwine notions of world-making with depictions of love, intimacy,
romance and desire. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel
Americanah, the two protagonists’ transnational, transcontinental routes
6 CODA: “DREAMING OF A YET UNWRITTEN FUTURE” 263
across the world interlink with their love stories and un/fulfilled desires.
Tracing different forms of black relationality, romance and the structures
of the happy ending, in this chapter I have inserted my work into discus-
sions of new developments of African and African diasporic literatures that
overcome the binary of home/away and portray new forms of writing
about displacement. With Americanah, as I have shown, Adichie has cre-
ated a story about love and space that generates an open and freer version
of Africa that does not subscribe to a “single story” (cf. Adichie 2009).
Constituting one of the first instances in scholarship to read Zadie Smith’s
three London novels together, my third chapter illuminated different fac-
ets of Smith’s African Caribbean urban realities. In my discussion of White
Teeth (2000), NW (2012) and Swing Time (2016), I have utilised a com-
parative approach to connect gendered post-Windrush constructions of
London’s cityscapes with strategies of affective and relational cartogra-
phies and mappings. Connecting city and love and then reading Smith’s
novels in that way has proved fruitful as it has offered new approaches to
a diasporic urban imaginary that is deeply imbued with structures of
encounter, neighbourhood and community—be it Felix’s death in NW
which brings together Leah and Keisha or the unnamed narrator of Swing
Time who dances her way back to her home and her childhood friend
Tracey in North West London. With my fourth chapter on Helen Oyeyemi,
a slightly lesser known but no less exiting Black British author, the discus-
sions moved from the heteronormative relationships depicted in Adichie
and the hidden homosocial desires of Smith’s works to the fully spelled-
out queer romance of Miranda and Ore in Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is
for Witching (2009). Set in the countryside and on the coastline of
England, the text’s most important spatial element is the haunted house
which tries to expel everyone perceived as non-English. In an experimen-
tal postcolonial gothic text that rewrites conventional narrative foils of
European literature from an African diasporic perspective, Oyeyemi coun-
ters, as I have shown, notions of nation and home with a story about queer
love. While in the first four chapters I have traced terrestrial spatial forma-
tions connected to the transnational and transcontinental, the urban, the
domestic interior space of the home and the chalky cliffs of Dover, with
my fifth chapter I turned to water and the space of the ocean imagined by
the Somali British poet Warsan Shire and the Indian Kenyan writer Shailja
Patel. In their poems and performances, water serves as a connective and
relational fabric that links people, histories and memories together. What
also becomes more fluid is love, as communities of care and familial and
264 J. LEETSCH
relational connections are established across the water to repair the trauma
of diaspora and displacement.
The texts which we have encountered throughout this study, then, por-
tray the inextricable entanglements between space and love offered by a
diverse body of black female writers who link across the globe to Nigeria,
Jamaica, India, America, Somalia, Great Britain and Kenya. Their imagi-
naries of longing and belonging, which delineate the oppressive dynamics
as well as the resistant revisionings of space while also, importantly, writing
about love, intimacy, desire and romance, collectively constitute a hetero-
geneous body of texts which tell no single story but instead bear witness
to the different geographical and affective border crossings that happen
when combining these two spheres. While these texts frequently tell a dark
tale of violence, hostility and conflict, they simultaneously emphasize the
vital creative potential of diasporic literature: from Adichie’s blogs to
Shire’s Dictaphones, from Patel’s material and embodied performances on
stage to Oyeyemi’s haunted text on paper, from Smith’s multi-tonal
London street slang to Adichie’s Pidgin English. Above all, however, I
have shown that despite the trauma, violence and negation present in the
texts, what always stubbornly re-emerges are reparative modes of love, alli-
ance and kinship. In my introduction, I outlined the project of a black
politics of love which I hope to have supplemented with a black poetics of
love and be/longing throughout this study. As Jennifer Nash has argued
in her article on “Practising Love”, the politics and practices of love can-
not remain separate from imaginations, creativity and the visionary—the
work that literature can do, needs to do and so often does:
Black feminist love-politics […] recogniz[es] that changing the grammar of

our contemporary political moment will not remove us from the script that
is always already in place. Instead, love-politics practitioners dream of a yet
unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical embrace
of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work
for each other. This dreaming, of course, does not suspend labor; black
feminist love-politics practitioners have always been attached to the idea that
the radical future requires certain kinds of very hard work, pushing beyond
our investments in selfhood and sameness, and reaching towards collectivi-
ties and possibilities. […] It is a critical response to the violence of the ordi-
nary and the persistence of inequality that insist on a politics of the visionary.
(2011, 18; emphasis added)
The literary texts that I have analysed throughout this study then help to
write and to imagine a shareable, liveable future. By focusing on the
intimate, the erotic and the romantic, they make “collective living more
possible and more pleasurable”, to come back to this coda’s epigraph
(Macharia 2016, n. pag.). The texts all provide strategies of “we-forming”
and “we-sustaining” (ibid.), as they focus on love, relationality and empa-
thy. Employing a method of reading together and reading counter to each
other the metaphors and materialities of space and love, I have shown how
the African diasporic authors formulate both as sites of political and ethical
consciousness, as artistic archives of resistance—and ultimately offer a pos-
sible solution for living in a diasporic world.
Throughout my discussions I have utilized a triadic structure to probe
each text according to its specific geographical, affective and structural
literary set-up. In doing so, I have given room to each text to unfold and
grow through detailed analysis and examination. I have connected my
findings with each other without ever losing sight of the specific cultural
and political contexts behind the novels, poems and performances. This
reading strategy has opened up a space for connection internally within
the works, for connecting out into the world beyond the textual frames
and for a connection between the differently situated authors, painting a
complex, often divergent, but ultimately connective picture of contempo-
rary African diasporic cultural literary production. It is as important to
note, however, that this study can contribute only a small part to analyses
of the vast and ever-expanding universe of twenty-first-century African
diasporic literature as many more works are being published daily, either
within the conventional and “official” frames of international or local pub-
lishing or through alternative methods—be that independent publishing,
online media, poetry slams or oral transmission. It goes without saying,
then, that this study, with its focus on five authors from albeit different
cultural and geographical contexts, nevertheless remains skimming only
the surface of the material available. Still, I hope to have painted a multi-
layered picture and to have pointed towards some possible ways of
approaching these texts. My interdisciplinary and comparative methodol-
ogy which productively interlinks spatial and affective thinking may func-
tion as a useful tool to apply to other contemporary texts and media that
revolve around questions of home and displacement. I also want to
acknowledge at this point my own limitations as a white Western researcher
who brings with herself the capacities for blind spots and for lacking the
knowledge and perspective of certain material experiences—I am thankful
for everything these texts have taught me and how they have enabled me
to reposition myself in the world.
266 J. LEETSCH
Cobwebs
To keep in line not only with the epigraph chosen for this concluding sec-
tion but also with the bigger and overarching premise of this study, as a
last step I would now like to open up my study even further and give at
least a little room to alternative connectivities and collectives. For one, all
the authors discussed here not only write fictional stories but are all active
in fields adjacent to literature and culture. They thus expertly connect
their fictional, imaginary worlds with the very act of producing and liter-
ally enacting new worlds by creating communities through practices that
are both “we-forming” and “we-sustaining”. Chimamanda Adichie, for
example, frequently speaks publicly about gender, black feminism and the
necessities of intersectionality in international contexts. Besides her famous
TED Talks and the recently published Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist
Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), she spoke at a conference on
human rights at the London Chatham House Conference in June 2018,
one of the most prestigious and respected conferences on international
politics attended by government representatives, businesses and NGOs
alike. What Adichie does, then, is to draw together story-telling with
policy-making, lending equal importance to both. Similarly, Zadie Smith
is not only an author of novels and short stories but has become equally
well-regarded through her succinct cultural and political analyses in the
essays which can be found in the collections Changing My Mind (2009)
and Feel Free (2018) as well as in the think pieces she publishes with
national and international newspapers. Even while living in New York for
most of the time, she has stayed deeply connected to her North-West
London roots—in 2012, for example, she wrote an article for The New
Review of Books titled “The North West London Blues” in which she
sharply criticised the Willesden Green council for their plans to shut their
local library centre and bookshop in order to build luxury flats there
instead, engaging in the necessary community work needed to preserve
meeting points and places of exchange in an otherwise anonymous metro-
politan thicket. Helen Oyeyemi, admittedly the most elusive of all these
authors and rarely seen in public, is nevertheless an expert in creating
global communities. She travels through the world and seems to arrive at
the unlikeliest of places: to volunteer in Paarl, a village outside Cape Town,
at a centre for children born with HIV; to teach writing at the University
of Kentucky or to live in Prague from where she dispatches digital travel-
ogues via Lenny Letter (a weekly online feminist newsletter run by Lena
Dunham and Jenni Konner), in which she draws geographical compari-

sons between European cities, connecting South London with Grenoble
with Budapest (cf. Oyeyemi 2016). Shailja Patel, in contrast, is incredibly
visible and very vocal about the non-literary work she does; she is a play-
wright and poet but also a political activist fighting against racism, fascism
and for human rights as she currently divides her life between Nairobi and
Johannesburg. She is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and
Justice, a civil society coalition that works for an equitable democracy in
Kenya and spreads her activism not only through these institutionalised
channels or news outlets like BBC, NPR and Al-Jazeera but also online via
her twitter and blog, combining art and activism at global intersections.
Similarly, Warsan Shire has engaged with these “we-sustaining” and “we-
forming” practices both poetically and politically through her writing,
through teaching poetry workshops all over the globe and online and
through her work with refugees in Europe and the US, all the while using
her voice to amplify the importance of such work after her ascent to global
fame after the popstar Beyoncé had used her poems in her visual album
Lemonade (2016) which intertwined intersectional feminism, trauma and
race in an African American context.
What I want to say with this seemingly haphazard collection of small
(her)stories is that the work of love and care is not only prevalent within
these author’s fictional worlds but reaches into the world along other
routes which are not more but as important as imagination. From each of
these authors and their works, then, it is possible to depart along new
pathways to connect to other innovative and truly exciting projects and I
want to take this coda as an opportunity to trace some of them.
From Adichie and the writing workshops she runs in Nigeria to give
young and unexperienced writers a chance, I could jump to Brittle Paper,
an ever-growing online platform run by Ainehi Edoro which gives space
and traction to innovative African and African diasporic literature. As
Edoro posits on the blog, her objective is to help build a literary scene
through book reviews and literary discussions in various different formats
as well as through news items and other commentaries: “[w]e monitor
how African authors interact with each other and with readers. We pay
attention to literary spats, literary celebrity lifestyle, news about the pub-
lishing industry, the book market, and festivals. We look out for ways in
which African literature intersects with local and global cultural currents”
(2018, n. pag.). Most importantly, Brittle Paper also publishes original
new work, thus providing a communal and collective open-access platform
268 J. LEETSCH
for aspiring writers to share their work with the world. From Zadie Smith’s
writing and her discussions of African Caribbean Britishness, I could open
the door to new engagement with the Windrush generation and its heri-
tage: the literary magazine Wasafiri in collaboration with the British
Library, for example, published a special issue on “Windrush Women”. As
Wasafiri’s editor Susheila Nasta argues in the preface, “[c]oinciding with
the seventieth anniversary of the docking of SS Empire Windrush at
Tilbury in June 1948, this issue shows us how the many global intersec-
tions of Britain’s mixed cultural past continue to reverberate in today’s
migrant present” (2018, 1). This becomes all the more necessary in times
after the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and with regard to the
Windrush scandal in the last years. Bringing together old and new African
diasporic voices across generations in this case turns into vital archival
work to bear witness to history that repeats itself and to sustain commu-
nity in the face of all that. In a similar vein, I could turn from Helen
Oyeyemi’s writing on borders and home/land to a new publication that
traces possible solutions that lie in the affiliative and relational. The poetry
anthology Wretched Strangers, published by JT Welsch and Ágnes
Lehóczky with Boiler House Press, has assembled a collection of contem-
porary poets to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to the
UK’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers showcases writing from around
the globe, emphasising the diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry:
“While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these
pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila
Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi
Karim’s words” (Lehóczky and Welsch 2018, n. pag.). In light of this
hopeful notion of “shared foreignness”, I could delineate how Warsan
Shire started out as a spoken word artist, reciting her poems at local com-
munity centres while growing up in London’s suburbs during her teenage
years. As the first Young Poet Laureate of London, she has drawn atten-
tion to the city’s poetry organisations and grass-roots movements that
focus on bringing black poetry to the streets and into the neighbourhood.
In spring 2018 at the Critical Negotiations in Black British Literature and
the Arts conference at Goldsmiths University, I saw one of these grass-
roots collaborations perform an emboldened mixture of poetry, dance, rap
and theatre: the poetry collective Voices That Shake! is a project that brings
together young people, artists and campaigners such as Selina Nwulu,
another Young Poet Laureate of London, to develop creative responses to
social injustice. Similarly, the Octavia Poetry Collective, founded by Rachel
Long with members such as Belinda Zhawi and many others, comes
together to create a safe creative community for female writers of colour
to change the conversation and to fully write themselves into being. In
June 2018, the collective acted as one the Africa Writes festival patrons in
order to “showcase and celebrate the words, the art, the song of womxn
from Africa and the diaspora” (Africa Writes 2018, n. pag.). Finally, if I
wanted to use Shailja Patel’s multi-routed/rooted Migritude as a starting
point to venture along other roads, I would perhaps find a text that was
originally published in 2007 but which has recently won Man Booker
prize: Olga Tokarczuk’s Flight, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, is
a novel of linked fragments, from the seventeenth century to the present
day, connected by themes of travel, migration, human anatomy and love.
It is not an African diasporic text but it features the same narratives of
crossing geographical and affective borders, in the process completely and
utterly dismantling them. A travel-companion perfectly attuned to this
century’s displacements and diasporas, it continues the themes discussed
throughout this study and carries them into different cultural contexts.
From each of these projects it is possible, then, to connect to yet other
collaborations, communities and collectives. Every literary text discussed
throughout this study constitutes a mere thread in an intricate and com-
plex cobweb of contemporary African diasporic literature and art that
grows and blooms all across the world. Imagining love and worlds
together, as these texts do, gives room to manifold be/longings that reach
into a future that is just about to be written.
Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story”. TED Talks.
Web. July 2009. www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a
_single_story.
Africa Writes. 2018. “Meet the headliners – Africa Writes 2018.” Africa Writes.
Web. http://africawrites.org/blog/meet-the-headliners-africa-writes-2018/.
Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San
Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Edoro, Ainehi. 2018. “About.” Brittle Paper. Web. 2018. https://brittlepaper.
com/about/.
Lehóczky, Ágnes and JT Welsch, eds. 2018. Wretched Strangers. Norwich: Boiler
House Press.
270 J. LEETSCH
Macharia, Keguro. 2016. “Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love.” The New
Inquiry. Web. March 14, 2016. https://thenewinquiry.com/
political-vernaculars-freedom-and-love/.
(2): 1–24.
Nasta, Susheila. 2018. “Editorial.” Wasafiri 33 (2): 1–2.
Oyeyemi, Helen. 2016. “Maybe Something, Maybe Nothing: A Prague
Travelogue.” Lenny Letter. Web. March 02, 2016. https://www.lennyletter.
com/story/maybe-something-maybe-nothing-a-prague-travelogue.
Index1
A affect studies, 8
Achebe, Chinua, 24, 28 Affiliation, 3, 14, 35, 49, 75, 77, 78,
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1, 81, 85, 86, 102, 113–115, 117,
11–13, 15, 21–69, 76, 82, 88, 126, 161, 186, 202, 215, 252
113, 137–139, 161, 189, 199, African diaspora, 2, 6, 13, 22,
200, 203, 225, 239, 250, 139, 206
262–264, 266, 267 African literature, 22, 267
Americanah, 11, 13–15, 23–26, Afropolitanism, 70n1
28–31, 33, 43–47, 49–52, Ahmed, Sara, 8–10, 31, 35, 40, 103,
55–59, 61–63, 66–69, 70n1, 126, 156, 177, 187, 192
70n3, 82, 88, 89, 96, 113, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8
140, 161, 189, 199, 203, 239, “Queer Fragility,” 187
262, 263 Queer Phenomenology: Orientations,
Half of a Yellow Sun, 22, 24 Objects, Others, 126
Purple Hibiscus, 24 Strange Encounters: Embodied Others
Affect in Postcoloniality, 31, 35, 156
affective dimension of the world, “Wiggle Room,” 40
10, 25, 127 Aje, 154
affective mapping, 99, 102 Ambi, 222, 223, 234, 237
affective textuality, 12 Anatol, Giselle Liza, 178–180
affective turn, 6 Angel in the house, 152, 175
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2021
Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1
272 INDEX
Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 7, 262 borderland, 262

Arata, Stephen D., 173 borderlessness, 26, 255n6
Architexture, 14, 93, 94 border politics, 160
Astaire, Fred, 119, 132n15 Botting, Fred, 143, 144, 172,
Auerbach, Nina, 169 173, 176
Augé, Mark, 37 Brah, Avtar, 3
non-place, 37 Britannia, 152, 155
Azzam, Julie Hakim, 141, 142 British Nationality Act, 81
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 131n10, 164
Brown, John, 56
B Bulawayo, NoViolet, 30, 54
Ball, Charles, 55 We Need New Names, 30
Barthes, Roland, 50, 70n2 Buraanbur, 227, 229, 230,
Baudelaire, Charles, 109, 130n8 254–255n5
Beauty, 28, 34, 37, 46, 49, 56, 70n4, Butler, Judith, 252
87, 88, 154, 175, 237
Bed and Breakfast, 149, 159, 168
Benjamin, Walter, 109 C
Bennett, Louise, 82 Caliban, 181
Berlant, Lauren, 10, 127 Capitalism, 42, 211, 240
Beyoncé, 267 Care
Bhabha, Homi, 140, 150, 151, communities of, 203, 250–254, 263
158–160, 191 economies of, 238
“Halfway House,” 191 ethics of care, 251
Location of Culture, The, 150 self-care, 24
“The World and the Home,” 150 Caribbean
Black Atlantic, 204–206 British Caribbean, 76
Blackface, 119, 120, 132n15 Caribbean folklore, 138, 139, 170
Blogging, 25, 44–57, 66 Cartography, 4, 12, 14, 78, 79, 83,
Blood 96, 99, 101, 102, 115, 118,
blood relation, 91 131n11, 202, 208, 213, 263
consumption of, 186 Chalk, 138, 139, 159, 178, 184, 186
Blunkett, David, 41, 82 Chaplin, Sue, 143, 147, 166
Body Chatrooms, 108
black and female, 46, 87, 88, Cheah, Pheng, 3–5, 11, 16n1, 17n2,
118, 120 17n3, 23, 69, 79, 223
body politic, 160 City
dead body, 208 literary construction of, 128
on stage, 233, 234 mapping of, 94, 95, 128
and trauma, 42, 64, 208, 213 metropolis, 79, 84, 91, 109
Boehmer, Elleke, 174 Cloth, 157, 216, 222, 234–237, 240,
Border 242, 243
border crossing, 51, 253 materiality of, 234, 237
INDEX 273
Cole, Teju, 30 Desire, 1–3, 8, 12–16, 21–69, 75, 77,

Open City, 30 88–90, 102–109, 113, 114, 116,
Collins, Wilkie, 145 125–129, 130n5, 138–141, 159,
Woman in White, The, 145 161, 163, 164, 169–193, 203,
Commonwealth, 82 214, 230, 231, 239, 243, 245,
Community 246, 250, 262–264
communal, 4, 10, 13, 14, 25, 36, desire lines, 78, 102–103,
78, 92, 93, 102, 190, 200, 116, 125–127
203, 230, 232, 253, 267 Detention centre, 159, 168, 169
community making, 38, 192 Diaspora, 2, 6, 12–14, 16, 22–24, 31,
Connective migrant, 231 76, 79, 83, 139, 150, 182, 201,
Consumption 202, 206, 207, 209, 216, 217,
gastronomical consumption, 220, 221, 223–232, 238,
171, 185 264, 269
gastronomical desire, 177 Digital diaspora, 226–232
Contact zone, 39, 40, 80, 200 Diminescu, Dana, 231
Contemporary African diasporic Displacement, 2, 3, 11, 16, 33, 35,
fiction, 51 36, 41, 42, 52, 57, 63, 64, 78,
Coolitude, 217–219 87, 89, 92, 101, 104, 109, 113,
Corporeality, 13, 23, 86, 87, 119, 115, 121, 122, 145, 151, 161,
123, 182, 212, 213, 245 199, 201–203, 208, 209, 211,
Cosmopolitanism, 3 214, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230,
Countryside, 1, 13, 15, 69, 97, 138, 231, 234, 235, 239, 251,
139, 159, 199, 263 263–265, 269
Cultural geography, 3, 75 Domestic
Cyberspace, 52, 55, 70n5, 203, 230 gender and the domestic, 146
Douglass, Frederick, 56
Dover, 1, 42, 138, 139, 142, 149,
D 155, 157–160, 178, 181,
Dance, 62, 115–120, 122–124, 126, 184, 263
132n15, 201, 233, 234, 237, Drag, 107, 108, 235
263, 268
dancing, 115, 119, 120, 123,
125, 126 E
Danielewski, Mark Z., 167 East Africa, 1, 200, 202, 207, 216,
House of Leaves, 167 224, 229, 235
De Certeau, Michel, 75 Eating disorder, 138, 163, 184
Deleuze, Gilles, 50, 70n5 Eating the other, 186
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 205, 218 Elkin, Lauren, 97, 109, 110,
Derrida, Jacques, 150 130n7, 130n8
Of Hospitality, 150 Ellison, Ralph, 56
Desai, Parijat, 129n2, 233, 236 Juneteenth, 56
274 INDEX
Embodiment, 47, 86, 110, 152 metaphors of, 164, 185

Emezi, Akwaeke, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 140, 144, 150
Freshwater, 30 Friendship, 15, 22, 23, 38, 41, 53,
Emotion, 3, 48, 49, 53, 65, 77, 185, 78, 85, 102, 104–129, 191,
187, 216, 234, 253 203, 239
Emotional geography, 3, 37, 77, 128 female friendship, 15, 78, 104–129,
Empathy, 56, 200, 242, 247, 249, 203, 239
251–253, 262, 265
Empire, 16, 39, 76–79, 81, 84, 128,
141, 158, 160, 169, 173, 200, G
202, 204, 213, 220, 222, 223, Gadsby, Meredith M., 178–180
234, 237, 243, 247 Gambia, the, 115, 116, 119, 121–123,
British Empire, 76, 222 125, 132n16
Emplacement, 30, 44, 64, 66, 76, 86 Genette, Gerard, 164, 165
Eurocentric, 50, 148, 171, 178, 205 Geocorpographies, 207–215
Europe, 1, 13, 15, 25–38, 44, 80, Ghost, 7, 62, 138, 140, 142, 145,
171, 199, 202, 205–212, 216, 147, 148, 150, 156, 161, 162,
223, 229, 232, 238, 239, 254n2, 164, 166, 168
261, 267 Gikandi, Simon, 80
Evaristo, Bernardine, 80, 129n2 Gilroy, Paul, 128, 202, 205, 206,
Exile, 2, 43, 213, 229, 251 224, 254n1
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double-Consciousness, 202, 205,
F 206, 224
Fairy tales, 137, 138, 179 “A London sumting dis...,” 128
Falklands Wars, 158 Glissant, Édouard, 204, 205, 219, 224
Family Poetics of Relation, 204, 219, 224
alternative family, 81, 88, 129 Global
non-biological family, 91 globalisation, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17n2,
nuclear family, 9, 92, 105, 188, 251 31, 42, 43, 92, 200, 218, 223,
Female genealogy, 92, 151, 201, 203 240, 252
Female solidarity, 13, 49, 89, 130n5, Global South, 13, 17n2, 255n6
242, 250 Google Maps, 78, 99–101, 131n11
Ferguson, Ann, 6 Gopinath, Gayatri, 190
Fitzgerald, Ella, 162, 163 Gothic
Flâneuse, flâneuserie feminist rewriting of, 149
black flâneuse, 110, 131n10 gothic fiction, 142–144, 148, 162,
flâneur, 109, 110 166, 172
Radical Flâneuserie, 110 gothic heroine, 171
Folklore, 138, 139, 170, 179, 180 gothic lesbian fiction, 176
Food, 42, 154, 164, 178, 184–186 gothic narrative, 146, 148, 172
INDEX 275
gothic novel, 143, 190 Homosocial, 13, 103, 114, 190, 263
gothic topography, 145 hooks, bell, 6–11, 17n5, 28, 49, 62,
Guattari, Félix, 50, 70n5 92, 139, 171, 186
Gujarati proverbs, 220, 221 All About Love: New Visions, 6,
Gulf of Aden, 209, 210 7, 9, 171
Guyana, 87, 90 Black Looks: Race and
Gyasi, Yaa, 30, 59 Representation, 7
Homegoing, 30, 59 Communion: The Female Search
for Love, 9
“Eating the Other: Desire and
H Resistance,” 186
Hair “Love as the Practice of
aesthetics of, 45, 47, 49 Freedom,” 9
black hair, 26, 45, 47, 56, 88 Salvation: Black People and Love, 9
hair salon, 26–29, 31–33, 37, 45, “Straightening Our Hair,” 28
49, 51, 61, 70n4, 88, 93 Horn of Africa, 200, 224
as political, 23, 45, 47, 88 Hunger, 164, 177, 178, 185
weave, 46, 88, 130n5
Haiti, 150, 153, 154, 162
Halberstam, Jack, 143, 171, 172, 188, I
189, 193 Idi Amin, 216, 217, 235
Queer Art of Failure, The, 188 Illegal immigrant, 39, 40, 169, 261
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Ilott, Sarah, 138, 160, 184
Technology of Monsters, Immigration, 41, 43, 82, 159,
171, 193 160, 253
Happy ending, 13, 14, 25, 57, 63, immigrant novel, 58
65–69, 75, 113, 189, 190, 263 Imperial power, 76
Hardt, Michael, 17n5 India, 80, 86, 93, 200, 207, 216, 218,
Haunted house 221–224, 237, 264
cultural haunting, 168 Indian Ocean
haunted text, 15, 140, 165, 264 histories of, 206, 216, 224
haunting, 15, 138, 140, 143, Indian ocean trade, 222, 234
145–149, 151, 155, 161, 164, Internet, 14, 16, 25, 44, 48, 50, 51,
166, 169, 210 54, 67, 68, 70n1, 70n5, 202,
Healing, 64, 185, 209, 219, 238, 242, 226, 230, 238, 255n6
243, 251 internet community, 230, 238
Herstory, 242 Intertextuality, 15, 140
Heteronormativity, 8, 106 Intimacy, 8, 34, 64, 69, 76, 86,
Historiography, 201 94, 96, 102, 104–129,
Hofmeyr, Isabel, 206, 207, 218 131n12, 212, 238, 251,
Home and belonging, 31, 79, 252, 262, 264
110, 150 Italy, 29, 209, 233, 261
276 INDEX
J Black London, 79–85, 87, 99

Jackson, Shirley, 145, 147 postcolonial London, 14, 76, 77,
Haunting of Hill House, The, 79, 82, 102, 128, 239
145, 147 London Tube, 39, 40, 96
Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 56 Longworth, Deborah, 109
Jamaica, 86, 90, 91, 129, 130n4, Lorde, Audre, 7, 45, 88, 249,
141, 264 250, 255n9
Jónasdóttir, Anna, 6 “Call,” 250
“Is Your Hair Still Political,” 45
“A Question of Essence,” 45
K Love
Kala pani, 219, 221, 223, 232, black love, 92
238, 253 conventions of, 3, 64, 66, 102,
Kankurang, 122, 123 176, 245
Kenya, 70n3, 200–202, 207–209, discontents of, 8
216, 217, 221, 223, 233, 235, ethics of, 186
237, 242, 264, 267 feminist love, 6, 7, 264
Khair, Tabish, 141, 172 at first sight, 61–63
Kilburn, 93, 94, 100, 101 as a force, 7, 10, 127
Kinship, 16, 92, 95, 204, 206, love ethic, 9, 10, 49
250, 264 love making, 12, 142
Krishnan, Madhu, 23 poetics of, 264
Kristeva, Julia, 7 politics of, 10, 93, 264
Kunta Kinteh, 122 as resistance, 17n5
Kureishi, Hanif, 80, 129n2 as a tool, 8, 10
Love story, 1, 11, 14, 15, 22, 24, 25,
57–69, 103, 105, 138–140,
L 162–164, 170, 171, 175, 177,
Lagos, 1, 14, 23, 28–30, 32, 38, 52, 178, 182, 183, 186–189, 192,
57, 59–61, 64–69, 70n1, 70n4, 203, 239, 263
189, 239 Love studies
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 171, critical love studies, 6
175, 176 feminist love studies, 6, 7
Carmilla, 171, 175–177, 183, 189 Lynn, Vera, 160
Le Gon, Jeni, 119, 120 “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the
Lefebvre, Henri, 75, 129, 130n6 White Cliffs of Dover,” 160
Levy, Andrea, 80, 185
Liminality, 170
Literary imagination, 3, 12, 161 M
transformative power of literature, 5 Maasai, 235, 236
Localiser, 94 Madwoman in the attic, 147
London Malkani, Gautam, 80
INDEX 277
Mami Wata, 179, 180 Beloved, 147, 148

Mare nostrum, 212 Motherhood, 95, 107, 108, 146,
Marriage, 30, 39, 41, 64, 103–105, 246, 249
108, 114, 189, 245–247 Mother tongue, 220
Massey, Doreen, 3, 75
Materiality, 12, 15, 44, 70n4, 77, 140,
161, 169, 212, 216, 224, 233, N
234, 236, 237, 265 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 5, 17n4, 23,
Mbembe, Achille, 22, 59, 69, 70n1, 69, 79, 83
204, 211 The Creation of the World or
Mbue, Imbolo, 30 Globalization, 5
Behold the Dreamers, 30 The Inoperative Community, 5
McLeod, John, 43, 81, 82, 86, 87, 92, The Sense of the World, 5
96, 97, 128 Narrative authority, 165
Mediterranean, 1, 201, 202, 207, Narrative instability, 166
209–212, 215, 224, 253 Nash, Jennifer, 8, 10, 92, 264
Memory, 65, 84, 91, 105, 107, 111, Nationalism, 138, 160, 205, 211
116, 124, 132n15, 148, 162, Negri, Antonio, 17n5
182, 205, 208, 213, 218, Négritude, 217, 254n4
227–229, 233, 236, 240, 249, New digital media, 50, 55
250, 253, 263 New Woman, 174, 175
Mercer, Kobena, 47 Nichols, Grace, 77, 86–92, 102
Metafiction, 166 Fat Black Woman Poems, The, 77,
Middle Passage, 115, 121, 122, 205, 87, 90, 102
206, 221, 254n1 i is a long memoried woman, 87
Miéville, China, 173, 193 Nigeria, 14, 23–32, 34, 36–39, 42,
Migrant crisis, 160 43, 45, 51–53, 57–59, 64–66,
Migration, 11, 14, 23, 25, 32, 41, 70n1, 189, 264, 267
58, 59, 63, 66, 76, 79, 80, 82, Nigerian politics, 67
83, 150, 173, 201, 202, 206, Normativity, 104, 189
209, 211, 216, 218, 221, heteronormativity, 8, 106
225, 231, 234, 235, Nursery rhyme, 162, 163
238, 269 Nurture, 179, 246, 248
Mills and Boon, 62 Nuttall, Sarah, 59, 69
Modernity, 4, 5, 205, 212
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 254
Mondialisation, 5, 12 O
Monster, 140, 145, 150, 155, Ocean, 13, 15, 16, 65, 121, 122, 199,
169–176, 179–181, 186, 193 200, 202, 204–207, 209–211,
monstrosity, 153, 173–175, 181, 213–216, 218–221, 223–225,
183, 193 232, 238, 239, 250, 253,
Morrison, Toni, 147, 148, 185, 191 254, 263
278 INDEX
Online community, 48, 54, 56, 61 93, 99, 102, 103, 112–114, 128,
Orality, 227 129n1, 131n10, 138–160, 162,
Other 166, 171, 183, 184, 189, 190,
consuming the, 15, 140, 192 192, 193, 193n1, 199, 226, 234,
othering, 17n3, 82, 99, 151, 239, 263
182, 229 postcolonial studies, 226
Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo, 59 Postcolonial gothic, 15, 140–160,
Dust, 59 166, 171, 183, 190, 192, 263
Oyeyemi, Helen Olajumoke, 1, 11–13, Postmodern, 79, 166–168
15, 113, 137–193, 199, 200, Powell, Enoch, 82
203, 225, 239, 247, 250, 263, “Rivers of Blood,” 82
264, 266–268 Power, 4, 5, 8–10, 17n3, 17n5, 29,
White is for Witching, 15, 113, 32, 42, 43, 76, 77, 80–82, 88,
138–142, 146–148, 161–177, 92, 102, 110, 112, 119, 120,
180–184, 186–193, 193n1, 128, 141, 143, 156, 172, 173,
199, 203, 239, 247, 263 175, 180, 182, 188, 190, 191,
210, 216, 220, 240, 248,
250–252, 254n4
P Pratt, Geraldine, 3, 245, 251, 252
Palmer, Paulina, 176 Public transport, 78, 94, 96, 115
Paratext, 164–166 Pugliese, Joseph, 213
Patel, Shailja, 1, 11–13, 15, 16,
199–254, 263, 264, 267, 269
Migritude, 15, 201, 203, 216–225, Q
232–235, 237, 242, 245–248, Queer
250, 253, 269 queer desire, 13, 105,
Patriarchal, 6–8, 49, 92, 146, 147, 107, 169–193
176, 180, 183, 230, 240, queer love, 103, 105, 139, 175,
241, 246 177, 186–188, 192, 203,
Perera, Suvendrini, 211, 212, 214, 239, 263
215, 224 queer reading, 104, 114
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, 146–148 queer time, 189
Yellow Wallpaper, The, 146, 147
Pica, 138, 164, 177, 178
Poe, Edgar Allan, 144, 148, 149 R
Polidori, John, 173 Racism, 9, 10, 23, 37, 47, 55, 82, 92,
Vampyre, The, 173 138, 157, 200, 267
Poltergeist, 148 racial stereotypes, 87
Postcolonial, 2–4, 6, 8, 12–15, 16n1, Radcliffe, Ann, 141, 147
17n2, 24, 32, 43, 76–79, 82, 87, Red Sea, 201, 202, 207, 210
INDEX 279
Refuge, 224–226, 229, 231, 238 Satanic Verses, The, 96

Refugee, 1, 2, 11, 43, 202, 207–215, Rymer, James Malcom, 173
224, 228, 229, 232, 252, Varney the Vampire, 173
253, 267
refugee crisis, 1, 209, 229
Relationality, 10, 12, 13, 15, 37, 44, S
60, 69, 78, 92, 96, 98, 106, 110, Salt, 156, 166, 180–182, 191, 214
118, 170, 177, 187, 192, 201, Samatar, Sofia, 22
204, 213, 215, 219, 248, 251, Sari, 216, 219, 223, 232–237, 242,
263, 265 243, 245, 246, 248
relational, 3, 5, 6, 10–14, 33, 44, Scafe, Suzanne, 87, 119
50, 51, 54, 57, 66, 75, 78, 85, Sedgwick, Eve, 18n6
86, 90–92, 95, 97, 99, 101, Selasi, Taiye, 22, 24, 30, 59, 67, 70n1
102, 111, 112, 114–116, 127, Ghana Must Go, 30, 59
129, 161, 200, 221, 223–225, Self-care, 24
234, 239, 247, 249, 254, 263, Selvon, Sam, 77, 81–84, 102, 129n2
264, 268 Lonely Londoners, The, 77, 81–84,
Reparative 86, 96, 102
repair, 7, 10, 17–18n6, 92, 127, Sexuality, 13, 16, 45, 92, 104, 105,
171, 238, 252, 264 119, 139, 146, 171, 174, 175,
reparation, 203, 240, 243, 251 179, 180, 183, 203, 243, 245,
Representation, 22, 24, 29, 67, 75, 246, 248
79, 94, 96, 152, 163, 209, 222, heterosexual, 9, 13, 62, 65, 106,
240, 250, 255n9 114, 131n14, 176, 189, 193,
of Africa, 22, 24, 67 203, 247
Return, 14, 25, 27, 28, 31, 43, homosexual, 174, 247
45, 57–69, 70n1, 87, 103, 107, Shakespeare, William, 181, 193n1
113, 116, 124, 126, 127, 141, As You Like It, 193n1
147, 152, 162, 165, 172, 176, postcolonial Shakespeare, 193n1
177, 179, 180, 187, 190, Tempest, The, 181
238, 239 Shame, 37, 68, 120, 210, 242
narratives of, 14, 28, 31, 43, 165, Shared humanity, 23
172, 238 Shire, Warsan, 1, 11–13, 15, 16,
Rhizome, 50, 70n5 199–254, 263, 264, 267, 268
Robinson, Bill ‘Bojangles,’ 119, 120 “Conversations About Home (at the
Romance Deportation Centre),”
romance genre, 63 209–212, 215
romance novel, 62 “For women who are difficult to
Rosner, Victoria, 3, 245, 251, 252 love,” 243
Rushdie, Salman, 80, 96 “Grandfather’s Hands,” 214, 215
280 INDEX
Shire, Warsan (Cont.) South East Asia, 82, 200, 207, 223
Her Blue Body, 15, 201, 207, Space, 1, 3, 15, 21, 24, 26, 28,
249, 253 30, 33, 39, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85,
“House,” 244, 245 86, 88, 137, 139, 142, 146,
“Mermaids,” 240, 243 147, 151, 176, 179, 190,
“My Foreign Wife is Dying and 199, 262
Does Not Want to be Antillean space, 204–205
Touched,” 212 deadly space, 211, 215
Teaching My Mother How to Give digital space, 226, 232
Birth, 15, 201, 207, 249, English space, 149, 158, 163
250, 253 gothic space, 144, 146
“Ugly,” 213, 215 maternal space, 154
Single story, 23, 263, 264 oceanic space, 206, 219, 225
Sisterhood, 191, 203, 243, 249, 251 safe space, 119
Skin, 37, 45, 62, 67, 98, 111, 155, space of connectedness, 97
156, 179–182, 186, 187, 208, space of disobedience, 189
239, 240, 248 space of encounters, 96
Slam poetry, 233, 265 submarine space, 204
Slavery, 8, 33, 56, 121, 147, 148, 200, transitory space, 84
204, 206 urban space, 79, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93,
slave narrative, 55, 56 110, 112, 121, 127
Smith, Zadie, 1, 11–15, 24, 75–129, Stagg, John, 173
137–140, 161, 189, 199, 200, “The Vampyre,” 173
203, 225, 239, 247, 250, 263, Stoker, Bram, 171, 173–175, 183
264, 266, 268 Dracula, 171, 174–177, 181,
NW, 14, 15, 77, 78, 93, 96, 98, 183, 189
101–129, 129n1, 203, 263 Storytelling, 5, 137, 141, 142, 163,
Swing Time, 14, 15, 77, 78, 102, 203, 207, 208, 217
103, 115–129, 129n1, Strange familiar, 60, 61, 64
203, 263
White Teeth, 14, 77, 79–81, 84–86,
92, 93, 96, 102, 113–116, T
127–129, 129n1, 203, 263 Tarlo, Emma, 130n5
Solidarity, 4, 13, 49, 89, 130n5, 206, Technology, 4, 49–51, 55, 172, 227,
215, 230, 243, 250–254 231, 255n6
Somalia digital technology, 51, 255n6
Somali civil war, 208, 210 Testimony, 48, 200, 216, 232, 236,
Somali poetry, 203, 227, 231 240, 242, 243, 253
Soucouyant, 139, 164, 170, 171, Texture, 44–50, 54–56, 70n2, 93, 94,
178–182, 187, 189, 191 112, 199, 234
INDEX 281
Theatre, 201, 216, 220, 232–234, V

237, 268 Vampire
Third World, 50, 262 lesbian vampire, 175, 176
Torabully, Khal, 207, 218, 219 queer vampire, 11, 162, 176
Transatlantic slave trade, 33, 90 vampire in love, 169–193
Translocal, 127 Victorian novel, 172
Transnational, 12, 14, 15, 24–38, 44, Vulnerability/vulnerable, 2, 8, 33,
49, 51, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 159, 177, 199, 200, 208, 235,
70n4, 138, 140, 205, 209, 211, 246, 251
239, 254, 262, 263
Trauma
colonial trauma, 168 W
cultural trauma studies, 239 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 21, 22, 24,
national trauma, 147, 168 30, 67, 69
sexual trauma, 62, 240 “How to Write About Africa,” 21
trauma studies, 239 One Day I Will Write About This
traumatic event, 225, 239 Place, 30
Tredennick, Bianca, 164–166, 168 Walcott, Derek, 201
Trousseau, 234, 245, 246, 248 Walking, 63, 94, 95, 98, 105,
Tube, The 109–112, 115, 116, 118, 121,
London Tube, The, 39, 40, 96 124, 125, 131n11, 192, 246
tube station, 39, 124 street walking, 39, 109
underground, 39, 97 Walpole, Horace, 141–144, 148, 149
Tubman, Harriet, 56 The Castle of Otranto, 142
Tumblr, 226, 230, 253 Weaving, 14, 44, 45, 49–51, 57, 207,
Typography/typographical, 94, 101, 219, 222, 223
161, 166, 167, 169 Windrush, 80–82, 129n2, 268
MV Empire Windrush, 81
Wisker, Gina, 141, 142, 148,
U 170, 176
Uganda, 216, 217, 235 Witness, 12, 200, 201, 203, 212,
Uncanny, 12, 140, 144, 150, 165, 221, 242, 243, 249,
192, 208 264, 268
Ungrievable lives, 252 Wolff, Janet, 110
Unhomely, 15, 140, 145, 148–161 Wolfreys, Julian, 78, 79, 94, 145
Unreliable narration, 166 World
Urban feminist rewriting of, 3
experience, 77 habitable world, 23
planning, 96, 125 hospitable worlds, 5, 23, 83
subjectivity, 86 making of, 2, 4–6, 83, 84, 262
282 INDEX
World (Cont.) Wound, 84, 200, 201, 238–254, 262

opening of, 4, 5, 23, 37, wielding the, 251
69, 199–254
world forming, 14, 77
worldhood, 4 Y
worlding, 4, 5, 11, 17n3, 23, 79, Yoruba
83–85, 128, 209 Yoruba mythology, 138
world literature, 4, 5, 16–17n1 Yoruba witchcraft, 154
worldly force, 3
world making, 10, 12, 30, 38, 79,
90, 102, 127, 139, 142, 171, Z
178, 191, 204, 238, 239 Zephaniah, Benjamin, 76
World literature, 4, 5, 16–17n1 “The London Breed,” 76

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

Love and Space in

Denise deCaires Narain

More information about this series at

Love and Space in

ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Cover image © work by Lisa Kling, Image ID: 956618782

This is a book about love, kinship and relationality—and it is here that I

Frieda Kuhn, Sophie Renninger, Haykanush Sazhumyan, Caterina Seeger,

(Indo-German Partnership in Higher Education)-­ funded programme

2 Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 21

3 London Lovers: Zadie Smith 75

4 Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi137

5 Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel199

6 Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”261

Erotic encounters on the bustling streets of Lagos or London; romantic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

and diasporic displacement and by simultaneously depicting the vulnera-

Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds

belongings that is carved out from an ambiguous and charged attachment

how contemporary fictional texts free up new possibilities for remaking

His approach to postcolonial, diasporic literature is marked by a complex

conception of world literature as the literature of the world (double geni-

What follows from such thinking is the responsibility we need to take on

literature’s vocation is to think the force of worlding, […] to enact the

Belonging otherwise, imagining other worlds—this is how we will be able

Longing: (Im)possible Love

Throughout her decade-spanning work, the African American philoso-

a distinctive feminist love studies questions the continual tendency within

They conceive of love as “a possible important creative force, connecting

exclusionary force provides the possibility to re-formulate it and posit it as

aboriginal children from their homes in the twentieth century, ostensibly to

socio-political imaginaries: “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the

would take to (re)build a world” (ibid.)—however messy and untidy such

constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive

chapter. The second chapter (Adichie) looks at movements spanning

geographical relations are always closely connected to stories of love and

relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time in order to

Damrosch, World Literature in Theory (2014), or the earlier Moretti,

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thinking of the “reparative”: reparative readings

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard

Routes of Desire: Chimamanda

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

We ascribe complexity to what we know and reversely try to put boundar-

novel’s intricate interplay of longing and belonging. This chapter will, in a

Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America

Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked

smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton

We first meet Ifemelu, one of the two protagonists of Americanah, when

In these first lines of the novel, we learn of Ifemelu’s desire to return to

Underlining the notion of intertwined familiarity and otherness that

Americanised African immigrant. What is more, Americanah’s worlded

between nations. This new wave of contemporary transnational literature,

transnationalism is not a new term for internationalism or globalization or

Echoing this, Sara Ahmed reminds us in Strange Encounters that “transna-

“Your hair hard,” Aisha said.

salons in different countries, the narrative goes on to chronicle Ifemelu’s

homes: “‘American passport is the coolest thing,’ Kayode said. ‘I would

Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians,

The temporary and transitional basement room creates a safe space—one

at home”: “the process of estrangement is the condition for the emer-

(Indo-German Partnership in Higher Education)- funded programme

2 Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 21

3 London Lovers: Zadie Smith 75

4 Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi137

5 Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel199

6 Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”261

the Guardian: “Hair is hair—yet also about larger questions: self-

Her blog, at first titled Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-