"secret places of pain": Colonial Ideology and the Fiction of Helen Oyeyemi

Abstract

My thesis examines the resurgence of colonial ideology in contemporary England through an examination of two of Helen Oyeyemi’s novels, White is for Witching and The Icarus Girl. Employing the framework of Sara Ahmed’s killjoy and Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia, I argue that Oyeyemi crafts unhappy narratives in order to interrupt the amnesia surrounding England’s reliance on colonial ideology. Although gothic tropes and magic realism underpin Oyeyemi’s novels, I assert that her narratives reflect the lived-experience of black British and hybrid subjects by defamiliarizing the world in order to unveil colonial ideology. In this way, Oyeyemi radically kills the normative joy of English nationalism by highlighting the suffering of those who are deemed racially and culturally other. Oyeyemi disavows celebrations of multiculturalism and instead renders racism visible through voicing the violence and hatred that circulates in contemporary British society.