The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora: Helen Oyeyemi's The Opposite House

The paper explores how Helen Oyeyemi searches for an appropriate form and language to describe the multiple cultures, histories and tongues she has inherited. She can barely remember Africa, a loss she only partially shares with slave descendents because she was born in Nigeria, but raised in England from the age of four. The novel is set within the triangular space of the trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean. I show how Oyeyemi conducts a thought experiment, imagining the journey, not of the slaves themselves, but of their gods. This journey is less physical than metaphysical, as the gods metamorphose or die in the opposite house; the house is Oyeyemi's mind, which contains the poetry and all the paraphernalia with which the writer struggles to come to terms with her confusions. The paper suggests that Oyeyemi's challenge is to write in such a way that she can invent new codes through which to tell the truth of her past, which is always refracted, unfocussed and skittering at the zigzag. The novel is ultimately impossible fully to understand, except at a visceral level. Yet, Oyeyemi's narrative voices are as compelling as they are bewildering, in their cacophony emerging beneath and beyond the realist narrative of slavery.