Reading the diasporic abiku in Helen Oyeyemi’s The icarus girl

This essay reads the abiku figure in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) in its new context of migration. This context, read as diasporic, provides a framework in which the abiku child confronts structures of racialized interpretation. Oyeyemi’s novel invites us to consider the tension between the narrative of abiku as Yoruba myth/legend with a particular material culture and its new diasporic double as a subject of psychoanalytic interpretation—Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The essay reads this interpretive tension, which is triggered by the protagonist’s split racial identity, as an opportunity for reexamining the signifying practice of the abiku figure within changing spatiotemporal contexts. The diasporic abiku lends itself to varied modes of storytelling, and of narrative practices occasioned by its new transplanted contexts, that allow Oyeyemi’s novel to reframe the discourse on migration and race in relation to a continuously evolving cultural space of the African diaspora.

Duke Scholars

Author Christopher Ernest Ouma English