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Sometimes I wear a comandante Marcos tee shirt. He’s not down with Globalism.
So naturally, when a book, any kind of book, circles around the topics of cultural assimilation, cultural hybridization, or cultural displacement, I am tempted to read it as some kind of indictment. This book review could easily become a rant about, say, capitalism or colonialism or, like, the IMF.
Who defines “normal”? Is it evil to have McDonald’s in Rio de Janeiro? And of course, Why invade Iraq?
There’s some of that in Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, The Opposite House. But I’m not sure that kind of an analysis would lend itself to the novel— Oyeyemi’s story, as good art tends to, resists truism.
And anyway it’s not even really one book; it’s more like four.
One story takes place in the “somewhere house” of Yemaya Saramagua, a santa in the tradition of Santeria, a brand of Catholicism infused with Yoruban deities. How would I describe this world? Lyrical and strange and beautiful and puzzling wouldn’t quite cut it. It reads like a litany. It reads like The Wasteland. One of its doors opens to London, England, the other to Lagos, Nigeria. Nothing but everything happens in the somewhere house.
The other world is the London of Maja, an Afro-Cuban-born though English- and German-raised young woman. Maja’s world is split, still again, between London and Cuba. Her father looks back on Cuba — its Castro, its superstitions, its African deities — with contempt; and Maja finds herself pregnant with the child of a white (though Ghana-born) Londoner. But the world of her mother — a world of Santeria — still beckons, and as the book’s final page draws nearer, Maja’s desire to see “her Cuba” is increasingly at odds with her London upbringing and her father’s dark memories of a place “ripped up from under him.”
The relationship between Maja and Yemaya is never explicitly revealed—their tales echo, shadow, or mirror one another, but there is no point of intersection. Is Yemaya Maja’s doppelganger? Her guardian? Her goad?
The truth is, I never really found out, and I doubt you will, either. But what I can promise you is that you’ll think about it months after you turn the last page. |
