The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century.[i] Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child.
The Icarus Girl tells the story of eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the mixed-race daughter of a white English father and Black Nigerian mother. Precocious and troubled, Jess feels out of place both in England, where her parents make their home, and in Nigeria, which she visits at the novel’s start. There, she meets Titiola, or TillyTilly, her first real friend, a little girl with supernatural powers who follows Jess back to England and proceeds to wreak havoc on all who wrong her. TillyTilly is at once a sinister imaginary friend, a doppelgänger, a malicious spirit, and the jealous ghost of Jess’s twin sister Fern, who died as an infant. TillyTilly seeks to possess Jessamy and, on the latter’s second trip to Nigeria, succeeds; she traps Jess in the bush, a ghostly “wilderness of the mind” familiar in Nigerian literature.[ii] In the novel’s ambiguous conclusion, Jess seems to escape the bush but only by incorporating TillyTilly into herself.
The uncanny child
Horror has long been fascinated with monstrous children, and the evil child remains popular, as the success of Zoje Stage’s 2017 debut novel Baby Teeth proves. But Jessica Balanzategui notes a shift at the turn of the millennium to the more ambiguous figure of the Uncanny Child, who may be either a ghost or a mediator between the living and the dead.[iii] The Icarus Girl offers a double dose of Uncanny Children, not only the ghostly TillyTilly but also Jessamy herself, whose position as a surviving twin means that, according to Nigerian belief, she “lives in three worlds […] this world, the spirit world and the bush.”[iv] While the Uncanny Child is never the sole protagonist of their own story, and often the villain, Oyeyemi’s choice not just to center Jessamy but to tell the story from her perspective brings The Icarus Girl into step with a different horror trend – children’s gothic fiction.
Damien from The Omen is one of the 1970s most iconic Satanic children
Children’s gothic
The twenty-first century children’s gothic, as Chloé Germaine Buckley notes, “begins with a violent act of un-homing,”[v] as child protagonists are relocated to an unfamiliar environment or made to become a nomad or wanderer. The resonances with stories of migration, a familiar theme of contemporary Nigerian authors,[vi] should be clear. While The Icarus Girl does begin with a moment of travel, as Jess leaves England for the less familiar Nigeria, Jess is already in an unhomed state, not at home in either country. TillyTilly taunts her: “You always want to know where you belong. […] Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child.”[vii]
The Icarus Girl breaks from the conventions of the immigrant novel; there is “no journey of assimilation or acculturation” nor is there “any comprehensive recovery of traditional culture.”[viii] While the traditional Ibeji statue in the shape of the adult Fern appeases her sister’s spirit and helps Jess escape the bush, the solution of Jess’ identity crisis is not to become either more English or more Nigerian. Indeed, her sudden ability to speak Yoruba towards the end of the novel is a sign of her possession by TillyTilly, not of a cultural reconciliation. Scholar Diana Adesola Mafe notes multiple scenes where Jess is uncomfortable responding to either her English or Nigerian name as if, by answering, “she must then commit to a fixed subjectivity – entirely English or entirely Yoruba.” Instead, Jess yearns to “articulate a cultural identity between identities.”[ix] Like the Children’s Gothic protagonist, she occupies what Buckley calls a condition of nomadism which “allows the children to inhabit a multiplicity of locations and identities.”[x] In this sense, Jessamy is a cultural and racial nomad.
Ibeji statues like this one represent a dead twin, and depict the twin as an adult even if they died in childhood (image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Liminal children
In both horror and Nigerian literature, children are in between, neither this nor that. Remarking the popularity of child protagonists in contemporary Nigerian literature, scholar Madelaine Hron notes that “the space of childhood is a space of hybridity, possibility and, most importantly, resistance” because children occupy the space of becoming, of not-quite-adulthood.[xi] Horror enhances the temporal ambiguity of children. Just as the figure of the Child “simultaneously embodies adulthood’s Past and the promise of Futurity,” ghost children interrupt the present with the traumas of the past while their living counterparts exist between the living and the dead.[xii] TillyTilly embodies the buried trauma of Fern’s death as well as the strain of Jess’s divided self, heavy with the history of colonialism and the weight of racism. Mafe calls The Icarus Girl a “postcolonial (female) Gothic text […] literally haunted by the colonial experience and its aftermaths.”[xiii] Oyeyemi applies the shapes and tropes of horror subgenres to a specifically postcolonial context, so the abstract unhomings, nomadic identities, and uncanny in-betweeness speak specifically to what Oyeyemi calls “the new-breed kid […] painfully conscious of a need for some name that she can call herself with some authority.”[xiv]
Jess is both the protagonist and, as in many Uncanny Child films, a frightening figure capable of causing harm. She has fits of screaming, bites her classmate, and kicks her teacher. TillyTilly, on Jess’s behalf, terrifies a babysitter and causes serious harm to Jess’s teacher, father, and best friend. In many stories about monstrous children, the child serves as a symbol for adult anxieties or projections and is posited as an Other to the adult viewers and protagonists. The medium of written fiction allows Oyeyemi to filter her story through the child’s subjectivity and subverts the Othering work that horror has so often applied to misfit children.
Esther from The Orphan (2009) is an adopted child who becomes a malignant, foreign threat to her adopted family
Theorist Andrew Scahill argues that horror films about monstrous children allow the viewer to occupy multiple subject positions at once: “in the cinema of revolting childhood, a child is being beaten, and the spectator is encouraged to take up the role of the righteous abuser” while also indulging in the transgressive pleasure of identifying with the “terrible child.”[xv] In The Icarus Girl, there are literal scenes of child abuse. The book is explicit that Jess’s otherwise sympathetic and loving parents act out of fear towards their troubled and troubling daughter. At one point, her mother says “I can’t mother this girl. I try, but…I’m scared of her […].”[xvi] In these harrowing scenes, the novel keeps us in Jess’s subjectivity as Oyeyemi displays how terrifying it is to be a source of terror.
Samara from The Ring is another monstrous child adopted by an unsuspecting family. Murdered by her adopted mother, she returns as a vengeful spirit.
Alienated from the home
Scahill argues that in horror about frightening children, the child is presented as “a foreign entity endangering the true, cohesive home.”[xvii] In the Children’s Gothic, the protagonists experience their own alienation from the domestic, which makes the nomadic subjectivity of the protagonists’ possible; as Gothic wanderers, they are “estranged […] from the idealized fantasy of home.”[xviii] Jess too is alienated; she notices how her father’s white family “look like a picture-book family: blond man, blond woman, cute little blond child.”[xix] Jess’s blackness, her biracial identity, and her apparent mental illness place her outside notions of the ideal family and make her a source of fear and conflict for her parents. But rather than sharing in the normative family’s alienation from Jess, the reader experiences the story from within Jess’s othered subjectivity.
Like Jess herself, Oyeyemi’s novel walks three worlds. In her fusion of genre, Oyeyemi finds ways out of the familiar narratives of these largely male[xx] and/or white subgenres. This is not a story of assimilation or cultural recovery, but one of necessary and terrifying hybridity. It is a Gothic tale that centers the postcolonial experience of a mixed-race child. And it is not a story in which the troubled child is othered but in which her subjectivity is rendered with compassion and humanity.
Notes
[i] Hron, Madelaine. “Ora Na-Azu Nwa”: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels.” Research in African Literatures, Summer, 2008, Vol. 39, No. 2, Nigeria’s Third-Generation Novel: Preliminary Theoretical Engagements (Summer, 2008), pp. 27.
[ii] Diane Adesolo Mafe provides a detailed look at the tradition of Bush stories in Nigerian literature. “Ghostly Girls in the “Eerie Bush”: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction.” Research in African Literature , Vol. 43, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 21-35.
[iii] Balanzategui, Jessica. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. pp. 18
[iv] Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. Penguin, 2005. pp. 181.
[v] Buckley, Chloe Germaine. Twenty-First Century Children’s Gothic. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. pp. 1
[vi] Coker, Oluwole. “Child Narration as a Device for Negotiating Space & Identity Formation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Fiction.” Children on the Move in Africa. Edited by Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet. Boydell & Brewer, 2016. pp. 194
[vii] Oyeyemi, 259, 261
[viii] Hron, 35-36.
[ix] Mafe, 24.
[x] Buckley, 2.
[xi] Hron, 29
[xii] Balanzategui, 15
[xiii] Mafe, 23
[xiv] This quotations appears in Coker, 200.
[xv] Scahill, Andrew. The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 2.
[xvi] Oyeyemi, 211
[xvii] Scahill, 10.
[xviii] Buckley, 6-7.
[xix] Oyeyemi, 157.
[xx] Mafe discusses in more detail how Oyeyemi subverts the largely male tradition of Bush stories.
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