starlady: (coraline)
[personal profile] starlady
Oyeyemi, Helen. White Is for Witching. New York: Doubleday, 2009. [In the UK by Picador as Pie-kah]

I was inspired to read this book by [livejournal.com profile] zahrawithaz's enthusiastic review, and I was not disappointed. I think Z does a much better job of digging into most of the issues the book raises than I will, so I encourage you to read her review and to consider my remarks supplementary.

That said, this is unquestionably an excellent, thought-provoking book that foregrounds race, gender and immigration in Britain. Miranda Silver has pica, a disorder in which those afflicted are compelled to eat toxic and/or non-nutritive substances; Miranda's great compulsion is chalk, which is fitting for a white girl who lives by the white chalk cliffs of Dover, the locked keyhole to England. Her twin brother Eliot and her widowed father Luc are largely powerless to deal with her condition, particularly in light of Eliot and Miranda's mother Lily having recently been shot on assignment in Haiti and their inability to discern the nature of their dwelling. Luc is himself an immigrant to Britain, being French by birth (and a chef, for extra irony), but he experiences none of the problems that the hired help at the family B&B, the Silver House, have in making a place in British society; he has the proper skin color to fit in, after all, and furthermore the house itself tolerates his presence--with ill grace, perhaps, but tolerates nonetheless.

Yes, the house is alive, with a malignant intelligence born of the legacy of the unhappy Silver women; the house narrates a good half of the book. It even lies. It's the housekeeper Sade, a Yoruba woman who holds a British passport, and Ore, the adopted black daughter of white parents whom Miranda meets at Cambridge and who subsequently falls in love with Miranda, who are able to most clearly perceive the house for what it is, and what it has done, and who fight against it most sustainedly. Even the salt and pepper with which Ore fights the house and the soucouyant she sees within it are resolutely black and white.

As usual I had the most sympathy for the women in this book, and I enjoyed that the women are full protagonists in the story, both doing and suffering. Ore was my favorite character, though I liked Sade too, and Miranda as well, who is very much a full person rather than a sketch of a damaged girl, as is far too common. On some superficial levels I was reminded a little of Coraline--a house that holds alternative maternal relations who are nowhere near as good as they seem--but Oyeyemi, who was born in Nigeria but raised in London, has more pointed concerns. I shall have to read more of her books.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-02-16 23:07 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] zahrawithaz.livejournal.com
So glad to see I convinced you to read this book! And I'm a bit in awe of your ability to sum up so complicated a book briefly (brevity is not my strength). Thanks for the link, too.

Ore was also my favorite character, and I do recommend reading more Oyeyemi. The Icarus Girl is also particularly good.

(no subject)

Date: 2010-02-17 00:44 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] starlady38.livejournal.com
I suspect the brevity comes from three years as a writer and editor on the staff of my college newspaper. If you can't say it in 800 words, you shouldn't say it at all, was our motto.

And, see, I liked your comments because they didn't flatten as much of the complexity as mine did. ^^