A Sprawl Inscribed: On Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
The stories have fabulist sensibilities that allow for the enchanted to coincide with the everyday, presenting a mystical version of our own world.
Helen Oyeyemi’s odd and bountiful short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, has a story in which an email asks the protagonist to give an answer that is “as full and as bigarurre as it can be.” Bigarrure, we learn, means both “a medley of sundry colors running together” and a “discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another.” The definitions, fittingly-enough, are near-perfect descriptions for Oyeyemi’s strange and discursive stories.
The nine stories that compose Oyeyemi’s sprawling collection inhabit a realm in which the figurative and the literal run together. Their commingling is most evident in the motif of keys — objects whose ubiquity and function make them ripe for metaphor. Rather than have keys embody only the most obvious metaphors — that of their granting access — Oyeyemi studies their individuality, their failures, and the mysteries they suggest.
As potent as a key can be, Oyeyemi emphasizes their frustrating limitations. In the collection’s intricate opening story, “Books and Roses,” a foundling is left at a chapel with a key chained around her neck. A reminder of her unknown origins, the key hangs over the girl’s life as a type of specter. People try the key on lock after lock, but it opens nothing. Only at the story’s fairytale ending does the key finally unveil what it’d been forever teasing at.
While she shows their ability to frustrate, Oyeyemi also underscores the keys’ cause for fascination. The insightful yet incompetent narrator from “Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?” says of a key, “You should look at it closely. Not only because you may need to identify it later but because to look at a key is to get an impression of the lock it was made for, and, by extension, the entire establishment surrounding the lock.” Keys merits consideration, Freddy suggests, less for what they do than how they do it. In being negatives to a lock’s spaces, the key evokes the lock and has etched in its teeth individual stories not only of itself but of its world.
The story never tries to explain away the voices with some clinical or explicitly magical cause, and through these supernatural facts, thrown in offhandedly, the story, like the collection, carves for itself a space between a strictly realistic world and a far flung fantasyland.
Keys accomplish their task via proper fit. Oyeyemi manages to mine this simple fact for numerous abstractions, both obvious and not. Making one of her effortless leaps from the literal to the metaphorical, Oyeyemi has her characters bring up, time and again, the importance of a good fit between people.
The unsettling “Presence” involves two adults who were once foster kids and who repeatedly heard the excuse from foster parents of them “not being ‘the right fit’ for each other.” The story’s only physical key comes in the form of one given to the husband as a child, by his adopted family. Since the key provides access to both house and family, he becomes disconsolate when he has it temporarily confiscated. Fitting is a matter between two objects — be it key and lock, parent and child, or husband and wife — and it constantly provokes anxiety among Oyeyemi’s characters, who repeatedly use their interactions as tests for their fit.
Fitting is also a matter between distinct narratives. The stories in Oyeyemi’s collection have a loose, rambling quality to them. Within a single story there are multiple perspectives, time periods, and locations, and Oyeyemi leaps across all these with disarming facility. The titled stories often have an assortment of smaller ones colliding within their space. A single story can contain strands about a love affair, a teenage girl’s obsession with a popstar, a prostitute’s tale of abuse, and the relationship between stepparent and child, all worthy of their own story but here presented as one discombobulating amalgam.
To complicate matters further, Oyeyemi interlocks her stories, thus expanding each story’s limits. The stories permeate one another in themes, motifs, and even characters. Major characters from one story reappear in others as side players. As it interlocks with its neighbors, each story turns porous and near boundless.
Had they lacked the more obvious connections, the stories would have still connected via their fantastical realm. The stories have fabulist sensibilities that allow for the enchanted to coincide with the everyday, presenting a mystical version of our own world. In “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” we meet a character who hears voices no one else does, but these voices aren’t only in his head. “In this world,” the narrator tells us, “there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end.” The story never tries to explain away the voices with some clinical or explicitly magical cause, and through these supernatural facts, thrown in offhandedly, the story, like the collection, carves for itself a space between a strictly realistic world and a far flung fantasyland.
This elusive prose frustrates any attempts at comprehension. Unlike the fables they evoke, Oyeyemi’s stories refuse interpretation, allowing her stories to exist as objects interesting in their own right and not just for their utility.
Oyeyemi’s shimmering prose courses through her book’s both realistic and enchanted elements. Her deceivingly pellucid sentences, fluid and smooth, invite us to breeze through them. The sentences’ simplicity hides their fantastical content in plain sight.
When the narrator of “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” tells of a girl whose touch can remove a person’s pain, Oyeyemi doesn’t reach for a higher register to describe the girl’s phenomenal ability. The style of simple declarative sentences like, “Rowan told me about a girl who responded to all external stimuli except human touch…She could see and hear her fellow human beings but making physical contact was identical to grabbing at thin air…She was walking pain relief,” doesn’t match with the wondrous traits being described and suggests that these singular traits are not only possible but likely.
Alone, each sentence makes perfect sense. Only when you begin stitching them together, trying to see how they fit, do you find your efforts frustrated by Oyeyemi’s wandering prose. The sentences’ plain-spokenness encourages a false sense of security, but the collision of the abundant narratives, characters, voices, and scenarios disorients the through line we’re trying to follow.
This elusive prose frustrates any attempts at comprehension. Unlike the fables they evoke, Oyeyemi’s stories refuse interpretation, allowing her stories to exist as objects interesting in their own right and not just for their utility. Many of the stories, engaging as they were, left me wanting. Yet the reasons for my dissatisfaction point to Oyeyemi’s powers as a stylist. After three-hundred pages and hours of reading, I felt I’d only scratched the surface of Oyeyemi’s stories. In their intangibility, the stories hinted at some marvelous boundlessness I couldn’t access. Slippery and porous, the stories construct what seems to be a purposely convoluted collection whose enchantments, fascinating as they are, feel like shadows of greater wonders, as if the text were some key, some figuration from which we’re meant to intuit a lock and the wondrous world beyond.
