Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans

Abstract

The first novels published by Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans feature twins of mixed-race parentage—a Nigerian mother and an English father—growing up in Britain. Eight-year-old Jessamy in Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl is unaware that she was born a twin, but on travelling to Nigeria she encounters TillyTilly, a troublesome girl she seems unable to shake off. Georgia and Bessi in Evans's 26a are identical twins who share all their experiences until a visit to their mother's homeland of Nigeria opens a breach in their perfect union. Both novels were published in 2005 and display certain commonalities of plot, characterisation, location and stylistic choice. Oyeyemi and Evans both explore Yoruba beliefs surrounding the special nature of twins—half way between the world of humans and gods. If one twin dies, parents commission a carving called ‘ibeji’ to honour the deceased and to provide a location for their soul. The specialness attributed to twins by the Yoruba is compounded in both novels by the fact that they are mixed-race and by the diverging locations, cultures and languages of their parents. Thus, this article addresses how the two writers deploy Yoruba beliefs in order to raise questions about the cultural grounding of their characters’ identities, and how being twins becomes a metaphor for the ‘double consciousness’ of being black and British.

Keywords:

• Black British
• double consciousness
• gender
• mixed-racedness
• twins

Notes

¹Oyeyemi has had two plays and two further novels published and Evans's second novel was published in September 2009.

²Diana Evans, for example, has admitted in interview with Bernardine Evaristo that the initial impulse for her novel was autobiographic, due to the death of her twin, but that later, ‘truth began to merge with fabrication and imagination’ (Evaristo 2005: 33). Although there is certainly an autobiographical element in the novels under analysis, I do not subscribe to other critics’ attempts to read them and their protagonists as mere reflections of their authors’ lives, as Hron has done for Oyeyemi (2008: 39).

³An episode concerning twins, the beliefs surrounding them and the death of one of them also appears in Aminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones (2006).

⁴Hron (2008) has traced more examples of the critical position that the figure of the child holds in African and Nigerian literature in a recent article. See ‘Oran a-azu-nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-generation Nigerian Novels’, Research in African Literatures 39:2, pp. 27–48.

⁵For more on W. E. B. DuBois's influential ideas, see Mar Gallego Durán 2005: 622–5.

⁶Hron has called attention to the frequency of the word ‘half’ in Oyeyemi's text, ‘stylistically intimating Jess’ sense of incompleteness’ (2008: 37).