Diaspora, gender and identity:Twinning in three diasporic novels

Abstract

The article focuses on young women writers, who have grown up in Europe or North America, one or both of whose parents are African.These parents grew up in Africa and migrated. The cultural consequences of this background are explored. These writers, as Black and female, occupy an ambiguous space of contested citizenship because of what they inherit from Africa and because they wear the signs of their parents’ backgrounds on their black bodies. But they occupy a profoundly different territory from their parents. It is this territory, both a literal place and a space of the performance of multiple imaginings that this article attempts to map out. In order to do so, it examines three writers, who play with form, language and identity through the construction of fictional twins: Diana Evans's 26a (2005), Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) and Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005). The use of twins becomes a coded language for the writers’ own splitting, doubling and questing for their identities in London or Alberta, as well as for their connection with Africa. This inspiration from African oral myths in general, and those of twins in particular, gives rise to a version of gendered magical realism.

Keywords:

• Diaspora
• gender
• identity
• magical realism
• twins in fiction

Notes

1 African attitudes to twin births are obviously varied, and have been changing all the time. For more information regarding these attitudes, see the special issue of Ethnology on Twinship in Africa, edited by Renne, Elisha P. and Bastian, Misty L. Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 2001.

2 See also Gubar, 1979, 307, Kristeva, 1981, 24, and Ostriker, 1986, 211.