Embodying “twoness in oneness” in Diana Evans’s 26a

Abstract

Diana Evans's debut novel 26a deals with the parallel childhood and subsequent dissimilar adult development of a set of female identical twins. Identical twins problematize the definition of identity and individuality by their superfluity, since being an identical twin is paradoxical, in that that one's body is a signifier of both individuality and twoness or duality. This article investigates the space of individual identity. Focusing on the body as the primary space of interaction, it analyzes the problematics inherent to a relation of twinship in Nigerian and western tradition, and the significance of the trope of twins in Evans's narrative, where it functions as a way of negotiating an ethnically diverse identity. The idea of space is important in the construction of the twins' identities; physical dislocation and dissimilar experiences bring about identity crises, and eventually death for one of the twins.

Keywords:

• Diana Evans
• body
• space
• diasporic identity
• twins
• 26a

Acknowledgements

This article is in part the outcome of a research project carried out with an FPU research scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Science (AP2004-0249) and co-financed by the European Social Fund.

Notes

1. The most evident difference between the novels is the fact that Smith focuses her narrative on the ways in which spatial boundaries are established or removed between individuals, according to differences of class, gender and ethnicity in a multicultural London society. In 26a, however, the focus lies on the space of individual identity.

2. According to Evans, 26a deals with death, grief, depression and sorrow, topics that for Evans need to be brought to the foreground as they are common problems in modern societies: “depression and suicide are very real problems, ones that continue to grow. Britain has the highest suicide rate in Europe, there are around 5,000 suicides a year and it’s increasing” (“In Conversation” 33). Yet these topics are, in her opinion, “still a taboo in literature” (Wajid 18). Evans dedicates her novel to Paula, her twin sister who, like Georgia, committed suicide when she was 26 years old. Evans created 26a as a way of acknowledging what had happened to her sister: “my twin passed away and that was like a thunderbolt which threw me into the writing” (“In Conversation” 33).

3. Brenda Cooper has analysed the depiction of the twins’ birth “in terms of a mixture of myths – African and ‘a personal creation myth’ (Mishan, first page), including an intertextual reference to the hungry road of their previous lives and of Ben Okri’s novel (1992) [The Famished Road]” (57).

4. Identical twins or monozygotic twins occur in fewer than 4 per 1000 births (Schwartz 22).

5. Among many others, and just to name but a few, this is the case of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), that depicts the legislation against twin infanticide as one of the ways in which western tradition was imposed upon the Igbo people with the arrival of missionaries and colonizers; Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde (1994), whose title is a direct reference to one of the two names, Tiago and Kehinde, given to twins by Yoruba people; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), where Evans’s contemporary portrays the difficult relationship between Olanna and her twin sister Kainene, who goes missing at the end of the novel.

6. There are studies of English literature in this field such as those by Karl Miller and Juliana de Nooy. The twins Millat and Magid in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are used to engage with the nature/nurture debate.