The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
The Times, UK January 01, 2005
The Icarus Girl is a story of overwhelming, corrosive loneliness. Jessamy Harrison lives in London, the only child of a Yoruba mother and an English father. As the novel opens, this intellectually precocious, angry, solitary eight-year-old has shut herself into a cupboard because only in such confined spaces does she feel in control.
On one level Jess’s alienation springs from everyday realities. She has been moved up a year in school because of her academic gifts. Her rages and screaming fits distance her further from her classmates. She is a stranger to her mother’s family and language. On a deeper level, Jess is haunted by other zidentities which threaten to take over and destroy her own.
The strongest of these takes the form of a little girl, Titiola, whom Jess encounters when she first visits Nigeria.
Jess names the girl TillyTilly, and she appears to be the typical imaginary best friend of an isolated child. But TillyTilly is far more powerful than this. It emerges that Jess is not an only child, but a surviving twin. It also becomes clear that this novel is as much metaphysical as it is realistic.
Twins bring blessings in Yoruba culture, but may also bring misfortune. If one twin dies at birth, the surviving twin is thought to have lost half her soul. A sacred image of the dead twin, an ere ibeji, must be carved and then tended like a living child; in its turn the ibeji protects the family. Otherwise, disaster follows in the form of sickness, death and barrenness. This fate overtakes Jessamy Harrison’s family.
Helen Oyeyemi was only 18 at the time that The Icarus Girl was written. Her style is bold, raw and often painful in its intensity as she describes Jess’s psychic torment and near disintegration. Her father is sucked dry by depression, her teacher disappears on sick leave, and Jess’s one good friend is almost killed during a sleepover from hell.
Oyeyemi’s writing is powerful if uneven. But at its best this is a chilling story about the anguish of separation from all that should be most familiar and dear. In the end it is only in Nigeria, within the traditional family compound, that wounds can begin to heal.
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