The Icarus Girl

Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. Toronto: Penguin, 2005. Print.

I think The Icarus Girl is a slippery novel: it resists a fixed reading. Is Jessamy mad? Is she seeing/becoming a ghost (110)? Is TillyTilly Jessamy’s dead twin sister or is she separate (161)? Is TillyTilly Jessamy’s alter ego, as the doctor suggests?; is she the alternate version of herself Jessamy wonders about when she asks herself upon arrival in Nigeria whether she could “become Wuraola?” (20). Is TillyTilly (who calls Jessamy Jessy, an in-between name) the embodiment of Jessamy’s unbelongingness, her cultural in-betweeness* (40, 51, 85, 143)? Is TillyTilly Jessamy’s way of “re-writing” her own story, so that the heroine gets to fight back against that which hurts her (113), and bring her happiness in the form of a friend (55)? Does Jessamy break free of TillyTilly in the end when she “wakes up” or does the warning from the “sister-girl” who appears in her vision at the novel’s end indicate there are further struggles to come for Jessamy (302)? I am reluctant to answer these questions, because I am reluctant to diagnose Jessamy, even inadvertently. Instead, I hope to engage in observation and speculation.

I think that this is a novel about split identity, about needing to have, as Rushdie puts it, an “imaginary homeland” because you don’t belong to a place**. I think for Jessamy, however, not belonging is not just about being between two cultures (although that certainly seems to be a big part of it). It’s also a question of being a child in an adult’s world (which can be acutely lonely, especially for only children) and a precocious adult-like child in the world of children (at school, especially). I think this is maybe why I (also an only child) identified with Jessamy; even though I never had to live between two nations, I did live between adult culture and child culture (and I think an argument can be made that they are separate cultures). Jessamy notes that “it was too, too miserable being a child and not being able to know these things or believe in a future change. So strange, being powerless to do anything for her own happiness” (221). I think this adult/child difference comes out especially at the start of the novel. Jessamy states that the real trouble happened after she went to Nigeria, and certainly the appearance of TillyTilly exacerbated her difference, but she did feel a sense of isolation and unreality even before the trip: “If she reminded herself that she was in the cupboard, she would know exactly where she was, something that was increasingly difficult each day” (3). Her sense of place and time is somewhat nebulous, and is directly connected to feeling, as a child, invisible to adults.

This is not to say, however, that her feeling of being trapped between two cultures doesn’t exist before she goes to Nigeria. It comes out especially in her parents’ differing approaches to discipline (109, 188). Her mother seems to have a clear sense of her own culture and heritage: she speaks Yoruba, and proudly wears her iro ati buba, putting it on “with the loving carelessness of one who could dress this way in the dark” (8). Jessamy can’t even pronounce iro ati buba. Her mother, Sarah, has not taught her Yoruba (8), or about Yoruba spiritual traditions (she doesn’t begin to learn about them until the issue of Fern’s death comes up 165). Sarah’s father claims that she “went on to England, and studied English stores, and gave up her own” (27). Jessamy’s parents haven’t shared these English stories with Jessamy, however, leaving her with an equal sense of estrangement from her Englishness (167).

Jessamy’s Nigerianness is something both of her parents also disavow to an extent (265, 297), though her mother is simultaneously disappointed her daughter is not Nigerian enough. Her mother worries because Jessamy isn’t as rambunctious as Nigerian children, (though she gets this and then some with TillyTilly!) yet Jess is given few opportunities to play. Her parents are perpetually too busy to play with her (88), she doesn’t have siblings or friends (67, 71), and she doesn’t even have many of the games or toys other children have (120). She can’t be child-like and her mother is fearful when she shows the insight of an adult (152).

Though Sarah might have stepped away from her roots, she is not an “oyinbo” in Nigeria, an outsider like Jessamy and her father (16). Sarah can easily (or so it seems) slip between her Youruba and English accents and cultures (15), but she has not taught Jessamy how to do the same. And if it is indeed difficult for Sarah to live between cultures, she doesn’t share her feelings about it with Jessamy. It’s almost as if Jessamy focuses on and becomes overwhelmed by small things such as sounds because something like racism is too big a thing to deal with (130). She doesn’t even have words for it that will be heard by either the adults or other children around her. It’s not even that her parents have failed to transmit culture to her, they have failed to address her in-betweenness as a valid and alienating part of who she is. Jessamy knows she can’t tell her Nigerian family about TillyTilly because “they belonged here and she didn’t” (39). She can’t tell her white, English family about TillyTilly either though, because they, who already (her grandparents, namely) “kindly, unintentionally made her feel abnormal, like a freak” might think she’s mad for seeing someone who “isn’t there” objectively (47).

Jessamy realizes the risk in being different, in being more imaginative than most. She thinks, “once you let people know anything about what you think, that’s it, you’re dead” (77). The other kids recognize her difference, condemning her with both medicalizing and racial language (102, 185). Her nemesis Colleen (with whom she uncomfortably identifies, 95, 100) suggests, “Maybe Jessamy has all there ‘attacks’ because she can’t make up her mind whether she’s black or white” (82). Jessamy is so scared of being teased as she has been in the past that she is afraid to befriend other kids who do like her, such as Tunde Coker (79).

TillyTilly is also especially concerned with what other people think, and vows to “get” anyone who thinks poorly of Jess or her. TillyTilly is especially cautions her about going to see Dr. McKenzie. Jessamy thinks, “maybe she was worried that Dr. McKenzie would say that she was made up” (116). Although initially, Dr. McKenzie seems quite sympathetic and willing to let Jessamy define her own experiences (124). (Jess is surprised that he doesn’t write anything down). Jessamy even feels better when she talks to him (197). Eventually, however, he does turn to diagnosis as she begins to behave more violently, and pose a threat to his own family (260, 268). I think this is a reflection on a cultural inability to deal with the violence of unacknowledged/unrecognized difference, and the violence it reflects back on those who make it invisible.

There is also a sense that Dr. McKenzie is not able to understand Jessamy because of his difference in both culture and age. His daughter, Shioban, is more willing to believe Jessamy’s story about TillyTilly. She tells Jessamy, “if I had a friend who kept appearing and disappearing and got my teacher, I’d be a little bit scared that they’d get me too!” (244). The novel gives us a sense of a kind of forbidden solidarity between children and the mad, since Dulcie and Siobhan and Jessamy’s father (once he also is mad/depressed) all possibly experience TillyTilly viscerally, as Jessamy does (142, 211, 256). This suggests that children, like the mad are more open to alternate kinds of perceptions.

There are no easy answers for Jessamy, who lives between worlds: spiritual worlds, cultural and literary worlds, adult and child worlds, and there are no easy answers for us, the readers, either. There isn’t really even an ending, but rather, a sense of continued story and difficult negotiation between ways of being. (After all, Jessamy ends the story half dead and half alive.)

* Post-Tilly’s-arrival the kids on the schoolyard tease that she is the “new girl” even though she looks like the same, old, friendless Jessamy (100)

** Jessamy (or TillyTilly) says that “There is no homeland - there is nowhere where there are people who will not get you” (236). I think there is a double meaning to get here, showing Jess’s sense that there are some people who understand or “get” her, but that these very same people might also be out to get her, like Colleen, for example.