Reviewed by
SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent

White is for Witching a.k.a Pie-kah is Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel. I have been stimulated by and enjoyed reading her The Icarus Girl (Mmegi, 7th April 2006). It was hailed as an extraordinary work of imagination about the three worlds - this, the spirit and the bush. Jess is haunted by being the twin that is alive. It was published by Bloomsbury when she was 18, having written it while doing her A-levels, making her their youngest author.

Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House (Mmegi, 17th October 2008) was set in London, Lagos and Cuba, with a fourth leg in Emily Dickinson (who lived in her family’s opposite house in Amherst, Massachusetts) and a somewhere house of Oyeyemi’s creation. In it she continued her exploration of the role of spirits in our lives.

In White is for Witching Oyeyemi’s exploration of the unknown (bordering on magic realism or gothic tales) is carried even further. She had gone to Paarl, South Africa, as a volunteer in a centre for young children living with HIV and AIDS. She says: “’I was staying in the dark wing of this house with the woman who helps the volunteering agency out and I started reading Dracula quite closely and intensely, probably more intensely than usually done, and I started thinking about the vampire novel and what it is, about monstrosity and what it means, and I thought it seemed to be about fear of the foreign and unnatural appetite” (Untitled Books blog Issues 18 December 2009).

White is for Witching is about Miranda (Miri) Silver, the fourth generation in a line of Silver women, going back to Anna, Jennifer and Lily (great-grandmother, grandmother and mother). Miri has Pica, an eating disease, or “Pie-kah”. Miri has a twin, Eliott. Their mother Lily, who had a studio there, was a photographer. Lily was murdered while on an assignment in Haiti.  She left her large Silver House in Dover, Cornwall, to Miri, Eliott and their father, Luc Dufrense, a former journalist who reviewed restaurants.

Luc first met Lily at a newspaper Christmas party and “He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes”. He inherited the house and all it eccentricities, including Miri’s psychomantium, secret rooms, an unbelievable attic and places to fall into. They run it as a form of an inn, but depend on foreign help. When one family who has tried to work there leaves, because they cannot cope with the hidden floors, the extra people and the ghosts, they write to Miranda, “We do not like this hose [sic] and we are glad we are going away”. Next Luc takes on Sade, who is Yoruba, to help run the inn. Sade may be more tolerant of unusual houses?

When Miranda and Elliott go to be interviewed for admission to Cambridge University, her admission essay was on The female consciousness explored in the Gothic. There she meets Ore Lind, a prospective student of African origin, adopted in the United Kingdom (UK) by elderly white parents. Later they become friends and lovers.

White is for Witching is told in a number of voices. At first this can be confusing to the reader unless you have figured out who “I” is at each point in the novel. The opening chapter gives a clue:”Where is Miranda?” The first voice is Ore’s and the first thing she says in answer to the question “Where is Miranda?” is: “Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house, her throat is blocked with a slice of apple ... She chose this as the only way to fight the soucouyant [a malignant witch in the West Indies]”.  Then Eliot answers the question, “Miri is gone. Just gone. We’d had an argument ... As part of me knows we can’t find her because something has happened to her”.  The next voice is that of the inn at 29 Barton Road, “Miranda is at home (homesick, home sick). Miranda can’t come in today. Miranda has a condition called pica, she has eaten a great deal of chalk - she really can’t help herself - she has been very ill ... she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica”. This pattern repeats throughout the novel and with other variations.

Great-grandmother Anna Good also had pica. In Miranda’s psychomantium “glass topples darkness”. There the three previous generations of women come to life. Luc, noticing how thin Miranda has become, orders, “You will have to eat. You will wear your clothes until they fit. It will be good for you.” He promised to make getting healthy delicious. GrandAnna also had mental problems. Miri says her crack-up “Was like the heraldic pelican” (the one that plucks its breast to feed its younglings). “White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you can use them” (page 108).

When Miranda has some trouble in Dover with Kosovan migrants who suspect her of something she didn’t do, she makes enemies and maybe a friend, Tijana, who later shows up as a fellow student at university. Luc considers selling the house and leaving Dover, but the house says, “Luc didn’t know why he couldn’t move. I knew why; it was because I’d leant all my weight, every wall and corridor, on his shoulders. He was lucky I allowed him to stand” (page 69).

The house turns against Sade. “Juju will not protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I’ll turn sugar bitter for you. I’ll take your very shield and crack it in on your head. What is for witching, so ti gbo? Do you understand now? White is for witching, Sade goodbye” (page 163).

Eliot prepares to go to Africa for his Gap. Miri and Sade went shopping together, even as far as London. That winter Miri and Eliott were turning 18. She knitted a scarf for him. The house was not happy, and did its best to scare away guests to the inn. The twins leave, one for South Africa, the other for Cambridge, but she only lasts one term there.

In the next part Ore Lind becomes the key voice relating events at Cambridge. “I sat down again and let her tell me about the project on her wall. The white haired woman was Miranda’s great-grandmother, who had raised the short-haired laughing woman, who was Miranda’s mother. The girl in the old school photo was Miranda’s absent grandmother. They were all dead” (page 150).  When Miranda came home from college she told the house, in a whisper “I’m in love”. “Anna was shocked. Jennifer was shocked. Lily was impassive”. The house says, “I would save Miranda, even if I have to break her.”

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984. Her parents (Nigerian mother, English father) moved to England when she was four, but they summered regularly in Nigeria.

She studied political science at Cambridge University and in 2007 enrolled for a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York City, but dropped out because she found it too cramped. Since then she has had more time for travelling and writing.

Will her fourth novel also pursue the world of spirits? I wonder if she has she read Paul Theroux’s The Black House (1974) that also links Africa and a house of spirits in England?
Email: sheridangriswold@yahoo.