The Opposite House

In a dazzling follow-up to The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity.

Maja Carmen Carrerra, the daughter of a black Cuban couple, was only five years old when the family emigrated to London. Growing up, she speaks the Spanish of her native land and the English of her adopted country, but longs for a connection to her African roots. Now in her early twenties, Maja is haunted by thoughts of Cuba and the desire to make sense of the threads of her history. Maja's mother has found comfort in Santeria — a faith that melds Catholic saints and the Yoruba gods of West African religion. Her involvement with Santeria, however, divides the family as Maja's father rails against his wife's superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution.

Maja's narrative is one of two parallel voices in Oyeyemi's beautifully wrought novel. Yemaya Saramagua speaks from the other side of the reality wall — in the Somewherehouse, which has two doors, one opening to London, the other to Lagos. A Yoruban goddess, Yemaya is troubled by the ease with which her fellow gods have disguised themselves as saints and reappeared under different names and faces.

As Maja and Yemaya move closer to understanding themselves, they realize that the journey to discovering where home truly lies is at once painful and exhilarating.

"Oyeyemi (Icarus Girl) returns to the realms of myth and magic in her second novel, the rewarding and challenging narrative of Maja, a 24-year-old black Cuban woman whose family fled Castro's revolution for London when she was seven. Maja has recently moved in with her boyfriend, Aaron, and discovers she is pregnant with the child she's wanted since she was five years old. And though adjusted to life in London, she begins to wonder about the country her family left behind. Coloring her search for a sense of belonging are the gods and goddesses of Santeria, a fusion of Catholicism and West African Yoruba beliefs. Flashbacks flesh out Maja's relationships with her Santeria-practicing Mami, her professor Papi (who is not a Santeria practitioner) and her bully-bait younger brother, Toms. Maja's gay best friend, Amy Eleni, provides Maja with sharp insight that helps her come into her own. Interwoven is the story of Aya, a goddess of Santeria who lives in the 'somewherehouse,' which has one door that opens onto Lagos and one onto London. Though the prose can tend toward the imprecise ('she felt a pull and a fuzzy, bite-sized happiness'), the novel's lyrical and stylistic experimentation speaks to Oyeyemi's depth of talent. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Recent postcolonial novels explore the cultural bouillabaisse: characters of various national origins, creeds and colors, living in an international capital and queasily negotiating issues of cultural transition. They have their heritages, African, Indian, Arabian, Jewish; they may speak Farsi or Spanish at home — or, if they're very young, they may speak only snippets of their parents' native tongue... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) — but socially they speak the majority language (often English or French), and they feel they have one foot in another country. They feel they are losing a sense of history, but the flux is creating something new.

The 22-year-old writer Helen Oyeyemi makes another contribution to this genre with her second novel, 'The Opposite House.' This is not to say that 'The Opposite House,' or anything about Oyeyemi's writing, is generic. Hardly. She is a startling literary prodigy. She wrote her mature first novel, 'The Icarus Girl,' at age 18. That book displayed Oyeyemi's gift as a fantasist. She has the ability to shift between realism and expressionism without surrendering to self-indulgence; it's a difficult trick to pull off. Her writing is delightfully eccentric.

She brings that special sensibility to her new novel of lives split between the multicultural West and 'the opposite house' — dreams, longings and sensibilities rooted elsewhere. The story is narrated by Maja Carmen Carrera, a semiprofessional jazz singer in her early 20s, living in London, sharing her unstable life with her parents, black Cuban emigres; her boyfriend, Aaron, a white Ghanaian; and the baby growing inside her that she keeps secret for most of the story. Maja's academic father is a skeptic who nonetheless attends Mass; her mother combines faithful Catholicism with fidelity to the Cuban religion of Santeria and its complex system of deities. Papi and Chabella (the mother) spend the story feuding over an altar in the entryway and her Santeria beads.

The other satellites in Maja's psychological orbit include her best friend, Amy Eleni, a lesbian of Cypriot extraction, and ancestral presences, such as her late great grandmother, Bisabuela Carmen, a Santeria priestess. Maja and Amy obsess over the symbolism in Hitchcock's 'Vertigo,' and they personify their psychological chaos as shadow identities they nickname 'personal hysterics': 'My hysteric smells foreign, like perfumed sand, but maybe that's how she's supposed to smell,' Maja reflects. Amy's personal hysteric 'walks three paces behind me at all times (then) she jumps on my back and takes me down.'

If 'The Opposite House' sounds like a busy novel, it is. Every two or three chapters of Maja's story alternate with a mythic account of the adventures of Aya Saramagua, a Santeria goddess. Her story unfolds mysteriously; her tale, which is allegorical, blends Santeria lore with the fancy of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' Aya Saramagua lives in a 'somewherehouse' in which one magic door opens to London, the other to Lagos. Aya Saramagua leaves the somewherehouse in search of her parents, finds children who grow from seeds and befriends a suicidal young girl named Amy who wears (like everyone else in the fable narrative) many faces. The dominant principle of Aya Saramagua's reality is 'ache, or power. When the accent is taken off it, ache describes, in English, bone-deep pain. ... Ache is, ache is is is, kin to fear — a frayed pause near the end of a thread where the cloth matters too much to fail.' Aya, a goddess, lives, loves and aches beyond the human scale.

To really enjoy parts of 'The Opposite House,' the reader has to let go of logical narrative expectations. Aya Saramagua's secondary narrative is best approached as prose poetry (Oyeyemi will occasionally even break the prose into verse-like lines), a wild ride on a horse of untamed metaphor: 'Aya steps through her London door and crosses concrete slopes that balance drowsy houses on their shoulders. Night's edge blunts itself at traffic-light level.'

Is there a symbiotic relationship between Amy (the suicidal girl in the mythic narrative) and Amy Eleni, Maja's best friend? Might all these images possess other levels of meaning and coherence to readers intimately familiar with the Santeria religion? It's our guess. The same holds true for the loose ends of Maja's domestic drama. She declares (then retracts) that she is moving back to her birthplace. Will she really move to Cuba? At the end of 'The Opposite House,' Maja's relationships with her parents, friends and boyfriend are still rocky, and the rationale behind Oyeyemi's use of a double narrative is still ambiguous.

'The Opposite House' is top-heavy with themes, symbols and motifs. It's overcrowded (and arguably unfinished), yet in its own way extraordinary. Though the first hundred pages are rough going, slowly the reader accepts the eccentricities and grows to appreciate Oyeyemi's rare jewels. The very first chapter is entitled 'Telling it Slant' (after Emily Dickinson's advice 'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant'). Oyeyemi writes slantwise. She has fashioned a narrative that is at turns comic, lovely and grotesque. She has an original voice and a rich gift for conjuring the fantastic. At age 22, she is already an innovator. Look what she's done to the contemporary novel of the cultural bouillabaisse. She's added a magical dimension that recalls the visionary worlds of Emily Dickinson, Neruda and even Rimbaud.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and social critic living in Charleston, S.C. His social criticism often appears in Dissent.

" Reviewed by Lily KingRon CharlesBruce SchoenfeldSusan WareJudy BudnitzBryan BurroughKaren DeYoungJonathan YardleyDarryl Lorenzo Wellington, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"I read The Opposite House with rare happiness. The voice in it is so sure, the risk it takes is so good and the intelligence in it is a sheer relief." Ali Smith, author of The Accidental

"[T]he book itself reads with a dreamy flow." Library Journal

In a dazzling follow-up to "The Icarus Girl," Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity.

In a dazzling follow-up to The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity.

Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja is a singer, in love with Aaron, pregnant, and haunted by what she calls “her Cuba.” Growing up in London, she has struggled to negotiate her history and the sense that speaking Spanish or English made her less of a black girl. But she is unable to find herself in the Ewe, Igbo, or Akum of her roots. It seems all thats left is silence.

Meanwhile distance from Cuba has only deepened Majas mother faith in Santeria the fusion of Catholicism and Western African Yoruba religionbut it also divides the family as her father rails against his wifes superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution.

On the other side of the reality wall, Yemaya Saramagua, a Santeria emissary, lives in a somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Yemaya is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them.

Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter.

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London since the age of four. She wrote her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, before her nineteenth birthday and graduated from Cambridge University in 2006.