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"Through Yoruba Girl Dancing, Simi Bedford ingeniously, entertainingly, eloquently, and intelligently examines the complicated issues of home and identity, language and diaspora, in multiple contexts."
Early in Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dancing (New York: Viking, 1992), during preparation for a wedding in Nigeria, the protagonist, Remi Foster, explains to the reader that "Asoebi was the Yoruba custom whereby all the women in each family were dressed in identical cloth so that at any gathering you could tell at a glance who belonged to whom" (16). To a large extent the entire novel represents her search to find out who she is and what world she is a part of. The book's title refers to one girl, but in fact it has collective meaning: during the wedding festivities, the women remark that "No snake is more sinuous...than a Yoruba girl dancing" (26). With this metaphor, Bedford has created a context for exploring what it means to be a Yoruba girl, a context that is marvelously multilayered and complicated, encompassing questions of language, physical appearance and kinship, colonialism, and European stereotypes of Africans. In fact, she uses a range of metaphors, from "a tortoise inside its house" (60) to "a perfect ambassador for my race" (123), a camouflaged airplane (123), and Yoruba dancing (26) to explore Remi's constantly changing psychological state at various moments in her life, as the reader follows her from age six through university.
The Foster family is a wealthy family in Lagos, the capital city of Nigeria. The patriarch is perhaps the wealthiest businessman in the city. Their residence is a four-story mansion and the household consists not only of immediate family but of poor relations sent to the city to better themselves. Remi is attended by three maids; the grandfather is attended by a steward. There are a driver, a cook, and various other servants. The family, as a whole, has attained a high level of education. Remi's parents and aunts and uncles have been trained in England as lawyers, art historians, pilots, doctors. The Fosters are Christian, though there is a definite tension between Christianity and traditional religion and belief systems within the household. It is a household, too, that represents the full spectrum of language usage in Nigeria, encompassing...