Content area
Full Text
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
-Gzvendolyn Brooks
In a 2009 interview for The Sunday Times, Helen Oyeyemi explains the impetus behind White Is for Witching, the tale of "a starving girl and a xenophobic house" (Machell). "I wanted to write a vampire story," Oyeyemi recalls:
After I graduated, I volunteered in South Africa for a few months. I was staying in this town called Paarl, and everyone wanted to talk about race all the time. I started to feel strange ... I got this flu-like illness and spent a lot of time in bed with Dracula in the dark wing of this big house. I was feverish. I started thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider, because you've got this foreign count with this unnatural appetite ... I thought, what's an unnatural appetite? A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else. (Machell)
White Is for Witching is by no means a conventional vampire tale, and it exploits not the familiar European vampire but the Caribbean soucouyant to represent the fear of the outsider and unnatural appetite. At the same time, however, it subverts the conventional and metaphorical associations of vampirism with the "foreign" other, as the British Nigerian Ore draws upon her knowledge of the soucouyant in order to try to understand and explain the dangerous matriarchal line of Miranda Silver's British ancestors. White is established as the marker of evil, a whiteness that embodies British nationalism.
The Caribbean soucouyant is a witch who transforms into a ball of fire after she removes her skin. She flies as this ball of flame, going through keyholes and crevices until she finds her human victim and sucks his or her life-blood. Joan Dayan appropriates this pre-colonial myth in order to analyze the colonial past and the European exploitation of the slaves. For Dayan, "these 'monsters' are the surfeit or remnants of an institution that turned humans into things, beasts, or mongrels" (258). The vampire functions as a metaphor in the Caribbean to stage the nightmarish consumption of the bodies of the colonized and to interrogate the relations of consumption between white and black bodies.
Oyeyemi relocates these violent relations within contemporary...