65 pages • 2 hours read
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
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Background
Authorial Context: Helen Oyeyemi and a Diverse Vision of Europe
Oyeyemi is a Nigerian-born British author who currently lives in Prague in the Czech Republic. She was 32 at the time of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours’s publication and had already released several works that could be placed within the magical realism subgenre; in 2013, her work earned her recognition as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Oyeyemi’s fascination with mythology and fairy tales informs the worlds that she creates in her work, surfacing in fantastical details like the living puppets in “Is Your Blood as Red as This?”
Oyeyemi’s experience as an African immigrant growing up in Europe also informs her stories. Her characters come from diverse backgrounds, and their names, traditions, and beliefs are culturally specific. Usage of these cultural markers is important, but so is the way that Oyeyemi silently incorporates them into the stories, making them just as matter-of-fact as anything else in their world: No character explains their ethnicity or culture to the reader because Oyeyemi understands that real people should not have to explain these things.
In What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Oyeyemi offers a glimpse into the diversity of 2010s Europe. The European settings of her stories reflect both the world that she is used to seeing around her and the cultures and identities of the people whom she has likely encountered in her daily life. Oyeyemi writes from the perspective of a person who is aware of and intrigued by the diversity of present-day Europe, presented through the varying races, religious and spiritual beliefs, gender identities, and sexual orientations of her characters. Oyeyemi treats these differences as ordinary parts of these characters’ lives, not emphasizing or making a spectacle of them. The characters just exist, like anything else in the world.
Though diversity was sometimes a contentious topic in Europe during the 2010s, this was also a decade in which diverse identities were increasingly accepted. The 2010s were a time of re-contextualizing views about race, gender, and orientation, especially in the media. Television shows that depicted ethnically diverse and LGBTQ characters were popular among UK millennials like Oyeyemi. Marriage equality was legalized in England and Wales in March of 2014, and in Scotland in December of the same year. This book was written in a pre-Brexit world, and it reflects the idealistic image of diversity from the early 2010s, in which race, gender, and sexual orientation matter less than who a person presents themselves to be.
Literary Context: Oyeyemi’s Voice Through the Use of Genre
The stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours use elements of fairy tale, magical realism, and speculative fiction. Collections of short stories often feature stories with similar themes or within similar genres, and Oyeyemi’s stories all exist at the intersection of the magical and the mundane. They make use of the aforementioned genres to create the extraordinary worlds that the characters occupy. The stories in this book resist conclusions, creating the illusion that one has only glimpsed the story’s world—like peeking through the keyhole of a locked door.
Magical realism is a genre that sets stories in worlds that largely seem similar to the reader’s own, but in which strange happenings occur as if by magic—e.g., the living puppets Rowan and Gepetta in “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” Oyeyemi’s stories also have elements of fairy tale, such as her adaptation of “Little Red Riding Hood” in “Dornička and the St. Martin’s Day Goose,” as well as science fiction, such as the futuristic augmented reality in “Presence.” Science fiction tries to imagine the world and its technology as it might exist in the future. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are magical stories, usually with some kind of lesson or underlying message and often featuring imaginary places, magical creatures, and extraordinary circumstances. Oyeyemi’s formally inventive work combines elements of these genres to disrupt assumptions about narrative structure and cultural norms, and to interrogate the human condition from unexpected and inclusive perspectives.
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