65 pages • 2 hours read
Helen OyeyemiWhat Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Helen OyeyemiFiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Magical in the Mundane
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is often considered a book that falls into the neo-genre “magical realism,” but beyond just the genre label, the nature of magic and the fantastical is a central theme of Oyeyemi’s work. The book presents its magical elements as if they were unremarkable—even mundane—occurrences; no one in the stories seems startled or excited by (for example) the existence of talking puppets. The characters live ordinary, recognizable lives as employees, students, families, and lovers, but in those lives, they experience the extraordinary. This typicality of the fantastic is the point, as What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours works to rediscover the strangeness and possibility of human existence through overtly fantastical elements.
The submerged “magic” that the stories uncover often relates to gender or sexuality, as in the case of Rowan. As a puppet who thinks and speaks, Rowan’s humanity is ambiguous, and the story pairs this question of personhood with a question about gender: Rowan is variously male or female depending on the desires of those they encounter. This gender fluidity is unremarkable in the sense that it does not confuse or disturb the story’s characters, but it is “magical” in the deeper meaning of the word that the collection suggests; it shifts and transforms in ways that evade easy explanation or classification.
“Drownings” combines fantasy with realism to suggest a more sweeping, societal transformation. The drowned victims of the tyrannical ruler, though dead, are active below the water. As the story progresses, the marshlands of the tyrant’s country also rise, flooding more and more buildings and eventually leading to the establishment of an entirely new society underwater: “[T]here was no king, no flag, and no soldiers […] there were only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down there” (176-77). The cities the drowned create have most of the trappings of real-world cities, including “houses and cinemas, greengrocers, restaurants, and concert halls” (173). Nevertheless, this society is fantastical not merely in the literal sense, but in its abandonment of any of the power structures that define modern societies: government (“no king”), nation (“no flag), military (“no soldiers”), etc.
With its magical diary, the collection’s final story provides meta-commentary on Oyeyemi’s magical realism, suggesting that language itself is among the “mundane” realities that are actually anything but. Eva's diary is literally expansive, its presence swelling into its surroundings: “[I]t […] seems to fill or absorb the air around it so that the air turns this way and that, like pages. In fact the book is like a hand and you, your living room, and everything in it are pages being turned this way and that” (322). The metamorphosis of the reader themselves into a text suggests the “magical” power of language to transform, reinvent, and unlock.
Interculturalism as the Natural State of the World
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is filled with characters whose cultures are varied and who are both celebrated in their uniqueness and presented as unremarkable. Interculturalism by definition is moving beyond acceptance of different cultures to promoting interaction and communication between cultures. In literature, interculturalism presents itself when a work depicts characters from diverse backgrounds interacting in the same world without exploitation of or apology for their diversity.
Oyeyemi comes from an immigrant background and has experienced the UK and Europe through the eyes of a woman of color. The perspective from which she drafts the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is one that sees the diversity of contemporary society as its natural state rather than as a remarkable outlier. Often, the stories do not explicitly refer to the race, ethnicity, or culture of their characters, communicating them only in cultural markers that might clue a reader in to their ethnic identity. Likewise, the stories are set in various countries across Europe, many of which are not explicitly identified.
While many of the stories take place in the UK and feature British characters, no particular culture is treated as the standard or dominant culture. In turn, no culture is treated as strange or “other.” This is most evident in the university setting of “The Homely Wench Society,” which features a group of young women who are diverse yet occupy the same space and same social club; the story unfolds through the eyes of Dayang, who is enthused and inspired by their diversity. The world inside of these stories is an intercultural world, and it assumes that the reader will come to the work with an understanding that this is the natural state of the world around them as well.
Love in Its Many Stages
The stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours explore love in its many forms and stages. Whether it’s the love that a mother has for the child she has to give up in “Books and Roses” or the uncertainty of the future of a marriage in “Presence,” this collection confronts the many questions that arise about the most human of emotions. By opening the book with a story that is completely about love, Oyeyemi establishes love as a major theme that colors each of the nine stories, existing as a through line of the collection.
From the opening story, the collection confronts several different expressions of love. Aurelie, who is the mother of Montserrat, surrenders her to the monks out of love, knowing that she cannot care for her. There are also romantic relationships between Lucy and Safiye, and Aurelie and Isidoro. Several love stories happen in the background of later stories, unfolding in glimpses over the course of the book. Radha’s love story with Myrna, for instance, is introduced in “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” but is only confirmed in a couple of brief mentions in subsequent stories. Likewise, Anton mentions introducing Chedorlaomer and Tyche, who are an inseparable couple by the time they appear again in “Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?”
The intermittent quality (narratively speaking) of these romances speaks to the nature of love itself, as Oyeyemi presents it. Love is complicated and often interrupted: There are lost loves in “Drownings” and in “If a Book Is Locked […],” and there are new loves found in “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” and “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society.” Nevertheless, the idea of love persists, often connecting one story to another through characters who are themselves connected by love. Oyeyemi acknowledges how fragile and fleeting love can seem, but also how enduring love is by its very nature. Arkady’s pain over losing his parents manifests in the care he feels for Giacomo and Leporello. Similarly, Eirini the First is devastated when the tyrant kills the man she loves, but she reunites with him in the afterlife. Whether at the first spark of love, such as the connection between Dayang and Hercules, or through the enduring love of Chedorlaomer and Tyche, what Oyeyemi presents is the idea that love is central to the human endeavor.
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