White Witch

I just read Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White is for Witching (2009). This book plays with faerie tale tropes… Snow White, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella even… and also a Caribbean folktale about a soucouyant who sheds her skin at night to feed on her victims. I shouldn’t say Oyeyemi actually plays with these ideas, because she weaves between them in a way that doesn’t truly bounce them against one another. She introduces them and then the story swallows them. It’s a strangely appropriate and dark way of dealing.

There’s a lot of fractality in this horror novel (if that is a word). Miri, the central figure, has pica - an eating disorder that causes her to crave non-food substances like chalk and plastic. Chalk is white, and so is Miri, and so are the cliffs of Dover, which is the town in which her ancestral and very haunted home is located. The house also consumes things it shouldn’t, specifically people. I’ve been watching The Servant lately (with Lauren Ambrose) and I am fascinated how accounts of food and privilege - racial and otherwise - intersect with familial dysfunction in these texts, separated as they are by a decade and an ocean.

I enjoyed much about this novel, but it kept me at arm’s length… as Miri does with her twin brother, her father, her Black classmate-and-lover Ore. This book tastes as I imagine chalk does. I wanted to get through to the bloody heart of the novel, even if I had to dig with a chewed-up plastic spoon… but I wasn’t offered a shiv. And strangely, Ore gets away, averting the true horror of what falling in doom can truly be. This hidden protagonist, introduced at the heart of the book, sidesteps a much darker ending, leaving Miri wasting into her own eternal sunken place.