ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Jennifer Leetsch traces different forms of African European belonging in two novels by the Nigerian–British author Helen Oyeyemi. In both her 2007 novel The Opposite House and her 2009 novel White is for Witching, Oyeyemi expertly draws together discourses about national identity and diaspora within the architectural space of the house. White is for Witching features a haunted guest house that tries to exclude those whom it considers to be foreign. The “somewherehouse” in The Opposite House has doors that lead to both Lagos and London, thus advocating a complicated multi-sited-ness. Both novels feature the house as a location for identity struggles while interrogating home and homeland. Even though initially internal, domestic, and exclusionary spaces, Oyeyemi’s homes become places filled with a plethora of diasporic identity constructs. In rendering the home un-homely and in de-nationalising the nation, the texts give way to other forms of belonging, fashioned by the female voices emerging from the narratives and their relationships—be they sexual, romantic, or familial, heteronormative or queer. This chapter thus pits the construction of explicitly diasporic, African European spaces against a more affective geography of practices of love and desire as developed in Oyeyemi’s texts.
