Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba gothic: White is for Witching

Abstract

White is for Witching is the vampire story Helen Oyeyemi conceived whilst reading Dracula and, despite its modern setting, it shares generic features and thematic concerns with this nineteenth-century gothic novel. Both can be described as narratives of reverse colonization, as described by Stephen D. Arata, which highlight fears that Englishness will be contaminated by the immigration of racial “others” into England. This article shows how Oyeyemi develops the genre through the introduction of Yoruba tropes, such as abiku, aje, and ancestors, not to create a new subgenre of “Yoruba gothic”, but to draw attention to the cycles of immigration, co-existence, and integration that have always existed in English history. In this way, White is for Witching forms a counter-narrative to the notion of racial purity associated with English nationhood that was crystallized during the colonial period and persists in the present through immigration policies informed by an “imperial ideology”.

White is for Witching (2009) is the vampire story Helen Oyeyemi conceived whilst reading Dracula (Stoker, 1998/1887) during a period working in South Africa where “everyone wanted to talk about race all the time”. The confluence of these two narratives “started [her] thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider” (Machell, 2009). Oyeyemi is not alone in holding this view: several critical works on nineteenth-century gothic identify concerns in these texts relating to the overthrow of white, English civilization by primitive, racial “others” who attempt to invade England’s shores. In Alien Nation (1997), Cannon Schmitt explores how this anxiety was rooted in the realization that colonially conquered peoples might, in turn, seek incursion into the English homeland, raising the spectre of “a displaced – or displaceable – population” in England (Derrida quoted in Schmitt, 1997: 3). As Schmitt notes (1997: 3):

[the] threat of invasion from without produces Englishness within. But if Continental Europe, the East, or South America provides an antithesis against which Englishness might be elaborated, their menacing and alluring alterity eventually makes good on its threat. The English are displaced, figuratively if not physically: their Englishness admits of Otherness, and England becomes an alien nation (1997: 3).

In White is for Witching that alien nation is signified through the novel’s setting in the “gateway to England”, Dover. Historically, Dover’s white cliffs marked an English border, but in White is for Witching’s contemporary setting, Dover becomes a site of alienation as a point of ingress for “others” whose material presence threatens to supplant Englishness. As Oyeyemi explains:

There’s the chalk cliffs…but there’s also the unease of Dover because it’s a port, it’s a place where so many illegal immigrants come in; there’s a lot of tension there…even just reading the local newspapers you can see that one of the things they refer to a lot is the immigrant problem…so that’s something that’s part of the town. (Armitstead, 2009)

The deliberate intention to express that apprehension regarding immigration through a gothic vampire novel, suggests that White is for Witching might well be categorized as a modern version of Dracula in its adherence to what Stephen D. Arata labels “narrative[s] of reverse colonization” (1990: 623). Arata notes the prevalence of such “fantasies” across a range of late-Victorian texts including the gothic genre but also science fiction, adventure novels, and some of the Sherlock Holmes detective fiction (1990: 623). In its gothic forms, Dracula provides a typical example. Arata insists that: “Late-Victorian Gothic in general, and Dracula in particular, continually calls our attention to the cultural context surrounding and informing the text, and insists that we take that context into account” (1990: 622). For Dracula this context includes its “extensive and highly visible contacts with…cultural issues…involving race, specific to the 1890s (Arata, 1990: 621). White is for Witching similarly demands that attention is paid to the racial issues it highlights relevant to the early twenty-first century; its setting and explicit engagement with the long and complex history of immigration into England suggest that, like Dracula, it can be read as a reverse colonization narrative.

Arata defines these as narratives articulating the “fear…that what has been represented as the ‘civilized’ world is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces” and communicating guilt about how, in “the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms” (Arata, 1990: 623), both of which appear in White is for Witching. However, the question raised through reading White is for Witching as a contemporary retelling of Dracula is how far it merely replicates the fear and guilt of this nineteenth-century gothic novel, or whether its specifically twenty-first century concerns, which replace “invasion” with immigration, have created a new form of gothic through which to express anxieties over “reverse colonization”.

Part One of White is for Witching features many recognizable elements drawn from nineteenth-century gothic, not least in its use of allusion, which self-consciously foregrounds earlier Gothic literature. Two of the main characters, Miranda Silver and her twin brother, Eliot, are reading Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe, whilst Ore Lind, whom Miranda meets at university, notes that Miranda’s “bookshelf was quite good – Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Perrault, Anderson, LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, M. T. A. Hoffman” (Oyeyemi, 2009: 160) ¹ : that is, full of the staples of gothic fiction. The twins themselves are archetypal gothic characters. Eliot is a feminized melancholic, “one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful” (28). After his mother dies, he conveys his teenage grief by “writing poetry, which he then ball[s] up and thr[ows] as far and as hard as he c[an]” (121). Miranda is described by Ore as “one of those gothic victims, the child-woman who is too pretty and good for this world and ends up dying of tuberculosis or grief” (162). Even the Nigerian housekeeper of the Bed and Breakfast where the twins live, in a touch of wry humour typical of Oyeyemi’s work, is called Sade - pronounced as a Yoruba name with two syllables as “shar-day” but, in written form, identical to the notorious eighteenth-century gothic author, the Marquis de Sade. Much of the novel is set in the Silver family home of four generations (now run as a guesthouse by the twins’ French father). Situated opposite a graveyard, and featuring huge marble fireplaces, crazily uneven floors, a “winding staircase” and a subterranean room, the house is a location fit for a gothic tale (17-18). As Fred Botting notes, in the nineteenth century, gothic settings of “the castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present” (1996: 3). In White is for Witching, the house manifests the returning past as a dangerously xenophobic character called the goodlady. The goodlady personifies a past which tolerated an overt racism, marked by her derogatory description of one of the black characters as having “the squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts…The skin. The skin” (194). Her irruption into the novel’s present warns the reader, however, not to be complacent about the persisting prejudices in contemporary society towards immigrant populations. Such populations are still marked by discursive and actual violence, as indicated by the goodlady’s capacity to attack residents of the guesthouse, and to send a manifestation of herself into the town to murder members of the immigrant community.

White is for Witching clearly replicates the nineteenth-century gothic genre both in its use of surface features, and through foregrounding thematically the “peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away” through the goodlady (Sage and Smith, 1996: 4). Yet other gothic features are not familiar from that genre: Oyeyemi, as a Nigerian immigrant to England, embellishes her gothic novel with cultural aspects of her Yoruba heritage, introducing a different field of gothic horrors. The practice of innovation in imagining new types of horror from previously untapped sources is not unprecedented in the gothic tradition. Botting notes that the “diffusion of Gothic features across texts and historical periods distinguishes the Gothic as a hybrid form, incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing” (1996: 14). Other cultures also provided useful new material: as Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert notes, by “the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realise that Britain’s growing empire could provide a vast source of frightening ‘others’ who would…bring freshness and variety to the genre” (2002: 229). Thus, in drawing imaginatively on her cultural background, Oyeyemi replicates the capacity of the gothic to incorporate innovative features alongside the traditional.

Sade the housekeeper perhaps represents the obvious example. She is associated with the novel’s title, through the witchery known as aje, a type of benevolent Yoruba witchcraft with aspects symbolic of maternal protection, and for whom “the hue of spiritual transcendence is white” (Washington, 2005: 29). This is figured through the juju Sade makes and her knitting something large and formless “like beaten egg white” (120) which she throws over Ore like a net to save her from the goodlady. However, somewhat unusually, the Yoruba elements are not limited to association with black characters, as is generally the case in the Victorian use of imagery drawn from the colonies such as in works by Rider Haggard. Arata notes (1990: 623) that, in these works, “a terrifying reversal has occurred: the colonizer finds himself [sic] in the position of the colonized, the victimizer is victimized”. White is for Witching suggests, not a reversal, but that the fraternization between colonizer and colonized has led to a hybridization, collapsing or blurring of the opposition by affiliating the Yoruba elements with the white characters in the novel. Thus, the great-grandmother of the twins, and the first Silver family owner of the house, Anna, is also related to aje through witching, the colour white, and motherhood, although in a more malign form than Sade’s. In a section narrated by the goodlady, it is claimed in relation to Anna: “you are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that I am” (24) because Anna has brought about the house’s sentience the day she hears her husband, Andrew Silver, has been killed in the Second World War. That day, she wears a cream dress and a white coat and “she did some witching…she gave [the house its] task” (117-8), conjuring up, in her anger and grief, a xenophobic, sentient being – the goodlady – designed to destroy “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty…dirty killers” (118) whom she blames for Andrew’s death. Although Anna is dead by the time of the book’s action, the goodlady preserves these emotions in the present.

Anna’s great-granddaughter, Miranda, is also strongly associated with Yoruba beliefs in a narrative which gradually shifts her from a gothic heroine to the vampire of the text. Sade recognizes Miranda’s chronic insomnia as emanating from her female ancestors, suggesting that she cannot sleep because “[t]hey’re calling you, aren’t they…Your old ones” (96). Yoruba religious belief integrates sacrifice to ancestors as one of its ritual practices because the ancestors have the ability to directly intervene in daily life. Ancestors are, however, distinct from the Yoruba deities in being “known individuals with whom the worshipper has had a personal relationship, perhaps an intimate and affectionate one” (Peel, 2004: 94) as, for example, that between Miranda and her dead mother, Lily. When Miranda responds to their calls, she is drawn to the cellar room where she encounters her deceased foremothers: Anna Silver, her great-grandmother; her grandmother, Jennifer, who disappeared mysteriously; and her mother, Lily, shot dead whilst working in Haiti. John Peel describes the “prosaic quality of the exchanges between the supplicant and his [sic] ancestor [in Yoruba ancestor beliefs], rather like how it would have been like in life” (2004: 95), and suggests that in Yorubaland “a popular belief [was] that the deceased, in going to Orun [the ancestors’ realm], enter a spirit world rather like earth, from which they revisit the living periodically” (2004: 174). Miranda finds her ancestors sitting at a table set for dinner replete with dishes full of normal, recognizable food (127) and her mother, in particular, is not spectral but recognizable as she was in life, although Anna and Jennifer present a more ghastly aspect, being tightly corseted and with padlocked lips which prevent them from eating.

The presence of food here signifies more though than the normality of a family gathering. Miranda has the eating disorder pica: a craving to eat non-nutritional substances, in her case, mainly chalk and plastic. During the encounter in the cellar, Miranda’s spirit-mother encourages her to eat – as she did in life – because Miranda’s pica has become extreme anorexia. Lily asks: “What will you eat? Tell me and I will bring it to you” (127). Miranda refuses to reply; not because she does not want to eat nor because she does not know what to ask for but because, “she knew, but she couldn’t say it” (127). In relation to writing a vampire novel, Oyeyemi has explained that she imagined her protagonist as having “an unnatural appetite. A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else” (Machell, 2009). Elsewhere in the novel, Miranda’s secret desire for an unnamed food is hinted at when Sade’s cooking makes her “realize how hungry she was; not for the sharp-toothed fireworks Sade was lighting in Luc’s pot. Not for chalk, not for plastic” (96). Yet Miranda’s refusal to eat appears to be more than a way to suppress her own vampiric craving for blood; it is also infused with another Yoruba belief: abiku, a common trope in Yoruba literature and one used extensively by Oyeyemi in her first novel, Icarus Girl (2005).

In an early text on the Yoruba, A.B. Ellis explained (1894) that the abiku “are evil spirits, who suffer from hunger, thirst, and cold, since nobody offers sacrifice to them”. One such spirit, on behalf of the rest of the group, will take up residence in the body of a new-born child, taking “for his own use, and for the use of his companions, the greater part of the food that the child eats” (Ellis, 1894) causing the child to waste and, without intervention, to die. Like possessing abiku spirits, Anna and Jennifer beg: “Eat for me…Eat for us” (128, my emphasis). Lily has padlocked their mouths shut to stop them eating and sustaining themselves, but Miranda’s food will nourish them, so Lily is compelled also to offer Miranda a padlock for her own mouth which she accepts. The insertion of Yoruba elements does more here than merely heighten the uncanniness of the text, by offering new ways in which to invoke terror. Miranda “gratefully” accepts the padlock, thankful that it will prevent her giving in to the temptation to eat what she, Anna and Jennifer really crave. Framed through abiku, the pica is reconfigured from a self-harming eating disorder to a sacrificial act intended to protect others from these dangerous, possessing, vampire-like spirits who sustain themselves parasitically.

Through her refusal to eat, Miranda refuses to be, or only to be, the evil vampire of earlier gothic texts. Miranda is displaced as a gothic heroine through association with Yoruba culture but in resisting the role of gothic villain, the character becomes progressively textually unstable, occupying a place outside of the generic archetypes of the genre. Miranda’s multivalence is refracted through a disorienting range of dual and multiple forms which go beyond the more typical gothic dualities. Thus, the vampire form – a soucouyant – that Miranda takes is itself amalgamated from various sources. This “Trinidadian vampire” is a gothic immigrant from Africa via the Caribbean described by Meredith Gadsby as a woman who, “sheds her skin at night and flies about sucking the blood of children and of careless travellers” (2006: 67). Gadsby cites Giselle Anatol’s work (2000) which “provides an excellent genealogy of the soucouyant, locating the figure as a construction based on both Victorian-era vampire mythology…and on pre-existing Akan [an ethnic group in Ghana] folklore of the obayfo” (Gadsby, 2006: 67), which travels as a ball of fire once it has shed its skin. Furthermore, Miranda is a twin who conceives of herself not in opposition to Eliot, but as a part of him in that, “he’s eliot eliot is [her they] were once one cell” (238). Biologically, of course, this cannot be true: all boy–girl twins have to be dizygotic. However, the text suggests that Miranda and Eliot are eerily identical: Ore, for example, finds that she can hardly distinguish between them as “Miranda and Eliot were so alike…when they both had their eyes on you, you couldn’t sort one from the other” (215). In the insistence on their oneness, Oyeyemi draws further on Yoruba beliefs: most cultures assume a closeness of twins but the Yoruba consider that “twins possess one soul between the two of them, and with the death of one, the living twin could not be expected to live with half a soul” (Oruene, 1985: 209-210). Under such a condition, Miranda is not a whole being but one spirit split into two physical components. Or perhaps, the text suggests, she is four beings in one. At several points Miranda is described as composite of “all her mothers”, seeing herself, Lily, Jennifer, and Anna as “look[ing] the same” in her reflection, which is “a cube…four stiff faces in one” (233; 236; 129). This aggregation of the Silver women is how the goodlady sustains herself, and, as Miranda falls under that influence more strongly – exposed to the goodlady’s attention as the last surviving Silver woman after Lily’s death – she takes on a different physical appearance, looking increasingly like Anna did. Seeing a photograph of a boy and girl displayed in Miranda’s room at Cambridge, Ore asks who they are:

“That’s my twin brother,” said Miranda…

“And who is she?”

Miranda sighed. “Very funny,” she said… “That’s me…”

I stared at her, and when she didn’t smile to show she was joking, I looked at the picture again…the girl in the picture was not the girl who stood in the room with me; I can unequivocally say that it wasn’t her. (162)

This implies that Miranda has transmogrified into the goodlady, as she admits to Ore: “We are the goodlady…The house and I” (218). The text deliberately obscures the relationship between the soucouyant and the goodlady to focus instead on the multiplying images associated with Miranda, which defy any attempts to impose narrative coherence.

Traced through the book, Miranda’s character is finally impossible to define in terms of the archetypes of nineteenth-century gothic, even as a “double” of heroine and vampire. In nineteenth-century Gothic, stability can be regained through expelling the embodied evil and transgressive other which includes doubles (such as those found in The Picture of Dorian Grey or in Jekyll and Hyde) as “figure[s] that threaten the loss of identity” (Botting, 1996: 131). Oyeyemi, however, presents her readers with the horrors of identity dissolution as described by Botting in relation to postmodernity:

In this “postmodern condition” the breakdown of modernity’s metanarratives discloses a horror that identity, reality, truth and meaning are not only effects of narratives but subject to a dispersion and multiplication of meaning, realities and identities that obliterate the possibility of imagining any human order and unity. (1996: 157)

Miranda’s textual dispersal is indicated by the very first sentence of White is for Witching which asks “[w]here is Miranda?”, a question it fails to answer by the novel’s end. Miranda might be dead, having swallowed the batteries Ore gave her for Lily’s watch (239), or she might be entrapped within the secret spaces of the house, battling the goodlady as she vowed; Eliot thinks she might just have run away, or perhaps she is buried “in the ground beneath her mother’s house” (1) as Ore suggests. The only certainty is that she has vanished and a disembodied evil presence cannot be located or expelled. However, this is not the entire difficulty of White is for Witching. Miranda has been characterized simultaneously as a manifestation of evil; the threatened female, English victim; and a heroic figure who vows to “get free” (233) of the malign influence of the goodlady. If she were expelled, what would be left?

The failure of the novel to follow the typical “triple rhythm” of the nineteenth-century vampire novel, described by Christopher Craft as a text that “first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings” (1984: 107), introduces some doubt that it can, straightforwardly, be categorized as a version of Dracula differentiated only by its contemporary setting. The novel’s refusal to present a monster or monstrousness in a form that allows it to be eventually expelled, deviates sufficiently to suggest that the novel might be better placed in a different gothic category. However, its designation as “Yoruba gothic” is not intended to indicate that this is a new gothic subgenre of which White is for Witching is an example. As established already, introducing the unconventional tropes of aje, abiku, ancestors, and twinning into an established gothic mode is a device already available to gothic writers as a way to refresh the genre and does not in itself indicate a new form. Rather, that description is intended to highlight the significance of the Yoruba elements, which represent more than just the reinvigoration of a traditional form as suggested by Paravisini-Gebert. By associating Miranda, an ethnically white and English character, with Yoruba features such as abiku, Oyeyemi draws attention to the ways in which, as Raymond Williams has pointed out (1983: 194), the idea of a “true-born Englishman [sic]” has politically elided the complexities of English history which includes, most recently, those movements of peoples around the world associated with colonization and then “globalization”. Howard Malchow suggests that nineteenth-century gothic constructions of the vampire rely on anxieties shared by gothic novels and racist discourses of “the chaos beyond natural and rational boundaries [which] massage a deep, often unconscious and sexual fear of contamination…present[ing] the threatened destruction of the simple and pure” (1996: 5). Through Miranda and her family, Oyeyemi contests the notion of racial purity associated with English nationhood. Miranda’s impulse to eat chalk might be an attempt to ingest Englishness both in terms of the whiteness that describes a traditional English ethnicity, and in its association with the chalk cliffs at Dover, which represent the borders of English territory. Yet, Miranda’s failure to establish herself as simply English is signalled by the competing associations of “white” through aje, by her manifestations as a soucouyant and abiku spirit, and by the description of Miranda’s heritage which, whilst it might derive from “white” races, has an immigrant in each generation. Her great-grandfather, Andrew Silver who originally bought the house, is “from an American merchant family” (116); his and Anna’s daughter, Jennifer, is assumed to have “run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been” (71); and Luc, the father of Lily’s twins, is French. The novel then is unable to resolve its crisis of “invasion” by expelling those who threaten a pure Englishness, because the English “self” and the foreign “other” are both embodied in one individual.

Equally as significant as the association of Yoruba elements with Miranda, however, is a refusal to associate these at all with another of the main character: Ore. Ore is born of black Yoruba parents but has been adopted and raised by a white, English family. In contrast to Sade, who is strongly identified through her Yoruba heritage in her dress, what she eats and her benign version of aje, Ore explicitly refuses any identification offered to her through her racial heritage. Although she asserts that “I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am” (157), this cannot be read as her claim to a Yoruba, Nigerian or black identity. When Miranda asks Ore: “Don’t you care where you came from?”, she simply replies “Er … not really” (183). In fact the only information that seems to interest her about her birth mother is that she “was a legal immigrant” (148) making Ore English by birth and by adoption. Ore refuses to be interpellated into any black identity which might call that Englishness into question. At the university fresher’s fair, a student staffing the Nigerian Society stand calls her “sister”, and “he presse[s] a leaflet into [her] hand”. Ore reflects: “I walked away with it, wanting to drop it on the floor” (149-50). Similarly, she “put[s] [her] hands over [her] ears and growl[s]” (211) when Sade tries to tell her the meaning of her Yoruba name. Ore is as upset by these benign interpellations as she is by the goodlady’s overtly racist attacks when she visits Miranda in Dover, which attempt to destabilize Ore’s identity. As a site of Englishness in flux, Dover signifies:

the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he was located…destabilis[ing] the boundaries between psyche and reality, opening up an indeterminate zone in which the differences between fantasy and actuality [are] no longer secure. (Botting, 1996: 12)

Here, Ore falls prey temporarily to the illusion that, whilst drying herself after a shower, her colour is coming off: “Where it [Ore’s towel] had touched [her], was striped with black liquid…there were shreds of hard skin in it…‘The black’s coming off,’ someone outside the door commented” (214). To combat the attack, Ore “concentrate[s] on making [herself] colourfast”; she tells herself: “I know what I look like” (229). Ore’s insistence on her Englishness is not, then, a secret hankering to be white; but neither does she harbour any inclination to seek out a Yoruba identity of any sort.

The generic structure of the gothic text supports Ore’s identification as English through her relationship with Miranda. At first friends, once they become lovers, they step into gothic roles. Malchow notes (1996: 41) that non-human (vampire) others of the Gothic are tied to “the constructions of the black savage” through racist discourses relating to cannibalism, of which vampiric blood-sucking is a part. Therefore “the vampire that closes the nineteenth-century gothic genre is a projection of dangerously constructed racial and sexual ‘Others’” (Malchow, 1996: 166). Oyeyemi shakes loose that connection by reversing racial norms through a racially white vampire who preys on a black woman. As Ore sleeps, Miranda pores over her, “running her nose over the other girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred…Miranda had needed Ore open. Her head had spun with a desire to taste” (91). Ore becomes physically wasted in this relationship, noticing that “for most of the term [she] had been eating and eating…But [her] clothes kept getting looser” (85), a phenomenon which links Miranda’s two aspects as soucouyant and abiku. Schmitt suggests that in the Gothic:

a notion of Englishness is itself constructed […which] functions by means of threatened female figures who ostensibly embody a particularly English subjectivity. Later, threatened femininity comes to stand in metonymically for the English nation itself. (1997: 2)

In Ore as female victim – black but also here, a metonym for Englishness – blackness and Englishness become conjoined. However, Ore is not only the female victim to Miranda’s sexual predation; the text later establishes Ore as a gothic hero – a role also typically taken by an English character. During her visit to Dover, Ore has to physically fight off, and eventually defeats, a “spitting and hissing” (228) Miranda. In either reading, this establishes Ore as an English “insider” in terms of the archetypes of gothic and, by insisting too on her blackness, the construction of Ore excludes the possibility of restoring an Englishness that excludes the non-white as the two are conjoined. Like Miranda, Ore also embodies a multiply encoded individual being, in this case, simultaneously black (where this refers to skin colour) and white (used as a synonym for English).

Oyeyemi’s adept manipulation of the gothic genre creates two characters where the signifiers of “insider” and “outsider” (as good/evil and white/black) are blended into a singularity. Oyeyemi’s novel asserts an Englishness that does not exclude blackness, and that rejects whiteness as the only guarantee of Englishness. However, the novel’s exploration of nationality and race does not stop here. It seems significant that in addition to using the gothic to make this point, both Sade and Ore are able to claim Englishness outside of those generic structures. Sade has her British passport; Ore’s legal claims to British citizenship are established through the circumstances of her birth and adoption. However, Ore’s impressions of Dover before visiting it are shaped by an incident recounted to her at university by a Kosovan girl from Dover: she “had told [Ore] about a good half-hour spent on a bench in Dover’s main Square while some old black guy had explained to her that refugees were a drain on the resources provided by the taxpayer” (203). The anecdote suggests that Oyeyemi fully recognizes that discourses of English identity persist in always fearfully labelling some group as outsiders even if the specifically targeted community changes over time. Hence, White is for Witching recognizes the legacy of colonialism as manifest in contemporary society where the “black” threat to Englishness as a moral force has been replaced by “refugee” to designate a new threatening outsider to English economic health. Through utilizing gothic’s propensity to create “others”, the novel realizes that potential in narratives of reverse colonization for “powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies” (Arata, 1990: 623). This is never made explicit in the nineteenth-century examples, only implied by parallels between the violence of the invading “others” and the inhumanities of colonial expansion such as found in descriptions of Dracula’s historical (rather than supernatural) heritage. Arata notes that for nineteenth-century readers of Dracula, “Transylvania was known primarily as part of the vexed ‘Eastern question…[as a] region…of political turbulence and racial strife” (1990: 627). Thus Dracula, as a member of one of the dominant racial groups in that area, represents a “conqueror and invader” himself, in parallel to England’s project of colonial expansion. In White is for Witching, Eliot’s explanation for the spate of fatal stabbings of Kosovan refugees draws on the same discourses of racial discord around the “Eastern bloc”:

It’s refugees killing other refugees, man…it’s far too simplistic to assume that just because they’re escaping similar troubles and are from the same geographic location, that it’s all love and harmony when they get over here. There are a bunch of differences between these people that precede their status in this country. Some of them really hate each other. (30)

Eliot uses this history to mark the Kosovan population as outsiders (“them” and “these people”) rather than to suggest that they share with Dracula an intention to violently conquer England. Ironically, though, Eliot fails to link the antagonisms internal to the refugee populace with his own recognition of historical divisions deriving from Britain’s long experience of immigration. Having established that Ore is a “Maid of Kent” – that is, living “east of the [River] Medway” and not a “Kentish…maid” who would live “west of the Medway”, he goes on to explain that the difference hinges on:

“Ancient distinctions, man. Ever since the Angles and the Saxons…”

“What happened to them,” Miranda sighed. “The Angles and the Saxons and the Druids and the Celts and the Picts and the…who else?”

“Jutes,” [Ore] supplied, bored. (208)

Oyeyemi is concerned here to make explicit those parallels between the two societies to establish how, in reality, England has never been the racially or culturally coherent society that was constructed and increasingly concretized through the colonial encounter with different peoples. Instead she shows how that discourse politically elides the complexities of a British history of “conquests and repressions…of successive supersessions and relative integrations” (Williams, 1983: 194). Oyeyemi links present immigrations to those of the past in order to assert the cyclical process of arrival, co-existence, and integration as a feature of Englishness which, if it could be recognized as a “long and unfinished process” (Williams, 1983: 194), would enable the integration of immigrants and reduce the negativity and violence associated with immigration as a “problem”.

This somewhat optimistic hope offered by the novel, is countered by Oyeyemi’s recognition that the “imperial ideology”, which continues to inform immigration policies, works against attempts to change social attitudes towards immigration into England. Set against Eliot’s assertions that the killings are internal to the Kosovan population, the novel strongly suggests that the goodlady is behind these attacks, offering her racism as the real gothic “monster” in the text, and not the vampire. It has also not escaped Oyeyemi’s attention in choosing her setting that “the [immigrant] removal centre is right there” (Armitstead, 2009) in the centre of Dover bringing into play a very real representation of the institutional condonement of violence against immigrant people. Sade, who regularly visits the removal centre is, on one occasion, denied admittance as “another inmate [has] hung themselves” (114; my emphasis). For Sade, to imprison immigrants is a national “shame”:

To make a man hang himself…You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and then when you arrive they put you in prison, and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered, they send you back…I hate them. (119)

The shame accrues to a systematic persistence in English “foreign” policy, to mete out inhumane treatment to those that it designates as “other” to a proper Englishness. Botting suggests that in traditional gothic novels, the “heroines and readers…return…to the solid realities of justice, morality and social order” (1996: 7). White is for Witching draws attention to the horrors – legal and illegal – visited in reality on those residents in England who are excluded from the legal rights and protection enjoyed by “proper” citizens. As Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith note, whilst “early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful” (1996: 5). Hence, the goodlady’s actions are revealed as part of a reality in England; in the “alien nation” the horror is enacted by “insiders” not “outsiders”.

Where political policies are typified by what Vron Ware describes as a “solipsism that locates fear and terror in the breasts of the majority population [which] threatens to obscure the effects of the racism-as-usual that continues to poison social and political life” (2009: 100), novels like White is for Witching provide important counter discourses. As Ware goes on to suggest:

The politics of the border represents one of the most important issues of our epoch, one that calls for constant vigilance and intervention by those who are opposed to fortresses of wealth and privilege surrounded by the dispossessed, the starving, and the desperate, whose temporary services are required as labor but who have no right as citizens. (2009: 106)

As one such intervention, White is for Witching combines elements of nineteenth-century gothic with a postmodern sensibility, and an attention to race which moves it into territory occupied by the postcolonial gothic. Here, writers express postcolonial themes of the outsider and the displaced through gothic tropes of haunting and monstrosity. In novels such as Dracula, the narrative of reverse colonization focuses on English fears and guilt associated with colonialism in an anticipation of the arrival of “others” into England’s homeland. White is for Witching actualizes that process in a modern setting post-arrival of many groups from other countries. Taking up notions of the “outsider” common to both gothic and postcolonial literature, Oyeyemi describes what is monstrous in the colonial past and its present legacies from the perspective of those that England designates as its “others” at home; she gives voice to those who occupy England but are refused Englishness. Oyeyemi properly understands this as a complex issue; however, she insists that when a national identity persists in relying on identifying itself against a monstrous alterity, the endemic suspicion and fear this creates – for all groups – can indeed be seen as poisonous and as deadly to a country as the battery acid swallowed by Miranda.