Diaspora hauntology,more-than-human energies,and Yoruba Mythopoesis in Olukemi Amala’s Under an Emerald Sky

Abstract

This article analyses Olukemi Amala’s Under an Emerald Sky through hauntology to interrogate the novel’s decolonial and de-anthropocentric reimagining of Yoruba myths, rituals, and cosmology. I argue that this Bildungsroman ties the protagonist Yewande’s cognitive growth to the complex spatiotemporal experiences of the African British diaspora. The spectres of colonial empires return as racist violence and disciplinary institutions, repressing Yewande’s connection to ancestors and more-than-human energies while trapping her in an unhomely home. On the other hand, her critical inheritance of African diaspora culture and her Olumu ancestry forges a non-traditional tradition that questions exclusionary logic, centring on shared vulnerability and the flow of cosmic powers. Amala’s mythopoetic style — infused with uncanniness — subverts metaphysical binaries (spirit/matter, self/other, reason/unreason, being/nothingness). Ultimately, the novel helps me coin the term diaspora hauntology, offering new theoretical frameworks for African diaspora cultural studies and postcolonial theory.

Olukemi Amala’s 2011 novel, Under an Emerald Sky, depicts the cognitive growth of a Nigerian-British woman, Yewande Daramola-Drayton, by reimagining Yoruba mythical themes and archetypes, especially those related to ancestral and more-than-human energies. A profound connection to her foremothers, especially her late grandmother Abeni Daramola’s spirit, unites Yewande’s consciousness with an ancient female tradition known as Olumu. This reunion re-enchants her world, integrating her life with a blend of human and nonhuman agency. It also helps her expose explicit and implicit forms of racial violence that fragment multicultural communities and repress the African British diaspora’s creative powers. I argue that the novel’s mythopoeic style is related to a decolonial and de-anthropocentric mode of knowing, offering a diasporic interpretation of hauntology and challenging colonial empires’ ghostly legacy.

My interpretation of Amala’s novel will contribute to the field of hauntological research by tracing the philosophical connection between this Derridean term and the notion of alterity, while also enriching its meaning with knowledge drawn from Yoruba mythology, diasporic experiences, and more-than-human intimacy. In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time” (2006: 202). Analysing the literary spectres haunting Karl Marx’s writings, such as the ghost from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Derrida proposes a way of thinking that “exceeds a binary or dialectical logic” (78) by bringing attention to the spectral ambiguity between being and non-being or among the past, the present, and the future. He names this method “hauntology”, claiming that “ontology opposes [hauntology] only in a movement of exorcism” (202, my emphasis). This comparison highlights hauntology’s difference from traditional ontological models that repress alterity, which Derrida clarifies by associating Sigmund Freud’s investigation of the uncanny and haunting with the ambiguity between hostility and hospitality: “To welcome […] with anxiety and the desire to exclude the stranger, to invite the stranger without accepting him or her” (216–17). Derrida’s theory helps associate exorcist-exclusionary modes of thinking with ontological categorization, thus exposing the philosophical foundation of xenophobia.

Existing scholarship has associated hauntology with ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Laura A. White’s literary studies on ecospectrality “include living humans that are rendered socially invisible, nonhuman matter that haunts human bodies, and repressed knowledges that register the presence and agency of nonhuman matter in the world” (3). Ayo A. Coly’s monograph Postcolonial Hauntologies argues that “the colonial history of un/clothing black African women and inscribing grotesquerie and sexual aberration on the black African female body has inflected postcolonial African discourses surrounding womanhood” (3). Questioning biases against nonhuman beings or non-Western bodies, both academics employ hauntological approaches to examine phenomena involving othering and otherness. I will demonstrate that Under an Emerald Sky helps expand hauntology’s scope by associating it with Yoruba cosmology and diasporic life in contemporary Britain. While celebrating marginality and destabilizing discriminatory social institutions, the novel also explores unity and continuity based on shared vulnerability and fluid cosmic forces, imagining creative ways to navigate complex historical and cultural traditions.

Signifying her connection with female ancestors, Yewande’s name means “mother has come back” (Amala, 2011: 129). Her mother, Ola Daramola-Drayton, once had a dream about the orisa (Yoruba divine spirit) Yemoja, who showed her the image of unborn Yewande inhaling the “last breath” of dying Abeni (9). Afterwards, the goddess drips the Nigerian Ogun River’s water on the baby’s lips (9). ¹ The dream implies that Yewande inherits Abeni’s ability to access ancestral powers through natural substances like air and water, blurring the putative boundary between life and non-life. Saturated with fluid agency, Olumu consciousness unites the world of the ancestor, the living, and the unborn, echoing the unified Yoruba temporality. It carries Yewande into confrontations with various social boundaries related to colonial empires. At the end of the story, Yewande discloses her connection to Olumu; as a result, she is arrested and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Nonetheless, Yewande envisions this ordeal as a means of reuniting her with enslaved ancestors and more-than-human energies, much like a Yoruba sacrificial ritual.

However, the novel does not impose Yewande’s worldview on the reader. Its shifting narrative focalization leaves the reader constantly questioning the authenticity of Yewande’s visions, thus granting them the freedom to wander between different possible worlds: mythical or disenchanted. In this way, the storytelling functions as a ritual involving a dynamic process of interrogation and mythmaking. Accordingly, Olumu is described as a radical tradition of questioning that empowers marginalized communities and challenges social institutions subduing their creativity. This is possible because Olumu is related to more ancient and more-than-human forces. Yewande’s awakening to Olumu is closely linked to her intimacy with the local Cedar Park, which functions as a locus of mourning and healing. I will demonstrate that Yewande’s communication with nonhuman beings highlights shared vulnerability as a basis for unity and for the transmission of cosmic powers.

This novel has attracted the interest of a few researchers: Sara Upstone (2016: 51) briefly mentions that the story, like the work of Helen Oyeyemi, “defines a new kind of British diasporic magical realism that positions itself critically against African spiritual traditions”, while Fattoum Mouissa (2021: 168, 214) argues that Amala “stresses the importance of blending African traditions in her writing” and “attempts to resuscitate the African culture” in her novel. I regard the stark difference in their interpretations a result of Amala’s non-traditional notion of tradition as a process of constant becoming and questioning, rather than a set of established beliefs and conventions. I will associate Amala’s work with existing critical theories, such as Paul Gilroy’s “postimperial melancholia” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work”, to analyse the contribution of Amala’s Yoruba mythopoesis to African diaspora cultural studies. At the same time, Amala’s diasporic reimagining of the Yoruba female traditions is complementary to Wole Soyinka’s literary representations of Yoruba culture, which present him as “an urbane but rooted, centered ‘returnee’” and inscribe “a subliminally ‘national-masculine’ vision of African postcolonial writing” (Jeyifo, 2004: 44, 58). By associating literary texts with philosophical and anthropological ones, I aim to delineate the contribution of Amala’s fiction to a contemporary reflection on home, tradition, and otherness. I will demonstrate that the novel links home to intimacies with natural and ancestral energies. Then I will read situations where Yewande finds homes unhomely because of the spectral legacy of imperial othering and society’s failure to acknowledge how the history of slavery and colonization shapes the modern world. Situating Amala’s storytelling within the black Atlantic as a non-exclusionary counterculture, I explore how Amala’s non-traditional understanding of tradition as a perpetual process of becoming and questioning helps construct imaginative communities based on stories about shared vulnerabilities.

The unhomely home: Ancestral energy and Empire’s spectres

Yewande’s story begins with a vivid demonstration of the Yoruba understanding of life force. As a newborn, Yewande finds herself severed from and yet haunted by her true home — a unified realm of energies. Longing “for the eternal rest of home”, she now suffers from a constant sense of homelessness and discontent (Amala, 2011: 18). Her need to absorb and release energy causes strong tides of desires and emotions to overwhelm her. She thus senses the existential need to find “a conductor to guide expression” (19). Yewande’s intense and chaotic feelings pertain to her intimacy with spectral powers. As her mother argues, in Yoruba philosophy, “every emotion and thought carries [the forebearers’] energies” and one’s being “is infused with ancestral energy” (91). Therefore, Yewande must learn to live with her ancestors’ spirits to acquire the guidance she needs. This imagination destabilizes the notion of home and ties it to a nonlinear understanding of time.

Before a more detailed textual analysis, I will compare Amala’s idea of a primal severance with similar philosophical notions to clarify its hauntological nature. On the one hand, it is related to what Soyinka describes as a Yoruba cyclic notion of time: the living beings are at once linked to and severed from the ancestral and the unborn. Soyinka (1990: 144) argues that “man is grieved by a consciousness of the loss of the eternal essence of his being”, and that there is an “essential gulf that lies between one area of existence and another”. He famously terms this abyss “the fourth space” — “the dark continuum of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality” (26). He thus contends that Yoruba tragedy expresses “the anguish of severance” while remaining hopeful that the gods will “be reunited with man” (145). While both authors attribute existential anguish to a partial severance from the world of the ancestor and the unborn, Amala’s imagination of spectral more-than-human energies is more fluid than Soyinka’s idea of “the fragmentation of essence from self” (Soyinka, 1990: 145), which indicates an essence/existence dichotomy. On the other hand, Yewande’s feeling of severance is similar to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely) human condition, which can provisionally be defined as the existential angst of being “not-at-home” bringing Dasein from its absorption in “everyday familiarity” back to its authentic being (Heidegger, 1962: 233). The Heideggerian uncanniness is entangled with the unity of “the ‘ecstases’ of temporality” — “the future, the character of having been, and the Present” (377). Amala and Heidegger both describe a living condition that is essentially rootless yet inseparable from unified temporality. But for Yewande, uncanniness is not an exclusively human experience, nor can authenticity be found in any form of “existential ‘solipsism’” (Heidegger, 1962: 233). When experiencing a moment of epiphany inspired by “the singing water”, Yewande hears her grandmother’s spectre telling her that the “truth of things” is not abstract but inseparable from life, and that “living is experiencing” (Amala, 2011: 297). This phenomenological understanding of authenticity enlightens Yewande to suspend her taken-for-granted beliefs. She is subsequently able to see the flowing life force uniting the living and the dead. This worldview is likely based on the Yoruba notion of ase.

Ase refers to the creative energy “present in every natural or manmade person or thing, whether animate or inanimate” (Omari-Obayemi, 1996: 93). This concept of energy is not restricted by spirit/matter dualism. Various natural substances “transform, transmit, and ‘store’” ase in traditional orisa worship rituals (Apter, 1991: 214). Serving as conductors of ase, ritual paraphernalia not only transfers divine energy but also contains knowledge of “alternative truths — access to a ‘deeper’ critical vision” which “both deconstructs and reconstructs the social order” (Apter, 1991: 224). In the novel, the Olumu legacy offers Yewande a unique perspective on her everyday life. She senses the “invisible energy” of Yemoja and her grandmother’s spirit via seawater (Amala, 2011: 27–29), which guides her to seek “the truths [that] others deny, or describe as fanciful” and to reflect on scientific rationality (273). Because of Yewande’s sensitivity to cosmic powers, she is more susceptible to barriers restricting her expression of desire and emotions.

Yewande’s hometown is an English town, Barring, fragmented by complex social boundaries and power disparity. She grows up on a street where most black residents have even house numbers. Yewande’s family, however, has an odd house number and lives “on the white side of the street” (Amala, 2011: 21). They dwell in a strange liminal situation, hated by their seemingly polite neighbours from both sides of the street. The even and odd house numbers are not just empty signs. In this community, different living conditions are distributed according to intersectional racial and class hierarchies, especially regarding their distance from green spaces. The privileged odd side is adjacent to Cedar Park, the local site of “replenishment and renewal” (24). There, cedars, “the stable, enduring presences” resembling “supreme goddesses” and “female elders” in the community, give the residents a sense of “coming home” (25, 73). The park seems to “iron out the presumed power differences between individuals and families” (25). It lets the residents share stories and a moment of conviviality, which Paul Gilroy (2004: xi) defines as “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life”. In Barring, this fragile convivial culture is confined within the suburban green space, evaporating when encountering what Gilroy terms “postimperial melancholia” — a syndrome derived from the inability to accept “the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige” (Gilroy, 2004: 98). He contends that the melancholic obsession with the imperial past involves the silence about the British Empire’s complex history, which results in the xenophobic imagination of “postcolonial people” as “unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects” (98). Such ahistorical nationalism is challenged by countercultures of modernity, such as “the black Atlantic”, which is an “intercultural and transnational formation” of the African diaspora based on a shared history of slavery and resistance (1993: ix). Therefore, racial othering is related to a fragmented sense of time and the incapacity to face the Empire’s ghost.

In the novel, Yewande’s confrontation with the Empire’s revenants is entwined with her sensitivity to ancestral energy. Let me elucidate this entanglement through a close reading of Yewande’s two, among many, encounters with racism. One is her visit to the home of a white friend, Monica Williams, in the 1990s, when she is a twelve-year-old child. The other is her dispute with the Bubble family in the early 21^st century, which ends with her unfair imprisonment in a psychiatric ward. I will demonstrate that Amala’s writing defamiliarizes everyday experiences to expose social boundaries suppressing individual expressions of desire and emotions.

The friendship between Yewande and Monica starts with the mutual appreciation of two girls unconstrained by gender stereotypes. Yewande is eager to meet Monica’s family after the latter invites her for dinner. Yet, doubt arises once she sees the Williams’ front garden. The rigidly organized evergreen plants and stone animal statues form a restrained and changeless landscape, giving her the impression that “the gardener, far from loving nature and respecting the seasons as she [does], [is] more concerned about picture prettiness” (Amala, 2011: 136). As Ann Bermingham (1994: 78) argues, landscape gardening functions as a medium “through which social dispositions toward order, power, and meaning found expression in techniques for rendering nature”. Mrs Williams’ treatment of nonhuman beings in her garden matches her hostility against other lives’ unbridled vigour. She complains to Yewande that Monica is not disciplined enough, hinting that Yewande may help Monica pass exams. Echoing her repressive parenting, she offers the girls bland, ultra-processed foods that fail to arouse Yewande’s appetite. For Yewande, eating is a ritual that stimulates vitality. She has to imagine eating her family’s Yoruba-style dinner so that she can “[pour] passion on every body tissue and [bring] to life every sense she had” (Amala, 2011: 140). The meal in her fantasy is not only related to her Nigerian ancestry but also a more passionate interaction with the nonhuman beings providing energy.

On the other hand, the invariable gardening style reflects an obsession with freezing a certain moment of glory. Yewande’s conversation with Monica’s mother reveals the colonial roots of the family’s stiff manner. Showing Yewande the photos of a family trip to Kenya, Mrs Williams affectionately describes how her husband conceives of himself as “the great white hunter like on those history programmes”, while mispronouncing Yewande’s name even after the latter corrects her (Amala, 2011: 138). Haunting the family via various media, the ghostly repetition of colonial violence reaches out from photos and TV programmes to possess Monica. Along with several other white girls, she gives Yewande Nazi salutes, shouting “Sudan”. Their English teacher only begins to intervene when Yewande, “feeling like a caged animal before slaughter”, attempts to fight back (141). Failing to handle racial discrimination responsibly, the school becomes such an unhomely place for Yewande that even her teachers’ relaxed voices “[cause] her to flinch” (142). Later, Yewande learns that Monica’s transformation happens after Mrs Williams accuses Yewande’s passion for food of being uncivilized.

This uncanny transition between hospitality and hostility involves the power dynamics between the host and the guest. As Derrida (2000: 55) argues, there is a “constant collusion between traditional hospitality […] and power”. Conditional hospitality involves “sovereignty of oneself over one’s home”, which is exercised “by excluding and doing violence” (55). For a body or a community, exclusion entails self-destruction, because the self and the other are not separated:

To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within […], it must therefore take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself. (Derrida, 2000: 177)

The entanglement of autoimmune anxiety and racism results in more severe hostility. Yewande compares her condition to “an antibiotic on an infected agar plate” when encountering racist isolation (Amala, 2011: 300). People treat her as a stranger, non-living or even anti-living, in her hometown. The xenophobic division restricts both those considered “the non-familial” and those included in “the familial”. Mrs Williams offers Yewande the dinner invitation because she wishes that the latter may be utilized to transform Monica into an amenable daughter. In objectifying Yewande, Mrs Williams also treats her daughter as property. When it becomes clear that Yewande is untameable, she is soon dismissed as a threat, while Monica is pressured to perform a hostile gesture toward Yewande to avoid banishment from her homely space.

Mrs Williams and Monica express their racism overtly, while Yewande’s conflicts with the Bubble family expose more implicit forms of racial othering related to the denial of historicity and the repression of emotions. Graham Bubble, a local newsagent, is a friend of Yewande’s late father, Curtis, who died in a car accident before she was born. Mr Bubble offers financial support to the Daramola-Draytons, insisting that he needs to pay back what he owes to Curtis. Yewande’s mother interprets his gifts as deeds of kindness. After his death, Yewande grieves deeply for her beloved Mr Bubble. However, Mr Bubble’s surname seems to imply that this father figure is fragile and detached from reality. Years later, when Yewande’s deep concern for her mother’s cancer enhances her Olumu ability, it allows her to look into the past and see a younger Mr Bubble, who repents having killed Curtis in a hit-and-run accident. After the initial shock, Yewande is filled with rage and determined to reveal Mr Bubble’s hidden crime and cowardice to her sister Aina and his son Jamie. Refusing to believe her, they call the police and send her to a hospital. The medical staff categorize her capacity to communicate with ancestral spirits as a form of mental illness, giving her “a life sentence” in a psychiatric ward (Amala, 2011: 377).

From Yewande’s perspective, Mr Bubble has mutated from a kind father figure into a stranger, a cowardly criminal who prevents her from knowing an important part of her family history and from mourning her father properly. Yewande’s disillusionment with Mr Bubble echoes her growing knowledge of her country’s imperial history. For example, her partner Adewale’s idea of “Colonial Imperialist value” shows that her privileged red-brick Alma Mater “owe[s] more to black people” than other academic institutions, prompting her to reflect on historical links among British higher education, industrial modernity, and the transatlantic slave trade (Amala, 2011: 229). Yewande criticizes the university for hiding its complicity in the “invasion, dominance and slavery” of Africa behind fine portraits of “colonial imperialists” (229–30). She also becomes aware of “her own status as a black child of the British Empire” (229). In childhood, Yewande is already used to walking “a thin line between acceptance, tolerance and hate” (300). While the school’s “ghastly uniform” traps her “in a cage” and “makes all the children look the same” (37), Yewande and her sister discover that their favourite fictional characters, Oompa Loompas from Africa, do not resemble them in the 1971 movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Instead, Oompa Loompas are represented as “white-skinned, orange-painted little people in stupid costumes and silly wigs” (54). This adaptation was allegedly an empathetic response to a criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which argues that “the importation of the Oompa Loompas to the factory had overtones of slavery” (Siddique, 2007). Still, the Daramola-Drayton sisters view this simplistic change, which avoided addressing the country’s historical and existing racism instead of representing the issue ethically, as fostering racial injustice and unfair media representation: “White people even get to be oompa loompas. It’s just not fair” (Amala, 2011: 56). The school uniform restricts her energy exchange with the surrounding environment, while the mass media represses her intimacy with her colonized ancestors. Although she benefits from the nation’s material wealth, her vitality is subjugated.

Therefore, Yewande’s fury against Mr Bubble is related to her awareness of colonial modernity’s violent and hypocritical legacy. Her subsequent attempt to spread this subversive knowledge is met with brutal suppression from various social institutions. She is, ironically, labelled as “a danger to herself and others” by the police, and two “big and brawny” policemen “[cage] her slender frame” (Amala, 2011: 377). The image of the cage reappears here, echoing Yewande’s previous experience of wearing uniforms and facing racial assault. In a medical centre, Yewande feels “like an African slave shivering on the auction block” (377). Her condition is similar to what Achille Mbembe describes as the “social death” that characterizes the slave condition: “loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over one’s body, and loss of political status” (2019: 74–5). The medical staff even disciplines her rage and passion, thus subduing her intimacy with ancestral energy: “Felan Ward [can] not cope with real emotion, preferring to keep feelings at bay with treatment, as if she didn’t have a right to her feelings anymore” (Amala, 2011: 384). The people Yewande meets in the ward are “half women, and half black” (382), showing that the exclusion of madness-otherness is in close association with systemic racism and sexism. The doctors’ repeated mispronunciation of Yewande’s name, a creative repetition of an aforementioned scene at the Williams’, also implies that their roles in British society are like those of Mrs Williams in her family: they limit the flow of life force and transform the home into a hostile space. The experience of expulsion not only revives Yewande’s life experience of xenophobia but also forms an embodied connection between her life and the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Yewande’s intimacy with enslaved ancestors is consonant with Paul Gilroy’s criticism of an “Africentric” tradition that centres “the ornate conceptions of African antiquity” while actively erasing “the complexity of slavery and its location within modernity” and dismissing colonialism as momentary and inconsequential interruptions of “African advancement” (1993: 189–90). He points out that this exclusionary and ahistorical mechanism of “Africentrism”, mirroring that of the British postimperial melancholia, “appears to rely on a linear idea of time” and betrays a “tacit acceptance of the idea of progress”, which he regards as “another symptom of white supremacy’s continuing power” (190–91). Like the adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that Amala criticizes, the exorcism of the spectres of slavery from mass media paradoxically exacerbates racism. It represses the powers inherent to stories about slavery and colonization, which inspire the feeling of rage and the recognition of shared vitality, both crucial for unity against existing forms of injustice.

Gilroy associates this exclusionary form of Africentrism with “the idea of tradition as invariant repetition rather than a stimulus toward innovation and change” (1993: x). He links the latter, innovative understanding of tradition with “the black Atlantic as a non-traditional tradition” (198) that is in line with non-linear “diaspora temporality and historicity” (191). One example of the black Atlantic non-traditional tradition concerns creative stories about slavery and escape, which constitute “the living memory of the changing same” (198). This form of tradition involves not mechanical repetitions of violence and restrictions, but transgressive haunting generating novelty and enabling the flow of creative energies. Gilroy celebrates “the dramatic power of narrative as a form”, which functions through “the ritual act of story-telling” (200). In particular, he strengthens the “significant counterpower in the medium of black popular culture” (201): “the circulation and mutation of music across the black Atlantic explodes the dualistic structure which puts Africa, authenticity, purity, and origin in crude opposition to the Americas, hybridity, creolisation, and rootlessness” (199). This form of dualism is a significant epistemological foundation of racism. In the next section, I will demonstrate that, unlike “the purified appeal of either Africentrism or the Eurocentrisms” that Gilroy opposes (190), the goal of Amala’s mythopoesis is not to preserve Yoruba culture in a pure and original form but rather to imagine a tradition defined by constant becoming and questioning.

A Non-Traditional Tradition: Shared Vulnerability and Imaginative Communities

Under an Emerald Sky is itself part of the black Atlantic non-traditional storytelling that Gilroy celebrates. The novel’s connections with contemporary black popular culture, especially hip-hop music, demonstrate the power of affective responses to stories about slavery, which contribute to the African diaspora’s self-construction and the emergence of a convivial public culture. To cite two examples, Yewande and Adewale enjoy Black Star’s song “K.O.S. (Determination)”, which ties the “knowledge of self” to the shared rage of black people who are “locked inside a cage” (Amala, 2011: 213), and a white teenager, who shows kindness to Yewande when she faces racism, is listening to KRS-ONE’s work “Ah-Yeah”, which regards the fury toward slavery as a source of revolutionary power (301). The intertextuality between the novel and the songs concerns collective “wake work”, which Christina Sharpe (2016: 13) defines as a method of thinking and writing about slavery as the “moment of historical and ongoing rupture”. Wake work involves “a sitting with, a gathering, and a tracking of phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples any and everywhere [they] are” (2016: 13). This notion associates the historical traces behind the slave ships and struggling bodies during the Middle Passage with the ongoing mourning ceremonies being held “to tend to the Black dead and dying” (10). Meanwhile, Sharpe distinguishes “wake work from the work of melancholia and mourning” (19), endorsing R. M. Kennedy’s idea that “melancholia, in its refusal of the outside, its refusal to bring into itself that outside object, forms a too-ready alignment with nationalist discourses” (139). Like Gilroy, Sharpe strengthens the importance of subverting the exclusionary structure inherent to the conservative conception of tradition to keep the African diaspora legacy open and alive. Accordingly, Yewande’s tragedy suggests that an autoimmune mode of inheritance may fragment the African diaspora, as in the conflict between the Daramola-Drayton sisters.

At the beginning of the novel, Abeni cautions Ola that “Olumu can create envy and betrayal in sisters” as it is a rare gift granted to the chosen ones: Yewande is selected, but her older sister Aina is not (Amala, 2011: 8). Nevertheless, Amala makes it clear that Aina’s jealousy is not the only cause of the sisters’ final split. More importantly, the family, especially Yewande, fails to overcome exclusionary logic in the process of inheritance. This is likely based on the tie between esoteric knowledge and social power in traditional Yoruba religion. On the one hand, such “gnosis” contains constructive and subversive agency, which limits the kings’ authority and enables the culture’s self-renewal (Apter, 1991: 224); on the other hand, “powerful knowledge is restricted to specific groups and statuses”, barred with “expensive initiation and prolonged seclusion” and “differentially distributed according to seniority”, thus creating a hierarchy within the community (Apter, 1991: 213, 217). This clannish power structure is more problematic among the diaspora communities, who must challenge society’s exclusion to fight for equal rights. Aina is a vigorous woman who defends her sister against racism and chooses a lifelong career of helping young homeless people. Yet, in a conversation with the cedar trees, she discloses “the wounds of her memory” and a sense of inferiority because of the attention and “special abilities” Yewande possesses (Amala, 2011: 129). Having no right to inherit Olumu, she feels abandoned by her ancestry. Meanwhile, Yewande’s pursuit of subversive Olumu knowledge is rarely accompanied by activism. Occasionally, her belief in the privilege of the Yoruba tradition seems to prevent her from reaching out to those in need. For instance, she is oblivious to the domestic violence that her neighbour, Mary Johnson, suffers and constantly makes fun of her Christian beliefs (133). When her sister endures the pressure of looking after their mother, instead of shouldering equal responsibility, Yewande judges Aina harshly for using their mother’s “pan for plantain” to fry sausages (363). Olumu is marginalized as “delusions of possessed women” and “witchcraft” even in Nigeria (7), so its secrecy may be a safety precaution. But it also limits Yewande’s Olumu consciousness and makes her already marginal condition more fragile. She chooses to hide her intimacy with Olumu from her lover, Adewale, and best friend Bisi — both of them are highly critical of traditional Nigerian cultures because of the homophobic violence that they have suffered. Adewale is particularly traumatized by his mother’s obsession with Yoruba animal sacrifice and exorcist rituals, which treat queerness as a spirit possession (243). The lack of communication denies them the opportunity to understand Yewande’s dilemma. Consequently, after Yewande is sent to the psychiatric ward, neither of them comes to her rescue. However, in Felan Ward, Yewande makes friends with fellow prisoners regardless of their race and ideology. This unity based on shared marginality helps Yewande cross boundaries and access true Olumu consciousness.

In the meantime, the novel also shows that Yoruba mythology is capable of self-renewal. Reformed ancient rituals help decolonize the sisters’ minds and free their female bodies. The family’s celebration of Aina’s first menstruation, for example, eases the girl’s anxiety about womanhood and enlightens them to defend their bodies against sexism and racism. Preparing offerings for the deities, Ola teaches the girls that the menstrual cycle empowers women, “connecting [them] with the Earth, Yemoja, Oya and other Orisas” (Amala, 2011: 104). The ceremony is based on Yoruba rites of passage for women, and the family inherits the Yoruba belief in the power of menstruation. Still, instead of seeing it as “the conveyor of potential life” (Olajubu, 2003: 95), that is, the sign of reproductive capacity, they associate the phenomenon with a larger cycle of energy circulation. While “puberty rites among the Yoruba are either situated in the institution of marriage or lead to it” (Olajubu, 2003: 95), the rituals in the Daramola-Drayton family are not related to the social role of a wife at all. These changes separate the rites from the traditional power hierarchy, emphasizing the girls’ autonomy over their bodies and their connections to more-than-human agency. In clear contrast, the Johnsons’ conservative-racist interpretation of Christianity instils in Mary a dual shame: for her dark skin and her perceived infertility.

That said, the novel does not prioritize “progressive” beliefs over “traditional” ones. Instead, it emphasizes the significance of constant interrogation. As Ola teaches her daughters, “any practice, religious or otherwise, should be examined and understood before it is owned” (Amala, 2011: 115). Yewande’s pursuit of Olumu wisdom is a circuitous journey full of doubts, mistakes, and pain. At times, “the strength of her denial of the extraordinary events in everyday life loosen[s] her connection to Olumu” (186). She nearly gives up after the vision of Mr Bubble’s crime, but her social death condition at the Felan Ward serves as a sacrificial ritual that connects her to the Olumu consciousness and gives her “a feeling of contentment” (391). During this period, her grandmother’s spectre tells her that she is pregnant, thus connected to the world of both the ancestor and the unborn. On the other hand, Mary’s experience shows that such interrogation does not come from external forces and requires incessant self-reflection. Abandoned by her mother and adopted by her uncles, Mary starts worshipping in a “new gentle church” believing “that God loved and respected all people equally” (205). This inclusive form of Christianity makes her reflect on her previous beliefs, thus viewing her body and her Nigerian ancestry in a more positive light. However, after marriage, she returns to the old church founded on punitive and racist ideology. Longing for the warmth of family, she endures the humiliation of her mother and brothers — even as her once-loving husband tacitly enables their systemic oppression. This unhomely home severely damages her mental health. In a hallucination, she sees Jesus ordering her to perform a sacrifice. She subsequently swallows a bottle of paracetamol and ends up in Felan Ward, taking a bundle to be her non-existent baby. Both Yewande and Mary suffer subjugation in supposedly homely spaces, and interrogation is significant for maintaining their right to self-determination. Meanwhile, Yewande’s vision parallels Mary’s hallucination of a blond Jesus promising her a light-skinned son, the apparent racist root of the latter casting doubt on the former. The novel blurs the line between their perceptions and reality, leaving the reader to question what is true.

Amala’s uncanny literary style encourages its readers to probe the repressed aspects of history and present life, thus joining in the novel’s inquiry. In “The Uncanny”, Freud (1976: 634) associates uncanniness with the return of “something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression”. The transformation of the Williams and the Bubbles generates an uncanny feeling, partly because it involves the recovery of the repressed or deceptively embellished memories about colonialism. In the novel, the suppression of Yewande’s awareness of the colonial empires’ legacy restrains her affective energy exchange with the surrounding world, making her feel simultaneously at home and not at home. This connection entails another aspect of Yewande’s uncanny living condition — racial objectification. Freud (1976: 625) endorses Ernst Jentsch’s claim that ‘leaving the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton’ is one successful storytelling device for creating uncanny effects. In terms of Amala’s Bildungsroman, the reader is certain that Yewande is a human being. Yet, uncanniness arises when they empathize with Yewande’s constant uncertainty about whether society treats her as human or property, living or non-living. Another aspect of undecidability in the text is related to the ambiguity between madness and animism. Freud’s analysis of the uncanny leads him ‘back to the old, animistic conception of the universe’ (633), which involves ‘a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people’ (631). For many, the most powerful recurrence of the repressed “residues of animistic mental activity” is related to “death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (634). Although Freud describes animism in biased expressions such as the “lure of superstition” (632) and “think[ing] as savages do” (635), his argument helps clarify the link between hauntology and otherness. Amala’s mythopoesis, on the other hand, guides the reader to question the interpretation of animism as unreason, or rather, the distinction between reason and madness.

The famous Derrida/Foucault debate over the Cartesian Cogito helps introduce haunting into the notion of rationality, thus revealing another subversive aspect of hauntology. In response to Foucault’s argument that “the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness” (1988: 108), Derrida (2001: 61–3) invokes the fictional character of “an imaginary nonphilosopher” and “the fiction of the evil genius” in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. He shows that the fictionality of Cartesian Meditations, exceeding the limitation of rational language, helps articulate a radicalized form of doubt that does not imprison madness. Derrida argues that, haunted by “the evil genius of nonmeaning”, Descartes’s writing demonstrates a self-confidence in “I think, therefore I am” that lies beyond “all determined opposition between reason and unreason” (67–8). Nonetheless, Descartes is responsible for the internment of madness because of his urge “to certify the Cogito through God”, who allegedly protects him “against the madness to which the Cogito, left to its own authority, could only open itself up in the most hospitable way” (71). Derrida subsequently discusses historicity in relation to “the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure” (73–4), locating it in dynamic cycles of certainty and doubt, exclusion and inclusion. In White Mythologies, Robert J. C. Young (2004: 108) points out that, as a result of Derrida’s intervention, “Foucault substituted the idea of an otherness at work within reason for that of a repressed alterity existing outside or beyond it”, challenging “the mythology of a continuous History which has turned difference into identity” (112). In a similar vein, Under an Emerald Sky demonstrates the impossibility of eliminating the mechanisms of othering once and for all by replacing the tradition of reason with one of animism or unreason. Instead, the subversive non-traditional tradition, Olumu, involves shifts between homeliness and unhomeliness based on constant interrogation.

Meanwhile, this uncertainty does not lead to nihilism, because the comprehension of shared vulnerability and the flow of more-than-human energies guide the questioning. Yewande learns this from her beloved Mother Cedar, an old tree that the Daramola-Draytons and their neighbours regard as “a nanny to their parents and to many generations of their bloodline” (Amala, 2011: 26). In a fragmented community, this nonhuman female ancestor offers unconditional hospitality and love to all the residents, giving them a sense of home (25–6). Yewande believes that cedars possess a healing agency that emerges from suffering, as Ola tells her, “Mother Cedar produce[s] powerful healing oils when the tree bark [is] damaged” (292). And the cedar’s aroma soothes Yewande when she opens her body to “[breathe] in the antiseptic molecules” (292). In this way, the cedars teach Yewande to draw regenerative power from her own pain. Accordingly, when Yewande understands the significance of unconditional hospitality in Felan Ward, it manifests to her as various lifeforms, most notably the emerald canopy of her beloved Mother Cedar.

The awakening of Yewande’s Olumu consciousness is similarly accompanied by cycles of destruction and creativity, pain and relief. In the formal initiation of her Olumu inheritance, Yewanda witnesses her classroom become a mythical “abyss”, where “the haunting emptiness” surrounds her, making her feel that “she [isn’t] just observing the void, she [is] the void” (Amala, 2011: 267). Her perceptions are only restored when she, following the teaching of her grandmother’s spirit, realizes that “[her] beliefs can limit [her]” (270). Shortly after, Yewande learns about her mother’s cancer and turns to Cedar Park for solace. She stumbles and falls in the woodland, “surrender[ing] her body to destruction” (296). She welcomes nonhuman creatures to “[converse] with the vestiges of her living matter” (296). Yet, their touches sharpen her senses, “reminding her of life” (296). Afterwards, listening to water’s music and observing a dead sparrow’s body, she discusses, with her grandmother’s spectre, the energy cycles transcending the dichotomies between self and other, being and nothingness.

The entwinement of destruction and creativity that Yewande discovers in the woodland is likely based on the myths of Ogun. This orisa of path, iron, war, and creativeness symbolizes the “creative-destructive principle” in Yoruba cosmology (Soyinka, 1990: 28). Drunk with palm wine, he kills his subjects in Ife and fragments himself in the abyss of nothingness. “Resorbed within universal Oneness, the Unconscious, the deep black whirlpool of mythopoeic forces”, he strives “to rescue and re-assemble himself”, “organising the mystic and the technical forces of earth and cosmos to forge a bridge for his companions to follow” (Soyinka, 1990: 153–54). Soyinka argues that this process of experiencing disintegration to understand the connection between being and nothingness is at the core of Yoruba tragedy. While Soyinka attributes Ogun’s successful reintegration in the fourth space to his strong will, Yewande escapes nihilation by contemplating her intimacy with ancestral spirits and nonhuman beings. Moreover, Yewande’s sacrifice inspires an imaginative community — the novel’s reader — to question their existing beliefs, instead of guarding a social system’s stability or the worshippers’ advantages as traditional rites do. By questioning and transforming Yoruba mythology, Amala’s mythopoesis shows how storytelling and imagination contribute to a non-traditional tradition.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that Amala’s mythopoesis, loosely based on Yoruba myths, rituals, and cosmology, offers a hauntological interpretation of the African British diaspora’s life. Yewande’s mythical worldview, centring on fluid cosmic powers and unified temporality, exposes explicit and implicit forms of racism embodied in her experiences of green spaces, dining, education, and entertainment. The discriminatory mechanisms of repression and exorcism sever her energy connections with ancestors and nonhuman beings, confining her in an unhomely home. On the other hand, narratives in modern media like photos, television, movies, and songs engage with the legacy of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade in different ways, prompting her to question her relationship with the British Empire’s spectres. Yewande’s inheritance of her Yoruba ancestry and the African diaspora culture pertains to a non-traditional tradition involving constant interrogation of unexamined beliefs and exclusionary logic. Her animistic knowledge is labelled as madness by the disciplinary power Felan Ward represents, which functions on the racist and sexist assertion of the reason/unreason dichotomy. However, the unfair imprisonment awakens her to the unconditionally hospitable nature of her beloved Mother Cedar and the creative-destructive principle that highlights the more-than-human power inherent to shared vulnerability. Amala’s decolonial and de-anthropocentric imagination of diaspora hauntology subverts metaphysical binaries of spirit/matter, self/other, reason/unreason, and being/nothingness. It also reveals how literary techniques related to mythopoesis and the uncanny help pose questions and articulate ideas beyond “rational” institutionalized language.