Some thoughts on Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching –
Oyeyemi, as a stylist, is rich and restrained in fine balance. She lets, it appears to me, each emotion of the book take a metaphorical shape, become a surprising object, motion, surrealist spasm. Her prose is otherwise confident and restrained. There’s shy humor and wit, especially about growing up. There’s an exciting willingness to play with perspectives.
Oyeyemi, as a structuralist, is doing things that I’m surprised she was able to get past a publisher. The antagonistic force that drives the novel (Ghost(s)? Curse(s)? Historical trauma? Racism?) is perceived differently by different characters, including the voice of the family home itself, which speaks to fill in the history past our other characters’ memory. With multiple contradictory and incomplete accounts, further muddied by the poetics of the style, the book challenges the reader to piece together a version of the story that explains the evil that haunts its protagonist, without ever truly resolving it. The book begins with a series of questions and conflicting responses. It ends in refrain.
Which means that Witching, as a story, is a little too incoherent for my tastes. I am certainly allured by the style and the structural gambit. But my investment in the core conflict of the story is hobbled by not knowing what the core conflict is. It’s not until halfway through the text that I resolve that there will not be a discrete conflict that I can invest with emotional force. At that point, I can have a little more fun reading between the lines to pick at the theories Oyeyemi is setting up for us – it could be a malignancy brought out by an ancient witch and/or how that malignancy bent future generations of women to commit haunting crimes and/or something inherent in the property itself and/or the racist attitudes of certain ancestors but none of them suffice for really defining the stakes of the story. I am left ultimately ambivalent. I am not entirely unsure that wasn’t the goal.
A good surrealist/magical conflict can pit two moral forces against each other that couldn’t otherwise collide in a literalist world. A discrete past trauma haunts the present in Beloved, e.g. But our engagement in the story requires us to buy in to what those moral forces are – what is really represented by the haunting/cursing/sickness/etc. Without that clarity, the conflict is hollow.
Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the gambit. But I think it’s the kind of book you might enjoy better on a second reading than a first, knowing that your reading depends on you deconstructing the text and making something of it.