2014 read #65: White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi.

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
227 pages
Published 2009
Read from July 8 to July 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

After my interpretive fiasco reviewing A Pale View of Hills, I hesitate to unravel the meanings and messages of another delicate literary construction. White Is for Witching is an especially dense and experimental work, something you'd almost expect an ambitious young author to produce for her third novel: the sort of book you have to read a paragraph at a time to sort out its possible implications and unspoken through-line. If pressed, I would guess -- hesitantly -- that it's about immigration and assimilation, racism and loss of identity, both in the nationalist sense and in the melting pot sense. It's also a novel of place and genius loci, the sort of thing Peter Ackroyd could dig into and appreciate. I speak of course of the house at the heart of Witching.

I prefer to interpret fantastical happenings in literary works as literal, rather than allegorical, figurative, symbolic, whatever -- or rather, I interpret them literally first, and incorporate other readings as they percolate into my genre-numbed skull. I hate the ending of Pan's Labyrinth, for instance. So naturally I like to read the portions of Witching written from the house's perspective (yes, chunks of the book are written from the p.o.v. of a grasping, greedy, jealous house) as literal "happenings" in the book's universe, which thankfully is left just ambiguous enough that I can get away with it. Four generations of Silver women warp and weave through the house, bringing it to life in a moment of wartime extremity but bearing its weight in their stomachs. Each generation is induced to consume bits of the house in (what I think is) an obvious allegory for expectations of place, privilege, position, and heritage, and the house fulfills its idea of loving and protecting them by swallowing them in turn.

Miranda, pricked pale and wasted by pica, sort of seems to me like an overbred aristocrat, bloodless and cadaverous, all her life and moisture wicked into her eyes; perhaps this imagery is even what Oyeyemi meant, the outcome of generations consumed by an idea of place and status. It is Miranda who is seemingly crushed most thoroughly and early in her development, the "curse" perhaps sinking deeper with each generation, yet it is also Miranda who feels fleeting hope that she can dig herself out of the chalk and earth and plaster of years when she meets and develops affections for Ore, a thoroughly Anglicized West African girl -- whose color the house makes abundantly clear it does not like. It's tricky stuff to interpret, at least for my muddled abilities, obvious in some respects but expressed so obliquely that picking apart leads to a quivering mess of strange substances and forgotten clues.

It is this symbolic density that makes me hesitate to give the book higher praise. Quite frankly, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think my critical faculties aren't prepared for this sort of deep diving.