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”.

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