What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi – short stories from a rare talent

Oyeyemi struggles against the confines of the short story in pieces that range from beautiful, simple fables to tricksy fantasies

Helen Oyeyemi’s new collection of short stories opens with “Books and Roses”: a beautiful tale which is also a beautiful lesson in how to read Oyeyemi. As the tricksy title tells us, it’s all about misdirection. We must learn not to be too attached to our first heroine, even if she is a figure as attractive as a black baby in the lap of the Black Virgin of Monserrat, for she will be unexpectedly supplanted by another, and then probably another again. We must accept that time, too, moves in curious ways, and that there is very little point in trying to work out what historical period you might be in. Geography is not stable either: spaces may appear at any time through secret doors. Mythological reference points are upended, and so are the conventions of story: thieves become heroines, dying old men fathers, and beauty may exist, but never as an objectifying tick list. We will be confused, bemused, frustrated, surprised – but in the end, all this may open a new space for us: a garden of books and a library of roses, hidden between buildings.

Subsequent stories, though, test our new reading capacities. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” takes misdirection to an extreme: it opens with a Nigerian man telling us about his superstar friend, moves rapidly on to his new gay relationship and his job in a weight-loss clinic where clients are put into comas, switches to his teenage daughters, and then on to a Kanye West-style rapper the daughters are obsessed with. To get to the heart of the story we must peer over the daughters’ shoulders at their computer, and not even at the video, but the comments below. The idea is novel and witty - but after such a chase, the screen seems small, and the figures not so much grandly ambiguous as rather indistinct.

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