{"id":35982,"date":"2014-03-04T04:57:02","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T04:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35982"},"modified":"2014-03-04T04:57:02","modified_gmt":"2014-03-04T04:57:02","slug":"white-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35982","title":{"rendered":"White Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Lies<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\nSunday Book Review<\/a>
\n2014-02-27<\/p>\n

Porochista Khakpour<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Boy, Snow, Bird,\u2019 by Helen Oyeyemi<\/em><\/p>\n

Strange times, crowed too many wise and unwise men over the millenniums. But as the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote in New York<\/em> magazine last fall, maybe we\u2019re finally at a point where the strangeness of the times is matched by an ability to accept it. In defending the perplexing Kanye West video \u201cBound 2,\u201d Saltz heralded this as an age of the New Uncanny. The all-American banal-bizarre spectacle of the video (synthetic sunsets; slow-motion galloping stallions; the nippleless ing\u00e9nue) is \u201ca freakish act of creation and destruction by appropriation,\u201d what Saltz deems \u201cpart of a collective cultural fracturing.\u201d Saltz is riffing on Freud\u2019s description of the uncanny as \u201cnothing new or alien, but something familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.\u201d But maybe we\u2019re not as alienated as we once were, something that occurred to me when beholding another unapologetic, all-encompassing contradiction-celebration: the story-allegory and real-surreal gyre of Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s<\/a> gloriously unsettling new novel, \u201cBoy, Snow, Bird<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oyeyemi is from Strange Times. Raised in Britain by Nigerian parents, the 29-year-old five-time novelist isn\u2019t even affiliated with a single home anymore: London, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Budapest, Prague \u2014 who knows where she is doing her thing at any given moment? For years I saw her as something of a literary mystic, reading her with a mixture of awe, confusion and delight, but only now do I feel that we\u2019re at a place where we can properly receive her, and she\u2019s ready for us too. With \u201cBoy, Snow, Bird,\u201d a culmination of a young life spent culling dreamscapes, Oyeyemi\u2019s confidence is palpable \u2014 it\u2019s clear that this is the book\u00a0she\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0been waiting for…<\/p>\n

…As usual, the Oyeyemi foundation is located in her fairy-tale comfort zone \u2014 in the case of \u201cBoy, Snow, Bird,\u201d the fairy tale is \u201cSnow White.\u201d She uses the \u201cskin as white as snow\u201d ideal as the departure point for a cautionary tale on post-race ideology, racial limbos and the politics of passing. It feels less Disney or German folklore and more Donald Barthelme\u2019s 1967 novella \u201cSnow White,\u201d in which the political and the social poke through the bones of a pretty children\u2019s tale, alarming us with its critical cultural import.<\/p>\n

Set in the 1950s, Oyeyemi\u2019s novel opens on the Lower East Side of New York City, with a young white woman named Boy Novak running away from her violent rat-catcher father. She soon meets a widower, a jewelry craftsman and former history professor named Arturo Whitman, in Flax Hill, Mass. She marries Whitman and becomes obsessed by her new stepdaughter, Snow. \u201cWhat was it about Snow?\u201d Boy asks herself. Oyeyemi paints Snow as half virtual, half corporeal: \u201cShe was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who\u2019d just come from the future but didn\u2019t want to brag about it.\u201d All seems well until Arturo and Boy have a daughter of their own, Bird, who is born undeniably \u201ccolored.\u201d Whitman\u2019s family members are light-skinned African-Americans who have been passing<\/a> as white, and the revelation becomes a turning point. The Snow White bits take over, with the Wicked Stepmother and the mirror motifs, and the fairy tale rewrites itself in startling ways…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White Lies The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-02-27 Porochista Khakpour \u2018Boy, Snow, Bird,\u2019 by Helen Oyeyemi Strange times, crowed too many wise and unwise men over the millenniums. But as the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote in New York magazine last fall, maybe we\u2019re finally at a point where the strangeness of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462],"tags":[2633,2640,17043,2327],"class_list":["post-35982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","tag-helen-oyeyemi","tag-new-york-times","tag-porochista-khakpour","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}