Helen Oyeyemi: Purveyor of myths turns her focus to Cuban deities

Helen Oyeyemi does things the hard way. She wrote her debut novel The Icarus Girl in secret when she was supposed to be studying for her A-levels. While her parents thought she was beavering away at homework, her teachers were telling her to "straighten up" because they knew she wasn't. "A lot of times I felt like crying," admits the author. When the book was sold, it was falsely rumoured to have netted a mighty six-figure advance - something which she still finds "incredibly baffling".

To write her second novel, The Opposite House (Bloomsbury, £12.99), Oyeyemi took herself to Florence. It was Easter. Still a Cambridge University student, she should have been revising for her end-of-year exams but "I needed to get this first draft out so that after the exams I could come back to it."

"I found it crazily difficult", she says. "I was doing 2,000 words every other day and on the days in-between I'd lie on the floor going, 'Oh my God!'. Building up two different narratives was so difficult and I hadn't helped myself with my reading choices. The Bible, the poems of Emily Dickinson and some Cuban legends. I was kind of going out of my mind a little bit."

George Orwell observed that "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon one can neither resist nor understand." Oyeyemi has certainly fought her own demons. Intelligent and unhappy (she was tackling Camus and Sartre aged 12), she found school a trial. She wept through lessons or walked out of them. Once, she drank iodine. "Why? I don't know - it was something to do, a survival strategy." She was suspended for bad behaviour.

Can this be the same smiling young woman who sits in her publisher's office punctuating her comments with "Yay!" and "Cool!"? Hair in bunches, pink shoes on her feet, Oyeyemi comes over as girlishly diffident, not a bit the pesky pupil.

"I was interested in school," she explains, "but not in a formal way, so I was bad at lessons. I found the whole having-to-speak-in-front-of-class thing inhibiting. I always had things I wanted to say but couldn't, because I knew no one else would appreciate them." She continues, "I had a problem with authority and kept saying to my friends, 'I'll never send my kids to school.' But you challenge things because you care."

Looking back at her time at her Southwark school, she shudders. "I remember being so mean to people. I really hated that school. It should be shut down. Horrible. Horrible", she whispers. "Except for my English teacher, the teachers were terrible and the pupils were like a pack of jackals. It felt like I shouldn't be there but I couldn't think of anywhere else I should be. So I thought maybe I should just not be."

Her depression led to the 15-year-old trying to commit suicide by downing a cocktail of pills: "I guess it had been building up. I couldn't be bothered to live." After being hospitalised, she saw a psychiatrist, but it was a visit to Nigeria that changed her perspective. In Ibadan, her relatives simply didn't believe in depression.

Joining a mixed sixth form promised a fresh start too, although a girl from the old school told everyone their new classmate was "weird". Oyeyemi sighs, "The boys tend to believe the girl they think is prettier, this is the thing, so they were kind of like: Yeah, Helen's a bit weird." She laughs. It was here, however, that she conceived The Icarus Girl, the story of Jessamy, who is given to screaming fits and a wild imagination. The super-bright offspring of a strict Nigerian mother and an English father, Jessamy is also whisked off to see family in Ibadan and meets the powerful TillyTilly, who becomes her secret friend.

Mixing myth, the spirit world and alienation, The Icarus Girl shows a child split between two cultures and realities. It's full of Yoruba rituals and "imbued with this enormous sense of dread". TillyTilly is possibly the spirit of Jessamy's dead twin. The novel is also about possession, connecting it not just to African stories but making it like a metaphor for writing - how novelists become possessed by their characters and a world which only they can access. Oyeyemi agrees. "Writing is a madness that you do in your pyjamas with a bowl of Weetabix."

Occasionally, Jessamy is a hard eight-year-old to credit. Oyeyemi, however, recalls being similarly precocious. At seven she also had an imaginary friend; at eight she was carrying around a copy of Hamlet. Not allowed to play on the council estate, she always had her nose in a book. Even now she admits, "It's as if things are more real in books than in my life. I will often cry or be anxious on behalf of a character whereas if something happens in my life, I just wait for it to go away. Reading makes life disappointing."

At night, when she told her younger sister stories, she'd slip in ideas from the fiction she had read. Oyeyemi's father tried to keep track of what his daughter read by getting her to write reviews. Often she clocked up 13 books a week but admitted to fewer, so that she only had to write six reviews. "The conclusion always had to be: 'What I learnt from this book.' Sometimes it was a bit difficult". A suspicious-sounding title led to novels being confiscated. "With What Katy Did, he said, 'What did Katy do? I'm sure it's something bad." I'm like, what? She fell off a swing and broke her back!" Oyeyemi lets out a girlish giggle.

When Oyeyemi became clinically depressed she discovered one of her great passions - Emily Dickinson's poetry. The Opposite House takes its title from a Dickinson poem and each chapter heading references the American's work. "I love so many of her poems," she says. "Her rhythms and dashes make it easy to read if you can't bear anything else. I remember being in hospital and sleeping with her book."

With the novel, "I was conscious of trying to pitch myself against Emily's sensibility. I love the way she so casually uses these enormous concepts like immortality and eternity. She has this sly, wry humour and so much gravity."

Not too surprisingly, The Icarus Girl was "prone to confusion with biography". Oyeyemi considers The Opposite House "clearer and stronger". Both have an interest in Yoruba myth and issues of identity. But The Opposite House displays a more marked poetic vein. Oyeyemi's use of repetition echoes Yoruba oral story-telling, while "The poetry was me trying to lean against Emily a bit."

Cuban legends dotted with Yoruban names provided a starting point. It intrigued Oyeymi how African slaves tried keeping their culture alive. "I thought, 'Why would you want to?' I don't feel I particularly belong anywhere and wouldn't say it's that big a deal. I wouldn't call myself Nigerian or a Nigerian writer." Yet as one of her characters argues, "If you forget your ancestors you forget yourself."

The novel follows two parallel narratives: pregnant Maja, an Afro-Cuban jazz singer living in London with her white Ghanaian lover, and Yemaya or Aya, a Santeria Goddess in the "somewherehouse" with its two doors on to Lagos and London. "I feel there are two different kinds of real," Oyeyemi says. "Each story is the story of the house opposite it. They are like reversals of each other."

Readers may find Maja's storyline simpler. Maja's pregnancy throws into focus all the uncertainties she feels about herself. Her parents represent opposites - one rational, the other spiritual. Her father, an academic and political exile, dislikes the superstitions of his wife, who keeps an altar and ritually burns paper prayer flowers.

"Santeria is fascinating", enthuses Oyeyemi. The religion was formed when Yoruba slaves in Cuba fused their guardian gods or Orishas with Catholic saints. "The trickster god suddenly becomes a lot more ambivalent. He'll offer you things with one hand and then snatch them back with the other. Yoruba rituals are very glad but Cuban ones seem so full of struggle."

Goddess of the ocean, Yemaya is likened to Diana in classical mythology. "She's also about subconscious forces, the great push that makes things happen." According to some sources, Yemaya is the great mother goddess, of women, childbirth and fertility. Although Oyeyemi doesn't see the two narratives as commenting on one another, there are echoes. Maja struggles with the idea of who she is. So does her sensitive younger brother, who is picked on at school. Displaced deities are striving, too. Can beliefs be sustained when dragged across boundaries, time and space? Would Orishas exist if people stopped believing in them? In the "somewherehouse" the old gods, the Kayodes, quietly starve to death.

Oyeyemi is proud of The Opposite House but confesses that she's "worried for it". After all the birthing pains, it's tough letting go. "It's a bit like having a kid", she says quietly. "I hope it won't be bullied in the playground!"

Biography

Born in 1984 in Ibadan, Nigeria, Helen Oyeyemi emigrated to the UK when she was four and was brought up on a council estate in Lewisham. Her father teaches and her mother works as a station supervisor with London Underground. She was educated at a girls' comprehensive school in Southwark, and then at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Notting Hill Gate. Her debut novel The Icarus Girl was written while she was in the sixth form. Having graduated in social and political sciences from Cambridge, she has just won a fellowship to do a MFA at Columbia University. Her plays Juniper's Whitening and Victimese are published by Methuen. Her new novel, The Opposite House, is published by Bloomsbury. She lives in south London.

Interesting? Click here to explore further