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Helen Oyeyemi’s Exquisite Corpses: Race, Authorial Multiplicity, and Aleatory Play in <em>Boy, Snow, Bird</em>
This essay uses the multivalent analytic framework of ‘exquisite corpse’ collage as a way of reading Helen Oyeyemi’s 2015 novel, Boy, Snow, Bird. Starting with a scene in which two characters produce a text collaboratively — a process the French surrealists called ‘exquisite corpse’ — the essay investigates Oyeyemi’s formal-theoretical interventions into the novel form, her relationship to her raced authorial persona and the critical horizon of expectations within which she is read, and the tension between her playful style and the brute materiality of the violated body. Though this analytic could be used to describe Oyeyemi’s fragmented and associative approach to the novel form more generally, Boy, Snow, Bird – a passing novel set in New England during the years of the rise of the civil rights movement –is her only work to engage directly with specifically American history and American discourses of race and racialisation. The essay thus draws on Michelle M. Wright’s critique of what she calls ‘Middle Passage epistemology’ to show how exquisite-corpse-like fragmentation and consequent authorial multiplicity enact a critique of normative, mostly American, narratives around racial progress and Black identity.
