Enter the Mysterious World of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Her latest work of fiction, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, is a collection of loosely connected short stories about immigrants, hoteliers, orphans, dissatisfied youngsters trying to find their way, and grandmothers attempting to outsmart greedy wolves. As in all stories, and as in life, characters stumble around hurting each other unintentionally, often in the process of looking for love; but in these stories, these characters are apt to be animated puppets, or haunted rock idols, or the owner of a House of Locks who has only to voice a thought to have that thought come true.
Calling Oyeyemi’s subjects “diverse” hardly does them justice. They hail from all over the world and, occasionally, from parallel worlds, myths, or fairy tales. They are straight and queer, white, black, and brown, participants in democracies and citizens straining under the rule of despots. Their names are wonderful in and of themselves: Tyche, Chedorlaomer, Arkady, Matyas Fust, Jindrich Topol. To provide some balance, there’s also an unsettling story (“Presence”) about a married couple choosing to undergo a dystopian relationship experiment named Jack and Jill.
What unites many of these characters is a fascination with keys: some metaphorical, some extremely literal, some both. In “Books and Roses,” for example, one of the collection’s most densely multilayered offerings, someone abandons a baby girl named Montserrat on the doorstep of a monastery, leaving the infant only an (actual) key on a chain to serve as the (figurative) key to her mother’s identity, and by extension her own.
The more straightforward “Drownings,” which is bittersweet but sublimely satisfying, is set in a small dictatorship run by a paranoid tyrant who enjoys filling up his nation’s swamps by submerging his enemies and occasionally the women he loves. A desperate resident trying to protect his boyfriend melts a key, and ends up tortured and imprisoned in a cell that cannot be unlocked for the crime of burning down an entire building.
Dark, yes, but brightened by Oyeyemi’s writing, which is both tart and psychologically astute. Married couples everywhere will shudder with recognition at the revealing details in “Presence,” and many single people will smile in wry recognition when the tyrant’s escapee daughter in “Drownings” is approached by a potential suitor in a bar:
The man…paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t loan sharks be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?
That deft, restrained tone and dry sense of humor keep these stories from veering into melodrama, even when women are beaten or children’s hearts broken. Consider this moment from “Freddy Barrandov Checks…in?” wherein a stranger is observed by our narrator after being stabbed:
He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care more for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is proof of it. To the boy gawping through the glass it seemed this man strove to be a worthy vessel, to live on and on at knifepoint… If he was a man without regrets then he was the first I’d seen.
Oyeyemi is also interested in the quiet moments. The stakes aren’t exactly life or death in battle-of-the-sexes college story “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” and yet it is one of the book’s most charming interludes, optimistic without being over the top.
Other stories, mostly to do with puppets, can feel surreal and dislocating. Even then, Oyeyemi’s narrative confidence helps carry readers through. Though we may not know for sure what’s going on at the start, or even the midpoint, we know that she does. Somewhere, someone, we can be sure, has the key.