Helen Oyeyemi Imbues Short Stories with Surrealism in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Helen Oyeyemi is an author for whom categorization is impossible. She’s written five novels—including a haunting take on Nigerian mythology (The Icarus Girl) and a reimagined Snow White narrative (Boy, Snow, Bird)—but the unifying theme throughout her work is an emphasis on humanity. Crafted with equal parts surrealism and realism, her stories never sacrifice substance for style. For that matter, her style is substantive in its own right.

Oyeyemi’s new short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, centers on tales involving literal and metaphorical keys. In her email interview with Paste, Oyeyemi describes the shift from writing novels to short stories, the Czech equivalent of “once upon a time” and what she’s working on next.

Paste: You’re comfortable writing in a variety of genres. Do you have a way you want to tell a story before you begin writing, or does the story/plot/etc. suggest how it should be told?

Oyeyemi: I’d intended to just say that the stories seem to dictate their own style—sometimes it does seem as if they arrive speaking different and distinct languages, like passengers filing off an aeroplane. But there are a couple of stories where I’ve begun with style and followed the style into a story. The first line of “Drownings,” for instance, was begun whilst thinking of a Czech analogue for “once upon a time”—bylo, nebylo, a literal translation of which would be there was, there wasn’t.

Paste: You’ve written entire novels in which you’ve retold fairy tales in a new context. What is it about the stories in this collection that made you believe they merited a shorter length?

Oyeyemi: I wanted to try and look at keys from a number of perspective—without any one view of what a key does getting set in stone. Nine stories about keys seemed to offer more possibilities than one continuous narrative.