White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
The Silver family home in the segregated town of Dover, England, is peculiar in some ways. It has been the home of four generations of Silver women: Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived there with her twin brother Eliot ever since their father turned the house into a bed-and-breakfast. The house is grand and enormous with secret tunnels and buried secrets. Since the beginning of their relationship, the Silver women have felt a powerful pull toward one another that spans both time and place. As a result, when Miranda’s mother Lily dies unexpectedly while travelling overseas, Miranda starts to have odd illnesses. She starves due to an eating disorder.
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
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She starts to hear voices. Dover’s animosity toward strangers appears literally within the four walls of the Silver house when she takes a friend home, forever altering everyone’s life. White is for Witching is a bravely innovative, horrifying, and gorgeous novel by a tremendous writer that is simultaneously a fascinating mystery and a reflection on race, nationality, and family legacies.
Let’s start with the writing style of the book. I have to agree that it is poetic. Reading a book that flows has a relaxing effect. where the written words seem to glide on a gentle breeze. It is airy and light. I did occasionally daydream while reading the book, but not because I was bored; rather, I was envisioning the events and the scenes that would come after them. A house on the Dover cliffs is the subject of the book. A house in the Silver family that has been handed down from mother to daughter. At a holiday gathering, Lily Silver first encountered Luc Dufresne. They were married and had Miranda and Eliot, a set of twins.
They relocated there and converted the house into a bed and breakfast. The family residence or estate was fairly vast and could hold several families at once. In this book, the house narrates as a character. It closely monitors the Silver woman. shields them.
The Silver women have a quality in common called Pica. Pica is a term used in medicine to describe a specific type of eating disorder. It involves consuming non-food items. Chalk is Miranda’s preferred medium. She prefers to be called Miri. Even her mother once consumed chalk. Because of her eating disorder, Miranda is in a hospital. Luc and her brother are optimistic that she will get over it.
Every piece of writing that Oyeyemi produces is brimming with intelligence, creepiness, and strangeness. The story of the woman the house loves a little too much is told in White is for Witching, which is set in a large home on the white cliffs of Dover.
This novel spends a lot of time discussing Miranda’s mental instability. She has a disease called pica that makes her crave non-food substances, with chalk being her favourite. She spent time in a clinic while in high school receiving treatment for her disorder, and we ride back to her house with her after her father and brother picked her up. It’s clear that the scenario in the car is awkward, and Eliot seems especially uneasy and quiet.
The twins’ mother Lily, a photojournalist who died in Haiti when Miranda was sixteen, is also being mourned by the family. Despite being in Dover, England, Miranda wears a watch with the time set to “Haiti time,” and she struggles with remorse over her part in her mother’s passing.
When Miranda gets accepted to Cambridge, she meets Ore, a young woman who was adopted from Africa, and the two fall in love. Miranda hears a tale from Ore about a monster called the soucouyant that escapes its body and feeds on the blood of the living. Given that Ore changes from being healthy to being almost anorexic when they are together, the mythology of the soucouyant is a reflection of Miranda’s relationship with Ore. Ore is being sucked dry of life by Miranda.
Miranda’s father brings her back home until she can get healthy after learning how ill she has grown while away at college. Ore visits her, observes some uncomfortable events there, and confides in Sade, the housekeeper and chef.
