The Woman with the Long Arms

            The Icarus Girl, by Helene Oyeyemi, is about a young girl, Jessemy, who is from a mixed family. She has a Nigerian mother and an English father and they live in England. One summer they go to Nigeria to see her mother’s family and there she meets a girl her age that Jess calls Tilly. Tilly is, at the time, the only friend that Jessemy has and Jessemy is amazed by everything that her and Tilly do together. After a while, things start to get weird and strange things start to happen when she gets home from Nigeria. But right before they leave for home, Jess goes and looks for Tilly in the old Boys Quarters, an old abandoned building that her grandfather’s workers used to sleep and eat meals in. As she looks for Tilly, she sees a crudely done drawing of a woman with very long arms behind a sort of shrine.

            This woman never leaves Jessemy’s mind and also makes me wonder, who is this woman with the long arms. This picture stays with Jessemy throughout the story and invades not only her thoughts, but also her dreams as she sleeps. Personally, I feel that this woman that has the long arms may in fact be Tilly. This could account for why she was so very protective of the picture and any kind of reproduction of the picture.

            Throughout this book, twins come up again and again. Jessemy is a twin, though she finds out rather late in her life that she is or had a twin, though she dies at birth. Tilly is also a twin or at least says that she is a twin of someone. A lot of hype is placed on the idea of twins in that culture and it says in the book that twins are said “to live in three worlds: this one, the spirit world and the Bush, which is a sort of wilderness of the mind.” In the book, it also says that if a twin dies at birth, the family normally has a statue made for the dead twin, depicted as the family thinks he/she would look when they would get older. Could this long armed woman really be Tilly Tilly. And that is why she is so protective of the picture throughout the novel.

            Even when they were just drawing, Jessemy happened to draw the long armed woman and Tilly got very defensive about the picture and destroyed it. Though I may be wrong in this fact, throughout the book there are numerous things, like some of the small details that I had just discussed that make me believe that the long armed woman may really be Tilly Tilly, and that her twin is still alive somewhere. And that is why Tilly really wants to be with Jessemy.