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.

Introduction to Myself

My name is Katherine, and I was born on September 17.  I live in a small town called Howards Grove where everyone feels like family. I am in pursuit of a triple major at Silver Lake College, studying Music Education – Kodaly, Choral, and Instrumental. I study piano, voice, and oboe privately. Yes, I took English classes straight through from elementary school until my last year of high school, and part of taking that class was reading books. Classics were read all the time, but they were books from Charlotte Bronte and Homer. We were never asked to read books or literature from cultures other than our own.  

One of my expectations for this class would be that I will learn many things about other cultures and the books that have come from all of the different cultures. For example, with the poems by Anna Akhmatova, you could tell that maybe there was more behind her poetry than what met the eye, and it could have been about numerous other things. Being able to not only understand the books, but to be able to connect the books with the social atmosphere and culture that was happening at the time is another of my expectations. Being from a smaller town in Wisconsin, we never had much diversity within our community. However, we had two very different cultures, farming and small-town people. Everyone knows everyone else and what they do and how they act, and, being from a small town and not having many different cultures and societies, I have not seen many of the different kinds of people that there are.

            I have read hundreds of books, but I have never found poetry very easy to understand what it may actually means and to be able to connect to the different materials. Where I grew up, poetry was not something that was taught above the 6^th grade English class. In this class, I look forward to being able to broaden my horizons and read more literature than just the books that are in my own personal library at home.

            Some of the goals that I would have for myself this semester would be that I want to keep up with the readings that we are supposed to do for the class, because it will be very hard to be able to catch up if I fall behind in the class. Also, another goal that I have for myself would be that I become more able to understand what I am reading. It is one thing to be able to keep up with the reading, but another whole thing entirely to be able to understand and apply what I will be reading in this class.