What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is often considered a book that falls into the neo-genre “magical realism,” but beyond just the genre label, the nature of magic and the fantastical is a central theme of Oyeyemi’s work. The book presents its magical elements as if they were unremarkable—even mundane—occurrences; no one in the stories seems startled or excited by (for example) the existence of talking puppets. The characters live ordinary, recognizable lives as employees, students, families, and lovers, but in those lives, they experience the extraordinary. This typicality of the fantastic is the point, as What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours works to rediscover the strangeness and possibility of human existence through overtly fantastical elements.

The submerged “magic” that the stories uncover often relates to gender or sexuality, as in the case of Rowan. As a puppet who thinks and speaks, Rowan’s humanity is ambiguous, and the story pairs this question of personhood with a question about gender: Rowan is variously male or female depending on the desires of those they encounter. This gender fluidity is unremarkable in the sense that it does not confuse or disturb the story’s characters, but it is “magical” in the deeper meaning of the word that the collection suggests; it shifts and transforms in ways that evade easy explanation or classification.