What Can a Puppet Do? or: What Makes a Puppet?

Marie Berndt

Authors

Marie Berndt University of Bonn

Keywords:

puppetry, short story, Helen Oyeyemi, the uncanny

Abstract

This essay presents a brief discussion of Helen Oyeyemi’s short story “Is your blood as red as this?”, from her 2016 collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. The story is set, for the largest part, at a school in London, where the main characters Radha, Gustav, Myrna and Tyche study the rather unusual art of puppetry. Their puppets however, are not merely tools in the students’ hands, but have their own plans. The essay goes to show how Oyeyemi portrays both conventional and subversive strategies and outcomes of puppet-play and leaves the reader’s head full of questions.

Author Biography

Marie Berndt, University of Bonn

BA and MA degrees in English Literatures and Cultures from the universities of Bonn, Swansea and Perugia. The MA thesis “‘Jamaicans with a different flag’: Representations of Precarious LGBTQ Lives in Jamaican Fiction of the New Millennium”, has been nominated for the Queen’s Prize and has won the GAPS Graduate Award in 2019; it is published on the website of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies. M.B. is currently employed as an academic researcher at the Department for English, American and Celtic Studies of the University of Bonn; she is also working on her PhD project with the preliminary title “Precarious Lives in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Literature”.