Quixotic Fissures by Irenosen Okojie
Irenosen Okojie's memoir tackles the unpredictability and unreliability of memory
To be quixotic is to be impractical, idealistic, maybe even unrealistic. In the memoir Quixotic Fissures: Notes on Transformation, Irenosen Okojie takes us through the physical splits between her idealistic and impractical yearnings, from love to race and diasporic experiences.
The strength in this memoir is how Okojie lets her modern perspective colour the understanding of memories. This is subtle in language, from using modern discourse to discuss 90s east London, remembering taste and smell over words, and italicising most conversations. Memory is tainted by today’s knowledge. This is especially true when Okejie plays with form to bring her anecdotes to life. The author’s boarding school experience contextualises the Black perspective she brings into her art, one that’s assured and loved.
Stories of love in three acts parallel east London’s gentrification. Her experience of seeing her complicated father in Nigeria speaks to the inherent contradictions of being racialised in the west. The essay which the book is named after yearns for the life Okejie’s mother could have lived and the inherent disappointments life offers us. But other essays slip away. They seem to be written for a different audience, one which the author perhaps has less trust in.
Okijie wants to “embrace reaching for the wild shores within our bodies”. At times that reach is present, and the reader begs to be taken along. At others, it slips through the fissures.
