| Summary: |
In recent novels from Nigeria and the Hispanophone Caribbean, spirits have assumed prominent roles. They pass from their own world to the human world; they move between Africa and the Caribbean; they inhibit people and change their perceptions, personalities, and bodies. This contribution aims to compare recent Nigerian and Hispanophone Caribbean novels in order to demonstrate how spirits are employed as personifications of the tight connections between Africa and the Caribbean. The corpus is made up of four novels: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House (2007), Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), Wendy Guerra’s Negra (2013), and Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015). In these novels, spirits are intrinsically related to temporal, spatial, and corporeal mobilities. They personify the passages from Africa to the Caribbean and back; through them, the characters are enabled to feel the connections between these two regions and to move beyond borders of time, space, and bodies.
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