‘The Desert is Our Neighbour’: A Postcolonial Feminist Ethic of Narrative Encounter in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox

Abstract Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox rewrites gothic and fairytale tropes to expose patriarchal and colonial lines in sand encoded in fiction that legitimise the subjugation of women. Drawing on the work of Mayra Rivera, Sara Ahmed, and Kamala Visweswaran, this article argues that Oyeyemi’s work enacts a postcolonial feminist ethic of encounter that foregrounds and challenges gendered and colonial power relations. The article examines Oyeyemi’s metafictive storytelling, her use and critique of feminist revisioning and voicing, and genre play as strategies that call into question processes of representation and meaning-making in encountering others.