Honey & Spice

Honey & Spice is filled with references to the racial and cultural identity of its protagonist and other characters and showcases the ways in which the young Black characters celebrate this. This sense of pride and heritage is shown to also be an active and collective defense against racial discrimination in the predominantly white setting of the novel.

Kiki’s pride in her Nigerian heritage, her acceptance into the Blackwell community, her interest in Yoruba language and culture, and her pride in the pan-African movement are all important parts of her identity, influences she cherishes and wants to preserve and protect. This sense of belonging to something greater helps her emotionally mature and also provides the safe space she needs to come to understand herself and her personal power.

Some of Kiki’s likes serve to highlight Black artists and entertainers who have done ground-breaking work, like superstar Beyoncé, or enormously popular if critically underrated works like Sisqó’s “Thong Song” or the movie Boomerang, a romantic comedy starring Eddie Murphy. Aminah uses Fenty products, the hair and makeup line developed by the singer Rihanna, who was born in Barbados, and who developed Fenty to cater to an inclusive range of skin tones and hair types. With these references, Babalola celebrates the accomplishments of Black artists and shows Kiki’s affinity for and identification with African and Caribbean cultures more broadly. Kiki’s enjoyment of Afrofuturistic speculative fiction and admiration for a pan-African movement that unites peoples from across African homelands and the African diaspora show her embrace of these forward-thinking cultural movements built around visions of unity, cooperation, and self-determination. The goals of these broader movements offer the freedom and opportunities Kiki wants for herself.

Her facility with the Yoruba language and her clear love for all things Naija also show Kiki’s love and pride in her ancestral background. “Naija” is a word adopted by young Nigerians to describe an identity that includes pride in their country’s cultural and intellectual achievements and hope for a new political direction, one that promises more freedoms, opportunity, and international recognition. Naija conveys associations of vibrancy, artistic flair, a spirit of community and exploration, and confidence. Kiki feels connected to this vision and considers her heritage a key piece of her identity, a source of wisdom and strength. For instance, when she is in the library hiding after Zack’s video, Kiki looks at a book titled Heaven on Earth: Divine Power in Ancient Yorubaland and thinks, “Maybe I could tap into my inner celestial being and transcend this situation totally” (308). Several of the girls are wearing Ankara prints for the AfroWinter ball, homage to Nigerian fashion and the colorful variety of these traditional West African textiles. In her yellow two-piece Ankara outfit, with an outline that flatters her shape, Kiki says, “I couldn’t wear a coat over this; it would be an insult to my ancestors” (326). Kiki’s ongoing connection to Nigeria is confirmed by her memories of and plans for holiday visits to Lagos.

Having this cosmopolitan background, Kiki becomes exasperated with the insular, Anglo-centric attitudes of so many of her Whitewell colleagues. For instance, she views instances of white students performing music by Black artists not as appreciation but as cultural appropriation. An even more egregious example of cultural appropriation is illustrated in Rianne and Amari’s description of their white colleague at their summer school in Kenya who embraced African culture because it felt exotic and different to him, more “natural,” a veiled way of saying he considers the culture less sophisticated or evolved. In attempting to behave like a native when he isn’t one, including adopting an accent, their colleague’s behavior becomes insulting rather than reflecting sincere engagement or curiosity.

Her cultural pride in her heritage as well as a preference for forms of expression rooted in Black cultures may be one reason Kiki prefers spaces that are exclusively populated by other Black people. Her white classmates aren’t individually distinct to her, as when she calls the young men in the crowd around her recording studio a James or a Francis; Kiki views her white colleagues as a collective force that is, when not overtly hostile, an obstacle to her aims. She prefers not to associate with the Black professor who is not sufficiently anti-racist, as demonstrated by a talk where he urged young Black men to stay out of trouble by trying harder to assimilate to the white culture. An extension of this exclusivity is the lack of other ethnicities in the book; there are no Middle Eastern or Asian characters, for example. This may reflect the geographical locale where the book is set, but it results in a stark opposition between the two elements of Whitewell and Blackwell. Zack, the only multi-ethnic character and the one who proposes Black-white interfacing, chooses to associate with whites expressing anti-Black sentiments, which draws the division between the two elements all the more strongly.

This exclusivity might be the book’s comment on how to create and maintain safe spaces within a dominant culture that can be hostile, thus allowing for the kind of personal expression and growth that Kiki is able to experience. Another strategy for preserving cultural pride is demonstrated by the women running for the board of the ACS, who call themselves the Dahomey Amazons after a famous female military regiment formed to support the Kingdom of Dahomey. The name suggests the women are willing to start to dismantle the ingrained racism that surrounds them. Kiki’s cultural pride extends to the hope that her culture can be more widely recognized, appreciated, and celebrated, a joyful and optimist approach in line with her identification with Naija colleagues, pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism.