At the end of 2018, I was dreading the thought of the new year. For whatever reason, New Year’s Eve has always been my least favorite holiday, probably because new year’s resolutions are the bane of my existence. My perfectionist self can’t handle the thought of purposefully guaranteeing that I will begin every new year with an inevitable failure.
But, at the end of 2018, beaten down by the exhausting cycle of bad news and plagued by the realization that, according to the Screentime app on my iPhone, I’d spent on average over three hours PER DAY mindlessly scrolling through the internet, I decided to commit myself at least to read something other than Twitter in 2019.
Sometime last year, I managed to catch an interview of Ann Morgan on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour and was captivated by her quest to read a book from every country in the world in one year. Her project, “Reading the World,” soon ballooned into a successful blog and a publishing deal.
As I listened to Morgan talk about her experience trying to find a book translated into English from every country (sometimes literally finding volunteers from each country who would spend hours translating their favorite works for her), I realized that not only was I not supporting artists and writers from non-Western countries, I also wasn’t supporting non-White, non-male writers from my own country.
Thus, inspiration for my 2019 resolution struck. I would read one book by an immigrant woman of color for every month of 2019.
She Would Be King
The first book of 2019 is Wayétu Moore’s She Would be King. Moore is a Liberian-American author who moved to the U.S. at age five after escaping civil war in her hometown of Monrovia.
Lost for weeks in the forest, Moore credits her father with keeping her and her siblings sheltered from the atrocities of war by making up stories about their surroundings. These stories would eventually influence Moore’s writing, as evidenced here in the way that she weaves a masterpiece of magical realism.
Although She Would be King clearly includes some fantastical elements in its storytelling, every moment feels real, as if we are living it alongside the main character, Gbessa.
Gbessa, a young native in Liberia, is marked as cursed by her tribe and is thus cast out into the wilderness to fend for herself. Incredibly, she survives, discovering that she is indeed both cursed and blessed—she cannot die. Her story weaves in and out of two other supernatural narratives: one of Norman Aragon and the other of June Dey. Norman, the son of a white colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, inherits his mother’s ability to disappear. June Dey, a slave living in colonial America, finds that he possesses a Superman-like strength.
The three eventually meet, and their coming together creates not only a compelling personal narrative but also tells the story of the founding of Liberia along the way.
Above all, Moore creates a world which is intimately believable. The characters, setting, and events all feel true, which is, I think, the most important aspect of a novel. If a book can convince you that the characters are not only believable, but that they are actually true and real, then the author has created a magic that is untamable.
This magic lives through the idea that, by reading, we are experiencing someone else’s life—someone else’s struggles and tragedies and triumphs—and living them as if they were our own. In a year already dominated by the poison of fearful rhetoric about how we can avoid others and keep them away from us, I can think of no better antidote than Moore’s kind of magic.
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