Witch’s Brew: Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King
by JOSH MYERS
in Spring 2020
Heather Polk, More than Enough, 2020
Often framed as a uniquely “African problem,” the story of Liberia is more accurately a story of the tragedy of the nation-state form. Nations are grounded in difference. They hyperbolize human distinctions in ways that exacerbate exploitation. One can tell the story of Liberia through this lens—civil wars, brutal dictatorships, greed and exploitation. But one can also tell a different story, while never losing sight of those conditions and in fact, truly contextualizing them. For within Liberia, there are also sources of beauty, traditions of living against oppression, traditions of existence that predate oppression, as well as measures of assigning to life a meaning beyond production and value. Edward Wilmot Blyden would ultimately see this for himself. So, too, would W.E.B. Du Bois.[1] It remains there for Africa and her diaspora to see as well.
She Would be King makes that same beauty available for us. In this, her debut novel, Wayétu Moore places the historical foundations of Liberia in tension with the meaning of African existence in the modern world—a sense of meaning both contextualized and grounded in African views of life. We are not told to ignore the evolution of the nation-state or the horrors of slavery and colonialism. Rather, we are taught to see this world through the lens of the mystic, the ones born with the gifts to navigate these existences differently. Through their ways of knowing, Moore gifts all with new eyes, new legends—ones through which founding myths can and will be unsettled.
With the wind as narrator that guides as it protects, She Would be King is a novel that moves in two directions—toward the continental and the diasporic. The first direction centers Gbessa, a child born on a day declared “cursed.” She, too, bears the burden of a curse. Among the Vai people, she is shunned, and eventually banished—a witch. She is left for dead. The eventual leader of the Poro—a society of men—named Safua, befriends her in secret, and perhaps the memory of his friendship kept her alive. Nevertheless, there in the woods, she discovers that she can not die.
The second direction positions readers in the United States and Jamaica. The violence, both gratuitous and functional, characterizes the lives of Africans in the plantationocene of North Carolina. The product of an African man whose spirit never faltered and a woman who faced ridicule all her own, June Dey is also born with a gift. A freedom fighter with superhuman strength, bullets fail to pierce June Dey’s skin. The slaveocracy cannot contain him. In Jamaica, a maroon woman named Nanni, taken as the concubine of a British academic, bestows upon their son, Norman Aragon, the gift of invisibility. She enjoins him to remember his gift, to “Go now.” To be a Maroon.
In the end, the three find themselves together amid the founding moment of an independent Liberia in the nineteenth century. A moment where Africans born in the United States return to continent. Africans adrift in the channels of political and social change in the Atlantic world find themselves in search of a nation, a place to belong. There are clear moments of contradiction woven throughout the narrative: of exile and return, loss and destiny, expectation and disappointment, of past and future.
There are also beautiful invocations of friendship. Gbessa finds solace in the embrace of Maisy, a fellow servant living among the Americo-Liberians. Maisy’s friendship evokes a measure of reprieve, largely because it so subtly woven into the fabric of the everyday survival of African women, even in the worst of conditions. The gift she gives to Gbessa is a kind of knowledge and knowing, a survival mechanism, but also much more. In their initial conversation, Maisy gives Gbessa an understanding of the social and political dynamics of the Africans who have returned:
“Yes, most of them kind,” Maisy said and became silent.
“Most of them, she repeated. “But…some of them don’t think all of us the same. Some of them think…some of them think they smarter and better fit to lead than those who were already here.”
“What is lead?” Gbessa asked, doing her best to pronounce the word: “leeee.”
“To be king. Chief,” Maisy said.
“Yeh,” Gbessa said. (173)
What might it mean to lead? The question is not a mere recitation of the desire to replace bad governors with good governors. Liberia’s layered history is more complex, intricate than that. By placing the category of leadership before the rejected and exiled, the novel practices a different kind of gesture. Moore thoughtfully admonishes the reader to see how it could cause them to abandon what we expect of leadership, not simply who we expect leaders to be. It is Gbessa’s practice of care, of commitment, not force. It is her love, not her strength.
A witch can lead.
But it is never so simple. And it is not so easy. Gbessa is courted by and marries the military leader of the Americo-Liberians. Her destiny is mired in contradiction. What did this young woman, exiled from her people truly have to give? How could she lead? The narrator bemoans:
“It never leaves, never comes off. It stays and stays, it transforms. It is a thief of time, of solace, of mind. And if the thing does return any of one’s peace, after it is finished, the size of what remains is like a mustard seed. Some people manage to grow this remnant into something different—a version of happiness that tries, every waking moment, to resemble yesterday to restore their battered spirit to its former self. A mustard seed…And where would she farm this seed? This was not her home.” (229)
The beauty of Moore’s writing is that one never loses touch with greater possibilities. Perhaps that is the power of magical realism. In Moore’s hands, the genre is not a device for escape, but a means of deeper confrontation. Spirit work is never simple. Nothing comes easy to Gbessa, to June Dey, to Norman Aragon. In fact, they all experience debilitating traumas. Much akin to what the African world writ large experienced and experiences. Yet, in the wake of seemingly intractable problems, Moore encourages us to ask what resources might we call upon to not only tell different stories of ourselves, but generate political possibilities we have otherwise denied? In the preface to his critical text, Of Africa, Wole Soykina describes the true resources of the continent:
“There also exist dynamic possessions—ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange—not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people—and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, indeed to global survival, if only they were known about…”[2]
In the end, Gbessa’s view points to a new way made out of the old. Moore leaves the reader asking—what worlds might be seen through her eyes?
References
[1] See Edward Wilmot Blyden’s late nineteenth century text, African Life and Customs and W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments about Liberia in “The Field and Function of the American Negro College.”
[2] Wole Soyinka, Of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), vii.
Josh Myers is editor of A Gathering Together.