In a way, my love for these three novels was cemented when I wrote Moon Goddess. The three women at the centre of these narratives resemble my own protagonist who is caught between her ancestral home and an adopted one. Each of these women must necessarily return to her respective home to expand their understanding of their history and of themselves. Moon Goddess is structured as a mystery because characters with roots in more than one place are always trying to fill the gaps, to understand events and motivations from a distance.
The three women at the center of these narratives resemble my own protagonist who is caught between her ancestral home and an adopted one.
I read Ahdaf Souief’s In the Eye of the Sun (1992), Aminatta Forna’s The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) at least ten years before Moon Goddess was published. What my work absorbed from them was largely subconscious and accumulated over time. But I can’t help but notice how the character of Tara has been moulded by the fictional women who came before her.
All three bring to light some of the most turbulent eras of Africa’s history in the twentieth century. For readers like me outside these countries, these eras also happen to be some of the ones we know least about otherwise.
The political struggle of a continent trying to come into its own after the end of colonisation resonates with me as I experience India grapple with the same. In these stories, as in the contemporary landscape, political climates rapidly change and overturn the lives of individuals in the process.
In the Eye of the Sun follows the changing fortunes of a young woman called Asya who has grown up in the liberal, pre-fundamentalist Egypt of the 1960s. Her relationship to art, to marital duty, to her own desire, and to the Cairo of her childhood are strongly juxtaposed with the political, economic and cultural changes that arrive by the end of the 60s to Egypt. The most compelling part of Asya’s story is her vividly remembered youth in Egypt with summer holidays in Beirut and London. When she returns to Cairo as an adult after completing a PhD, she faces a place she must learn all over again.
In The Devil That Danced on the Water, Aminatta Forna returns twenty-five years after her father’s execution to Sierra Leonne where she spends a year locating and speaking to the men who gave false and lethal testimony against her father. Armed with her early memories of her loving father as a conscientious politician, she sets about clearing his name. The first half recounts her childhood, her parents’ divorce, her stepmother’s crucial role in smuggling the Forna children out of the country to safety, and the racism that awaits her in the UK. The second half is the story of the year where Aminatta discovers the truth, twisted and unsparing, about her father’s death.
Set in the years before and during Nigeria’s Biafran war (1967-70), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun expands on the complicated and rich cultural tapestry she introduces to us in Purple Hibiscus. Told through the perspective of three characters, the novel lays bare the multitude of horrors of a war that left over a million dead. Ugwu is a thirteen-year-old houseboy for an idealistic university professor called Odenigbo. Olanna is Odenigbo’s girlfriend who is drawn to his revolutionary convictions, and leaves her comfortable life in Lagos to be with him. As the war reaches them, they find their lives and loyalties put to the worst kind of test.
In each book, places are just as crucial to the story as people. Their fates are intertwined. When Tara returns to her ancestral home in Karjat, she has dreams and experiences she cannot explain. Her life in New York is completely removed from the surreal atmosphere of Karjat which is the site for memory, magic, instinct and familial truths. If the works I’ve mentioned interest you, then I think Moon Goddess will too.