Authors at Home: Jacinda Townsend; “Mother Country”
We are pleased to feature award-winning author Jacinda Townsend and her sophomore novel, Mother Country, published by Graywolf Press. Mother Country is an enthralling transnational story about two women, a desperate decision, and the fate of a young girl caught in the throes of defining “home.” Equal parts heartfelt and harrowing, the novel explores the gifts and grief of intergenerational resilience and the lengths we will go to protect those we love. Here, Jacinda shares with us the inspiration behind her new book; her love for traveling; and her life as a writer, mom, and educator.
Mother Country moves between Marrakech and Kentucky. What draws you to visit, research, and write about different places? What were the joys and challenges of writing a story set in multiple locations across the globe?
There is so much about the human experience that is both dissimilar and universal, depending on where we’re living. I first happened upon Marrakech by accident as a single woman with no children. But when I went there again as a single mom of first one and then two children, it struck me just how universal the constraints of patriarchy are. Where, in Morocco, I might be denied a hotel room or questioned about why I was traveling with children and no husband, in the United States, I faced employment discrimination as a single mom. Both impacted me tremendously. Both caused existential angst atop the logistical issues.
The joys of writing a novel in a different place are so numerous. Gosh. Morocco and Mauritania are both beautiful countries full of hospitable people. Both are places where many cultures meet and form a pretty unique cultural fabric. The beauty of not just the landscape of each country but each country’s art and music are simply unparalleled. I also enjoy learning from others whose experiences of life are so different from my own. I feel that I expand a little each time I interview someone. Each time I go out into the little-seen parts of the world and witness the hardships that political systems force on their citizens, my spirit of resistance is fueled.
The challenges, however, are numerous also. When I went to Mauritania, there was only one ATM in the entire country, and it wasn’t working. I had to have my dad wire me money; he didn’t even know I was there — it was a surprise on a number of levels. And because I was a woman, I had to be chaperoned at the bank. It’s a differently developed country — with streets made of sand and water that my digestive system wasn’t used to — when I got back to Morocco from Mauritania, I was sick for days. But I’m an adventurer. I live for that kind of thing. I was kind of happy about it.
Have you always been a traveler? How was your experience as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire, and did it inspire any of your writing?
I was always a girl who wanted to travel. I grew up in Kentucky and spent most of my childhood there in the same small town. But when I was three or four, my mom had gotten me a book — a children’s survey of three different children in three different countries living very different lives, complete with photos, and it was one of my favorites. It had a purple cover, and I still remember some of the photos.
Also, I was a very early reader, so I’d been traveling in my mind since I was just out of diapers, and my dad, who lived in Louisville — which was like Paris to me at that point in my life — traveled a lot for business. Occasionally he’d take me places — Phoenix, New York, Orlando — but I didn’t actually travel extensively or live in another country until I did my Fulbright, which was pretty late in life — I was 29. Once I did, the travel bug pretty much took me over, and I went to a number of places and lived all kinds of ways until I had children.
When I was in Cote d’Ivoire, I was so fortunate — each country in West Africa is like a whole other planet, and I visited Ghana, then Mali, a number of times. I went to Timbuktu for my 30th birthday and had the most magical experience. Casablanca was a layover between Abidjan and New York City, where my then-husband lived. I extended the layover by four days. Morocco blew my mind. The rest is history.
Before turning to fiction writing, you worked as a broadcast journalist and an antitrust lawyer. How did your professional attuning to current events and social justice issues play into the themes of Mother Country?
All my novels cover social justice themes. Artists are the only people whose very jobs require us to step out of our skins and into the skins of others, then come back and transmit that psychic experience to the rest of the world. I believe, accordingly, that art should strive to serve, and I always choose to do that in a pretty political way.
Your work with anti-slavery activists and escaped enslaved individuals in Mauritania served as the starting point for writing Mother Country. How did these conversations and lived histories influence the stories woven into the novel?
I had, sadly, a lot of case histories from reading the records of cases against slavemasters that have not been successfully prosecuted. Only a smattering of them have been prosecuted and, in the entire country, only a handful of people have been convicted and jailed. Souria’s life is a composite of these case histories. Her story isn’t a typical one — most Mauritanian slavery, brutal as it is, probably happens in one location and within one family — but her story is hardly unheard of.
When one escapes slavery in Mauritania, it’s very hard to find employment because employment is based on caste in that country (e.g., if you come from a family of car mechanics, well, then, there you are: a car mechanic). And employment is very hard for migrants to come by in Morocco because it is a country that does not readily offer work visas or citizenship to immigrants. Accordingly, there are a great number of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who work in the sex trade, particularly in northern Morocco and Casablanca. I volunteered one of the summers I was there at a mission for such women and collected some of their stories as well.
Your family visits Morocco pretty frequently. Do you have a favorite trip or experience that stands out in particular?
Yes. Morocco is one country of a million experiences, and each trip has been so incredibly different from the last. The desert is an experience wholly apart from the busyness of Marrakech, the beachside town of Essaouira — where much of the novel takes place — and an entirely different experience from the Atlas Mountains one often drives through to get there.
But the trip my kids always talk about is the year we began in Chefchaouen before heading south. Chefchaouen is what I call the grouchiest HOA in the world — every single building, residential or business, is painted blue. People have different interpretations and combinations of the blue, so staying in the medina is an otherworldly experience. We were also there during Ramadan, and Chefchaouen is the kif capital of Morocco. So every evening after Maghreb prayer, when folks broke their fasts, there would be a big cloud of weed wafting up as if from the medina itself. Even my kids enjoyed that. My younger daughter lost her first tooth in Chefchaouen that year. The tooth fairy was pressed for American money, so she got ten dirhams. She got cheated on the exchange rate, obviously, but she was really happy.
Were there certain people, places, or events that inspired your characters, Shannon and Souria?
They are both composites, really. Shannon and Souria are both stories that I’ve heard, stories of existential angst as well as harrowing life experience. They are also both very much my deepest inner fears. From car wrecks to child kidnappings to terrible husbands, they are both an exercise in “what, really, might happen if [the worst].”
Your debut novel, Saint Monkey, received wonderful, well-deserved praise and awards. What was the process of writing your second novel like? Did the positive reception to Saint Monkey propel you forward in the creative process, or did it heighten your expectations for Mother Country?
Writing is such a solitary activity that we depend on feedback, and some of the most heartwarming feedback I got on Saint Monkey was from people who’d been the protagonists’ ages during the fifties. “You got those seats on the Merc just right,” an elderly man told me at a reading. And another reader wrote to tell me that my conjuring of the Apollo was incredibly accurate.
There was so much research I had to do for Mother Country, and knowing that the authenticity would not only educate readers who haven’t seen that side of Morocco — but perhaps touch and elevate readers who have — really kept me going.
How did your own childhood — and now experience as a mother — play into writing about motherhood and intergenerational relationships?
My mother told me in a number of ways, when I was a child and then a teenager, that I wouldn’t make a great mother. If my mother didn’t now have dementia, she’d probably agree — motherhood is, ironically, one of the sourest points between us. When I had a baby, our relationship necessarily became a more distant one. I think on some level, I just retreated into myself, into a place where I shunned any support from anyone, most of all my own mother.
On the other hand, my mother was a single mom as well for most of my childhood, and that inspired me. I knew by way of example that if I did retreat, I could still handle it all on my own and handle it pretty well — and I believe that for a number of years, I actually did.
Shannon has much the same relationship with her mother — and gosh, I didn’t realize that until I just now answered your question. I am always drawn to write about strong single mothers in my fiction. I would like to help get literature away from the trope of the sad, bedraggled single mother. Most of us are single moms by choice. Most of us are happier than when we were married. Most of us are doing just fine. It is only mass media and literature that think we aren’t.
How has teaching MFA programs across the country made you a better writer?
I often get jealous when I give an in-class assignment and watch my students write. They are at the point where writing is more of a joy, the point where they are still discovering their voices, the point where they are uncovering the fact that they can do this mind-blowing thing of bringing what is imagined into form. I think watching them, reading them, and guiding them has made me so much better at chiseling what is imagined into stark relief because, at the graduate level, an instructor really has to believe in the aesthetic they’re offering to people who are usually getting four or five different shows from other professors.
It makes me lean harder into my own quirks as a writer. At the same time, it makes me think about the universal and what is always in the service of emotional resonance. More than that, it helps me to have this deep connection with others who are doing this storytelling work that is so sacred to a culture. Writing is a solitary experience, yes, but having an MFA community punctures the black hole, as it were.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Mother Country?
I wrote the book for reasons both political and personal. The political germ of an idea came to me in 2013 when I was in Mauritania writing an article on women in development for Al Jazeera. I was hosted by a couple of anti-slavery activists, one of whom introduced me to a family of escaped slaves. The family matriarch had escaped the desert — and thus slavery — with her eight children, one of whom was born on the way out. I got to hold this sleeping infant and feel, albeit vicariously, the most powerful feeling — that feeling that people throughout history have felt when one of their children was finally born free. It was amazing. I asked in French, through a Hassaniya translator, what I could do for her. She said, “Just tell my story.” I hope I did.
Twenty percent of the population of Mauritania is enslaved brutally, and I hope that readers of Mother Country will become more aware of the ways in which modern-day slavery still thrives and oppresses.
The other germ of the idea behind Mother Country is that I was, as a young woman, indoctrinated into the natural birth cosmology that I was supposed to have this beautiful, natural delivery — that when my children were born, it would be into a pool of water and Bambi would come out from the forest and talk to me, and it would be the most perfect moment. It wasn’t. Both my children were born via c-section, and I felt like a failure for long years thereafter. It took my having a second child and being too sunk under the demands of single motherhood to care, to forget that feeling of failure. I realized that good parenting was in every action we undertake after our children are born — very little of it is about the moment of birth, which is always painful and scary and fraught, no matter how a woman delivers.
I think the process for Shannon is much the same. I hope readers with delivery trauma can identify with her and find the same sort of healing I found in writing the novel.
Book Summary:
Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.
In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.
About Jacinda Townsend:
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her new novel, Mother Country, was published by Graywolf Press earlier this year.
Connect with Jacinda:
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Read more Authors at Home:
Karen Winn: Our Little World
Erica Ferencik: Girl in Ice
Elle Marr: Strangers We Know
Lara Elena Donnelly: Base Notes
Yasmin Angoe: Her Name is Knight
Lynne Reeves: The Dangers of an Ordinary Night
Gabrielle St. George: How to Murder a Marriage
Cai Emmons: Sinking Islands
Emily Giffin: The Lies that Bind
Jeanette Escudero: The Apology Project
