Set in Western Liberia, She Would Be King (out Sept 11) begins with the promising premise of a black girl born with red hair and soon cast out from her community. Children taunt her by yelling “witch!”, and at first you may think what bored punks until it’s apparent they have a point, as this story revolves around a protagonist who cannot die.
In her debut novel, Wayétu Moore, a lecturer in Africana Studies at John Jay College, manages to pull off a narrator that seems impossible: the wind. This isn’t a spoiler as you find out all about it in a pleasing twist toward the end of the first chapter. Such a choice allows her to brush along several continents and gain intimate knowledge of dozens of characters. It’s impressive that Moore can sustain the contrivance for so long. It’s a wise and affecting move that, for all its oddity, really works.
Moore’s sympathy lies with outcasts. She seems heavily influenced by Toni Morrison (they share an alma mater, Howard University) and in particular The Bluest Eye (one character, Cholly, shares the same name as the father in of Morrison’s debut novel). Gbessa (pronounced “bessa”) experiences intense personal rejection which, like Pecola in The Bluest Eye, requires intense self-numbing.
But unlike Morrison’s debut, the awkward sentences here keep the characters at a distance. Too often, it seems that the author is observing the characters rather than getting under their skin. It lacks the taut energy of the British-Nigerian writer Helen Oyeyemi’s stories, which also employ magical realist elements, or the swift storytelling mastery of Ghanaian-American Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which also intertwined stories from Africa and America.
There are some lovely phrases: “The sun took pleasure in having her all to itself, digging its impression in to her pigment, making her skin the color of twilight” and “There was Lake Piso, displaying seventy reflections of a full moon, each ripple a different translation.” But these rewards are far too few to justify the incredible patience this first work demands. They’re also complicated by clumsily sentences like “she thought heavily” and “upon opening the door…” (then, just pages later, “upon entering the cave…”). People are always approached or recognized or stimulated. Nearly every character at some point snaps.
Gbessa is, according to the wind narrator, shrouded in “otherness.” These academic concerns distract from the lifeblood of this novel. The dialogue is accompanied by so many qualifiers as to prove distracting.
Moore strikes a more realistic tone in the section “June Dey.” Starting from the perspective of Charlotte, a slave on struggling plantation owned by a wicked man. The windy narrator doesn’t distract from the characters and seamlessly presents their perspectives. The most moving scenes are when she (the wind/Gbessa) comforts the downtrodden–a tortured slave, a lover–and conveys the impressions of a community to which she is simultaneously on their skin of and perpetually removed from: “Everybody’s business was a small part of my own.”
The accumulation of subplots ultimately becomes cliched and slackens; the plotlines don’t cohere. The pacing is slow and the images fog. Unless you’re in the market for forced emotion, She Would Be God is unlikely to elicit the sort of awe of Colson Whitehead’s plantations scenes in The Underground Railroad.
She Would Be King will appeal to people interested in Liberia, but there’s better art out there. Unlike Homegoing, which dealt with similar themes or Helen Oyeymi’s work, which present so many powerful fairytales, this debut work is unlikely to resonate with the uninitiated. But with enough patience (and an anthropologist’s assiduousness), She Would Be King can be rewarding.
