Mother Country
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Synopsis
A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author.
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.
Release date: May 3, 2022
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Print pages: 320
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Mother Country
Jacinda Townsend
And what, after all, to make of a choice? She’d chosen to return to Morocco with a man she’d wed just two years prior, a man she felt she could never know from Adam, a perennially constipated wind engineer named Vladimir who still shocked her in the mornings with his routine of gargling loudly before spitting. And now here Shannon was in calm, cool Essaouira, that frat boy of Moroccan cities, with all the riads, all the hotels, all the municipal buildings painted blue and white to mirror the water and sand opening out into the Atlantic.
After the roasted air and sandstone red of Marrakech, the breezy days and cold nights of Essaouira were a relief. Their hotel stood beachfront, with a view of the distant island of Mogador and its time-crumbled slave prison. Daytimes, when Vlad was away overseeing his powered turbines, she walked the streets behind the hotel. She wore sunglasses so no pickpocket could register her wonder, and put on the harried pace of the Moroccan women she saw running errands all around her.
Unescorted, she found flowering bushes in people’s front yards, and a film of grit that blew from the graveled public lots to coat her hair. A mole, decomposing in stages until its fourth day dead, when what she found in its place were maggots, writhing in a dark, murky pudding of sand. She found an école privée for children, with a mural of dolphins and squid painted on its face. She took long lunches of fish tajine with glass after glass of red wine, and wiped her lips clean with wet napkins. The waiters exercised patience with her French. And everywhere, everywhere rode the persistent sound of wind, howling through the door cracks like lost souls.
She’d been collected at the Marrakech airport the Friday before in a private car, a newish Mercedes that hermetically sealed the extension of her American existence. Without Vlad running interference, she took in the traffic lights of Morocco, posted on actual poles, the bulbs within them old and heat dimmed, on the verge of not working at all. An ambulance had passed with its lights flashing, but no one, including her driver, stopped or even slowed to salute the urgency. In a roundabout near the city center, she saw an unhelmeted child sitting on the back of a motorcycle, holding fast to her father’s back as he leaned into his turn. Morocco was at once psychedelic and ancient, like a collage of retro-painted postage stamps, every surface and every crowd turned seven different colors at once.
Even more stunning than the exquisite tiles of old palaces and the snake charmers with their cobras had been the taxi drivers, who seemed some new superspecies of human, a bridge from Homo sapiens to whatever would come next. They were hyper-attenuated to the small movements of tourists and capable of replying in whatever language they’d been offered. She’d made the mistake, at the Djmaa-el-Fna, of entering the first parked taxi she’d found on the street, but when the driver started his engine, five other drivers came to beat on the hood of his car and shout obscenities: there was a queue, and in accepting her fare, he hadn’t respected it. She didn’t understand much in this country, but she understood the drivers—there was no other group of people so willing to have their asses beat over two American dollars.
In Essaouira, by contrast, she walked every sunblessed evening to Orson Welles Square, where people congregated and listened to the gnaoua drummers, and to the Scala, where the gulls soared overhead sighting fish in the market, then through the medina’s covered walkway and up to the turret overlooking the Atlantic. She and Vlad took dinner at a different restaurant every night, and Vlad wrapped scraps of fish in his napkin to scatter to the stray cats and dogs they’d pass on their walk home. Sometimes, she walked to Bab Doukkala and took the long way back to the hotel, past what seemed to be the town liquor store and its accompanying prostitute, decked out in a woolen coat and high heels; a distinctive lime-green bicycle parked outside, one that belonged to the bearded Belgian she’d met her first day walking the beach. Maybe every small Moroccan town had one, she thought. An expat alcoholic.
Vlad was one of two American engineers on the project, the other being a younger woman named Jitka Stehnova, who’d been in a car wreck five years earlier and had her entire face reconstructed to a supermodel-level of chiseling. Jitka regularly wore black leather pants to work, Vlad told her. He spoke of her often, in tones of hushed admiration, and Shannon was glad for him, that he had someone to speak English with during his long weeks in Morocco.
Away from the demands of managing his speech in the company of people who could interpret its English-language undertone of dork, he relaxed into a sexier, less cowed version of himself. At night, he ripped the buttons off her shirt. He growled; she giggled. It felt, to her, like another beginning. Like the foreign film version of their marriage.
She asked about Jitka, whether she might like to join them for dinner some evening, but Vlad said she would not.
“But who is she going to speak English to?” Shannon asked.
“She’s from Poland. English isn’t even her second language.”
“But she doesn’t know anyone here.”
Vlad chuckled once, mirthlessly. “She’s doing fine for herself. Jitka’s not the lonely type.”
And so Vlad was high up in the hills of Diabat with his surveys, and she was riding down the main street in a petite blue taxi that seemed to be held together by one metal bar bolted to the inside of both front doors. She could feel the axle turning under her very feet. God, she thought, what a country. It was raining, so she walked through the covered part of the medina, passing stall after stall of dried leaves and herbal cures. They were stuffed in bushel baskets, with three-by-five cardboard signs explaining their uses. In every shop stood concoctions of Viagra, mostly misspelled as “Viagara.” Viagra Fort, Viagara pour les Femmes, Viagara pour Grimper les Rideaux. She thought to buy some for Vlad as a joke, but she knew without the signs, she’d just be offering him raw herbs in a paper sack; the joke would be lost.
She was walking past a fabric store, eyeing a yard of purple cloth with gold thread running through, when she saw her—a little girl of about three, in blue jeans and a powder-pink spring jacket. Her curly hair fell to her shoulders in two braids that were sealed off with bright green rubber bands. Though she looked clean and kempt, she seemed alone. Shannon stood for a long time watching her, but no adult called or even poked their head out of a storefront.
She felt her heart step up its pace and realized the little girl was somehow familiar, though she couldn’t possibly have known her. Africa was the Motherland, after all, and the proof was here in this small girl who could have come from her very own barren body. Shannon felt she was peering across time when she asked, “Qu’est-ce que tu t’appelles?”
The girl backed up to stand against the wall of the souk, refusing her any information, and Shannon wanted to believe it was because she didn’t speak French—so many Moroccans did not—and so Shannon asked, in the small bit of dialect she’d gathered, “Asmitek?”
But still, the child denied her. She turned her body into the brick wall until she was facing it.
When she turned back, coyly, Shannon waved. “It’s okay,” she said, in English. “I’m just wanting to say hello.” She watched, as the girl turned first one foot and then the other sideways in infant bashfulness. She scuffed the toes of her little shoes against the cobblestones.
“Where is your mommy?” Shannon whispered. “Where is she?”
And how, after all, to judge a choice? In two years with her solid, stable breadwinner, Shannon had forgotten the horror of going to the ATM and being denied. But in this quarter-developed country, of all places, she found herself again insolvent, the caisse automatique telling her there was no money to be had. It wasn’t that Vlad had drained his bank account, or even that this bank was temporarily not talking to their bank in the United States, or that Vlad had forgotten to notify Fifth Third that they were out of the country, as had been the case when she’d tried a juice stall during her layover at the airport in Madrid. No. It was simply that she’d come up behind a long line of French tourists descended from a bus that waited for them along the brick sidewalk, and somewhere in that line of people, the machine had dispensed the last of its Moroccan currency.
She set out for the medina, crossing the sidewalk to the face of the Attijariwafa, but the man who’d been last in line was throwing his hands up in despair. The machine spat his card out of the slot, and he glowered at its sunken screen, clenching both his fists as though he might reach down and punch it. The cause and effect clicked, as between two sequential illustrations of an IQ test, and for the first time in her life, she understood just how much damage the French could do to a day.
“Merde,” she spat, at the world of tourists. She spat a second, softer “merde” at herself.
She had a hundred-dirham note in her pocket, a leftover from her lunchtime trip through the medina the day before, whiling away all the slow hours of being someone’s wife. She walked north toward Bab Sbaa, where a woman with one leg sat planted in her wheelchair, trying for eye contact with passersby. All day, thousands of times per day, Shannon calculated, the woman motioned toward her ample stomach and then rubbed her fingers in the air to make the universal sign for money. The first day, Shannon had felt cowed into giving her one of the single-dirham pieces she had jingling around the bottom of her purse. The woman had taken it in her outstretched hand, kissed her teeth in disgust, tossed the coin to the ground. Now, Shannon passed and gave nothing. Since she had no small change, nothing save the hundred-dirham note, she said it happily, even: “Je n’ai pas d’argent.”
Vlad hadn’t wanted to tour the medina, not once. Shannon had led him to the fish market near the Scala, but three tables in, he stopped. “All those eyes of the innocents,” he’d said, viewing the mounds and piles of dead fish. She’d convinced him he had to witness the Viagra baskets, but it had been dinnertime, with all the locals out, and when they got to the bottleneck just inside Bab Doukkala, he stopped her by the shoulder and turned her back toward the exit. “All those pickpockets,” he’d said, “walking shoulder to shoulder. Is there anything we really need in there? ’Cause I look at all those people and know I ain’t lost one thing in no Essaouira medina.” He promised they’d go down to Agadir one weekend, to the real beach, where wind never blew. He’d booked a guide with a 4x4, he said.
Now she found the eggcup house Vlad had mentioned, and the fabric store next door, where she inquired discreetly and was sold an eighth of champion-quality Moroccan kif. She left the shop and walked the cobblestone streets, managing the constant wobble beneath the soles of her sandals. Above her, the sun had disappeared, and clouds swept by fierce winds at a rate of twenty, thirty miles an hour, fast as a parade. The sun shone through the clouds momentarily, and she found dust motes glistening in the air, but just as quickly the light was gone, the only visible world the one of medina commerce.
She passed a whittler, inhaling the clean scent of worked thuya wood, and then stopped to take in the fanciful plates outside a ceramics shop: goldenrod discs anthropomorphized into suns with eyes and noses, infinity-sign fish swimming in lines around the edges. She walked with neither aim nor direction, but soon came across the same little girl, in the same pink jacket as the day before. Today her hair rose free of its braids, in a bush of curls around her head. Still, she seemed to belong to no one.
Shannon bent until she was eye level, and carefully used the phrase she’d absorbed over the course of two Moroccan visits. “As-salaam alaikum.”
The girl clenched her fingers open and shut: a wave.
“Come with me,” Shannon said in English, taking her hand. She could almost hear the fast beating of her own heart, and she had to stop to make herself think, for she recognized the feeling: a cat, stalking birds. She didn’t want to feel this bald, this rapacious, but the desire she bore was beyond her strength, as though her resistance had been drowned in all the Clomid and progesterone she’d injected into her own veins. She turned warm, and drifted temporarily to the side of herself, outside any lingering sense of morality. She’d wanted too much in this long year of not being pregnant; she’d desired too hard. She was as afraid of losing Vlad as she was of being permanently childless, and she was less afraid of losing herself as she was of losing either thing. “La glace?” she asked the girl.
But when the girl grinned and nodded her head yes, greed stepped itself back into the inner chamber of her heart. This was someone else’s child, she reminded it, and she held her arm out to the girl in a manner slightly stiffer: this was someone else’s child, whom she was just taking for ice cream. The girl clenched her teeth against her lip in a show of delight Shannon had never seen on anyone, anywhere, ever.
Holding the girl’s hand, Shannon retraced her path, out to the Orson Welles Square and the Dolce Freddo, where she got lime for herself and, at the girl’s pointed request, one boule of raspberry. Since they didn’t share language, all was accomplished through pointing—the flavor, the refusal of the two napkins Shannon offered. They sat at an outdoor table eating, the girl hauling a spoonful to her mouth and then mashing it around, neither licking nor siphoning off cream but letting it melt on its own time.
“Qu’est-ce que tu t’appelles?” Shannon asked again, hopefully. But the girl understood nothing, so she pointed to her own chest, like Tarzan. “Shannon,” she said, hoping it might get her somewhere. She pointed to the girl’s chest, but she just stared longingly at Shannon, all the while her mouth still pressed around her spoon.
Shannon’s mother had notified her of her grandmother’s death at a Baskin-Robbins. “Your mimi, she has passed on,” her mother said, though no water breached her eyes until the day of the funeral, at which Mrs. Cavanagh had given the eulogy. She’d stood at the church podium, rigid as a pole despite her shaking voice, talking about how her mother had always meant the absolute best for her. Shannon was six years old and had not seen her grandmother in eight months. What she mostly remembered was Mimi’s small house in her tiny town near the Missouri state line, the curlicues on the wrought iron columns that supported her porch. She remembered what her own mother would say every time she caught her sliding down the stair banister, or tracking mud in the house, or not wearing socks in the winter: “My mother would have beaten me with a lampcord.”
Shannon’s grandmother had raised three children—Shannon’s mother, an uncle who also lived in Louisville but never visited, and an aunt who’d flown in to the funeral from the farthest reaches of Southern California and caught a return flight back the very next day. “Sometimes, she caught us with the belt buckle,” Shannon’s mother had said during the eulogy, to polite laughter from the church. “But she always meant us well. She raised us to succeed, all by ourselves.”
“Finit?” Shannon asked the child of no French. The girl somehow understood and nodded, and Shannon walked her back to the alley where she’d found her. The sun had moved an hour or so higher in the sky. Still, no one stood ready to whisk the little girl back into their arms; no one called her name. It infuriated Shannon. Her childhood neighbor, Heather Berry, had gotten a brand-new bicycle for Christmas one year but would leave it lying around other people’s yards. Shannon had ridden it one day to a nearby park shelter, left it there, and never said a word, not even as she heard Heather crying down the street, looking for her bike. She hadn’t stolen anything since, not even so much as a drugstore mascara, and now she flinched at the memory of her one attempt at theft.
She stood with the little girl in the alley, checking the colored soap bottles in Savons Mogador. A giant bronzed hand of Fatimah lodged at the tail of the shop’s sign, but its middle finger had been taken by vandals. Shannon wondered if, without this crucial piece, the hand still held its protective properties.
“Au revoir,” she told the girl, and she tried to walk away without looking back, but she did. Several times. Until she had to make a turn through a covered walkway, and she lost sight, and then made a U-turn and doubled back through the walkway, only to emerge back into sunlight and her view of the child, to whom she’d assigned the name Mardi, for the day of the week she’d first seen her. Rain edged the day, and as she neared the fabric shop, the grit of the street swirled around her ankles, stuck itself between the soles of her feet and her sandals.
The following day, she again found the girl in the alley. “Glace?” she asked. “Encore une fois?”
Again, the girl nodded yes, though the look of pleasure on her face shifted a tick from gratitude to expectation, and Shannon wondered what would happen if she came and got the girl every day for the rest of the week she still had in Morocco, whether the routine would get old for both of them. Again, she watched the girl mash her mouth down on the spoon until all the raspberry cream had melted and run down her throat, and then, perhaps because it was a day that looked so much like rain, and she couldn’t bear to imagine Mardi standing out in such weather, she took her small hand and walked her right through the narrow passageway from Orson Welles Square to Bab Sbaa. Down the brick sidewalk and past the possibly still-empty ATM, across the street, and down the boardwalk. As they walked alongside the ocean, the girl looked longingly backward, but Shannon pushed on, with one hand shielding her face against the windblown sand.
“Froid?” she asked, though she knew the girl couldn’t answer. She moved Mardi from the right side of herself to her left so that she could block the wind that wanted to eat the little girl alive, pulling her close, as a mother bird might shield a chick with its wing.
And nothing in life had yet proposed this solution; there was no draped helix within which Shannon would become the perfect mother she herself never had. It was neither breaking a circle nor filling the hole in its middle. But when she held the soft palm of this child’s hand and felt how she herself had never been enough for her mother, she realized she wanted to try.
They’d moved from a stone-cobbled walk to a brick-cobbled one, and the rain fell so hard, the droplets bounced off the ground. The rhythm of precipitation rose; it drummed the corrugated tin roof of the spaghetti diner and leaked in 4/4 time from the corner of the boarded-up ice cream kiosk. Shannon had thought that one day, when her mother was finished with the harrying work of parenting, she might become frivolous. They’d go shopping together just to go shopping. Stop and get their nails done. Eat gelato in a mall coffee shop. But it hadn’t happened. Katherine Cavanagh had taken the hole in her heart, dug it wider, and poured in the cement of bridge club and gardening. A good part of her mother would simply never happen. And for that, Shannon was furious.
Against the force of wind, she guided Mardi back to the boardwalk, hurrying to the corner where the Hotel Atlas sat like a ship waiting to take them both in. They passed the reception desk, and Shannon pressed the elevator button. She felt someone’s gaze, but when she looked over her shoulder, both the man and the woman at reception were busy, the man lost in counting small slips of paper, licking them with his forefinger to separate them, the woman typing, peering down at the keyboard. Neither of them was looking at Shannon.
Finally, the elevator arrived and she entered with Mardi, who was hesitant enough to have to be pushed slightly into the machine’s cavernous belly, but who looked on with wonder at the reflective chrome panels as the doors closed. She stared mostly at herself, measuring the way her reflection moved its hand when she moved hers. When the machine started its ascent, she scrambled to hold Shannon’s leg.
“It’s okay,” Shannon told her, as she again draped a hand over the girl’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said again, as they exited the elevator to the quiet hotel carpeting. “It’s okay,” she said, as she removed the soiled clothes; as she washed Mardi’s baby-fatted legs with a washcloth in the hotel bathtub; as she threw away the girl’s underwear, so eaten with holes.
“It’s okay,” she told Mardi, as the girl sat in the middle of the bed in one of Shannon’s t-shirts, laughing at cartoons. “It’s okay,” she said, from across the room, where she texted Vlad to warn him about what he’d find when he got home, but her spoken assurance was half drowned by the heavy rain just outside the window, and the drone of rai music from the room’s small radio clock. Mardi, under the covers already, closed her eyes at last into sleep, drowning the other half.
Shannon buried her head in her own used bath towel, trying to pick up the molecular-level settling that might tell her what kind of mother she could be, but the towel gave off an aroma of high-end bath salts, crystalline and harsh. She stepped back, as if slapped.
“My mother raised us for a hard world,” Mrs. Cavanagh had said at the end of the eulogy. She moved aside from the microphone. Bowed her head. “She raised us to know that sometimes,” she said, directing her eyes toward a wall behind all their heads, ...
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