Who is Morayo?
Morayo, the main character in my novel An Uncharted World is a young Yorùbá woman stolen into slavery in the 16th century. She was inspired by a real African woman captured by Francis Drake in 1579 when he was on his way around the world, a woman was described only as “a proper African wench called Maria.”
Who was Maria?
I often say I read history and ask questions. That’s what I was doing when I discovered Maria. I was reading an account of Drake’s voyage around the world when I read that sentence fragment about her, and I thought, “Wait a minute! Who was she? Where was she from? She had a story, she had a culture. What can I find out?” As it turned out, all I could find was a second piece of information: Drake left her, pregnant, in what is now Indonesia.
Having insatiable curiosity, as I have, is kind of like having a talking monkey on your back. Questions just fly into my mind. I can’t stop them. I have to have answers, which is one reason I end up doing a lot of research.
And if I’m going to do that much research, I might as well write a book.
Research Tools
Here are some of the research tools I used, ranging from the usual to the unique.
The Internet
It’s easy, accessible, and may be wrong. It helped me a lot in writing some of the details in this book (How long does it take for a sailing ship to go from Lagos to Salvador de Bahia?), but you always want to re-check internet facts.
Primary Sources
These are sources from people who were in the time and place: eyewitness accounts. Very valuable in writing about historical characters. There are very few primary sources for the lives of people in West Africa if they were not generals or kings. Few people were literate, and modern scholars of Nigerian history depend a great deal on archeology and careful use of oral history. Information on humble everyday things, such as what they ate and what they wore, is hard to come by.
There are lots of primary sources about Drake, such as the journal kept by his chaplain on The Golden Hinde, and accounts by officials of the Spanish empire, whom he would capture and release. But even though these sources report that he kept extensive records and created many sketches and paintings of the places he visited, those have all been lost.
Secondary Sources
I read histories written about the time, as well as scholarly and popular works on Yorùbá culture. It’s a culture that spread widely during the African Diaspora and is still vibrant in West Africa, with many Yorùbá people in what is today Nigeria. It is also culturally significant in Brazil, the eastern Caribbean, and the Southern United States.
I had decided to make my central character Yorùbá almost as soon as I thought about writing the book. I had started learning about Yorùbá culture when I went on a reporting trip for the Voice of America, and interviewed Olúṣẹ́gun Ọbásanjọ́, the Yorùbá who was then the newly-elected president of Nigeria. Yorùbá culture is complex and vibrant, and its musical and religious influence shows up in many places and in many ways.
Spiritual Traditions
Yorùbá tradition holds that there is a divine energy, aṣe, which is in all beings, and which connects them all together, as well as connecting living people to their ancestors, and that honoring and maintaining those connections is vital. They also developed elaborate religious practices centered around supernatural deities called òrìṣàs.
The trickster òrìṣà Èṣù travels with Morayo after she is captured. Because he speaks all languages, human and animal, he is able to help her survive, even though she never sees him. Èṣù was fun to write, and he provides some of the more trenchant commentary in the novel. He also represents her spiritual culture.
I’m digressing, and I need to wrap up about secondary sources. You could fill several libraries with books about Drake, and lots of those would be good. Morayo’s travels take her to Brazil, Peru, Central America, Indonesia, Macao, and across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, so my research had to cover so many things from ocean currents to swear words to food preparation. I am grateful to the scholars who have written about them. I did a lot of reading.
Language Lessons
If you’re writing about people that use another language, you need to learn some of it. The online Yorùbá lessons I took through the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies were not extensive, but they helped me acquire some vocabulary, as well as an appreciation for the importance of diacritical marks. They were also very helpful in introducing traditional cultural norms, some of which were surprising to me.
Visit the Setting
There’s no substitute for putting your feet on the ground—if it’s still visible. I have taken two trips to Nigeria: the reporting trip for VOA, and a research trip only a couple of years ago. I saw the physical layout and vegetation of the beach where Morayo is captured, and learned that the term oyinbo for white people—meaning “peeled-off skin”– is not used in a racist or hateful way. It was worthwhile, plus I got to taste the cooking and see how people interacted.
Find the Stuff That’s Not on the Internet
The term Yorùbá does not refer to what Americans would think of as a tribe or a clan. It is more a “community of practice,” people who speak the same language and follow many of the same traditions. Morayo would likely not have thought of herself as Yorùbá, but as Àwórì. Many Àwórì lived, and many still live, in the western part of Lagos. I decided to make Morayo Àwórì, but found almost nothing easily accessible on the Internet. I was fortunate to find Professor Rasheed Olaniyi’s Migration and the Awori -Yoruba Frontiers, which gave me their origin and migration stories. I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Olaniyi when I visited the University of Ibàdàn.
That study visit to Ibàdàn also gave me a detail I could not find on the internet: Was Morayo likely to have been “cut,” subjected to female circumcision/genital mutilation. While there is a lot on the internet on this general subject, there was nothing I could find that would tell me if an Àwórì woman would have had this done in the 16th century.
I found in the library’s small women’s studies section some articles by Nigerian women on this subject. One was based on research done in the Lagos area. They found that the practice extends across cultural, ethnic, and religious lines, and is a deeply entrenched tradition there. So my answer was, yes, it is very likely someone like Morayo would have been “cut.” An interview with Seunfunmi Olutayo, the Coordinator of the Gender Studies Programme, confirmed that. She also made it possible for me to interview a woman willing to talk about her personal experience of the practice, and I included her story in An Uncharted World.
(Re)Search Yourself
There was another question I had to answer, which you may have to answer, too: am I the right person to write this book? I am a white American woman, and my skin color and background raise questions about my ability to understand someone like Morayo.
I get it. I am a member of the dominant population group in this country, and members of that group often do not see clearly the people who are not. It’s not unique to the United States, nor to the blindnesses white people have often shown toward African-Americans and other people of color.
A best-selling book forcefully brought this issue to light a few years ago. American Dirt, a dramatic story of a woman and her young son escaping danger in Mexico by coming undocumented into the United States, was riding high on the best-seller lists and highly praised.
But the author, Jeanine Cummins, was of Puerto Rican and Irish heritage and had grown up in the United States. She had no known connection to the Mexican migrant experience, and people who did have such experience, or knowledge of it, criticized the book harshly.
And I wondered if I was a credible person to write my book. I heard an interview on NPR with Nisi Shawl, one of the developers of a process called Writing the Other, which helps authors write accurately and sensitively about a culture that is not their own. I read the book, and I’ve used the course material, and I recommend both. One of the first things I learned is about coming into a new situation where you don’t know the people. If you’re an African-American, for example, you are immediately aware of how many people in a new group look like you, and probably what their position is in a hierarchy.
I have never had that awareness. I never had to, even when I was the only woman in the room, which has happened to me often. That’s just one example.
Figure Out What You Can (and Can’t) do:
I don’t think I should attempt to write from the point of view of an African-American, because I do not have in my bones and in my upbringing the centuries of injustice that goes into building the context they have always lived in. Besides, there are plenty of African-Americans alive today—about 53-million in the United States—and I’m pretty sure almost all of them could reflect that experience better than I could. But Maria was not African-American, because there was no such thing then. Maybe the ideal person to write this story would have been born in the 16th century, and I have assumed there aren’t any of those left.
There are certainly modern Yorùbá people who could write about their culture better than I could. But their culture is not what it was in the 16th century. It has been profoundly affected by Islam, Christianity, colonialism, about 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade.
Besides, we don’t know if Maria was Yorùbá. She could just as easily have been Fon, Bakongo, Igbo, or Mbundu. That would change her story. I did have two modern Yorùbá people, both living in Nigeria, read my manuscript, and they were very encouraging.
One critic of Jeanine Cummins’s work said that she didn’t have to be Mexican to write the book, but that she should have done more work, deeper research, to make it more credible. I think I have honored my story, Morayo’s story by working hard, digging deeper, and examining myself honestly. I also had a couple of modern Yorùbá people as beta readers.
An Uncharted World is dedicated to those people whose stories were erased by the slave trade. If it stimulates interest in those people and their stories, if more people living today can see our common humanity with each other and those who lived long ago, it will have done its work.
For further reading:
My book, of course! An Uncharted World is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, and is easily ordered through most bookstores. A paperback copy is available at a discount on my book page.
A comprehensive and modern (2020) book on Yorùbá people is The Yorùbá: A New History. It’s a transdisciplinary work , with some fascinating work on linguistics.
Two essays in Women Issues in Nigeria: 2009 were helpful to me. You may not be able to find them on the internet, but you may be able to find the editors of the collection: Helen O. Nwagwu, Olawale A. Moronkola, Dorcas O. Akintunde. Essay #6, by Omolade Olomola, “Unending Harmful Tradition & Shrouded in Secrecy: Female Genital Mutilation,” and Essay #15, “Cultural factors as Predictors of the Practice of Female Genital Mutilation among inhabitants of suburban areas of Lagos State,” B.B. Idowu, J.A. Molayoto. (If you can find this collection on the internet, please let me know. As of this posting it’s still not there.)
Black Tudors: The Untold Story, by Miranda Kaufman. Kaufman’s impressively researched book tells the stories of ten African people who lived in England during Tudor times. There isn’t much about Maria, but she has an entire chapter devoted to Diego. He was an African man who was a personal servant to Francis Drake, and is a character in An Uncharted World.
Writing the Other is both a book and a series of workshops and classes run by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. They acknowledge that, “writers often find it difficult to represent people whose gender, sexual orientation, racial heritage, or other aspect of identity is very different from their own.” The book and other materials helped me.
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