Liam Neeson's recent film career has revived the genre of movies where fathers are taken to their limits in order to retrieve missing daughters. In Jacinda Townsend's beautifully complex "Mother Country," an American woman crosses a series of dangerous boundaries in a quest to claim someone else's daughter as her own. Rather than the simple resolution to the "missing daughter" plot in films, however, Townsend constructs a story in which the resolution challenges readers to map where their own ethical borders lie.
The novel opens on the streets of Essaouira, Morocco, a coastal city due west of Marrakech. Shannon is there with her engineer husband, Vlad, and while he works, she wanders "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."
Shannon suffers chronic pain after a near-fatal car accident, and is in search of the kif that provides her relief. It's then that she spots "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 recognizes herself in the child as a result of their shared African ancestry but also in the waves of memory that recall her own mother's neglectful parenting. Those psychic wounds refuse to heal. Thus, despite the clear evidence that someone has been looking after the child, Shannon makes an impulsive decision to "rescue" the girl.
The girl's mother, Souria, bears the physical and mental scars of having been enslaved in her native Mauritania, and is now an undocumented migrant whose skin color makes it possible for her to be invisible while also making it impossible for her to blend in. Unseen by those who dismiss her as yet another refugee, she is trafficked by those who inflict further misery.
As Townsend unfolds each woman's story, the reader's sympathies are pulled in both directions. Townsend further complicates those emotions by placing readers inside the head of the child, called Yumni by her birth mother and Mardi by Shannon. Her needs and desires should be paramount; instead, she bears the weight of both women's choices.
Townsend will ask the reader throughout the book to think about choices. How to evaluate a choice we make in an instant, those we make because we are privileged by having free choices, and whether decisions made as life-or-death choices can be judged outside that immediate context. As Townsend pulls the golden threads of compelling narrative ever tighter, readers are confronted with a Gordian Knot: Is there any circumstance in which kidnapping a toddler is justified?
Lorraine Berry is a writer in Oregon.
Mother Country
By: Jacinda Townsend.
Publisher: Graywolf Press, 312 pages, $17.