Susan Storer Clark, author of An Uncharted World, reflects on the research and writing challenges she faced when writing about the 16th century slave trade and a Yoruba woman named Morayo who is snatched away and forced into slavery. Susan had a long career as a journalist in radio and TV and it was at the time when she read about Francis Drake’s voyage around the world that An Uncharted World began to take shape.
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All living beings have a context: the natural world we inhabit, the social structure of our species, the food available to us, and the dangers we face. We human beings live within our context: how we get and prepare our food, social and political events around us, and the spiritual lens through which they see our world and our lives. Humans stories only make sense in context.
If you take the old adage, “Write what you know,” to an extreme, it would eliminate the possibility of writing about any story set outside your own lived experience, which would eliminate almost all historical fiction.
Where’s the fun in that? Nowhere! That’s why we do research. And if your characters inhabit times and places very different from your own, you’ll need to do a lot of it. Research dedicated to my book An Uncharted World took me more than three years, and that’s after I’d done a lot of background reading. The story takes place in the 16th century, on four continents and three oceans, with vocabulary from six languages. And getting the story right, an accurate creation of its context, required several different kinds of research into civilizations half a millennium old. I also found that many modern authors need to research inside themselves, to ask and answer the question, “Do I have the right to tell this story?”
I discovered my central character when I was reading about the voyage around the world by English privateer and explorer Francis Drake. I’ve been reading about Drake since I was eleven, more than half a century. I got started because family members told me we were related to him.
We’re not. But by the time I found that out, I had studied Tudor period history for years and was finishing up an advanced degree at King’s College London concentrating on the 16th century. I just kept reading.
When I read that Drake captured “a proper African wench called Maria” off the coast of Central America on his voyage around the world, I thought, “Who was she? What was her story?” I soon learned that whatever her story was, it was not told in the historical record. The only other information we have is that he left her, pregnant, seven months later, on an island in what is now Indonesia.
I decided to make her a Yorùbá woman. Yorùbá people are numerous throughout West Africa, and many of them were taken as slaves. Their culture spread widely during the African Diaspora, and is still evident in Brazil, the eastern Caribbean, and, to a lesser degree, in the southern United States. I got interested in the Yorùbá people when I went to Nigeria to report for the Voice of America in 1999. I interviewed Nigeria’s newly elected President, Olúṣẹ́gun Ọbásanjọ́, a Yorùbá man, and in doing my background reading I became fascinated with this vibrant and imaginative culture, which I still study.
Many aspects of their culture made it into the book. The naming of a child is a solemn undertaking, and relatives use dreams and divination to choose the correct name. I chose the name Morayo, and wrote how deeply upsetting it was when her name was abruptly and arbitrarily changed by her first enslaver. I included the divine beings called òrìsàs, whose stories reveal a unique cosmogony. The òrìsàs have traveled everywhere the Yorùbá people have gone. The divine trickster Èṣù travels with Morayo, usually unseen and unheard, but also learning and changing as he goes. I do not have scientific evidence of his existence, but I thought his presence in the story gave it another dimension of truth.
I took Yorùbá language lessons, and a second trip to Nigeria. I learned how people fished on the lagoon where Morayo was captured, what the vegetation would have been. There are very few contemporaneous written records by West Africans so historians must dig information out of archeology and oral history. I talked to an expert on the oral history of the subset of Yorùbá people that Morayo came from.
I learned that it is very likely she was subject to genital cutting, and was able to talk to a woman who has experienced it.
It wasn’t just Nigeria I needed to know about. The action of the story takes place on the high seas, Brazil, Peru, Indonesia, Macau, and on board ships. I couldn’t afford to visit all those countries, but life in those cultures is more widely documented than 16th century Nigeria, and I got help from books and the internet. I chose readers familiar with the different languages and cultures, and took their advice.
I also needed to know: Do I have the right to tell this story?
That question never occurred to me until 2020, when American Dirt became a best-seller. The novel about migrants from Mexico was controversial mostly because the author was neither Mexican nor a migrant.
An editor told me point-blank that I was the wrong person to write my book, because I’m a white American-born woman.
I took the point seriously, but didn’t know what to do. I was fortunate to hear an NPR interview about a process and a book called Writing the Other. I read the book, took the course and studied, and I recommend that path.
Do I have the right to tell this story? I think so.
I would not be qualified to write, say, a story centered on African-American culture. Almost any one of the 53 million African-Americans in this country could write it with more authenticity than I would.
But Morayo is not African-American, or even a contemporary African. Her story predates the influences of colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and the slave trade, which have shaped contemporary West African culture. The people who lived in Morayo’s world are long gone, but their story should be told. I have researched it conscientiously and respectfully, and I think that is a deeply important thing for an author to do.
Many thanks for sharing this perspective, Susan. Adding my own two cents worth – I believe that stories like this are important to tell, not only to shed light on the past but to add to our broader understanding of cultures that are different from ours and from which we can learn so much.
An Uncharted World by Susan Storer Clark
An Uncharted World is historical fiction with an element of magical realism.
It begins in 1574, when the growing transatlantic slave trade began to ravage West Africa. A young Yorùbá woman, Morayo, goes to look at a strange ship near her home and is snatched into a terrifying journey: slavery in Brazil, servitude in Peru, and capture by privateer Francis Drake on his way around the world.
Can she regain her freedom? Is there any way she can get back to her home?
Inspired by the true story of a real African woman, Morayo’s tale of resilience is told through her own eyes, and through those of a wide range of characters: priests and pirates, aristocrats, freed slaves and the divine trickster Èṣù. It takes the reader around the world and into the uncharted depths of the human heart.
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
