The product of an African man whose spirit never faltered and a woman who faced ridicule all her own, June Dey is also born with a gift. The violence, both gratuitous and functional, characterizes the lives of Africans in the plantationocene of North Carolina. The second direction positions readers in the United States and Jamaica. Nevertheless, there in the woods, she discovers that she can not die. The eventual leader of the Poro-a society of men-named Safua, befriends her in secret, and perhaps the memory of his friendship kept her alive. Among the Vai people, she is shunned, and eventually banished-a witch. The first direction centers Gbessa, a child born on a day declared “cursed.” She, too, bears the burden of a curse. With the wind as narrator that guides as it protects, She Would be King is a novel that moves in two directions-toward the continental and the diasporic.
Through their ways of knowing, Moore gifts all with new eyes, new legends-ones through which founding myths can and will be unsettled. Rather, we are taught to see this world through the lens of the mystic, the ones born with the gifts to navigate these existences differently. We are not told to ignore the evolution of the nation-state or the horrors of slavery and colonialism. In this, her debut novel, Wayétu Moore places the historical foundations of Liberia in tension with the meaning of African existence in the modern world-a sense of meaning both contextualized and grounded in African views of life. She Would be King makes that same beauty available for us. It remains there for Africa and her diaspora to see as well. Edward Wilmot Blyden would ultimately see this for himself. For within Liberia, there are also sources of beauty, traditions of living against oppression, traditions of existence that predate oppression, as well as measures of assigning to life a meaning beyond production and value. But one can also tell a different story, while never losing sight of those conditions and in fact, truly contextualizing them.
One can tell the story of Liberia through this lens-civil wars, brutal dictatorships, greed and exploitation. They hyperbolize human distinctions in ways that exacerbate exploitation. Often framed as a uniquely “African problem,” the story of Liberia is more accurately a story of the tragedy of the nation-state form.
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