Jacinda Townsend's "Mother Country"

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Here Townsend dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Mother Country:

The hardest question, for me, is casting. When I think of my protagonist Shannon Cavanagh, whose muted sauciness informs so much of the plot, I think of Kerry Washington. My co-protagonist, Souria Maouloud, does not speak the same language as her captors and neighbors for so much of the novel: Thandiwe Newton is an actress whose range would allow her to commit all the on-screen physicality that Souria's role would require. Shannon's husband, Vladimir Grenfell, is such an unmitigated dork, and in some way nonetheless to blame for everything that goes wrong in this novel. LaKeith Stanfield would be a perfect Vlad.

My favorite films are the Star Wars episodes, and when I finally traveled to North Africa, I deeply understood why it had been the real-world backdrop for so much of the Star Wars universe. After having been there one can see, in Obi-Wan Kenobi's costume, an echo of the robes that men wear in the Sahara; the swoop bikes that make for such prevalent Star Wars transportation very much recall the mopeds that clot the medinas of North Africa. To watch even ten minutes of Tunisian-set Star Wars is to sense the magnitude and force of rock formations in the Sahara: it's an ancient, powerful place that's impervious to change even as it is ever-evolving.

I'd love, then, for the North African half of Mother Country to be filmed on location--as much as the cities of Marrakech and Essaouira are a backdrop for much of the plot, the Sahara Desert is what truly shapes each of these characters, even the American ones. Souria, of course, has an iron that's been forged in the Sahara's hot, hot cultural fire. But Shannon and Vlad don't understand how they are butting up against a desert-shaped culture that leaves a child wholly free at the same time she is utterly, lovingly attended to, and this is their great failing in the novel.

I'm also someone who's incredibly picky about music--not only did I assemble a six-piece ensemble to play at my wedding, but I arranged all the world music. The soundtrack of Mother Country would ideally be played by Tinariwen, a well-known band from the Saharan region of northern Mali. Besides being deeply involved in the region's politics, some of which are front and center of Mother Country, Tinariwen are expert at creating the mood I can describe only as "heightened trance." To see them in concert is a magical experience, but to hear them in-studio is to salve the soul. Having the texture of their work behind these characters would be a dream.

Visit Jacinda Townsend's website.

--Marshal Zeringue