Mother Country

Jacinda Townsend is the winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Book Award.

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When she’s writing, Jacinda Townsend begins her days at 5:30 am, before her daughters wake up. Her first book, Saint Monkey, is made up of short chapters strung together by lyrical prose, partly because it was written in rare captured moments all to herself: lunch breaks, piano lessons, early mornings. She’s got a ritual, she tells me, a practice of working the imagination like a muscle. “If you stay with it, it’s like the imagination begins to beget imagination.Those characters become people that you’re living with, actually.” She meditates. She reads. She always has tea. And she writes.

It’s a solitary exercise for her, even smuggled in between teaching and parenting. And it can be isolating.

So, when Townsend learned that her latest book Mother Country (2022) was the winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the prospect of celebrating her work within the literary community, within the Black community, was exhilarating. Presented annually by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to emerging Black fiction writers, the award includes a $15,000 grant to support their work, and to carry on the legacy of one of Louisiana’s most important writers. Mother Country was selected by a national panel of literary judges, and enjoys company with works such as Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water (2021), Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong (2020), and Bryan Washington’s Lot (2019).

“If you stay with it, it’s like the imagination begins to beget imagination.” —Jacinda Townsend

Multi-faceted and resounding in its empathy, Mother Country is a story that begins with a kidnapped child. Vacationing in Marrakesh, Townsend’s protagonist Shannon sees the girl, and assumes she has been abandoned. From a dark place plagued by the prospect of an unwanted marriage, overwhelming debt, and infertility, Shannon sees in her a glimmer of hope, and decides to take her home.

The concept came from Townsend’s own reflections on what makes someone a mother. “There is this personal underpinning to her story that …before I had my children, I thought childbirth would be this beautiful experience of joy,” she said. “And it was not for me. Both of mine were C sections, one was an emergency C section. It took me a long time to not feel like a failure, to feel like a real mother. So, I kind of spooled that out in my head to the nth degree and wondered how long it would take someone to feel like a mother if they actually stole a child.”

This exploration is further complicated by Townsend’s other protagonist, Sourria—the child’s birth mother, a survivor of the Mauritanian sex trade—whose harrowing journey might, in the hands of a less compassionate writer, comparably make Shannon’s first-world problems seem facile. Instead, the two women’s journeys wind together in a complex and emotional investigation of transnational womanhood, and especially of motherhood. “Women, we run up against the patriarchy no matter what,” said Townsend. “No matter how privileged we are, no matter where we live, where we move to, it’s ever-present… and there are all kinds of mothers. And it’s all valid. And it’s all love.”

[Read about Gabriel Bump, who received the 2020 Ernest J. Gaines Award, here.]

Intimately personal in so many ways, the book for Townsend is also decidedly political—spurred by a promise made to a real mother, a real survivor of the sexual slavery that affects twenty percent of the population in Mauritania. Townsend has been visiting Marrakesh for years since accidentally falling in love with the city during a layover, and in 2013 she visited Mauritania to report on anti-slavery activism for Al Jazeera. Working on that story, she met a woman who had recently escaped enslavement with her eight children—the last of which had been born during her flight through the desert. “And I got to hold that baby while she was sleeping, and it was the most powerful thing. Because it was like that feeling people have had throughout history, when that first family member is born free.”

Townsend asked the woman what she could do to help her. “Tell my story,” she said. “Tell my story.”

Through Sourria’s experience, Mother Country is Townsend’s attempt to do just that—to spread awareness of this human rights crisis taking place in the modern day, in a country where little information gets in or out. “Slavery can just kind of thrive under those conditions,” she said. “It’s protected.”

As a political writer, Townsend says that one of her earliest models was Ernest Gaines himself, whose fearless and moving depictions of race and community in the rural South have established him as one of the great American writers in recent history. “A Lesson Before Dying is one of those books that made me realize that one thing we’re called to do is sort of step outside of ourselves, step into someone else’s experience, and then step back into ourselves as writers, and transmit that into the world,” said Townsend. “That book had such an impact on me. I feel like a lot of American literature wants to be sort of apolitical, it wants to avert its eyes. But you know, we can’t.”

Learn more about Townsend’s work at jacinda-townsend.com, and about the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence at ernestjgainesawrard.org. The 16th annual Gaines Award will be presented to Townsend at 6 pm on January 19 at the Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge.