Elaine Neil Orr is the author of the new novel Dancing Woman. Her other books include the novel A Different Sun. She teaches at North Carolina State University and at Spalding University.
Q: What inspired you to write Dancing Woman, and how did you create your character Isabel?
A: I was inspired by an ancient sculpture in my local museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. We’re lucky to have a robust Africa collection and many pieces, both ancient and contemporary, from Nigeria, where I was born and grew up.
This particular sculpture of a man is called a Nok because of the village in Nigeria where these works of art were first uncovered early in the 20th century. The coil-built terra cotta sits about two feet high. The head is its largest feature and the most compelling are his large eyes. They seemed to look right through me. The figure sits like a thinker or a philosopher.
I was just so struck by this figure. He seemed to carry a secret, and I wanted to find out what it was.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: While I grew up in Nigeria, I did not spend much time in northern Nigeria, which is where this figure comes from. I grew up in the southern part of the country. The north is savannah or arid while the south is verdant and even rain forest. The north is largely Muslim and the south largely Christian. So I did need to do significant research.
First I read everything I could about Noks. I also researched the provenance of the sculpture at our museum and the history of how it was obtained.
But what I most needed to learn about was the terrain, culture, geography, and religion of the north. My parents were missionaries and when I was a girl in southern Nigeria, Christianity dominated, though I had regularly seen Muslim men lay down their mats to pray.
Fortunately for me, a very good friend still lives in the city of Kaduna near which I set my story. And she is a research librarian (along with being a missionary). She tutored me for at least two years. And she could look up and discover anything she didn’t already know.
What she already knew was the Hausa language. She picked out the exact town where I would plop my main character, Isabel. She knew the university where Isabel’s husband would report. She knew the hospitals and clinics they might visit as well as the dramatic surroundings they might visit such as Matsirga Waterfalls and the Kagoro Hills.
She knew where Isabel’s husband might plant a Neem forest. She explained how Nigerians would prepare for Ramadan and how the children would dress up and go from house collecting treats. She told me to be sure to add patas monkeys. The novel would not exist without my friend, D’Anna Shotts.
Q: The writer Rachel M. Harper said of the book, “Dancing Woman is a fierce reminder of the dangers of unearthing long buried passions, while simultaneously whispering a call to do just that.” What do you think of that description?
A: How it makes me feel is happy. So I guess that means I think Rachel got it right.
I started publishing creative work in the second part of my career, after I had published two scholarly books with university presses and had been promoted to full professor. Those books bought my freedom to write other books, books more people would read.
I also experienced a life-threatening illness at about the same time: end-stage renal disease. I was on dialysis for two and a half years as I wanted for two organ transplants: a pancreas and a kidney.
Those events together—being promoted to full professor and facing my mortality--turned me completely around and into a creative writer. It’s never too late to start doing what you meant to do in the first place.
That message was resonant in me along with this Nok figure. I had to bring them together somehow. So I made the Nok a messenger to Isabel. But on the way, I had to change the sculpture into a woman, into a dancing woman, no less. Only a female sculpture could awaken her to what was in her to be.
Her journey to herself is dangerous. She makes one very impulsive choice and there are huge consequences. I guess I think that’s always going to happen on the road to our true destiny. It’s not going to be safe, whether we pursue painting, writing poetry, publishing novels, writing an operetta, choreographing a dance, or designing fabric.
Yes, I do notice that all of these options are forms of art. That’s because I believe in creation as our core purpose as humans. Art is our route to the mystery of life.
I also happen to believe that women have had much less access to art-making than men, largely because for millennia, women were having babies from the time they were 14 or 15 until they died. So women are making up time. We have fewer models from the past. In the literary arts, our books still aren’t taken as seriously as men’s.
Still, women HAVE made art and one thing Isabel learns on her journey is to SEE the art Nigerian women make and have been making for a very long time. Part of Isabel’s enlightenment is recognizing traditional women’s arts as worthy of emulation.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: Most fundamentally, empathy. For me, the purpose of literature is to learn empathy: to feel with another human being; to experience life through another person’s intellect and heart.
I’d also like for readers to see the world in a new light, to see it from a new geography, a new (to them) culture.
And my dearest wish would be that readers can see the brushstrokes in my writing. That they see the art in it. And that this doesn’t create a distance between the story and the reader but rather draws the reader further in. Just as when we see a painting in the museum we get closer to see the intricacy of the work. I want readers to come in close.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve started a novel that’s a sequel to a novel by a famous (and dead) American woman writer. I’m not saying who or the name of the novel. But it’s going to be set in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, though it starts in New England. And the main character is going to be around 50 years old.
I always write the character’s journey, both physical and emotional. I love conjuring landscapes, including the sacred forest inside each of us.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I would like to thank so many women writers before me, including Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, Alice Walker, and so many others. I’m writing because they wrote.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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