Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson
DANCING WOMAN. By Elaine Neill Orr. Blair/Carolina Wren Press. 291 pages. $28.95, hardcover.
Elaine Neill Orr is a gifted writer whose works are inspired and enriched by her creative temperament and her unusual perspective on the world. In her third novel, Dancing Woman, she is perhaps at the height of her powers and insight. Although she has previously drawn upon her years in West Africa for her memoir and her two previous novels, this book is her first attempt to imagine the life and thoughts of a young 20th-century American woman living in Nigeria.
The results should speak eloquently to everyone, regardless of identity or locale.
Orr’s parents were Southern Baptist medical missionaries from North Carolina who worked in southern Nigeria. She was born and grew up in Nigeria, except for the year she was 6, when her parents were on sabbatical in Winston-Salem. Then, as a teenager, she was plunged into the midst of troubled race relations in the American South when she was sent to Atlanta to attend a newly integrated high school. In a 2013 interview about the writing of her first novel, A Different Sun, she told me that she felt at ease with neither the black nor the white students.
That first novel is about a fictitious woman who accompanied her missionary husband to Nigeria when the Southerners in America – including her parents – still owned African slaves.
Five years later, Swimming Between Worlds was published. In that second novel, Orr told of a sensitive young man in the mid-20th century who, armed with a degree in architecture from State College in Raleigh, heads off to help an American firm design a prototype high school in Nigeria. That experience leads him to see and question much he took for granted while growing up in a privileged family in Winston-Salem.
As he makes friends with Nigerians rather than just trying to “help” them, he draws the ire of his employers and is sent home in disgrace. Back in North Carolina, he sees everything with new eyes. He falls in love, and he also becomes embroiled in racial unrest amid the lunch-counter sit-in movement.
Now in Dancing Women, Orr offers us the story of Isabel Hammond, a young, inexperienced Southern American woman who comes to Nigeria in the early 1960s with her new husband, an agricultural aid worker with the U.S. Agency for International Development who is dedicated to helping the Nigerians learn new ways of doing things.
Isabel had been an aspiring artist, but she dropped out of college to marry Nick. After all, the ultimate goal of a young woman then was to marry a husband with a good future. And Isabel was ready to go places, to live an interesting and fulfilling life.
But now she finds herself aimless and lonely in Nigeria, where she often does not understand the social rules and expectations. Nigerians, she comes to see, have their own complex culture – or cultures, sometimes at odds – and are not just poor Africans needing American help.
Her husband is obsessed with his work, and their hopes for starting a family are thus far unfulfilled. She feels lost, wondering what her future can hold. Even though she succeeded in making a “good” marriage, she still feels that much is missing, that as a woman she may never be able to live that full life she’s hoped for.
Then, while her husband is away on yet another important project, she accompanies a fellow expat woman to an overnight social event in another city. Somehow, almost as if in a dream, she finds herself spending a night of passion with Bobby Tunde, a Nigerian rock singer.
Determined to put that inexplicable betrayal behind her, Isabel resolves to get on with her life, her painting and her garden. While planting a lemon tree in her yard, she unearths a terra-cotta statue of a dancing woman, about the height of a table lamp, a “rounded figure built to last,” perfect except for one hand broken off at the wrist.
Isabel realizes this is a relic that should be turned over to local people, but she longs to keep the dancing woman, at least for a while. She is fascinated, feeling that the woman speaks to her, has some message that could help her find her way.
Life goes on, and with it come more complications – changes in family, political strife in Nigeria, people who frown upon her art “hobby,” the judgments of those around her…
When Isabel at last gains deeper understanding of life, when she indeed hears what the dancing woman has to tell her, she realizes a truth that should resonate with everyone who reads this beautiful, powerful book.