Identity and Belonging: A Guest Post by Nikki May
This is Mansfield Park like you’ve never seen it before. Nikki May (Wahala) reintroduces us to a Jane Austen classic through a brand-new lens, reimagining the characters and setting in a fresh, exciting way. Read on for Nikki’s exclusive essay on how This Motherless Land came to be.
Hardcover $30.00
This Motherless Land: A Novel
This Motherless Land: A Novel
By Nikki May
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
From the acclaimed author of Wahala, a “vibrant” (Charmaine Wilkerson) decolonial retelling of Mansfield Park: Jane Austen meets The Vanishing Half
From the acclaimed author of Wahala, a “vibrant” (Charmaine Wilkerson) decolonial retelling of Mansfield Park: Jane Austen meets The Vanishing Half
A life spent code-switching between my two cultures has made me slightly (OK, very) obsessed with identity. It’s nuanced and not just about how I feel – other people are only too happy to tell me what they’ve decided I am. I’ve always known I’d write about identity and belonging one day, but re-reading Mansfield Park was my “Aha!” moment. The idea of a girl being ripped away from everything she knows and dropped into an alien environment where she needs to prove herself, over and over, is genius. So I stole it!
But my novel, This Motherless Land is a reimagining, not a retelling. I used Mansfield Park as scaffolding and built a different story around it. A personal story about belonging and how you can twist yourself out of shape to fit in but still fail. I recreated Fanny as Funke. She’s quiet and conformist but hopefully less passive and insipid than the original. My Funke doesn’t need a lie-down after a short stroll.
I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s personal. When we meet Funke in 1978, she’s living my happy middle-class childhood in my house in Lagos with Billy, my sister’s African Grey parrot. She goes to my school, spends weekends on my beach, and rides my green Chopper round the quiet campus streets with her little brother, just like I did. She reads Enid Blyton and thinks that’s what England is like – she’s in for a big shock.
Because we’re not in Georgian times anymore and cousin-sex would have given readers the ick, I recreated Edmund as Liv – it’s still a love story, just not the romantic kind. There’s something compelling about mirrored lives, so I set out to compare and contrast Funke and Liv on the basis of simple binaries: black vs white; rich vs poor, introvert vs extrovert, conformist vs rebel, good mother vs bad mother.
In Mansfield Park, Fanny’s mother married to disoblige her family. “By fixing on a lieutenant of marines, without education, fortune or connexions, she did it very thoroughly.” Funke’s mother fixed on a doctor, but he was black so the result was pretty much the same. Neither could have made a more untoward choice, both were cut off as punishment. Liv’s mother, Margot, is my Mrs Norris – possibly Austen’s only thoroughly evil character. I love writing baddies – the badder the better!
I had such a good time mocking the irrationality and ridiculousness of prejudice in both my homes. And I loved writing about my two cultures – they are very different, but humans are the same everywhere, we seem determined to find disparity and then exploit it.
Like Funke, I’ve found it’s possible to belong in two places and also belong nowhere. It’s taken me a lifetime to realize I’m not half, I’m both. But poor Funke is only nine and she’s traumatized when I uproot her – it makes her the perfect lens to see my two homes through.