A Different Sun
Elaine Orr
Genre: Fiction (Historical)
Publisher/Publication Date: Berkley Trade (4/2/2013)
Source: TLC Book Tours
Summary
Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I
send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. When Emma Davis
reads the words of Isaiah 6:8 in her room at a Georgia women’s college, she
understands her true calling: to become a missionary. It is a leap of faith
that sweeps her away to Africa in an odyssey of personal discovery, tremendous
hardship, and profound transformation.
For the earnest, headstrong daughter of a prosperous slave
owner, living among the Yoruba people is utterly unlike Emma’s sheltered
childhood—as is her new husband, Henry Bowman. Twenty years her senior, the
mercurial Henry is the object of Emma’s mad first love, intensifying the
sensations of all they see and share together. Each day brings new tragedy and
heartbreak, and each day, Emma somehow finds the hope, passion, and strength of
will to press onward. Through it all, Henry’s first gift to Emma, a simple
writing box—with its red leather-bound diary and space for a few cherished
keepsakes—becomes her closest confidant, Emma’s last connection to a life that
seems, in this strange new world, like a passing memory.
A tale of social and spiritual awakening; a dispatch from a
difficult era at home and abroad; and a meditation on faith, freedom, and
desire.
My thoughts
A Different Sun is
an epic, atmospheric and compelling a novel as A Passage to India mixed with something of a mid-1800’s version of Cry, The Beloved Country. Set in the slave South, the novel follows the
life of Emma Davis, a native of Georgia, but no Scarlett O’Hara. Emma feels called to mission work and dreams
of traveling to the Africa of her imagination gathered from stories of a
beloved slave.
As fate would have it she meets Henry Bowman, who like Emma
is called to missionary work and is soon wedded and bound for Yorubaland
(Nigeria) in West Africa. Not
surprisingly, upon arrival Emma is overwhelmed by West Africa and immediately
takes to her new home. Her husband,
however, is afflicted by a variety of aliments and is restless to go in search
of more challenging missionary work. He
challenges her desire to build a church and does not approve of her friendships
with the locals.
Indeed, Emma finds herself in a netherworld of her past and
her present. She has unintentionally
stepped from one world where white people own black people in a rigid caste
system, forbidding them to learn to read or write, depriving them of family
relationships and where they are bought and sold as livestock and into another
where black people are their own people, with their own culture, with its own
community and social structure, they are property owners and possess a wisdom
of which she had heretofore lived entirely ignorant.
Truly, Emma faces an overwhelming realization that her life
was never what she thought it to be; nothing she believed in or accepted is
rooted in truth. Truly, a precipice that
few ever face in their lifetime and yet here is this young woman, virtually
alone with her discovery. Faced with her
realization and as she begins to work through her conflicting emotions the
reader is able to watch as Emma becomes a woman. Her life now set against the captivating
majesty of Africa Emma never falters from her dedication to work as a
missionary. Indeed, the novel very
convincingly portrays the struggle and hardship of that calling.
As a student of African History I was anxious for Orr to
address how the move to West Africa had affected Emma’s ideas of
slavery, it is after all an institution she grew up surrounded by and accepted
without question. When Orr does address these issues she does so in a way that I found not only original but profoundly thought
provoking for the reader. Emma comes to realize that slavery dehumanizes not only the slave, but the slave
trader, and the slave owner, including herself and all her family, because it
is not and can never be a benevolent institution, nor is it in keeping with the teachings of the Bible.
A Different Sun is a masterfully written novel that manages
to deal with the atrociousness that was the West African slave trade thorough
the eyes of a compassionate young woman who has slowly discovered, not only the
truth, but of her part in it. In truth,
Orr takes a political complex subject and makes it human and approachable and
in so doing it looses its taboo. It is
through Emma’s looking back and looking into the future that Orr is able to compare
and contrast the two worlds of the slave south and West Africa. In this examination Orr so skillfully leads
her reader through a discovery of life’s intimacies and losses, wonderful
moments of a character’s personal insight and the appreciation of the majestic natural
beauty of Africa, a land that God created.
I hope her beautiful narrative of this wonderfully diverse continent
will inspire those that have the pleasure of reading her novel.
When I was reading A Different Sun I was struck by how masterfully and skillfully Orr had presented the struggles of a fictional character against a larger historical backdrop. I have to admit I nearly fell out of my chair when I finally discovered
that these characters actually existed. Lurana
Davis Bowen (Emma), was indeed the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, who
married Thomas Jefferson Bowe (Henry) and travelled as missionaries West Africa
in the mid nineteenth-century. Indeed,
they were the first Southern Baptist missionaries in Africa. Orr relied heavily on Lurana’s journal for
her narrative, but the novel’s wonderfully descriptive and transporting
description of Africa is due to Elaine Orr’s own upbringing in Nigeria.
To Purchase A Different
Sun
About the Author
Elaine Neil Orr is a trans-Atlantic writer of fiction,
memoir, and poetry. Themes of home,
country, and spiritual longing run through her writing. A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, her
newest book (Berkley/Penguin, 2013), has been called by Lee Smith “as lyrical
and passionate a novel as has ever been written. [It] shines in the mind like a rare
gem.” Philip Deaver describes it as“[a]
beautiful novel, exquisitely written, perfectly complex, true to the past,
relevant today, unforgettable.”
Her memoir, Gods of Noonday (Virginia, 2003), was a Top-20
Book Sense selection and a nominee for the Old North State Award as well as a
SIBA Book Award. She is associate editor
of a collection of essays on international childhoods, Writing Out of Limbo,
and the author of two scholarly books.
Orr has published extensively in literary magazines
including The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, and Image Journal. Her short stories and short memoirs have won
several Pushcart Prize nominations and competition prizes. She has been awarded grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts.
She was born in Nigeria to medical missionary parents and
spent her growing-up years in the savannahs and rain forests of that
country. Her family remained in Nigeria
during its civil war. Orr left West
Africa at age sixteen and attended college in Kentucky. She studied creative writing and literature
at the University of Louisville before taking her Ph.D. in Literature and
Theology at Emory University. She is an
award-winning Professor of English at North Carolina State University and
serves on the faculty of the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding
University. She reads and lectures
widely at universities and conferences from Atlanta to Austin to San Francisco
to Vancouver to New York to Washington D.C., and in Nigeria.
Orr lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband,
Anderson Orr.
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