Word: stewart
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...able to find herself in American literature. Her ten years of writing have soothed the frustration and resulted in a work that is tightly bound to her own life experience in what Ladd describes as a "geo-biographical" novel that tells the story of a fictional black woman, Sarah Stewart...
...Stewart, much like Ladd, was born and raised in a traditional middle class, African-American family in Washington D.C. The reader first meets Stewart in the spring of 1963 as the enviable picture of success. She is a 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard and is married to her handsome highschool sweetheart, Lincoln, a graduate student at MIT consumed by the civil rights movement. Friends and family members look at the couple with pride and exclaim, "You two look just like magazine models", but looks prove to be worth nothing...
...marriage predictably dissolves within the first twenty pages and Stewart quickly packs off to Senegal compelled by her lifetime obsession that she has always been "meant to exist elsewhere". Her excuse for the trip is dissertation research which requires her to interview and study with a Senegalese poet and activist, Ibrahim Mangane. Mangane, however, is not a purely educational pursuit, but rather an obsession and the embodiment of everything that Stewart wants. Happily married but infamous for his numerous affairs with young women, he is everything but the traditional young, stable and picture perfect...
...novel spans a time frame of thirty years and watches Stewart grow through a variety of stages. She leaves her husband, promising career, parents and America the moment Mangane asks her to return. She is then consumed with Mangane, his work, his life and Senegalese politics. Throughout this time Stewart stuggles to find her niche and her happiness, always inspired by the adaptation of the 121st psalm: "I will cast mine eyes upon the ocean from whence cometh my help. May he cometh from Senegal, which is heaven and earth...
...Still, Stewart is not a completely satisfying charcter. Ladd doesn't give enough insight or background for the reader to become familiar with her. The character is presented from a sterile distance, so that the reader has a vague idea of her, but little understanding. One of the most traumatic scenes, the moment that Stewart miscarries, is ended simply with the phrase "I had lost a part of myself". While this may be true, the reader needs more. What part of herself, and how did that feel? The reader is left to fill in the blanks...