Unknown men suddenly appear and snatch Souria from her family and her girlhood. She will never know if her father sold her because he had too many children who lived and now must eat. Or if raiders randomly identified her as vulnerable and profitable prey, a pretty 14-year-old woman-child who could be a servant for life and a vagina to plunder.

Souria hails from Mauritania, where the Sahara meets West Africa. It was, in 1981, the last country in the world to formally abolish slavery, a full 116 years after the practice was abolished in the United States and 93 years after Brazil did the same. But no matter when slavery was abolished, it still persists in Mauritania despite international condemnation.

In Louisville, Kentucky, Shannon lives in not-so-quiet despair. Like all of us, she is a bundle of multiple identities, and hers blend simultaneous privilege and disadvantage: from a “good” family, obsessively self-aware, Black in a region of hegemonic whiteness, dealing with infertility. Her other malaise is a thoroughly modern condition: educated yet not qualified for much. Her mystery is not who kidnapped her, but who deserted her along the way — parents who are technically “providers” but emotionally absent — and the origins of the scar on her face, a feature barely mentioned in the opening pages of Mother Country (Graywolf Press), the novel by Jacinda Townsend.

Souria and Shannon live in different worlds, but diasporas are notorious chameleons. And they aren’t just groups of scattered populations, but tangled relationships forged by heritage, imagined connections, pain and pleasure. People may live oceans apart, divided by borders, language and history. But in a moment, human desire can shrink those distances to a nanometer.

Souria and Shannon’s paths cross in the coastal Moroccan town of Essaouira, known for breezes that delight surfers and the blue-blue merging of Atlantic Ocean and sky. Souria has settled there after a noxious fog of biblical proportions kills the villagers from a different ethnic group who held her captive. She riffles through the pockets of corpses and sets out on a series of hejira. Her goal: to find her family or at least a safer place. A kind trucker gives her a lift; she gifts him her body. An older woman recognizes Souria’s aloneness and takes her home to Morocco — another seemingly kind act. Souria is determined to make it work (for survival is work), though the woman steals brazenly from her and her son’s desire for Souria is clear. By this time, Souria knows she’s pregnant, without citizenship papers or protection. She hopes that the son will believe that the trickle of his sperm across her belly planted a seed — and security — there.

All travel is not leisure. A girl coerced into early womanhood, Souria is a forced migrant: kidnapped, held in bondage, released by inexplicable disaster, and, later, earning her daily bread through sex work. Mother Country dwells in the land between “choice” and “no choice.” And this is a particular woman’s land, where the body is currency and all choices are not created equal. How can you exercise autonomy without citizenship, family and the means to survive?

Souria has few good options, and as Townsend deftly builds the novel’s worlds, Souria deploys the pragmatism of the poor and displaced. Townsend excels in difficult-to-read passages that distill her characters’ torment in spare, beautiful yet brutal description. In one example, Souria sizes up the men who pay her for sex with a horrible clarity that’s her best self-defense: “She had to learn how to laugh wryly, for benefit of the French. How to laugh for old Moroccan grandfathers with their full bellies and moist eyes and memories of [actress] Eliane d’Almeida. … How to laugh when she wasn’t quite sure what had been said. How to laugh when she wished her daughter could also have couscous and freshly butchered lamb for dinner. How to laugh while calculating what sort of bodily pain her client might inflict by gauging the hostility with which he held his fork against his knife while cutting meat.”

She sells herself to a succession of tourists. But in moments of heaving sexual transactions she doesn’t want but can’t afford to spurn, she imagines olive groves and her homeland’s welcoming hot sands. She keeps a bit of herself, and in critical moments, she grabs at the chance to free herself.

Like Souria’s clients, Shannon has come to Morocco as a tourist. But she’s with her husband, Vlad, an engineer working on a wind power project. Shannon has married him because he seems stable and willing to ignore how she pillages his bank account for her prodigious weed habit. Shannon is willing to ignore Vlad’s fondness with Eastern European women because student and medical debt threaten to swallow her whole. After all, Vlad is better than the father who had a knack for ignoring her when she was in the same room. Or the mother who reminded Shannon, while she’s unable to speak after an accident, how she’d be such a ghastly mother that infertility is a perverse blessing.

While Vlad is out doing surveys, Shannon soaks in the cacophony of the souk, noticing a tiny girl wearing a soiled pink jacket and wandering the market unencumbered by an adult. In another of the novel’s many moments of women wildly seizing opportunity amid violent constraint, Shannon takes the toddler for ice cream. Such an innocent gesture.

Shannon knows this child may be no “orphan,” as commonly defined, just as many African children who wind up in Western homes are not truly parentless (see: Madonna’s Malawian adoption in the early 2000s). The girl “seemed to belong to no one.” “Seemed” is a one-word danger zone, where Shannon begins to justify the kidnapping to come. But she is all id, set aflame by this unaccompanied minor and the possibility of parenthood presenting itself to her: “ … she recognized the feeling: a cat, stalking birds. She didn’t want to feel this bald, this rapacious, but the desire she bore was beyond her strength, as thought her resistance had been drowned in all the Comid and progesterone she’d injected into her veins.” Being away from home as an unknown traveler and being on a tenuous maternity journey “loosed” Shannon.

She’s an unwitting part of the global cult of maternity, a toxic norm that elevates motherhood at all costs. “Have a baby, young woman!” Townsend writes, in the commanding, first-person voice of maternal pressure. “But ignore the sharpening fact that you will never really have one, how there was only a 34 percent chance with an IVF in the first place, how it was even less in your case, because of your freaky, Morticia Addams uterus. … Ignore the hormone-laced tears that mingle with your sweat and run down your face when you watch commercials for diapers and children’s toys.”

After repeated fertility treatments Shannon knew would fail, she takes the child baldly and rapaciously. She conveniently dismissed the possibility that Souria’s daughter, Yu, had been occupying herself in the street but also under the careful gaze of adults lingering just offstage. In one of many split-second decisions that determine the course of these women’s lives, a Moroccan baby-minder who watched Yu from nearby thinks of Souria’s burdens and the prospect of that elusive better life for both young mother and child. She says nothing.

Stealing Souria’s child is relatively uncomplicated, when the right people are bribed and bullied to guarantee their complicity. Yu looks enough like Shannon that the lie is credible. But the Moroccan hotel and embassy workers know the truth when they see Shannon with the girl or hear the child’s wails in a local language. They too mute themselves, for they know the ire of an angry, unsatisfied Western tourist.

And it’s easy for them to overlook the stealing of a Black child of a young trafficked mother who works the hotels, or to hope that this family separation is ultimately a kindness for child and parent alike. Black life and motherhood are cheap everywhere, it seems. Souria’s Blackness is an invitation to abuse in a corner of Africa that has tired of sub-Saharan migrants and often looked Middle East-ward for its identity. This is one of the complications of diaspora, the place where it zooms out again, and the miles stretch between people. It may seem an irony that, in North Africa (for Morocco is in Africa; it never hurts to reaffirm this), Blackness can be a badge of shame and subhuman status, and that anti-Blackness enables a contemporary trade in people. Souria knows enough to conceal her origins and her undocumented status, but throughout Mother Country, Townsend makes clear the limits of diaspora and continental camaraderie. West Africans try to sell her fake goods, a Moroccan woman who chases her out screaming about the Black dog who impregnated her and a shopkeeper won’t give her temporary shelter from the rain, assuming she’s a beggar and a foreigner. Souria “had not known to expect this in this new, kinder country, that people would look at the shade of her skin and guess what kind of dog beating to give her.” It’s a sobering reminder of Africa’s diversity, the legacy of colonialism and today’s rabid anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the eyes of authorities, Souria and Shannon are both disreputable women, criminals even, deceitful at minimum. But before they became calculating survivors, they were victims. Each woman searches for a family and agency denied her by circumstance and gender violence. But no similarity or superficial notion of shared African origins stops Shannon from purloining Souria’s child. Becoming The Ugly American is also all-too easy. Despite racism at home, Shannon still an American. And U.S. nationality is social and economic capital. While street vendors adjust their sales pitches to the motherland yearnings of Black Americans, Shannon harnesses the power of her U.S. passport and dollar. She shoulders her way into the American embassy, blackmails an employee into falsifying documents and seals the deal with a nice cash bonus. For $5,000 — a fraction of average adoption costs within the United States — she now has a daughter. Her own tiny American girl is African-American in the most literal sense. But Yu knows that her new parent is not her mother, and in passages that give dubious cognition to a toddler, Townsend narrates the child’s mental resistance to that new, ostensible better life with parents who, as it turns out, are bound by child theft but not by much else.

This story was created by Detour, a journalism brand focused on the best stories in Black travel, in partnership with McClatchy’s The Charlotte Observer and Miami Herald. Detour’s approach to travel and storytelling seeks to tell previously under-reported or ignored narratives by shifting away from the customary routes framed in Eurocentrism. The detour team is made up of an A-list of award-winning journalists, writers, historians, photographers, illustrators and filmmakers.

This story was originally published July 29, 2022 9:00 AM.