Over the course of four books – culminating in her stunning new novel, Dancing Woman (Blair Publishing) – Elaine Neil Orr links the American South to West Africa with her lyrical and transporting prose. Raised in Nigeria by Baptist medical missionaries, Elaine spent her college years in the U.S., receiving her Ph.D. from Emory University, becoming Professor of English at North Carolina State University and teaching at Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. After writing two scholarly books, she started her creative oeuvre with a memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life. The novels that followed, A Different Sun and Swimming Between Worlds, and now Dancing Woman, have shown the experiences of complex Americans shuttling between the U.S. South and Nigeria, each on their own pilgrimage of place – and self. In Dancing, the tentative heroine, Isabel Hammond, a Virginian in her 20s, finds herself thrillingly displaced when her husband accepts a position in northern Nigeria with an aid organization. An aspiring painter who “longed … for a greater expression of her inner world,” and to become “a true artist,” Isabel encounters culture shock, sexual passion, and political upheaval. The dancing woman, a statue she discovers buried in her backyard, becomes far more than artifact as Isabel grows, by the hardest experiences, from an innocent abroad to a character with a deeper understanding of herself and the world.

+

Roy Hoffman: Why Africa? You’ve lived back in the U.S. for most of your adult life, have long made your home in Raleigh, N.C., and started out with a personal voyage of discovery in your early memoir, subtitled, A White Girl’s African Life. When did you know you would pour heart and soul into exploring the theme of ex-pats in Africa, rooting characters from the American South into Nigeria and Yoruba land, and taking us, as readers, on our own voyages of discovery? And why 1963, the setting for “Dancing Woman”?

Elaine Neil Orr: Of course, I’m not writing about “Africa” just as you aren’t writing about North America. I write specifically about Nigeria, and until Dancing Woman, I wrote about Southern Nigeria, and not just Southern Nigeria, but southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba land, as you say, where I was born and grew up. Nigeria is an enormous country with over three hundred languages. Writing about a small segment of it is like writing about the state of California. Writing about the entire country would be like covering the entire East Coast of the U.S. to the Mississippi River. I’m writing about particular cultures within Nigeria. What excites me about Dancing Woman is that it places a white Protestant American woman in a Muslim dominated territory, and here she must stretch herself mightily in order to navigate her days. She needs to learn Hausa to communicate and make herself respectable to her neighbors who don’t think she’s special just because she’s white and an American. In fact, they are skeptical of her.

But to answer your question: when did I know that the link between the American South and Nigeria would be my focus? I didn’t. The stories just kept coming to me. Perhaps the question is: why does any writer go back to the same territory? Faulkner is always in his fictitious Yoknapatawpa county (actually his own Lafayette County), and Lee Smith sets so much of her fiction in her home territory of West Virginia, and Henry James is always placing his Americans abroad as he was an American abroad.

I think we are always writing scrambled autobiography. We can, perhaps, create the most vivid worlds by drawing on the impressions of our youth. In addition, we’re obsessed with a sub-set of questions or dilemmas. Freud was obsessed with Oedipus and worked out his most famous theory based on the relationship between fathers and sons. Faulkner was obsessed with the post-Civil War South and race relations. I’m obsessed with the consciousness of people who are global nomads, whose interior life is shaped by coming of age in the context of at least two vastly different countries. That inner split fascinates me. It complicates every other matter of life: falling in love; creating a family; choosing a profession; making art; choosing a faith.

I do plan to set my next novel in western Massachusetts and the Sauratown Mountains of North Carolina. There will still be two worlds and two cultures. But I can’t say more than that right now.

RH: Isabel, the young Hollins grad, is an involving and intriguing character, her interiority vivid through the novel’s close third person point of view. At age 21, when she marries Nick, you write “she had escaped from every ordinary thing that might have held her down to arrive at this exotic, fire-lit place of dreams.” What was the inspiration for Isabel? Why did you choose a protagonist, little-formed in the world at the outset, to drive this narrative of strong drama and profound questions?

ENO: I suppose 21 is young, though in the early 1960s, a woman of 21 was likely finishing college and getting married if she wasn’t already. Isabel has experienced some significant challenges and profound disappointments. Her father is an Italian immigrant; she lives in a working-class neighborhood of Richmond; she feels an outsider when she goes to school with girls whose families are wealthier. She develops a profound relationship with a Cuban exile who tutors her in watercolor, but then at Hollins she is subject to debasing criticism by a male art critic. She is old for her age. At the same time, I’ll grant that she has little experience for taking on northern Nigeria. But this would be true if she were forty. I wanted her to have her life before her, to face all of the huge questions that come to us in our twenties, or to many of us, perhaps especially women: will I marry? Will I have children? If so, what else will I be able to do? Can I follow my destiny? What if it conflicts with my other commitments? How do I express my passions? What if I fail? Ultimately, what is my responsibility to myself?

I see Dancing Woman as a response to Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, in which she casts two women as central characters: one a mother, one a painter. She, Woolf, seems to say that a woman cannot be both, as she was not, though her sister, Vivian, was. I wanted to see what would happen if I created a woman who is mother and artist. And I have felt, too, in the span of writing this novel, that young American women may be losing rights and privileges won by the feminist movement that gave women of my generation so much more freedom to follow our dreams, the loss of the right to control one’s own reproductive life, for example. Dancing Woman is a feminist novel written in full awareness of where we are in terms of women’s rights in 2025.

RH: Although the Yoruba musician, Bobby Tunde, appears only a few times in the novel, his presence is propulsive to the narrative, his impact on Isabel huge. His musical show, near the opening of Dancing Woman, is highly sensory – and spectacular. What was the inspiration for Tunde, and how did you go about creating him? Your backgrounds are markedly different – nation, race, gender – and you’re not a professional musician. Can the imagination take us, as writers, anywhere we wish to go? What’s your strategy for crossing the gulf of differences to create figures as dynamic as Tunde who are also so different?

ENO: There is a greater gulf of difference between me and Bob Dylan than between me and Bobby Tunde. I guess that might be heard as scandalous. I grew up hearing highlife coming out of every radio station in the marketplaces of the towns where I grew up. I listened to the Beatles too. But highlife, the kind of music Bobby plays, was ubiquitous. I fell asleep at night to the sound of drums coming through my windows. The drums went on all day long in the town of Ogbomoso, where I was born. Tunde’s clothing and fashion sense are seared into my eyes, much more so than American men’s fashions.

I don’t try to give Tunde’s point of view. That would be going too far.

Recently I was rereading Henry James’s pivotal essay, “The Art of Fiction,” where he talks about being “a writer on whom nothing is lost.” I first read that essay in graduate school at the University of Louisville. It had a profound impact on me way before I knew I would be a novelist. I’m going to quote him at length:

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man [sic] of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. (34-35)

You might be surprised that I am employing James with his emphasis on a “man of genius,” but he goes on to write about a woman of genius:

The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair . . . to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. . . . I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the Fresh Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door, where, in the household of a Pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her direct personal impression, and she turned out her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism, she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. (35)

James goes on to talk about the capacity to guess the unseen from the seen. But his key concept is that if we cultivate a sensitivity on which nothing is lost—and this goes back to my point about our youth, when we are most impressionable; if in that time we were paying attention—then we are endowed with a capacity to create life that is very different from our own. This may not be a popular opinion at present. But I think we must try to create lives different from our own. And we will be judged on how well or not we have succeeded. You succeeded brilliantly in your last novel, The Promise of the Pelican, when you cast your plot to include a young Honduran undocumented immigrant accused of murder who is defended by a Jewish American attorney. I’m glad you took the risk.

RH: Dancing Woman is a perfect title for a novel about an African statue of a dancing woman, found by a character who is herself, emotionally, spiritually, a dancing woman. I’ve asked about the origin of two characters – and now, the third. The statue itself, or should I say, herself, as the figure comes a central player in the narrative, too. What’s her origin in your imagination?

ENO: The sculpture is a Nok, a grouping of ancient sculptures discovered in northern Nigeria near the city of Kaduna where I set the novel. I saw one in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh about twenty years, and through some mysterious process I cannot trace, it inserted itself into this novel very early. These sculptures are coil built terra cotta, about two feet tall. I knew the curator who had procured the sculpture I saw in my local museum, though she had moved on to the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. She told me the story of how she got it and why it had fascinated her. I meant to use the one I had seen, a sculpture of a man in a thinker’s pose, his large eyes his most prominent feature. The sculpture was the germ for my novel. I knew my character, Isabel, would encounter a Nok and that this sculpture would lead to her awakening. But then as I wrote, it became clear to me that the sculpture had to be a female form. Fortunately, there are female Noks, though they appear less frequently, and there aren’t dancing Noks that I know of. I made that up.

The Nok is an “objective correlative,” to borrow a T.S. Eliot phrase. The sensory experience of the object evokes emotion both for the character and the reader. There are other objective correlatives in the novel, such as the many birds Isabel encounters, but the primary one is the dancing woman, who, as you observe, is both representative of Isabel’s own core being and of all that she admires in the world and believes to be sacred. This includes her own art. Rather than a book of scripture, Isabel has the Nok, which she “reads” or tries to interpret throughout the novel.

RH: The great North Carolina novelist Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and “The Trackers,” praises your novel in this way: “A profound exploration of the transformational power of art.” In your mind, what is that “transformational power” in Dancing Woman?

ENO: The transformational power is the practice. I spend a lot of time in the novel describing Isabel painting. I don’t just have her dab a bit of blue and pink here and there and call it a sky. I go to rather great lengths to describe her approach, the sort of brush she uses, the exact names of the colors she selects and blends, the strokes, each area of the cotton rag. While I had studied watercolor in college, I had to ask an artist friend to help me with the terminology because I wanted it to be exact. Practice is what makes art. It took me ten years to write my first novel. Not inspiration, not genius, but practice. The reason this practice is transformational is because it’s a form of prayer. In concentrating on our craft or our art, we commune with the deepest in us and the deepest in the universe, the creative spirit that hovers all about us and inflames our souls. Selling a book is a great victory. Publishing a book is a great joy. Sharing it is enormously rewarding. But none of that is transformational. The work is everything.

RH: At the conclusion of the novel, in 1966, three years after its opening, Isabel is capable of “holding her own wondrous life in her hands.” What takeaway do you want the reader to have after spending this amazing time with Isabel and others? A message? A revelation? A sensation? A recognition of their own?

ENO: Well, that’s a hard question to answer. I hope each reader will take away what she or he or they need or desire. Perhaps the primary thing I wish to convey is that art is not indulgence. It is bread and water. It is human instinct to create and make beauty. Having the circumstances to create art ought to be a human right. Because it is essential to the soul.

+++

Elaine Neil Orr (https://www.elaineneilorr.com/) is the author of five books, including the novels A Different Sun and Swimming Between Worlds. She was born and grew up in Nigeria, the daughter of missionary parents, and most of her writing is grounded in both the American South and the Nigerian South. She is a professor of literature at N.C. State University and serves on the faculty of the Brief-Residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. She lives in Raleigh.

+

Roy Hoffman, novelist and journalist, is the author of six books: the novels, The Promise of the Pelican, Come Landfall, Chicken Dreaming Corn, and Almost Family, and the nonfiction Alabama Afternoons and Back Home. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall St. Journal. He lives in Fairhope, AL, and is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. On the web: www.royhoffmanwriter.com