She Would Be King has been described as a “magical realist” take on Liberia’s history, by everyone from the New York Times to her own publishers, placing Moore’s book in the same tradition as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nights at the Circus and Midnight’s Children. “So when I realised I wanted to be an artist, and began to write, Liberia was one of the first places I went to.” “Not learning about Liberia in my Texan public schools was a form of erasure that deserved to be rectified,” she says.
But outside her own household, she barely heard anyone speak of her home country. Growing up with her father’s stories of the “profound experiment” of Liberia, Moore knew she wanted to unpack it through literature. At five, she found herself living in her mother’s Upper Manhattan dorm before the family eventually settled in Texas, where she spent her formative years. “We left Monrovia and hid in a village for six months before my mother was able to send someone to get us across the border,” Moore says. Moore was living with her father and sisters at the time, while her mother, a Fulbright scholar, was studying abroad at Columbia University. The seven-year conflict would kill 250,000 people and displace around half of the country’s 2.1 million population. “Representation is important.”Īs Africa’s first independent republic, Liberia began as a settlement of the American Colonisation Society, which believed freed African American slaves would fare better there.īorn in Monrovia in 1985, Moore was four years old when the first Liberian civil war broke out. “It was in reading that I was able to make sense of my new country,” Moore says of her early days in the US. And somehow she also found time to write a novel: She Would Be King, a fantastical retelling of Liberia’s founding. She started One Moore Book, a non-profit publisher of children’s books for underrepresented communities, after seeing first-hand how children engaged better with characters that look like them. The Liberian-American author and social entrepreneur opened her own bookshop, One Moore Bookstore, Liberia’s first dedicated to reading for pleasure.
Wayétu Moore, however, believes differently. Had there never been any art, he claimed, “the history of man would be materially unchanged”. W H Auden once said it was a “fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen”.
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