Reading that will take you far away from your self-quarantine:

In Pursuit of Disobedient Women:  a memoir of love, rebellion and family, far away, Dionne Searcey

In Pursuit of Disobedient Women:  a memoir of love, rebellion and family, far away, Dionne Searcey

The author, a financial writer for The New York Times, and her husband, an executive at a conservation nonprofit, live in Brooklyn with their three small children as the book opens.  The dual career couple is struggling with managing jobs, long commutes, business trips that take one or the other away for a week at a time, and raising three little kids with all of the school and sports commitments that come with upper middle-class life.  Drained after a particularly long trip on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, her husband suggests they move to the suburbs; Searcey, somewhat horrified about the idea, counters with another proposal:  take a foreign correspondent job and relocate to another country.  In 2015, she accepts the West Africa job and they all move to Dakur, Senegal.  

The memoir covers the next three years as life in Africa poses its own challenges.  Resources aren’t as plentiful.  The cultures are decidedly patriarchal.  Government and police corruption are the norm.  They all get worms.  Although Todd, her husband, has agreed to do the lion’s share of parenting so that Dionne can travel, he is not accepted by the stay-at-home moms in the ex-pat community and he is often frustrated with trying to do his job remotely.  She is often gone for weeks at a time, in pursuit of stories that take her to rural, hard -to-reach areas.  Transportation snafus abound and officials often make her wait hours and even days for interviews.  

Although Searcey’s beat covers 14 different countries, mostly she shares her travels to and around Nigeria. While she would like to provide a balance of stories, not always focusing on the stereotypical perspectives of African countries (e.g. war, poverty, famine, corruption), she finds herself repeatedly drawn to stories about women who have been first victims and later heroes.  Her efforts to follow up on the women kidnapped by the Boko Haram as schoolgirls and later released into the custody of the Nigerian government lead to interesting conversations with other women who have also escaped the terrorists.  She speaks with a number of women who, when captured and told they would “marry” (Searcey’s quotation marks) Boko Haram fighters, refuse and then are turned into suicide bombers against their will.  There are a number of harrowing stories about girls wandering down roads in search of people, usually soldiers, who will unhook the bombs so that neither they nor others are killed.  

Increasingly, Todd becomes professionally frustrated.  At one point, several years in, he is offered a dream job in Britain which he ends up turning down because Dionne persuades him that she is not yet finished in Africa.  After more than 3 years in Senegal, Dionne is offered the Paris bureau job, “the greatest job at the paper,” but knows immediately that her husband will never agree as his bosses have been clamoring for him to return to New York.  He tells her, “I thought moving abroad would be wonderful, and in many ways, it has been.  I know my kids so much better than I did before.  And I know myself better too.  I really want to stay at my job.  I want to move back to New York. . .And, you know, the last couple years has been about you” (278).  Dionne reasons that this is only fair.  As indicated on the back flap, the family is back in Brooklyn now.  

Searcey ends her story by expressing that in her work in Africa she had found “a set of truly incredible women everywhere I went . . .and I came to respect the differences in how other women make their way through a dramatically unrecognizable set of circumstances – and the similarities that I found we all shared as wives, workers or mothers, regardless of privilege or poverty, wealth or wartime.  Except the women I had met navigated their worlds with superhero-like aplomb” (279-280).