A BookSense pick and SEBA Book Award Finalist,
Creative Nonfiction, 2004

View Elaine's selection as Image "Artist of the Month," July 2008 and read about her new projects

See Elaine's appearance on February 11, 2006
at Ten Thousand Villages in Raleigh, NC

"Nigeria is the place of my hidden self that is truer than my public self. It is the country of my heart. But having left Yoruba land long ago, I have become broken. So it is not by chance that I read a book in which I learn about Itefa, a Yoruba ritual of rebirth . . . As with all Yoruba rituals, this one is a journey, a journey back in order to go forward."

Born into a white family of medical missionaries living in Nigeria in 1954 but hailing from the American South, Elaine Neil Orr was given two African names.  The hospital staff dubbed the child: Bamidele and Funmilayo. "Bamidele" meant to her mother "born away from home," but there were other meanings that, in time, the blond gangly girl would learn: "come home with me" or "follow me home" — spoken with arms outstretched, beckoning. "Funmilayo" translates simply: "she brings joy."

While the U.S. was entering the Civil Rights Movement, Nigeria was in the midst of a national clamor for independence from Great Britain. Nigerian history and details of Yoruba culture Elaine Orr didn’t need to study, since she lived them as a girl.

But when she became herself a young wife and mother with a forward-moving career, she faced diabetes and later kidney failure. As she started her dialysis and patient wait for transplants, she began to live a Yoruba concept held deep in her bones: to journey forward you must journey back.

She realized that only through recovering the homeland she left in her teens, could she find the strength to survive.

Purchase Gods of Noonday (available in hardcover or paperback) through your local independent bookseller.  Also available through amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million and the University of Virginia Press.

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Last Updated:  07/10/08