The Tale of a Title

Titles, to me, are magical, mystical creatures. Every literary project I've ventured upon has presented its title long before I begin to write.

To Dine with the Blameless Ethiopians snuck up on me as I was riding a train across the Namibian desert, hundreds of miles away from Ethiopia. The only Ethiopian I knew was the same age that I was--seventeen years old. She could hardly be blamed for anything, so there was no need to associate her with blamelessness. And I would not term our manner of eating from the food stalls along the side of the road, as proper dining.

And then I remembered a conversation I had with my father the year before. After receiving my admission to college, he told me I could defer college for a year to travel and serve as a youth volunteer anywhere in the world. Just name the place. I told him I wanted to go to France. He made a hard sell for Africa. I shared my cultural inhibitions with living in on a continent that I, as an African-American teen, preferred to distance myself from. And he shared with me a line from Homer's Iliad, where the ancient scribe described the Ethiopians in glowing terms. Homer spoke of them as beautiful and blameless and told tales of dining with them.

It was the impetus for my travels to southern Africa a year later, and served as the foundation for my ruminations on race, class, and identity. The title presented itself long before I knew I had a book to write. And so has been my process.

I have had similar apparitions with my unpublished novels. The one that has been with me the longest, through so many years of revisions that it no longer bears any resemblance to its original form, is The Train of the Decidedly Deceased. I now hardly remember much about the premise of the train, except that it served an obscure graveyard where militants were buried in unmarked graves. The story centered around the life of the boy who manned the graveyard since its inception as a graveyard for the pets of village children. It evolves into a graveyard for humans when an agnostic passes away, and neither the Muslim nor the Christian graveyards permit him to be buried on their property.

Needless to say, the novel of the graveyard met its own grave fate. But somewhere in the midst of exhaustive revisions, I realized that a sub plot so minor it barely covered a page was the real crux of the story--the story of the graveyard keeper's parents. His mother was from a village along the east coast of Africa, and his father was a Middle Eastern ship ledger. That they came to know one another at all, was on account of a most unusual promissory note between two business men who, in lieu of currency, promised the hands of their unborn offspring.

As the latest revision unfolds, a new title has presented itself--The Promissory Note--which I now trail behind like a hunter trying to keep up with her blood hound on some trail I can hardly imagine.