This Novel About a Missing Musician Moves Like a Storm

THEY DREAM IN GOLD, by Mai Sennaar

Before I’d read a word of Mai Sennaar’s extraordinary debut novel, “They Dream in Gold,” I was struck by her opening author’s note. In it, Sennaar describes a real-life dust storm in the Sahara whose effects were felt as far as Britain. For the author, the storm illustrated “the reality that our world is but one place.” She wishes, she says, for her writing to be like the storm: something that speaks to “our shared experience in an organic, tangible way.” Indeed, these principles whirl through Sennaar’s book, which is a powerful and poignant exploration of the African diaspora and global Black identity.

The novel opens in Switzerland in 1969. A young, pregnant Black American woman named Bonnie anxiously awaits the return of her Swiss-Senegalese lover, Mansour, a musician who has gone missing while on tour with his band in Spain. After months of standing by for his homecoming, Bonnie, with determination and grit, sets out to determine if a recently discovered corpse is his.

From there, the novel threads through time and space, unfurling the story of Bonnie’s search while also probing the past to unpack the histories of people involved in Bonnie and Mansour’s lives. We rove through the decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, and we journey through Senegal, Paris, New York and Brazil, meeting along the way vivid secondary characters like Mansour’s aunt Sokhna, who sneaked onto a jet and flew it when she was 13 years old, and Bonnie’s grandmother Sylvia, who helped her civil rights lawyer father represent the widows of those lynched in Alabama.

In “They Dream in Gold,” Sennaar weaves a large quilt of culture and identity, delving into the American dream as a part of the complexity of the global immigrant experience. As a child in Senegal, Mansour begged on the streets, but even then his voice “always yields the best tips, the most rice, the most sugar.” When he later moved to New York to develop his career as a musician, he discovered that the gift of his voice didn’t translate to the ability to communicate. He didn’t “have the language to respond,” Mansour notes during a tense band rehearsal, “probably wouldn’t even if he did know what to say. His quest to understand Black Americans is ongoing.” Bonnie also finds it “hard to process an identity that seemed to have no gatekeepers — its roots breeding, building, breaking under everything America was.”