> 📗 The following story stands alone and can be read without any knowledge of my prior works, but does involve story elements that appeared previously in [Breakdown](https://eleanorkonik.com/breakdown/) %% ( [[2022-06-08 Breakdown]] ) %%, which is about the chemistry of avoiding emotions & the spread of euphoric gums.  ``` Suppose you've found yourself Under the protection of a conqueror, foreign-born Right at a time when you most desire freedom for the women of the world — I must warn: Vanity aside, the irony will burn Into the dawn of heathen days and past the Veil of death, yet A widow as cursed as I for living still surely knows Lingering past the death of love is sacrifice as surely as embracing the wind's flame breath ``` ## Afterword This poetry series is a weird little collection about a woman who defied her culture's customs and chose exile over joining her husband in death. Exile is kind of a funny thing, though. Usually it's a punishment — sometimes for committing a crime, sometimes because the winds of politics have turned against you. Sometimes a person in exile doesn't travel very far from home at all — an Athenian moving to Sparta, for example. But sometimes, people wind up very far from home indeed... and in need of a patron. Patronage comes in a variety of flavors (y'all are my patrons and I'm very grateful for your support!) but at a certain time in history, many powerful folks, royal or otherwise, collected artists and exotic foreigners. Avyaan is, in her own way, both, although inspired more by the immigrant habit of opening restaurants in America than by Renaissance painters. [Europeans arriving to the Americas in the sixteenth century](https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/guide/encameri.html) were intrigued by (and honestly pretty critical of) everything they saw. The natives felt pretty similarly; Chinese traders arriving in East Africa in the fifteenth century weren't terribly different. I've been reading about the age of galleons and galleys, and in a lot of ways, although cultural diffusion and trade were common throughout history, these long distance cultural exchanges — fueled by long-range ships — were something fairly new. So starting around the 16th century, when natives of one continent showed up at the court of some monarch or ruler in another, typically European court, it was often a pretty big deal. One such "exotic foreigner" was [Manteo](https://www.native-americans.org/manteo/), a member of a tribe of the [Croatan Indians](https://www.ncpedia.org/croatoan-indians) who lived in what is now the coastal region of North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. He was there amongst his people when the English courtier and explorer, [Sir Walter Raleigh](https://www.worldhistory.org/Walter_Raleigh/), began launching expeditions to the region in the 1580s. Raleigh’s goal was to establish England’s first permanent colony in North America. I first learned about him during a vacation to the Outer Banks, when I visited Roanoke Island and attended a really need play put on by the local Historical Association. For now, the relevant bit is that some Englishmen made contact with the natives upon arrival. Two of the local Croatans, Wanchese and Manteo, were particularly adept at communicating, although this is speaking comparatively; communication was pretty basic. Incidentally, Manteo has often been depicted as having been a chief of the local Croatans, but from what I can tell it's possible it was more like his mother one of the local rulers. Anyway, several weeks later, they decided that Wanchese and Manteo would return with the ships to England, leaving a small colony of English settlers on Roanoke. When Wanchese and Manteo arrived to the court of Elizabeth I in England later in 1584 they were [the talk of London](https://roanokeisland.net/history). They were presented before the queen, and Raleigh held several private audiences with them to find out more about Roanoke Island and the wider region. In the course of this several academics whom Raleigh had employed began to develop a way of understanding the Croatan language. Manteo was sent back to North America with a new expedition in 1585 and then returned to England again. As such he was pivotal in the English gaining geographic, linguistic and sociological knowledge about this part of North America on the eve of England settling its first colonies there in the early seventeenth century. He also has the distinction of having become the first Native American to be recorded as being christened in North America. The ceremony took place on Roanoke Island in the late summer of 1587, following which Raleigh’s colony [disappeared in mysterious circumstances](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/archaeologists-mystery-lost-roanoke-lost-colony-1921594). We don't know what happened to Manteo afterwards, unfortunately, but the disappearance of Roanoke is still a hotbed of [drama and scholarly debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony#Hypotheses_about_the_colony's_disappearance). Another example of an exotic foreigner at a European court, though one from a much later time period, was [Sarah Forbes Bonetta](https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/real-stories/the-african-princess-sarah-forbes-bonetta/). Sarah was born as Aina or Ina into the Egbado clan in modern-day Nigeria at some time in 1843. This was during a period when the British Royal Navy was attempting to impose its prohibition on the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean by forcing the rulers of West African states to stop capturing and selling slaves. In 1850, when she was still a young girl, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy ended up arriving to the [Kingdom of Dahomey](https://www.britannica.com/place/Dahomey-historical-kingdom-Africa) which ruled much of what is now Nigeria at the time. There, he came across Aina and ended up adopting her in order to prevent her being entered into a [Dahomey ritual of human sacrifice](https://face2faceafrica.com/article/a-look-at-dahomeys-gory-history-of-human-sacrifices-on-a-large-scale). Forbes renamed Aina as Sara Forbes Bonetta after he became her custodian. She was brought to Britain and raised amongst the upper middle class in Britain in the 1850s. Because Captain Forbes was a major figure within the Royal Navy he was present at many major court gatherings. Sara was introduced to [Queen Victoria I](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victoria-queen-of-United-Kingdom), who was apparently beguiled by the young woman’s intelligence and adopted her as her godmother. Thus, this woman of Nigerian heritage became a revered figure at the British court. She spent the next quarter of a century moving between England and west Africa, marrying into the colonial aristocracy of Lagos and proving that exotic figures could flourish at the European courts by the mid-nineteenth century. Hopefully, Avyaan will flourish as well.