Wild Seed

Anyanwu is a person of extraordinarily long life; when the book begins, she is three hundred years old. She can crush rocks with her bare hands, jump across rivers, heal herself with a thought, and transform her body into any living shape she can imagine. She also represents the moral heart of Wild Seed. Though she is put through many trials (presumably more during the 150 years presented in this book than she experienced in her 300 years before) her motivations do not change. She is motivated by ties to family and community, and by her responsibilities as a healer. Her people are the Igbo, native to central and eastern Africa. At the same time, she has within her an antagonistic moral force that longs for freedom and excitement.

Doro both repels and fascinates the part of Anyanwu that longs for freedom, and this story is less about a dynamic change in her moral character and more about the reconciliation of her two moral halves. This reconciliation happens with time and raw data: “She had power and her power had made her independent, accustomed to being her own person. She did not yet realize that she had walked away from that independence when she walked away from her people with him” (29).