Tracing conflict through generations

When refugees of Liberia’s civil war began arriving in Minnesota in the 1990s, they encountered the typical challenges of new immigrants, along with some unexpected resentment from U.S.-born blacks.

Shannon Gibney’s new novel, “Dream Country,” traces the roots of this conflict, following five generations of one family from a Virginia plantation to Liberia’s founding by freed slaves to a reverse migration 150 years later during the country’s brutal civil war.

The story opens in Brooklyn Center, Minn., where 16-year-old Kollie is navigating adolescent turbulence as he tries to find his footing between cultures.

At his large public high school, he’s harassed by black students for being too “jungle.” At home, his parents work long hours at menial jobs and expect him to be a dutiful son.

When these tensions boil over in a school fight, Kollie’s parents decide to send him back to Monrovia to keep him away from bad influences at home.

The narrative loops back in time to Liberia in 1926, where Togar, a member of the Bassa ethnic group, is fleeing from agents of the country’s LibericoAmerican rulers, who want to force him to work on a plantation off the West African coast.

A deeper jump in time folds in the story of Yasmine, a freed slave who escapes the antebellum South with her children for what she hopes is a better life in the new colony of Liberia.

The novel comes full circle with Kollie’s father, Ujay, who falls in love with a “privileged indigenous” woman in Monrovia, even as he puts his faith and ideals in a revolution that will spark two decades of civil war.

“Dream Country” is an ambitious novel, tackling colonialism, slavery and racist violence across centuries, and the way that an oppressed group — such as freed slaves — can replicate that oppression in a new environment.

The challenge of its loosely linked form is that just as readers become invested in one character, the story jumps to another. Some of these jumps feel abrupt, abandoning characters deep into their narrative arc.

In the end, “Dream Country” asks big questions and exposes new histories as it digs into the complexities of what Gibney calls “the ongoing, spiraling history of the African-African American encounter.”

As one character says, the dreamer is always part of the dream.