Maps

by Nuruddin Farah

  Then hurriedly, my thoughts moved to less controversial topics. And I remembered the day the photograph was taken; I remembered how much fuss was made about my clothes; I remembered being forced to change the shirt and trousers that had been my favourites, then—thinking it wasn’t /who wore them but that they wore me. (Very often, I associate certain items of clothes with one person or the other. For instance, Salaado’s necklace has an “S” dangling down from it, so not only do I associate the letter with her but it is, for me, the same letter with which the notion of “Somalia” comes.) And I wondered if it made any sense believing that passport-size photographs would help anyone identify a person? Are we merely faces? I mean are faces the keys to our identity? What of a man, like Aw-Adan, with a wooden leg—would you know it from the photograph? What of a baby just bom, a baby abandoned in a waste-bin, a baby, violent with betrayal—would you be able to tell who it was by wiping away the tear-stains and the mucus, would you know its begetter, would you trace it to its mother or father?

  Alone, I studied the details of my new identity with the care with which one does such things—a tender care. I learnt how tall I was, how much I weighed, how my grandfather’s name was spelt in a Somali script new to me. With nostalgia, I read the name of the town in the Ogaden in which I was born—Kallafo—and was happy to know that, professionally, I was a student. Then two questions came to my mind simultaneously: one, would Misra be given a Somali identity card if she came? If not, why not?

  I confess, I did think that I was expected, from that moment onwards, to perceive myself in the identity created for me. Although there were other sorts of difficulties which I encountered head-on when a young man, unemployed and a relation of Salaado's, was hired to become my tutor. His name was Cusmaan. Now this young man insisted that he remind me who I was. “Do you know who you are?” he would say. “You are a refugee. You've fled from the war in the Ogaden and, whether the Somalis have lost this war or no, you will have to remember who you are and, when you grow up, you must return to the Ogaden as a fighter, as a liberator.” Salaado and Uncle Hilaal, however, took a different position—that of allowing me to live my life—of course, promising and trying as hard as they could to make living easier. As far as Cusmaan was concerned, I should be trained as a soldier. Not sent to the school as any normal Somali child, no. He argued if the Azanians had not been given the comforts of citizenship or refugee status, as they had in the front-line states, maybe they would've wielded their strong spirit into a greater force that the apartheid regime wouldn't be able to cope with. I confess that I had difficulty perceiving myself in Cusmaan’s concepts, although I realized later that he made some sense. Salaado, however, told him, more than once, to stop preaching to me. “No politics,” she said one day. “Just teach him writing and reading.” Uncle Hilaal spoke at length, saying how writing and reading were as political as casting your vote, if you happen to live in a country where elections are held. “Think of the Arabs imposing on our African language their alien thought; think of the staunch Somali nationalists giving us a script which was uneconomical and difficult to read. So what is more political than writing? Or, for that matter, reading?” he said, turning to Salaado who had remained silent, apparently because she realised he had misunderstood her.

  As I remembered all this, I gave the identity paper further scrutiny and it assumed a greater importance than what either Cusmaan, my tutor, or Uncle Hilaal had said. For I could decidedly see that, in front of the space of “Nationality”, there was, neatly typed in capital letters, the word “Somali”. Did that mean that I was not to consider myself a refugee any more?

  I put the question to Uncle Hilaal.

  And while he was finding the right things to say on this particular occasion, I began to study with appropriate seriousness the linguistic map of the continent as updated by researchers at the AIA, London.

  III

  “A Somali,” said Uncle Hilaal, “is a man, woman or child whose mother tongue is Somali. Here, mother tongue is important, very important. Not what one looks like. That is, features have nothing to do with a Somali’s Somaliness or no. True, Somalis are easily distinguishable from other people, but one might meet with foreseeable difficulty in telling an Eritrean, an Ethiopian or a northern Sudanese apart from a Somali, unless one were to consider the cultural difference. The Somali are a homogeneous people; they are homogeneous culturally speaking and speak the same language wherever they may be found. Now this is not true of the people who call themselves ‘Ethiopians’, or ‘Sudanese’ or ‘Eritreans’, or Nigerians or Senegalese.”

  A river of ideas, winding as were the Shebelle and the Juba in the map in front of me, poured into my brain. I felt calmed by his voice; I felt calm listening to the rise and fall of his beautiful rendering of his own ideas.

  “Somali identity,” he went on, “is one shared by all Somalis, no matter how many borders divide them, no matter what flag flies in the skies above them or what the bureaucratic language of the country is. Which is why one might say that the soul of a Somali is a meteor, shooting towards that commonly held national identity.”

  I had a question. “Yes?” he asked.

  “If Misra were to apply, would she be entitled to be issued the nationality papers which would make her legally and forever a Somali?” I said, and waited anxiously because I knew I had laboured the point.

  “If her Somali is as good as yours, then I doubt if any bureaucratic clown would dare stand in her way or dare deny her what is hers by right. Remember this, Askar. For all we know, there is no ethnic difference which sets apart the Somali from the Ethiopian—the latter in inverted commas. What she might need is a couple of male witnesses to take an oath that they’ve known her all her life and that she is a Somali, etc., etc.; no more. And all they have to do is sign an affidavit, that is all.”

  I had another question. “What’s it this time?’” Uncle Hilaal said.

  “How would you describe the differences which have been made to exist between the Somali in the Somali Republic and the Somali in either Kenya or in the Ethiopian-administered Ogaden?” I said, again feeling that I had expressed myself poorly.

  He answered, “The Somali in the Ogaden, the Somali in Kenya both, because they lack what makes the self strong and whole, are unpersons”

  Silence. Something made me not ask, “But what is an unperson, Uncle?” Now, years later, I wish I had told him I didn’t understand the concept. Years later, I find it appropriate to ask, “Is Misra a Somali?” “Am I a refugee?” “Am I an unperson?” “Is or will Misra be an unperson—if she comes to Mogadiscio?”

  IV

  My tutor, Cusmaan, behaved as though he were the self-avowed conscience of the Somali nation. He came to the house daily, taking upon himself to remind me that unless people like myself returned to the Ogaden to fight for its liberation, the province would remain colonially subjected to foreign rule. I resolved not to report him to Salaado who, I was sure, would probably have told him to leave. One reason was because I liked him. The second reason was because he was willing to share with me the pornographic magazines he used to borrow from friends of his who had just come from Italy. I don’t know if he was aware of the inherent contradictions in what he was doing—but I didn’t mind. I thought it was fun to build a secret subway tunnel between my tutor and me, a tunnel to whose wide or narrow passage only he and I had access. Somehow, this secret knowledge enabled me to exert on him whatever pressures I chose. Whenever I didn’t do my homework, whenever I was too lazy to study, I said so and we found a way of occupying ourselves. Then he would say, “You must take your studies seriously so that, when you are a grown-up man, you will use your knowledge to liberate your people from the chains of colonialism.”

  “And is that why I should learn to read and write Somali and also English?” I would ask

  “Yes.”

  I remember, a couple of days or so later, putting the same or similar questions about written and oral traditions to Uncle
Hilaal. And he explained that “History has proven that whoever is supported by the written metaphysics of a tradition wins, in the long ran, the fight to power,’ And he went on speaking of a God—with capital G—backed by technology however unadvanced the stage, and gods—with small g—who were not, “That is, the Amharic-speaMng people, because they had a written tradition, could spread their power over peoples of the oral tradition such as Somalis, the Arusas and even the Oromos, who form the largest single ethnic community in Ethiopia. The Amharic-speaMng people were themselves conquered, at an earlier period of their history, by the Tigregna-speaMng people—apparently a people with a script, namely Gaez.”

  This made sense. It made sense to me the way a mothers encouraging a child to eat the soup laid before him, so he would grow up to be a strong man, might make sense to the child in question. And every letter became a sword—by pronouncing it, I sharpened it; by drawing it, I gave it a life of its own; all I had to do was to say “Cut” and it would cut the enemy’s head. Mind you, I knew that this was a highly personal interpretation of things, but it freed my imagination from any constraints. And that, I found, was not something to take lightly

  Nevertheless, my life was taMng a different turn from what I had presumed. My tutor, balancing the dignified and the undignified ethos, would have the centrefold of Playboy in view and would also have our textbook open at the appropriate page. That was how I learnt my first English sentence. I can hear it today, I can feel my tongue wrestle with its sounds, I can sense my questioning the logic of why the first sentence of Book One Oxford English had to be “This is a pen”, and the second sentence, “This is a book”.

  I repeated these two sentences again and again until I was hypnotized by the sounds each word made and my head wove a tapestry from which I deciphered a divine design. From that emerged the first words the Archangel Gabriel dictated to the then illiterate Mohammed, thereafter Prophet—may his name be honoured! That is, I remembered the Koranic verse “Read, read in the name of Allah who created you out of clots of blood, read!” I also had the calm of mind, and the composure, to remember another verse from the Sura, The Pen, a verse which goes: “By the pen and what it writes, you are not mad!” Then my imagination cast its net further afield and I was younger and was in Kallafo with Misra.

  And under a thatch roof, in Kallafo, I found a much smaller boy also named Askar, a boy in a woman’s embrace, and the woman was asking this young boy to repeat after her—(she wasn’t decently covered and his recently bathed body was in direct contact with hers)—she was telling him to repeat after her the sentences “That is the sky” and “This is the earth”.

  A question to Uncle Hilaal, years later.

  “What was I to make of all this? I wonder if the pastoralist nature of the Somali sees an inborn link between the child and its cosmology by having it learn the words ‘sky’ and ‘earth’? First, the child is taught to identify its mother, then its father and there are a chorus of questions like ‘Who is this?’ and, naturally, ‘Who is that? ‘ or ‘What is this or that? ‘ I suspect that the cosmology of the nomads comprehends, at a deeper psychical level, the metaphoric contents of the statements ‘This is the earth’ and ‘That is the sky’. Can this be interpreted to mean ‘God and the grave’? Or do you prefer ‘Rain and food’? In the latter, you identify or locate the source of life, as it were.”

  Uncle Hilaal was silent, making no further observation. And I was hearing in my mind the child’s answer “This is the earth”, although not pointing at the earth but touching Misra’s bosomy chest, and she laughing and teasing him, pardon, me. By then—or after a little while—I was back with Hilaal who was saying, “Now what about ‘This is a pen’ and ‘That is a book’, which are the first sentences that open the English world to a Somali or an East-African child?”

  I wasn’t sure if he expected me to answer, but he didn’t, apparently. So I simply said, “What about it?”

  “An exploratory question. Let’s start with one.”

  I waited.

  He said, “Are we, in any manner, to see a link between ‘This is a book’ and the Koranic command ‘Read in the name of God’, addressed to a people who were, until that day, an illiterate people? In other words, what are the ideas behind ‘pen’ and ‘book’? It is my feeling that, plainly speaking, both suggest the notion of ‘power’. The Arabs legitimized their empire by imposing ‘the word that was read’ on those whom they conquered; the European God of technology was supported, to a great extent, by the power of the written word, be it man’s or God’s.”

  He was silent again. I thought 1 had to make an intelligent contribution. So I said, “That is why the Muslims refer to the Christians and the Jews as the ‘People of the Book’, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  And he sat there, friendly, lovable—and fat. I thought that he was two balls screwed together: the top, his head, was round like a globe and it turned on its axis and travelled, returning every time it made a circle, to the point of reference upon which he pontificated; the middle, his chest, was the seat of his emotion—his paunch breathed like bellows when he laughed and his voice had a fiery fervour about it, setting ablaze, inside my head, a great many fires whose thought-flames burned the ground separating me from him.

  “You might take pens and books,” he was saying when I turned to him, “as metaphors of material and spiritual power. And the most powerful among us is the one who will insist that pens write his thoughts in the form of a letter of glory to posterity and that books record his good deeds.”

  I thought—but didn’t say—that the one who teaches one either the written or the oral word remains, for oneself, the most powerful among us. Hence the influence of Misra, Salaado, Cusmaan, Aw-Adan and finally Uncle Hilaal, on me. And suddenly, I had a most ingenious thought, “What happens when a people with no written tradition invades a people with such a long history of it?”

  I waited anxiously. I wondered if he would use the only example of such a conqueror I could think of. For an instant, I was trapped in the fear that I was off the mark.

  “The Goths, a Teutonic people who were illiterate in the sense that they had no written culture, pillaged Rome and Southern Gaul as well as Spain. I am certain there are many others, such as the Mongol warriors.”

  “And the view of history? How does history view such conquests?” I asked.

  He said, “History treats rather badly emperors who hail from a scattered nomadic warrior people—I’m thinking of Genghis Khan—and who reach the walls of such seats of scientific learning as Peking or Iran’s Tabriz. Genghis Khan—the name means universal emperor—may have been at the head of a cavalry of master horsemen, but history portrays him as ‘barbaric and accuses him of pillaging cities of learning and setting fire to libraries of tremendous worth.”

  I was about to ask him another question when I acknowledged Salaado’s entry into the living-room where we were. She said something about lunch being ready and could we both join her at the table and eat so that she could go back to the school where there was a meeting. I said to Uncle Hilaal, “We know what conquerors with written traditions who occupy a land belonging to a people of the oral tradition do. We know they impose upon them a law which makes it unlawful to think of themselves as human. The European colonialists have done so. Can you think of a conquering people, whether nomadic or no, who didn’t impose alien learning, language and culture upon those whom they conquered?”

  He got to his feet and reflected.

  I readied to follow him should he decide to sit at the dinner-table.

  “I can think of one special case.”

  I asked, “Who?”

  “The Fulanis.”

  I said, coming closer, “Who?”

  He was silent until we reached the table, until we each picked up a paper serviette. He tucked his under his fat chin (I snickered every time he did that!) and I unfolded mine and laid it on my lap (thinking of the writings I used to scribble on my thighs
and on every part of my body, when younger; thinking of Misra, who taught me Amharic in secret).

  “The Fulanis of West Africa are the only conquering people I know of who adopted as their own language and culture the one of the people whom they conquered. I’ve never learnt why.”

  Plates were passed to and fro. And I grieved at the thought that millions of us were conquered, and would remain forever conquered; millions of us who would remain a traditional people and an oral people at that. And I saw, abandoned, burning cities the Goths had set ablaze (I didn’t know who the Goths were, but promised myself that I would find out). I saw, in my mind, the Mongol Emperor, and he was riding a horse and kicking his heels against the beast’s ribs and setting fire to all the letters of the alphabet and more. I also saw abandoned dead bodies—those of men and women and children dead from napalm spray—and cursed the Russians and the Cubans and the Adenese. (I think this must have been after the Russians, the Cubans, the Adenese and the Ethiopian soldiers defeated the unaided Somali army) And I saw history books open at the page beginning with the encyclopaedic definition of the concept “Civilization”.