Maps

by Nuruddin Farah

  Suddenly, you appeared relieved—like a husband who warmly welcomes an unexpected guest, arriving just at the instant when his wife is about to put an embarrassing question to him—because Cusmaan, your former tutor, had arrived. You introduced them to each other. They displayed the pleasant surprise of each indicating that he/she imagined the other to look not exactly as “I had imagined”.

  In a friendly way, Misra said, “Perhaps Askar has misled you.”

  “No, no,” said Cusmaan. “I’ve misconstructed images of you which apparently do not match the reality. It is all my fault,” and they shook hands again.

  “He’s certainly misinformed me,” said Misra, still in her consistently friendly manner.

  “He overpraised me. He always does.”

  Misra said, “On the contrary.”

  “He underpraised me?”

  Misra nodded her head.

  Cusmaan remained charmingly polite and exchanged a few more niceties with Misra. Then he gave you a booklet which was to give you the basics of how to repair a car. You opened the book with obvious excitement and saw a highway of technical signs which you didn’t know how to read, and then glanced at the glossary offering explanatory footnotes to the jargon of motor mechanics. “Once you’ve understood what this booklet says, you are on your way to becoming a potential repairer of vehicles appropriated from the enemy.”

  You knew things were not as easy as all that. But you were glad he had come. His arrival had injected new blood into everybody and there was a great deal of excited movement. You were all in the kitchen, milling round one another. Hilaal then offered to finish cooking the food whilst you talked to Cusmaan.

  By chance, your gaze fell on Misra. She was pressing the inside of her forearm against her chest—a gesture breast-feeding mothers make when they are full of unsucked milk. You guessed, correctly, that her breasts were aching. Also, when she saw Hilaal, Salaado and Cusmaan’s look home in on her too, Misra’s arm ceased moving and there occurred something similar to the transformations caused by a whirlwind turning over dust, earth, etc., only to leave everything, a moment later, in the hands of gravity, trusting it to restore to the elements the balance they had lost. You came closer to her. And you smelled her.

  True. She had started her period at the very instant you looked at her.

  III

  “If you went?” said Salaado; and looked in your direction.

  All five of you were at table, all five, including Misra. You thought that either Misra’s body’s habits had undergone surprising changes or you didn’t have your facts right. Although at this moment in time, that wasn’t your main worry. You were attentively listening to a point Cusmaan was making, Cusmaan, who had become an expert at spinning a tapestry of controversies, having learnt the trade from Hilaal. The gist of what he was saying wasn’t vivid even to himself, you could see, but it was touching on a topic which interested you, namely the relationship between “high” literature and “scripts”. He quoted two instances: Amharic, although a written language for centuries, with little or, he said, no “exceptional” literary figures to speak of; Somali, a language that had no orthography until October 1972, with “exceptional” poets, gifted orators and highly talented wordsmiths. The question, he argued, was not a case of one of oral literature against a written one, no. It was a language (i.e. Somali) with phenomenally sophisticated literature, against another (Amharic) served poorly by her poets and prose writers.

  Cusmaan’s point became clearer in the brief silence between the moment he stopped talking and the instant Hilaal picked its loose threads, adding a couple of his balls of cotton-threads and weaving out of them a plait of conclusions, with its own web of yarns, warps and wefts.

  “No, no, no, you don’t get my point,” argued Cusmaan.

  Hilaal said, “I do. I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  Salaado said, “You are saying the same thing, Cusmaan.”

  Hilaal was saying, “But this is a dangerous point Cusmaan is making. You don’t know enough about Ethiopian literature to compare it fairly with Somali literature. For example.”

  “Please no for examples. Listen to me.”

  The women communicated secretly (Misra was in her seasonal pain and Salaado decided to be with her) and left the men to determine how best to rule the world. In the meantime, Hilaal got caught in the intricacies of his ideas. In his spiral thinking he went up and up the entwining stairway, reaching such great heights as would justify his encroaching on historical as well as literary theories, in and outside the Horn of Africa. At some point, when he got to a landing, he paused. Leaning against a ramshackle railing, his hands open in the shape of brackets, he commented on the political and literary activities of Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, the Somali peoples’ greatest warrior-poet to date and Menelik, his contemporary, the architect of the Ethiopian empire. Suddenly, however, Hilaal’s eyes narrowed and he appeared ill at ease, as though the flight of stairs leading up to the summit of his climb would give way if he tried to ascend them. Another pause, this time of a more pedestrian kind. He looked up and saw that Salaado had returned alone. “What is the matter with Misra?”

  “She is a woman,” said Salaado.

  A briefer pause, and he was moving round his spiral thinking, ascending now, descending now, describing vividly the poetic feud which involved the Sayyid and a number of detractors including one unheard-of English poet who entered the feud with a contribution “veined as the romantic arm extended out to the victim who must be cajoled before he is dealt the final blow. For example.”

  And there came a chorus of complaints. “Wait, wait.”

  You heard drumming. You thought of the mingis ceremony. Salaado nodded her head in your direction and said, “She’s resting for a while, but she says she will come with you.”

  Cusmaan was saying, “Ethiopia, let me for-example you, Hilaal, has never been colonized. Her national language, although spoken by a minority, has had a script from long before Christ. And yet, how is it that this country that has been independent all through the ages of documented history this Ethiopia whose population is ten times that of Somalia’s; this Ethiopia, with a script from long before Christ—how is it that Ethiopia has not produced one poet, ancient or contemporary relying either on the oral or the written form, one single Ethiopian genius of a poet, who is comparable to Somalia’s hundreds of major poets that Somalis can field?”

  “Don’t be ethnocentric. That’s all I say. Of course, being independent for a hundred years didn’t get Liberia into the same bracket as Ethiopia. No one can explain these things. How, for example, does it happen that two-thirds of Somalia’s major poets come from the Ogaden and the Haud?”

  Silence. And the voice of the master of mingis ceremony singing, right in the heart of Mogadiscio, in a language definitely not Somali—this fact alone deserved a body of study and research work. The masters or mistresses of these ceremonies chant in the language the spirits understand—and that language is not Somali. It is Boran. Just as voodoo ceremonies in Haiti are conducted in Yoruba and not in the language of the island, Creole.

  “Let’s go,” Misra said to you.

  IV

  You were admitted into a large room and there were many people and there was a great deal of toing and froing, with a stream of men and women entering or leaving. The neighbour’s wife had been ill for some time. According to the shamanistic prescription, the woman would have th influenced for the better, and they would leave her, if a white-tailed sheep was slaughtered; if the blood was smeared all over her body; and if she submitted herself trustfully to the incantantory rite of dancing and singing for three solid days and nights. The neighbour, an Xamari, was very wealthy and he loved his wife, who was his youngest. He didn’t mind the expense. He agreed to pay the priest-doctore spirits in her a handsome fee and would probably buy him an air ticket to and from Mecca. Also, the man refused to analyse or comment on the religious and philosophical contradictions surrounding
his activities. He was a colleague of Salaado’s, he was, by anybody’s standards, a knowledgeable man, and was the son of a well-to-do Xamari family

  You and Misra, on being invited, went and watched the dance as you might have watched any theatrical performance—no more. But you didn’t understand the language in which they sang, you couldn’t decipher the chant. The language was definitely not Somali, Did Misra understand? You were surprised how much she was able to comprehend. And the woman-patient danced and danced and danced; and the priest-doctor challenged the spirits, asking that they name themselves—at least identify themselves, at least say whether they were human or jinn—and she danced and danced and danced.

  “What’s the name of the woman?” asked Misra,

  His voice, loud, overpowered the drumming and he said, “Waliima Sheikh,”

  Impatient, the priest-doctor beckoned to the drummers to beat softer, slower. And he took the woman’s hand, then held her by the shoulders and he started shaking her and shouting, “Tell us who you are. Are you jinn or human? And what do you want?”

  The woman danced and danced and danced.

  The priest-doctor asked, “Now, who are you? We haven’t much time nor patience. We’ll deliver you from the diabolical demands of the evil spirits who’ve apparently taken residence in you. So who are you?”

  And the woman stopped dancing altogether. The drumming ceased too.

  As if exhausted, the woman-patient began to speak, but her voice wasn’t loud enough and nothing save the first part of the sentence could be heard clearly But the “I am… I am”, which evidently was heard by everybody, did generate a great deal of interest and hope in the hearts and minds of the audience. The priest-doctor concentrated intensely on the forehead of his patient as though his powers would drill through to her brain cells and this would help him, in the end, to solve the shamanistic riddle of what jinn or human could be so obstinate as to have withstood his probing for forty-eight hours. Presently, he signalled to the drummers to resume their drumming and they did as instructed. As more dancers encircled the woman-patient, the priest-doctor left the floor for his throne on the left-hand side of what was once the wife’s living-room. But he rose again immediately as if he sat on thorns, and he was moving in the direction of his patient and saying, “I will punish you severely if you don’t tell us who you are,” and was shaking her body as though fruits, small as jinns or large as human eyeballs, would drop to the floor and he would just pick them up and make a gift of them to the patient’s husband who was seated in another comer, on the right-hand side of the room.

  You were not sure “who” the priest-doctor was addressing; you were not sure “who” he would punish severely—the woman-as-human or the spirit in the woman. After all, you knew the woman’s name and you hoped the priest-doctor knew her human name too, or even if he didn’t, the husband was there to remind him, or one of the neighbours. But then, what confounded you more was that he was now whipping her and was repeating loudly, again and again, the sentence, “Just tell the congregation your name, address and, if possible, your profession. Are you a man, are you a woman or are you a child? Are you human or jinn?”

  She stopped dancing and her head dropped to her chin—the way toys’ heads do when the springs which hold them fail or snap. The drumming stopped. Everybody listened.

  “Your name, sex, profession and address?” repeated the priest-doctor.

  The woman finally said, “I am Deeqo Amin.”

  “And where do you live?” said the priest-doctor.

  Silence. Meantime, the congregation repeated, in various manners, the name the patient mentioned. Somebody cursed “Deeqo”, another wished her hell, here and in the hereafter, but many waited before they pronounced their verdict. “Where do you live?”

  You remembered the cuudis ceremony in Kallafo, the one in which Karin gave a name different from her real one, and her identity as that of a man. Mingis! Cuudis! And you thought about the Egyptian Zaar and about the Mogadiscian’s Beehe and Booràn. You asked yourself, But who are we? Are we the jinn who dwell inside “us” from time to time? Or are we always the human beings that we claim to be? What proportions of us are human and what jinn? Now the woman was shouting, “I live in the Medina quarter of Xamar,” a statement she repeated thrice.

  The priest-doctor waited for that to sink in. Then, “And how many children have you?”

  “I have none.” The members of the audience mumbled something to one another.

  He repeated the question louder and expected the patient would repeat her answer louder too. “I said, I have no children.” (And someone shouted, “A bad eye.”)

  “What’s the name of your husband, the full name please?”

  The woman answered, “I am a widow My husband died in the Ogaden war.”

  “And you have no children?” repeated the shaman.

  The woman-patient said, “That’s right.”

  You could tell from his voice that he was pleased his patient spoke somebody’s name; that she claimed to be somebody else with a name and an address; that he had convinced all those present of his expertise. “Please tell the congregation here, why you've chosen to take residence” in Waliima Sheikh? Do you know her? Have you ever met, you and Waliima? Are you envious of her, her children and life style?”

  “You might say that I've known Waliima Sheikh from when we played house-and-family together as girls and you would be right if you assumed that I’ve coveted her her marriage, her wealth, her children and her good looks. I married badly, she well; I left school early, she finished at hers and did well by it.”

  He put more and more questions to the woman-patient until it became obvious another was speaking through her; another, with a different name and address; another, whose voice interfered with the proceedings, for it emanated from a different other. Could a good person live in an utterly bad one? you ask yourself, your imagination overwhelmed by the thought that this was possible. Could Misra hide in you? Could another dwell in her?

  The world of the unknown had greater potentials, you thought, and lost interest in the mundanities of what the priest-doctor was saying or what wicked actions the audience was prescribing as punishment for the woman who, out of jealousy, “took residence” in another;

  Do you remember?

  V

  There was a flood.

  And you floated. You floated, heavy as a corpse, asleep to the end of the world. You floated easterly towards the sea. You remember someone saying there would no longer be any more rebirths, or renewals of any sort. Millions of people had lost their lives and property in the flood, but then everyone agreed this didn’t matter, for this was the end of the world and the flood was to mark the end-of-the-world’s beginning. And when a woman who had floated beside you for days asked what you were doing, you responded that you had come to bury yourself in the water. You said you would blow out the light and, in the total darkness surrounding you, you would expire. You prophesied that a heavy downpour of successive floods would fall from the heavens, joining the earth and the sky, obliterating from everybody’s memory all the dreamt dreams, and there would be no past, no present and no future. Then you turned to the woman who had earlier asked you why you were there and you inquired of her why she too was there. She said, “My husband and I are in the business of building tombs on seabeds.” You took a fresher look at the woman. And you put a name to her face.

  You were spat by the flood, as though you were an uprooted weed on the bank of a river, green with young foliage—foliage whose chaotic message you couldn’t follow. There, you were met by an old man who, in a big way, reminded you of Aw-Adan, but also, in a small way, looked like your younger tutor, Cusmaan. Suddenly, the heavens darkened and all you could see was the man’s grey hair, bushy and also silvery Then the man put his hand into his pocket and he gave you a knife. You dared not ask the man what you were supposed to do with the knife, but you said, surprising even yourself, “But why the flood?” And the old man with th
e white head said, “Floods are a product of a common bad.” Now do you remember, or have you chosen, as usual, to remember only the good things, deciding to forget the bad?

  Anyway!

  You were surrounded by darkness. You were surrounded by multitudinous water. Inside the water, you passed more water, your own water that is, as though you were expected to make a contribution, however small. And there shone in the sky a fairly young moon, beautiful as a maiden’s face. The sea was green as the silver of a mirror and you could see your own shadow on the tinier crests your body’s movements created. You had bloodshot eyes, but you didn’t know because you couldn’t see it yourself. You were alone, but you didn’t think about it and you didn’t feel at all lonely You would dive every now and then, and reach the bottom of the deep, deep sea, and whenever you came out to take another lungful of fresh air, you felt as if you were an entirely different person. Tired from swimming alone, you went to sit by a sand-dune near the sea.

  It was light already—dawn had broken.

  And there was a young boy, barely ten, who was meditatively busy washing clean a skull. He was performing his task with absolute devotion—you could tell from the way he breathed, you could see the concentration on his face, you could sense, without touching him, the tension in his own body. The skull was that of a human. But you couldn’t determine, even when you held it in your hands, whether it had belonged to a small person or a heavily built man or woman. Yin could decide, without taking undue risk, that it had been there for years. For one thing, plants had begun to sprout in it. For another, the colour had worn off its cheekbone, which had grown a shade browner.