Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Unlike the Somali hawkers, coffee cleaners, beggars, or dancers who often abandoned four- and five-year-old boys on the street when their fathers absconded, she had guarded Jama as best as she could, and thought day and night, How can I keep my baby safe? They had come to Aden expecting an El Dorado where even the beggars wore gold but instead it was a dirty and dangerous place, heaving with strangers and their vices.

Jama was the only family she had or wanted; she had not seen the rest since leaving for Aden. Ambaro had grown up in the care of her aunt after her mother, Ubah, died of smallpox. Izra’il, the angel of death, had barged through Ubah’s door fourteen times to spirit away her legion of children with diarrhea, petty accidents, coughs that had wracked tiny rib cages. Ubah had left one live child, a heartbroken, sickly little girl who haunted her grave, waiting for the Day of Judgment to arrive and restore her mother to her. Smallpox had laid its hand on Ambaro’s body but she had survived, wearing her scars as proof of her mother’s ghostly protection. As she grew older, Ambaro became a lean, silent young woman, beyond the jurisdiction of her father’s other wives; she wandered far away with the family goats and sheep. Grief for her mother and lost brothers and sisters kept her detached from the other members of the family, who feared her and worried that misfortune might lead her to perform some evil witchcraft on them. Ambaro’s eyes were too deep, too full of misery to be trustworthy. It was only Jinnow, the levelheaded matriarch of the family, who showed her any affection. Jinnow had delivered Ambaro into the world as a baby, whispering the call to prayer in the small shell of her ear. Jinnow had held the baby up to her mother, rubbed the blood off the child and revealed the brown birthmark on her cheek that earned her the old-fashioned name Ambaro.

Guure the orphan grew up in the adjacent aqal with another elderly aunt, but while Ambaro was called “cursed” and “miserable,” he was petted and fawned over. He pulled Ambaro’s plaits and nicknamed her “Ameer,” heifer. One dry season, Guure went away with the camels an irritating, dry-kneed wastrel and came back a lissome poet with long eyelashes. She watched him for a long time before he noticed her, but then he began sneaking up behind her as she trekked to the well or collected firewood. She had always felt as thorny and barren as the desert that surrounded her, with snakes and cacti in her heart, but Guure brought rains that made the cacti flower.

When Guure’s proposal of marriage was refused by Ambaro’s father, she pleaded with Jinnow to send word to Guure to meet her, and Jinnow, unable to deprive her of any happiness, acquiesced. Ambaro wrapped herself in her newest shawl, broke through the back of the thorn fence, and escaped into the night. Guure stood waiting under the great acacia as she planned, lithe and smiling, his skin shining in the moonlight. His brown afro formed a halo around his head and with his luminous white robes she felt she was running away with the archangel Jibreel. He had brought with him a cloth bundle. He kneeled down to open it and brought out a pomegranate, and a gold bangle stolen from his aunt; he passed these to Ambaro, kissing her hands as she took them. Then he removed a lute and pulled her down to sit next to him, the cloth underneath her. He plucked the strings sparsely, delicately, watching the shy smile on her face grow mischievously; he then played more confidently, easing out a soft melody. It sounded like spring, the twang of a blossom as it bursts out if its bud. They sat entwined until the moon and stars were hidden by clouds, leaving them with the freedom of the night.

They were married the next day by a desolate saint’s tomb near the road to Burao, in a wedding witnessed by strangers and conducted by a rebellious sheikh who laughingly placed two goats in the role of the bride’s male guardians. They returned nervously to the family encampment, its girding of thorn branches torn in places by jackals, bloodstains and wool stretching away into the desert. The elders were furious, both for their disobedience in getting married and for damaging the fence, so they refused to give anything to the young couple, who were forced to build a ramshackle aqal of their own. Ambaro quickly learned that her husband was a hardened dreamer, always stuck in his head; he was the boy everyone loved but would not trust with their camels. Guure could not accept that his carefree youth was over; he still wanted to wander off with his friends, while all Ambaro wanted was a family of her own. Guure played the lute with all of his passion and attention but was listless and incompetent with the practical details of life. They had no livestock and lived on plain jowari grain, boiled and tasteless. Jinnow smuggled them small offerings of meat and ghee when possible but she could not stop tut-tutting at the predicament Ambaro had got herself into; she had wanted Guure and Ambaro to get married but not in this slapdash, hurried way. Jinnow’s disappointment was cutting to Ambaro, and in the blink of an eye, she became Guure’s judge, his overseer, his jailer; she followed him everywhere and dragged him home when necessary.

When Jama arrived a year later in Ambaro’s eighteenth year, she hoped it would force Guure to start providing but instead he carried on endlessly combing his hair and playing his lute, singing his favorite song to Ambaro, “ Ha I gabin oo I gooyn. Don’t forsake me or cut me off.” He occasionally dangled the baby from his thin fingers before Ambaro snatched Jama away. Ambaro carried both a knife and a stick from the magic wagar tree to protect her son from dangers seen and unseen — she was a fierce, militant mother, her sweet mellow core completely melted away. Ambaro tied the baby to her back and learned from Jinnow all the things that women did to survive, how to weave straw baskets, make perfume from frankincense and myrrh, sew blankets from Ethiopian cloth, intending to barter these items in neighboring settlements for food. Whatever Ambaro did, they remained destitute, and she was reduced to foraging in the countryside for plants and roots: dabayood, likeh, tamayulaq. When Guure began to spend his days chewing qat with young men from whom he caught the Motor Madness, Ambaro was ready to tear her hair out. He bored Ambaro with obsessive talk about cars and the clansmen who had gone to Sudan and earned big money driving Ferengis around. It all seemed hopeless to Ambaro, who had never seen a car and could not believe that they were anything more than the childish sorcery of foreigners. Ambaro tried desperately to extinguish this fire that was burning in Guure, but the more she criticized and ridiculed him, the more Guure clung to his dream and convinced himself that he must leave for Sudan. His talk stole the hope from her heart, and she wondered how he could desert his family so easily. He would hold her as she wept, but she knew only heartache lay ahead.

Guure quietened down when a daughter arrived a year after Jama, a smiling golden child with big happy eyes that Ambaro named Kahawaris, after the glow of light before sunrise that heralded her birth. Kahawaris became the light of their lives, a baby whose beauty the other mothers envied and whose giggles rang through the camp. Jama had grown into a talkative little boy, always petting his little sister, accosting the adults with questions while he carried Kahawaris on his back: “Why are your toenails black?” “What made your beard orange?” With his two children pawing at him, complaining and crying with hunger each night, Guure promised that he would take any work he was given, even if it meant carrying carcasses from the slaughterhouse. He began to help Ambaro with the chores, scorning the jeers of his friends to collect water from the well and milk the goats alongside the women.