Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Imagine: a maid, wet to her elbows in the master’s muck, a maid who is on her fours, whose bottom is high and is spread out in a protruding manner. And the master comes from behind and he takes her. How many films in which maids were raped by their employers had he seen? Or a secretary by her boss? How many stories in which a slave is raped by her south-of-the-Dixon-line master had he watched? Did Aw-Adan make her read the Koran and, while she was busy deciphering the mysteries of the Word, did he insert his in? Many stories of Ethiopian atrocities invaded his thoughts. And not in all of them were the raped women maids, mistresses or whores. In all of them, man was “taker”, the woman the victim. “Why, if she isn’t your mother, your sister or your wife, a woman is a whore,” said a classmate of his. How terribly chauvinistic, thought Askar. Women were victims in all the stories he could think of. Misra. Shahrawello. And even Karin. The soul is a woman — victimized, sinned against, abused.

Karin was such a dedicated soul and he trusted the truth of all that she had told him about Misra, trusted the truth of Misra’s surrendering her body in order to save her soul — giving in ransom the warrior’s faith in her integrity

IV

Why did she incestuously surrender the body he knew better than he knew his own? For weeks, his mind felt numbed at the idea that he had been part of the body which had been given away incestuously “How much of a child’s body or a woman’s for that matter, can be said to be his or her own?” he asked Uncle Hilaal. “Precious little,” had responded Hilaal. But even this did not damp down the fire of disgust burning inside of him. Uncle Hilaal wondered if, in Askar’s opinion, Misra’s betrayal was comparable to a woman who was unfaithful to a husband? No, no. It was more like a mother who brought dishonour upon the head of her child — right in the child’s presence. What is in surrendering a body that is not one’s own? But what soul is there that’s worth saving? The noon was high and the sun climbed the steps of time.

“Possibly, Karin is not telling the truth,” said Salaado.

Askar retorted, “Possibly she is.”

“And maybe you didn’t know Misra that well,” suggested Salaado.

Askar nodded.

“And wars kill friendships in the same way as they bring into being other forms of trust and interdependence, don’t you agree, Hilaal? Don’t you agree, Askar?” said Salaado.

Hilaal, not reacting to what Salaado had said, nodded his head in silence.

“True, they were once the world’s best friends. To each other. And to me, too,” said Askar.

“Well, there you are,” said Salaado.

A question imposed itself on Askar’s mind: how much of a man’s body can be said to be his own? A man is a master, a part of him said, he is a master of his own body

Hilaal then said, “Hadn’t he better ask her to account for her life before he totally condemns her? Hadn’t he? She, who was once his only world?”

In silence, Askar’s mind continued along the same lines as Hilaal’s thoughts — Misra, who was his only world, the content and source of his secrets, the only one whom he trusted and in whom he confided; she whose arm, large as anything he had touched or seen, would extend upwards and with short fingers point at the heavens, naming it; the same fingers which cleaned his face or dried his nostrils and had the agility to point subsequently at the earth on which she sat, her thoughts, like a pendulum, going from the sky (God’s abode?) and the earth (feeder of man?) and then himself or herself. It was she from whom he learnt how to locate and name things and people, she who helped him place himself at the centre of a world — her own!

“Where is the sky?” she would ask him.

He would point at it.

“And the earth, where is the earth?”

And he would point at her.

“The earth, I said, where is the earth?”

Only after a number of attempts would he get it right. Then Mother, where is Mother Misra? And she would point herself out, her short finger placed between her breasts, saying “This is I”. For years, he had had enormous difficulties pronouncing his Somali gutturals correctly, since he learnt these wrongly from her; for years, he mispronounced the first letters of the words in Somali for “sky” and “earth”—just like she did; for years, too, he remembered her favourite phrase: “You are on your own!” She used this when she was fed up with him because he wouldn’t stop crying or wouldn’t sleep and she used this very shibboleth as an avant-courier of unhappy tidings. And the world, because she decided to walk out of it, would disintegrate right in front of him and he would, faithful to the formula, burst into a cry the instant she walked out of his sight, out of his world, and into one he couldn’t get to, a world whose code of conduct he was not familiar with. At times, she would step out and hide behind the first available wall and listen to him express himself via a fit of weeping, his cheeks sooty with tear-stains, his heels painful from pounding them on the paved floor; on occasion, she would return after a long absence when he had tired and fallen asleep; on other occasions, she would come back to him playfully and teasingly, and she would tickle him and kiss him and hold him tightly to herself, speaking to him endearingly, calling him “my man”, addressing him as “my love”.

Misra is here, in Mogadiscio , he read the note again.

Does that mean that I will have to touch her, kiss her, hug her to myself and hold her in my embrace? he asked himself. He wondered to himself how loathsome any physical contact with someone one doesn’t love any more turns into; when the person to be touched, to be kissed, to be hugged, is now hated. Why is it that we love touching, animallike, the one we adore? Why do we shun contact when this very person becomes the one we hate most? The body speaks, the soul obeys — is that not so? The body refuses to make contact with a love gone senselessly numb — is that not so? But to touch Misra, to kiss her, to hug a woman who has betrayed one’s trust — here in Mogadiscio — when one is to make a decisive decision such as whether or not one should join the Liberation Front or choose a career in the world of academia? Had he not better write to the Front intimating his immense wish to join its ranks? That way he would wash clean his conscience — and live at peace with it. Neither the members of the panel nor Uncle Hilaal would know of the connection, and his going before them would undo the fetters tightening on his conscience. If killed when defending his country, he would die a young man at peace with his soul — and therefore a martyr.

And if he joined the university? It worried him that, at a university, he was likely to indulge his thoughts in higher intellectual pursuits and that he might not think it worth his while to fight until death in order to liberate the semi-arid desert that was the Ogaden. He was sure, in the camaraderie characteristic of the times in which he lived, that there would be a great many people who would dissuade him from dying for a nationalistic cause, such as the Ogaden people’s. Many Somalis, he knew, were inarticulate with rage whenever the argument they put forward was challenged. Wouldn’t a university education equip him with better and more convincing reasons, wouldn’t it provide him with the economic, political and cultural rationalizations, wouldn’t he be in a better position to argue more sophisticatedly? He would, perhaps, write a book on the history of the Ogaden and document his findings with background materials got from the oral traditions of the inhabitants. So would he take the gun? Or would he resort to, and invest his powers in, the pen?