Nuruddin Farah - Maps

And I was suddenly a bird in ascent, a bird, holding, in the clutch of its beak, the foreskin of a boy's circumcision; a bird, inside of which was folded up, like a map, the entire experience of the cosmos; a bird that had walked out of my human body and been metamorphosed into a dream-animal, free to fly as it pleased. I surveyed the world of which Misra had been an integral part from a reasonable height, after a dreamy flight that nearly took the breath out of me. And I noticed that her hand had been severed from the rest of her body and her head, not in the least plaintive, shouted, “Askar, what’s the meaning of all this?”

It rained non-stop for hours and the darkness of the night was thick-bodied. I made sure I held a tighter grip on myself. Then I saw a figure in the distance, a figure standing tall as an obelisk. I walked in the direction of the figure, above whose head, clear as a halo, there now was a lantern. The nearer I moved to the figure, the further we got from each other. Wet, exhausted, my body ached and I walked and walked and walked, and it rained and rained and rained. I walked, holding my sarong at the edges, my body alert, my every step careful. Finally, I reached where the figure and the lantern had been: there was no figure, no statue, no lantern — only the remnants of a corpse, blown up in an explosion of some kind. I went here and there, collecting the unnamable parts of the blown-up person’s body, until I got to where the head had dropped — and I screamed with fright.

I don’t know what curses I shouted or uttered. All I can tell you is that I woke up, my body wet with sweat, my throat aching from crying and saying again and again and again, “Who am I? Who am I? Where am I? Where am I? Who am I?”

Misra was not there. I was alone.

And no one told me where I was, no one told me who I was.

VI

By the time I started to limp my way to places (although there was a slight pain between my legs) I noticed there was a halo of silence above many a person’s head — an ominous silence, a silence punctuated by prayers and sacrificial offerings. I had never seen as many beasts sacrificed as I saw in the following few days, beasts whose meat was offered, with blessings, to the sheikhs who were invited to pray for the safe conduct of those whom Kallafo, our town, sent to the war front.

I asked Misra, “A war? And whom are we fighting?” In those days, everything and everybody was throbbing with inexplicable activity in so far as I was concerned and a number of people were said to be getting ready to marry Once married, the men went off, leaving behind them the dust of victory, the women whom they had just wed, their old parents and the very young. Not until weeks later did we see the full-blooded men in our midst and no strong men returned for long periods unless they were wounded and in need of medical attention. That was how I learnt where Aw-Adan had gone — to the war front. People sat next to the radio and names like Jigjiga, Harar, limey and Dire Dawa occurred frequently in their exchanges — which was when the atlases Uncle had given me became very useful to own. Most of the women were illiterate and had never seen or owned a map. And our room was turned into something like a war-room. We spread the maps on the tables and calculated how long it would take the Somali army to capture a given town and how far this was from us or from Mogadiscio or, for that matter, Addis Abeba.

It was only gradually, however, that it dawned on me that Misra’s heart wasn’t in it as much as mine or the other people’s were. She was excited, of course, whenever any town or village fell to the Somalis, but she was exaggeratedly cautious, saying something like “How long will this victory last?”, or “Where will it take us to?”, or “What will the Russians do?” Somebody called her a “spoil-sport” once or twice and I heard many more wicked things said behind her back. Then, a few days later, I felt that the mood which prevailed was one of hostility towards her. I could sense that more and more people were coming less and less to our war-room. I remembered that she was different from us — that she wasn’t a Somali like me and the others; I remembered how often people teased her about her pronunciation of Somali gutturals; I remembered about the warrior of whom she had spoken and of the saddled horse which had dropped its rider. And I, too, saw her in a different light. She wore a grim appearance and was ugly. I recalled a dream I had seen previously, a dream in which the finger of collective guilt was pointed at the Somaliness in me and the others. I asked: hasn’t Misra chosen to be one of us? Hasn’t she chosen to share with us our pain and pleasure? Now she was undecided whether to leave us or share our bitter destiny with us. She spoke of this too, although I do not think I understood it at the time. “ I am an Ethiopian,” she said. But how was I to know what species an “Ethiopian” is? I asked the appropriate questions and got the appropriate answers. The image which has remained with me, is that of a country made up of patchworks — like a poor man’s mantle. She wasn’t decided whether to go back to the Highlands or stay she repeated. Although she no longer spoke or understood the language of the area of Ethiopia in which she was born.

I said, “I’ll come with you.”

She greatly belied her pleasure by saying, after a long, long silence, during which she wiped away the tears which had stained her cheeks, “I will not want you to come with me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She turned towards me, her eyes aflame with hot tears. “Because it’s not safe for you. They will kill you, my people will, without asking questions, without wanting to know your name or what our relationship is.”

I asked, “Your people, my people — what or who are these?”

“One day,” she said, speaking of a future in which we would meet, “one day, you will understand the distinction, you’ll know who your people are and who mine are. One day,” she prophesied, speaking into that void of a future in which she hoped we would meet again, — “you will identify yourself with your people and identify me out of your community Who knows, you might even kill me to make your people’s dream become a tangible reality.”

“Kill?” I asked.

“Yes. Kill. Murder. Loot. Rape. In the name of your people. Kill.”

I said, “One day, I might kill you?”

“Maybe,” she said, and walked out of the room.

I

In a month or so, especially now that his manhood was ringed with a healed circle, the orgies of self-questioning, which were his wont, gave way to a state in which he identified himself with the community at large. And he partook of the ecstasy of madness that struck the town of Kallafo, an ecstasy that expressed itself in a total self-abandon never known, never experienced in the history of the Somalis of the area. The war was on. At first, the war was mentioned in whispers and was spoken about as one talks of a certain calamity But what mattered to Askar was that it presaged, for him, a future maturer than he had awaited, that it predicted a future in which he would be provided with ample opportunities to prove that he was a man. In his mind, he didn’t exclude that some day he might even be recruited as a member of the Western Somali Liberation Front, the front fighting for the liberation of the Ogaden from Ethiopian domination. Who knows, he thought, he could become, at such a tender age, the movement’s flag-bearer; who knows, the Ethiopians might forcefully conscript him if the Somalis lost the war; who knows!