Nuruddin Farah - Maps

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.”