Nuruddin Farah - Maps

This made sense. It made sense to me the way a mothers encouraging a child to eat the soup laid before him, so he would grow up to be a strong man, might make sense to the child in question. And every letter became a sword — by pronouncing it, I sharpened it; by drawing it, I gave it a life of its own; all I had to do was to say “Cut” and it would cut the enemy’s head. Mind you, I knew that this was a highly personal interpretation of things, but it freed my imagination from any constraints. And that, I found, was not something to take lightly

Nevertheless, my life was taMng a different turn from what I had presumed. My tutor, balancing the dignified and the undignified ethos, would have the centrefold of Playboy in view and would also have our textbook open at the appropriate page. That was how I learnt my first English sentence. I can hear it today, I can feel my tongue wrestle with its sounds, I can sense my questioning the logic of why the first sentence of Book One Oxford English had to be “This is a pen”, and the second sentence, “This is a book”.

I repeated these two sentences again and again until I was hypnotized by the sounds each word made and my head wove a tapestry from which I deciphered a divine design. From that emerged the first words the Archangel Gabriel dictated to the then illiterate Mohammed, thereafter Prophet — may his name be honoured! That is, I remembered the Koranic verse “Read, read in the name of Allah who created you out of clots of blood, read!” I also had the calm of mind, and the composure, to remember another verse from the Sura, The Pen , a verse which goes: “By the pen and what it writes, you are not mad!” Then my imagination cast its net further afield and I was younger and was in Kallafo with Misra.

And under a thatch roof, in Kallafo, I found a much smaller boy also named Askar, a boy in a woman’s embrace, and the woman was asking this young boy to repeat after her — (she wasn’t decently covered and his recently bathed body was in direct contact with hers) — she was telling him to repeat after her the sentences “That is the sky” and “This is the earth”.

A question to Uncle Hilaal, years later.

“What was I to make of all this? I wonder if the pastoralist nature of the Somali sees an inborn link between the child and its cosmology by having it learn the words ‘sky’ and ‘earth’? First, the child is taught to identify its mother, then its father and there are a chorus of questions like ‘Who is this?’ and, naturally, ‘Who is that? ‘ or ‘What is this or that? ‘ I suspect that the cosmology of the nomads comprehends, at a deeper psychical level, the metaphoric contents of the statements ‘This is the earth’ and ‘That is the sky’. Can this be interpreted to mean ‘God and the grave’? Or do you prefer ‘Rain and food’? In the latter, you identify or locate the source of life, as it were.”

Uncle Hilaal was silent, making no further observation. And I was hearing in my mind the child’s answer “This is the earth”, although not pointing at the earth but touching Misra’s bosomy chest, and she laughing and teasing him, pardon, me. By then — or after a little while — I was back with Hilaal who was saying, “Now what about ‘This is a pen’ and ‘That is a book’, which are the first sentences that open the English world to a Somali or an East-African child?”

I wasn’t sure if he expected me to answer, but he didn’t, apparently. So I simply said, “What about it?”

“An exploratory question. Let’s start with one.”

I waited.

He said, “Are we, in any manner, to see a link between ‘This is a book’ and the Koranic command ‘Read in the name of God’, addressed to a people who were, until that day, an illiterate people? In other words, what are the ideas behind ‘pen’ and ‘book’? It is my feeling that, plainly speaking, both suggest the notion of ‘power’. The Arabs legitimized their empire by imposing ‘the word that was read’ on those whom they conquered; the European God of technology was supported, to a great extent, by the power of the written word, be it man’s or God’s.”

He was silent again. I thought 1 had to make an intelligent contribution. So I said, “That is why the Muslims refer to the Christians and the Jews as the ‘People of the Book’, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

And he sat there, friendly, lovable — and fat. I thought that he was two balls screwed together: the top, his head, was round like a globe and it turned on its axis and travelled, returning every time it made a circle, to the point of reference upon which he pontificated; the middle, his chest, was the seat of his emotion — his paunch breathed like bellows when he laughed and his voice had a fiery fervour about it, setting ablaze, inside my head, a great many fires whose thought-flames burned the ground separating me from him.

“You might take pens and books,” he was saying when I turned to him, “as metaphors of material and spiritual power. And the most powerful among us is the one who will insist that pens write his thoughts in the form of a letter of glory to posterity and that books record his good deeds.”

I thought — but didn’t say — that the one who teaches one either the written or the oral word remains, for oneself, the most powerful among us. Hence the influence of Misra, Salaado, Cusmaan, Aw-Adan and finally Uncle Hilaal, on me. And suddenly, I had a most ingenious thought, “What happens when a people with no written tradition invades a people with such a long history of it?”

I waited anxiously. I wondered if he would use the only example of such a conqueror I could think of. For an instant, I was trapped in the fear that I was off the mark.

“The Goths, a Teutonic people who were illiterate in the sense that they had no written culture, pillaged Rome and Southern Gaul as well as Spain. I am certain there are many others, such as the Mongol warriors.”

“And the view of history? How does history view such conquests?” I asked.

He said, “History treats rather badly emperors who hail from a scattered nomadic warrior people — I’m thinking of Genghis Khan — and who reach the walls of such seats of scientific learning as Peking or Iran’s Tabriz. Genghis Khan — the name means universal emperor — may have been at the head of a cavalry of master horsemen, but history portrays him as ‘barbaric and accuses him of pillaging cities of learning and setting fire to libraries of tremendous worth.”

I was about to ask him another question when I acknowledged Salaado’s entry into the living-room where we were. She said something about lunch being ready and could we both join her at the table and eat so that she could go back to the school where there was a meeting. I said to Uncle Hilaal, “We know what conquerors with written traditions who occupy a land belonging to a people of the oral tradition do. We know they impose upon them a law which makes it unlawful to think of themselves as human. The European colonialists have done so. Can you think of a conquering people, whether nomadic or no, who didn’t impose alien learning, language and culture upon those whom they conquered?”

He got to his feet and reflected.

I readied to follow him should he decide to sit at the dinner-table.

“I can think of one special case.”

I asked, “Who?”

“The Fulanis.”

I said, coming closer, “Who?”

He was silent until we reached the table, until we each picked up a paper serviette. He tucked his under his fat chin (I snickered every time he did that!) and I unfolded mine and laid it on my lap (thinking of the writings I used to scribble on my thighs and on every part of my body, when younger; thinking of Misra, who taught me Amharic in secret).