Nuruddin Farah - Maps

“Let’s go back to Salaado,” I suggested.

At the mention of her name, he appeared animated with life. He was like one who had found the right road to self-confidence. He started the engine of the car and, clumsily, didn’t coordinate the clutch and gear shifts so the vehicle jumped and the ignition went off. Then the car wouldn’t start because he flooded the carburettor. Finally we got out. “Let’s take a taxi home to Salaado,” he said. “She’ll come and drive the car home herself.”

We walked away from the car in subdued silence. We walked for a long time and were unable to find a taxi. Which was just as well, for we had the opportunity to talk and think.

IV

I said to Uncle Hilaal that instead of thinking about Misra’s disappearance, I started becoming obsessed with “bodies”—human bodies, that is, my body, Misra’s, etc. I admitted that I could find an even subterranean link between bodies and Misra’s disappearance. This gave Hilaal a golden chance and he talked about Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, Marx and Fraser, men, he said, “who’ve divided up the universe of thought amongst themselves, leaving little for us to contribute”. I think he quoted passages from each of these. I think he threw in other twentieth-century figures — poets like Eliot and Neruda, and “body poetesses” like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and “body novelists” like Toni Morrison and Günter Grass. He for-exampled me for what appeared like a long time and then we entered the tunnel leading to my subconscious. I don’t know precisely where, but I abandoned him in a dark corner in “my subconscious”, digging for psychoanalytical evidence. As if this would illumine an obscure section, he mentioned the names of Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, William James and Adler too.

At the thought that I had to read and know thoroughly everything these “men” had written about one’s relationship with one’s body, mind, sub- or unconscious, I said, “No, thank you. Millions of people live happily, believing that knowing more will not help them, but will rather stand in the way of enjoying themselves.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“I understand it is in your material and intellectual interest to promote these names, for you to teach psychology at the university and to teach these thinkers’ findings to your students, yes — but…!”

“For example.”

I don’t remember what he said after this. I only remember my questions — queries which have become part of me in the way wrinkles are an integral part of somebody’s face, inseparable from it. It seems to me, when I look back on this conversation, that Hilaal, as though he were hard of hearing, gave his answers to questions I didn’t put to him. I didn’t let him get away with it, I thought I shouldn’t. I said, among other things, that I am a question to myself— and my body asked the first question. Was it salvaged from the corpse of my mother? What’s a body for? To worship God? To have sex, have children? Has anybody known a man who menstruated? What is it that is in the “mind” of a man’s uffthat makes it “rise” to the naked body of a woman? What’s in the touch of a woman’s breasts or thighs?

“Sooner or later, sex,” said Hilaal. What did he mean by that?

“No story is complete without sex; no story can be considered well told unless sex runs in its veins like blood in a living being. If sex is not present, then its absence indicates inhibitions, unless the symbols, motifs and metaphors that make the tale work, are such they narrate the story in a veiled manner. For example, Al-Macarri’s Letter of a Horse and a Mule . What’s more, no family can be happy without sex. And the sex of a child — a boy or a girl. Sex as honour. Good sex. Bad sex. Sooner or later, everything is sex. Religion organizes sex. That’s why society frowns upon and punishes unauthorized sex. The economics of non-industrial societies consider cattle and women as chatties, as properties that change hands. And sex costs money. To marry, you pay dowry, you give so many heads of cattle in exchange for what? For a hand? No. For sex. I keep asking myself if the Adenese in your story the one who raped hens and small boys, was simply stingy or was he beastly?”

“I don’t understand.”

He said, “Sex between the higher and the lower animals (that is between human beings and beasts) is taboo in all societies. I won’t go into the politics of apartheid in South Africa which essentially denies the humanity of the African. Nevertheless, there is an element of superiority and inferiority relationships in sex. The master has access to his servant/slave — Qorrax and Misra is a case in point — the teacher to his pupil — Aw-Adan and Misra. But when the Adenese copulates with his hen, he does something more than break a taboo. For this is substantially different from the one he breaks when he mates with small, non-consenting boys. The small boys belong to the higher-animal category and society frowns upon sex between two beings belonging to the higher-animal category. Sex between men (who are, in all traditional, i.e. male-dominated, societies, placed higher than women) and women is okay. Sex between Misra and her rapists, who themselves assumed the identity of baboons — is this sex between higher and lower animals?”

He scoured the area, looking for a taxi. None. He went on, “For example. In almost all these relationships, the woman occupies the lower rung. In bed, she is the one below, the one being made love to. Sex, sooner or later. God is male. All the prophets are male. And it is no accident that Prophet Mohammed worked for a woman who, in the end, he married and subdued. It is significant that he was an ummi —the Arabic word suggesting, at one and the same time, that he was illiterate and that he was a man of his mother’s people. You can deduce whatever Freudian conclusions you please. Sooner or later, at any rate, sex.”

Again, he fell into his “for-exampling” euphoria, talking about boys who because their rudimentary nipples grow visibly larger than other boys’, refuse to shower in the company of their peers. These boys are so obsessed with their bodies, they wonder if they are girls underneath the skin. Women who grow beards or moustaches early in their lives tend to worry about this too. But when a girl plays with boys and enjoys (with a certain immodesty, and, it must be said, panache) taking part in one tomfoolery or another, it is the parents who are preoccupied.

Suddenly just when I was about to start wondering why he was talking nervously and continuously he paused. I thought he, too, was anxious about Misra’s disappearance and this was why he was talking non-stop. But he surprised me. I knew, from the twinkle in his eye, that he had thought of something funny or wise. He said, “Do you know why sex bothers me, why I give it much thought?”

I said I didn’t.

He laughed. Then, “Because you come when you are not ready to go, ” and he laughed at his own joke. I retraced his steps to before his first laugh. Oh what a fool, I thought to myself, when I got the joke. But I couldn’t laugh to my heart’s content because he had already moved on further afield, picking ripe fruits off trees older than the one planted by Misra the day I was born. How did I know that he had picked tasty fruits? Because he was tasting his “thoughts” like a peasant pouring a quarter of a pound of sugar into a mug of tea, one who is plainly after the sweetness of the hot, brown water, not the nicotine content of the beverage. However, he was speaking slowly, moving relaxedly in the spaciousness of his ideas, although he appeared to be full of mistrust, like a baby bom with its bottom first because it is sure someone will do an untoward thing to its sight.