Black Mamba Boy Book

Nidifa Mohamed published her first book Black Mamba Boy in 2009. She took the material for it from her father's account of his real life to craft this phenomenal book, which, unlike her flawless beauty, is made more achingly beautiful by its mesh of strength and unapologetic flaws. I met Nadifa at a writer's workshop in the middle of last year, and the wisdom, passion and grace with which she spoke seems to be naturally instilled into her writing.

The book is about a journey. Not about a destination. Though Jama is convinced there is a destination. He dreams of meeting his father. Just like we all are in life, breathlessly working towards attaining our goals. In the end Jama realizes one thing; "not to observe the hustle and bustle of life but to BE IT."

Jama sets out to seek his father whom he believes will make his life a lot better. He has grown tired and dissatisfied with his life on the street as a small Somali scavenger. And when his mother dies, he decides to move. An emotion and a decision beautifully captured by the writer when she writes:

"Life is just this, Jama thought, a long journey, with light and darkness falling over you, companions all around, on their own journeys. Each person sitting passively or impatiently, wondering whether the tracks of their fate will take them on their clattering iron horse to their destination or will sweep them away in an invisible path to another world."

And so she sums up what each of us has felt at some point. That desire to move, to seek to complete ourselves somehow by finding an object of desire to which we might move towards. Often times this is an object that is never there, but it causes us to engage in the journey nonetheless.

Jama's journey is replete with trials and harsh moments, for which the writer does not shy away from in giving scintillating detail. At barely ten years old the boy is left to cater for himself, and when he begins his journey, one can only admire his spirit and courage. I looked up the map and traced my imagination from Yemen to Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, Marseille, Hamburg and finally Wales. My mind was spinning. I don't remember walking a distance more than a few kilometers in my life, and those of my friends who have been privileged to live in a country with a hitchhiking tradition, you will agree that this a great distance indeed. One with no highways but the scorching desert sands for your path. A little unapologetic flaw, I think, for which Mohammed allows Jama to transition rather too fast from place to place. Never truly settling. Though in fiction all is allowed, the very feeling that it is fictitious should perhaps not be a part of the reader's experience.

But Jama's spirit is not destroyed by the harsh journey, or the strange people that he meets along the way. One must also remember that this novel is set in the 30s and 40s. Just a few decades shy of the independence movement and at the height of colonialism, and equally, the onset of the World War II, which started in Europe. Mohamed puts this in context beautifully. Not only does one Italian official imprison Jama in a chicken pen, but he also renames him for his own pleasure. The cruelty mated on Africans by the colonialists is great; and the reader with an aversion to human indignity will probably skip this section of the book. In the writer's words the helplessness of Jama and his fellow Africans is clearly stated:

"It is hard to avenge yourself on someone you fear, when everything about them, their height, power, possessions, confidence, imposes a sense of your own inferiority."

This is a straight-forward novel that is enjoyable both because of its beautiful, honest language and the beautiful scenes that come alive and stay with you long after you have read them. One may have a problem with the range of movement, the many places Jama visits and the many characters that he meets and leaves, but that is the nature of life. There really isn't an absolute need for a direct dramatic trajectory in life is there; we have the ups and downs that make it worth living. Even if, like Jama, we lack a map or have no single penny in our pockets