Hassan Ghedi Santur
Monday, September 26, 2011
“I’m my father’s griot, this is a hymn to him. I am telling you this story so that I can turn my father’s blood and bones, and whatever magic his mother sewed under his skin, into history.”
And so begins Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel, Black Mamba Boy. Based on her father’s amazing story of hardship and survival, it follows him as a little boy making his way from Northern Somalia to the cold shores of England.
I first heard about Black Mamba Boy last year when the long-list for the prestigious
Orange Prize for fiction was announced. The list included Nadifa Mohamed, making her the first Somali-born author to achieve this honour. I bought a copy, and on a cold, winter
Saturday morning, I opened the first page, not knowing what to expect. I was immediately transfixed by the novel’s Dickensian plot of a little orphan boy’s astonishing and heart-breaking adventure across continents, suffering and surviving the horrors of colonial wars and countless other misfortunes. By the time I closed the book it was nighttime, and I felt transported, exhausted, elated, and enriched. I wanted to talk to this fellow Somali writer who has made us all so proud to call her one of our own. I spoke to Nadifa Mohamed from her home in London, England where she lives and is currently at work on her second novel.
Before we talk about your debut novel Black Mamba Boy, tell me about Nadifa Mohamed, the author. What was it like growing up in England as young, Somali, Muslim girl?
There were hardly any other Somalis when I came. It was very rare to meet other people from Somalia, so there was a sense of unity when you did meet other Somalis. It was interesting—it allowed me to create an identity of my own rather than belonging to a big group of any kind.
You went on to study at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, Oxford, where you studied history and politics. Why those two subjects? Have you always been interested in politics?
I think that definitely has something to do with being a Somali. When you’re at home, you talk about history and politics—especially politics—all of the time. I don’t know if it was just my family, but I think it’s more general than that because when you see Somali men gather, that is all they talk about. Even as a child, it was just natural to have these big, angry discussions with my dad about different things, so it was just natural to me to be interested in politics and to have Newsweek lying around. I nearly did study literature because I have always loved literature and fiction, but I wanted to come out having learned some concrete things. I loved history because it’s a combination of fact and imagination. There are facts, but you glue them together in a way that suits our interests. And you learn how history can sometimes be twisted to a completely different narrative. All history is mythology, it’s never universal. Literature is not universal and history isn’t universal. It depends on where you’re looking from.
One of the things your novel does so well is that it humanizes big historical and political forces, such as European colonialism and World War II, through the story of your father as a little boy caught up in these great historical events. Was that a conscious goal, to imbue these events with emotions and humanity?
Oh absolutely. I think part of writing the novel came from a desire to see people like my father’s story described in detail and made central, and when you do that, you create full-bodied characters rather than a snapshot of a hungry child somewhere who’s easily ignored and forgotten. So to tell the story of one person, but also the story of a community, and humanizing the community, was my goal.
Ever since I read your novel, whenever I see stories about Somalis on boats crossing the Mediterranean, they’re no longer figures and numbers. I think about their back stories now.
I think people don’t like to see the full complexities of these people because it’s too upsetting. When I see child soldiers or people starving, it always makes me think of my father. They can never be anonymous anymore.
Has your father read the novel and what was his reaction to it?
He was really amazed, he said, because he never expected anyone to be interested in the small details of his life. But he always did say that his life was unusual and extraordinary and worth telling to people, so for that reason, he feels quite proud.
I was surprised to learn that your father was one of thousands of young Somali boys who made that perilous journey out of Somalia. Can you set up the socio-political conditions of that time that led so many Somali boys to put their lives at risk for a shot at a better life abroad?
He was one of many, many Somali boys who ended up on the streets of Aden. That was very common. There is a really amazing account by a man called Ibrahim Ismaa'il and he wrote a book in 1929 called The Autobiography of a Somali Sailor, and he’s amazing. He’s like my father, but maybe ten to twenty years older. He made that same journey. He took himself to Aden because he heard from other kids that it was like El Dorado with the streets paved with gold. So basically it was a pressure to leave Somali combined with opportunity somewhere else, so when Aden became the second biggest port in the world outside of New York, of course many Somalis went there because their lifestyle was based on livestock, which was very volatile. A few years after my father was born, there was a massive drought and that is why his father left, to look for work. The extra capitalism that came with the British, the French, and the Italians did provide some opportunities, but it also provided the reason to leave because in the south of the country where the Italians were, there was terrible oppression. People were forced to work in plantations and often people died there.
Ever since the controversy over James Fry’s A Million Little Pieces, the whole notion of narrative authenticity has become a big issue. Even though Black Mamba Boy is a novel based on your father’s story, you decided to tell it not as a biography, but as a work of fiction. Did you ever consider telling it as a biography?
I did actually. It started off as a straight biography, but it was just too constricting. My father remembered the practical details, you know, the wheres, hows, and whys, but not really his spiritual life, and the best biographies are the ones that get under the skin of people. And my writing style is…I’m interested in the descriptions as well as the plot. So it just gave me the freedom to write how I wanted to and to also get under the skin of the characters. Lots of Somali biographies tend to be very short because they don’t want to get into the emotional side of things and it’s a big loss.
The book is essentially a historical novel. You describe, quite vividly, the world of 1930s and 40s East Africa and the Middle East, a world that no longer exits. So clearly, there was a great deal of research you had to do. What were some of the challenges of writing about this particular world?
Well, I started with the British Imperial War Museum in London, which is not that far away from me. They have these amazing films recorded by British soldiers of Hargeysa and in Eritrea and different places where my father lived, and that was unique and I am really glad to have seen that. I also went to the School of Oriental and African Studies because they have probably the most thorough collection of books on Somalia. I
also got films—there is this ridiculous film called A Time to Kill set in Eritrea and
Ethiopia during the Second World War, and it has Nicolas Cage in it as an Italian soldier.
It’s very strange, but it gives you a sense of how they saw Africa. And of course lots and lots of interviews with my father, because that was the basis of the book.
Were these interview sessions formal sit-down interviews?
They started off as formal, recorded interviews, but then it became informal and they never really stopped. They just opened the channels of communication, and the more he told me, the more his memories became my memories and I could bring him things he found interesting, like music or maps and different things like that. It was a real privilege.
Lots of people come up to me and say they wish they’ve done that with their grandmother or their great aunt.
I’m of the opinion that the vast majority of writers end up becoming writers because they love to read. That’s certainly true of me. What novels shaped you as a writer? Who are some of the novelists you feel indebted to?
As a child, I loved books by Roald Dahl, and I am re-reading them now to kids in my family. There is a child who is underprivileged in some way who’s up against the hostile world. That has always been an interest of mine, how children like that survive. In terms of style of writing, I think people like Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy. I loved Pushkin when I was young. I love gorgeous writing, writing that doesn’t pretend to be plain or journalistic. I can’t imagine writing a plain book. It takes half the fun away from it. And of course, Shakespeare, which we had to study every year starting in primary school. I love Shakespeare and I think that’s part of the reason why I love gorgeous writing.
There is a whole generation of Somalis who are growing up in the UK, the US, and Canada and so on and who have become exposed to Western literature and who want to be published writers someday. What advice would you give to a young Somali girl or boy who dreams of becoming a successful novelist like you?
I don’t think I would’ve become a writer if I didn’t have a story that completely grabbed me and fascinated me and made me want to write it. You need a story that you won’t give up for years and years, that will not become boring to you. Read everything that you can, as much as you can. The way I write takes a long time. It involves reading, listening to music, looking at photographs, watching films. All of that helps, and sometimes you need to go away and let it cook in the back of your mind for a while and come back to it. It’s an irregular process, but you have to accept that.
As a Somali writer who has visited Somalia recently, what are your thoughts on the famine in Somalia now?
It’s heartbreaking. I can’t describe how heartbreaking it is. You feel guilty for eating.
You feel guilty for enjoying yourself. I remember vividly being ten or eleven when the first famine happened in the 1990s and feeling really impotent, and as a child you think, someone can fix everything and it didn’t happen. So now this time, I want to help, I want to be as active as I can and encourage others to do as much as they can. Considering the global debt crisis facing the world, it would be very easy for Somalia to slip through the cracks and that is a scary thought. At the moment, a million children are at risk of death.
It’s a frightening thought that just by people taking too long or getting distracted, something that has never happened in Somalia, the death of a million children, could happen just like that.
So what would you say to the Somali Diaspora? What can we do?
I think I have been guilty sometimes of being so depressed by the situation that I have ignored it for a period of time, and then I come and think, oh it’s too terrible and look away. I feel in a way personally responsible, even though I know I am not, because when you look away, people starve to death. That’s what happens. What I’ve come to now is the conclusion that it’s a long-term commitment. It’s not something you can look away from and then come back to.
Do you think you might ever settle in Somalia one day, or are you at home now in England?
Each time I go back to Hargeysa, I feel more at home. I went back last year and I really enjoyed it. I always feel like I can do some good there. When we left Somalia, I always felt it was meant to be a temporary absence, so in the back of my mind I always have this feeling, I am gonna go back.
Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel is Black Mamba Boy. It is now out in paperback in North America.
Hassan G. Santur can be reahed at [email protected]