Maps

by Nuruddin Farah

  No, I do not remember anything else!

  I remember no flood!

  I recall nothing else either!

  II

  The following morning, I awoke and there was a taste of blood in my mouth. I found it odd that, although my tongue scoured the area surrounding the palate and the floor of the mouth, I could not account for it. Had I drunk drunk blood when asleep? I brushed my teeth a ramber of times. My saliva was as clear as sperm. I sensed no pain anywhere in my mouth. I confess it caused me some concern. And I couldn’t help recalling the day I “menstruated”. But what could the reason be?

  I was torn between sharing the secret with Uncle Hilaal and Salaado and a wish to keep it all to myself, since I didn’t tell it to Misra the first time this happened in Kallafo. I decided to make myself busy so I would occupy my thoughts with grander notions and I began to redraw my map of the Horn of Africa. (In my map, the Ogaden was always an integral part of Somalia.) Anyway, no sooner had I completed the first draft than I heard a knock on the door and I answered, “Please come in. It is open.” Uncle Hilaal entered, holding in his tight grip a teacup he had brought for me.

  “Good morning,” he greeted.

  I said, “Good morning,” and thanked him for the tea.

  My uncle stared at the map for a long, long time, piercing it with his severe concentration. I wondered if he did so because he noticed that my map didn’t have a generic name, but a specific categorization, in that I had scribbled not “The Ogaden” but simply “Western Somalia”, thereby, in a sense, making The Ogaden lose its specific identity, only to gain one of a generic kind. I was surprised that his imagination had taken him to a destination very different from the one I had considered. He said, “Tell me, Askar. Do you find truth in the maps you draw?”

  My mind became the blotted paper one had covered worthless writings with, but it took me nowhere, it mapped nothing, indicating no pathway to follow. I repeated the question aloud to myself as if to be sure, “Do I find truth in the maps I draw?” and waited to see if the coarse ink on the blotted brain would dry, and if I would be able to visualize a clearer image, of which I could make better sense myself. All I could see was a beam of dust the sun had stirred nearer the window. I remained silent.

  Uncle Hilaal clarified his point more. “Do you carve out of your soul the invented truth of the maps you draw? Or does the daily truth match, for you, the reality you draw and the maps others draw?”

  Now, I walked the pathways of my thoughts cautiously. I was an old man negotiating with his feet (he was nearly blind—longsighted as well as shortsighted—you may as well ask, how can that be? but he was!) the hazardous, slippery staircase of a condemned building. ancient as himself. I was sure everything would collapse on my head before long. With the confidence of one who’s regained possession of a mislaid identity: “Sometimes,’ I began to say, “I identify ^2 truth in the maps which I draw. When I identify this truth, I label it as such, pickle it as though I were to share it with you, and Salaado. I hope, as dreamers do, that the dreamt dream will match the dreamt reality—that is, the invented truth of one’s imagination. My maps invent nothing. They copy a given reality, they map out the roads a dreamer has walked, they identify a notional truth.”

  Either he was dissatisfied with my reaction to his question or he didn’t understand it. After he had allowed me time to take a sip of the tea he had just brought in for me, he said, “The question is, does truth change?”

  “Or do we? Do we, men and women and children, change? Or does truth?”

  He said, coming closer, “Better still, who or what is more important: the truth or its finder? You look at a map, of the British colonies in Africa, say, a map whose pinkish portions competed in terms of size and imagination with the green which represented the portions of the continent under the French. Now compare the situation today with its ghostly past and someone may think that a great deal of change has taken place and that names of a number of countries have been altered to accommodate the nationalist wishes of the people of these areas. But has the more basic truth undergone a change? Or have we?”

  In the meantime, I picked up an old atlas: Somalia Italiana, British Somaliland, French Somaliland, the Northern Frontier District (which was then a protectorate, administered separately from the rest of Kenya) and a larger Ogaden. And I remembered seeing a map a German cartographer had drawn as his country invaded and conquered more and more of Europe. In my mind, I compared this “temporary truth” of the German’s redrawn map with Somalia’s remapping the Ogaden as an integral part of the Republic when it held it for a few months. I compared them as “truths”, not as analogous points of rationalization. For in my view, there was a substantial difference—the Germans had no “truthful” right to reassign territories, redesign maps just because they overran these lands and subjected the inhabitants to their tyrannical regimentation, but I believed the Somalis had a “truthful” right to the Ogaden and, in a “just” world, wouldn’t have had to reconquer it.

  Uncle Hilaal asked if I had heard of the name of Arno Peters? And of Eduard Kremer?

  I said I had.

  “And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the 1567 map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our notion of the world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map, is smaller than Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the European’s prejudices, are the maps we used at school when I was young and, I am afraid to say, are still being reprinted year after year and used in schools in Africa. Arno Peters’s map, drawn four hundred years later, gives more accurate proportions of the continents: Europe is smaller, Africa larger.”

  He had laid his finger on the map, tracing the African continent’s projections from its Cape Guardafui in the Somali Peninsula down to the raped Cape in the South, up to North Africa, which once formed part of a Mediterranean world of values. The “truth” was, I thought to myself, that Africa had little or no place in the anciently mapped thoughts of a mini-world. And what was he doing? He was staring at the map and then at me. And I saw in his stare an ambivalence of a kind I had difficulty interpreting. His finger, however, lay on the Somali Peninsula—his finger, skeletal, feeble and without energy

  Then he spoke at length and gave me a richer background, addressing himself to the Mercator projections of the world map and the image the cartographers imprinted on the imagination of billions of school-going populations anywhere in the world. He added, “There is truth in maps. The Ogaden, as Somali, is truth. To the Ethiopian map-maker, the Ogaden, as Somali, is untruth.”

  Silence. My stare presently dwelled on the cup of tea, whose brim was mapped with a whiter, unskimmed milk, which, to both of us, indicated its undrinkability. As he took it away, he stopped, like one who just then remembered why he had come in the first place. He massaged his forehead and finally spoke. “1 meant to ask you if you wanted to come with me because I am calling on Misra. Do you?”

  I thought for a minute or two. “Give me five minutes,” I said.

  “You have ten,” he said.

  III

  As though it were an afterbirth, the sky lay in the secundine of the sea’s womb, it having been expelled in the act of parturition. And Uncle and I sat in the car, with the wipers going flik-flaag, one of them fast, the other limply slow and half-broken, and it poured very, very heavily with rain. I couldn’t tell why we were where we were, there was no reason I could give why Uncle Hilaal had decided to go in that direction. Could it be that we were both upset by the news that Misra had disappeared from her hospital bed? Perhaps “disappeared” is not the right word. Perhaps “taken away” is the right expression. But you have to know something in order to express it well, you have to have evidence so that you may describe things well or know what to do, or, for that matter, decide whether to think badly of someone, or a group of persons. Could it be, for instance, that she was kidnapped by the people whom she thought ill of, because she believed that they suspected her of betrayal? />
  “But what is one to do?” he would say every now and then, when we were both sadly silent for a long time. His look in my direction read like pages of appeal to me and it wasn’t difficult to decipher it. It read, “Since you've known her longest, since you know her a lot better than I, please tell me what to do.” In other words, he wanted me to be his guide in this.

  However, it didn’t take long for it to come out that I didn’t know under what name she had entered the country and hadn’t bothered to ask her who her own contacts in Mogadiscio were. It was only then that one began to regret; that one said what should've been done in the first place; how I should Ve been kinder, more sensitive, more understanding; that Uncle should Ve been more inquisitive and, in a sense, tougher in his dealings with her and if need be more bureaucratically minded. And Salaado? Uncle and I appeared lost without her. It oc-curred to me that he was most definitely unhappy because she wasn’t with him to suggest what next course of action to take. We had driven around for quite a while looking for her. We had been to our house at least three times. We had called at the school where she taught and the principal said she had gone shopping. Since we didn’t know what she was buying, we didn’t know what market to go to when searching for her. As a matter of fact, while driving around. Uncle suggested I keep my eyes wide open just in case “she” was also walking amongst other people, in one direction or another. The “she” my eyes were intent on spotting was not “Salaado” but “Misra”. Although I thought things might have been eased a great deal once we saw Salaado. How we needed her, Uncle and I!

  At the hospital, they said, three men had come and “taken her away” because “they” argued “she” wanted to go. When asked, Misra gave the response, herself, in the affirmative to the nurse. Did she look threatened, tortured, did she appear at all frightened? had inquired Uncle HilaaL The nurse wondered why she should have. Why should a woman leaving hospital of her own accord appear frightened? the nurse had argued. Of course not. “She was, to me, a woman ready to go for a quick dip in the sea,” said the nurse. “The three men were carrying towels—or something like towels anyway, and they were dressed in casual clothes and were addressing her in a friendly manner, each teasing the other and she, in turn, teasing them too.” (I wished I could've asked the nurse what language Misra and the men had communicated in, but I thought better of it because it might not have made any sense to her.) When did she leave the hospital grounds and how? No one knew in what—maybe a taxi, maybe a private car. The time recorded by the nurse on duty was precise to the second—eight thirty-five in the morning. Before the ward’s doctor made the rounds.

  “What are we to do?” Uncle said.

  We were still in the car and it was pouring with the heaviest of downpours I had seen in years. I thought he had looked, not in my direction, but at the sea when asking the question and I wondered why!

  “Suppose they kidnapped her?” I said.

  He was suddenly conscious of one thing—that perhaps there was nothing we could do—and he looked most unhappy “Well, in that case, well have to revise our strategy, won’t we? We must find out how best we can save her life. That is most essential. Save her life.”

  “How?” I said.

  He was relieved that it began to rain less heavily. He switched off the noisy wipers and sighed loudly. He drummed on the dashboard of the car, staring away from me, in silent concentration. “We could go to the National Security and ask that they intervene. I have some friends. I can tell them the whole truth, tell them it is a matter of life and death. In the meantime, we inquire around, see if we know anyone who might know anyone from Kallafo who might know the kidnappers.”

  I was about to say something in disagreement when, suddenly, I tasted blood in my mouth again. I rubbed my tongue against the front of my teeth, down and under them too and tasted my saliva which, in my mind, was white, as spittle generally is. Without giving due thought to the consequences, I placed my cupped hands in front of me and spat into them, only to see that the saliva was actually not affected by the taste in my mouth. My uncle was puzzled. I wouldn’t help him at first. I spat out again. And saw, to my great relief, that it wasn’t red as blood.

  “What are you doing?” he finally said, when he realized that I had repeated the process a number of times. “Are you all right?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  My tongue, in the meantime, was busy working the mouth and tasting the saliva, which the rubbing act had produced. “There is the taste of blood in my mouth,” I told him.

  “Blood?”

  “Yes, blood.”

  “In your saliva, there is the taste of blood?” he asked, worried.

  He seemed anxious about finding a link between the taste in my mouth and Misra’s disappearance. He reflected for a long time. He had an exuberance of expression, one moment delighted at discovering a link in his head; the following moment, unhappy because he couldn’t pursue the idea any further. He said, “Is this the first time ever?”

  And he didn’t let me answer him. He held me by the chin, saying, “Open your mouth and let me see,” and was breathing heavily into my face, making me feel ill at ease. “Move your tongue around,” he said. I did as requested. “But it is white,” he suggested. “Your saliva is white. How can you taste blood in it?” he challenged.

  I sensed in Uncle’s voice a helplessness, but I remained silent. It made me sad that I couldn’t explain to him the workings of my own body, that I couldn’t give him the reason why this most illogical of occurrences had taken place. Could I claim to know Misra better than anyone else when I didn’t know my own body, when I couldn’t determine what made me taste, in my white saliva, the redness of blood? I was sad that I couldn’t say, “This is I. This is my body. Let me explain how it works, why it behaves the way it does.” Or had I underestimated my body? Was it seceding from me, making its own autonomous decisions, was my body forming its own government, was it working on its own, independent of my brain, of my soul? Did we have to go to an arbitrator, say, a doctor, a psychoanalyst, who would determine why it was I had tasted blood in my saliva that day, in Kallafo, many years ago, at the same time as I jumped up in glee because Misra had seen and foretold a future, my future. Was my future in blood? Would I kill? Would I avenge the martyred warriors of Kallafo and therefore “drink” the blood of the one I kill?

  Uncle Hilaal sat back, resigned. He said, “What do we do?”

  “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 psychoanalyti
cal 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?”