Black Mamba Boy

by Nadifa Mohamed

  “Yes, hooyo,” Jama replied and stood up to go.

  Grabbing his hand, his mother looked up at him. “God protect you, Goode.”

  Mrs. Islaweyne had a problem with her unwanted houseguest, and she didn’t inconvenience herself by concealing it; rather, in the mother’s long absences she went for the cub. When she realized in her lengthy sickly sweet interrogations that Jama would never speak badly of Ambaro or let slip embarrassing secrets, she volunteered her own criticisms. “What kind of woman leaves her child alone to roam the streets every day?” and “I’m not surprised Somalis have a bad reputation, the way some of these newcomers dress, all naked arms, with their udders hanging out the sides.” The resentment was mutual, and Ambaro and Jama mocked her behind her back. When Ambaro saw Mrs. Islaweyne wrapping her nikaab around her face, she would raise an eyebrow and sing in a bittersweet voice, “Dhegdheer, Dhegdheero, yaa ku daawaan? Witch, oh witch, who will admire you?”

  Dhegdheer was a strange, vain woman, with short plump limbs always oiled from head to toe, her eyebrows drawn on thickly with kohl, a fat, hairy mole on her cheek blending into a luxurious mustache, small, swollen feet squeezed into shoes that Ambaro could never afford. Sometimes Dhegdheer would appear on their roof, glaring at them for no particular reason, marking her territory, and when she returned downstairs, Jama would copy her signature waddle and squint to perfection. “Go eat yourself, witch!” he shouted when she was safely out of earshot.

  “The one thing that woman is good at is breeding, she must have a highway between her legs, she gives birth to litters of two and three as if she were a stray bitch,” Ambaro would say, and she was right, Jama had counted eight children but behind every door there seemed to be more sleeping or crying. The older Islaweyne boys went to school and chattered away in Arabic, even at home. Jama had learned a rough street Arabic which they mocked, mimicking his bad grammar and slang in slow, imbecilic voices. Although ZamZam was not the most alluring of girls, Dhegdheer had her eye on one of the wealthy Somali men who imported livestock from Berbera and wanted her daughter to appear a delicate flower, cultivated in the most refined setting. Jama heard Dhegdheer complaining to her husband that Ambaro and her guttersnipe son lowered the honor of their family. “How can we be first class when we have people like that in our own home?”

  Mr. Islaweyne grunted and waved her away, but it was clear to Jama that his place in the home was precarious. As Jama spent more time on the streets to avoid Dhegdheer and her sons, the more their complaints about him increased.

  “Kinsi said she saw him stealing from the suq.”

  “Khadar, next door, said that he hangs around the Camel mukhbazar joking with hashish smokers.”

  Jama joked with the hashish smokers because he knew his powerlessness and did not want to argue or make enemies. He did not have brothers, cousins, or a father to protect him like the other children. He had recently befriended Shidane and Abdi, who were kind and generous, but friendships between boys of different clans tended to form and collapse as quickly as nomad’s tents, never lasting.

  In the apartment, the cold war between the women was thawing and simmering in the summer heat. Ambaro, tired and frustrated after work, became more combative. She used the kitchen at the same time as Dhegdheer, helped herself to more flour and ghee, picked out whichever glass was clean instead of the ones set aside for them, and left the laundry waiting for days at a time. Even with Jama she was like a kettle whistling to the boil: one day she wanted him to work, another day to attend school, another day to stay on the roof and keep away from those market boys, and yet another day she didn’t want to see him ever again. Jama at first tried to soothe her, massaging away all the knots in her body with his keen, sprightly fingers, but soon even his touch irritated her and he left her, to spend the nights with Shidane and Abdi. He returned every few days to wash, eat a little, and check on his mother, until one evening he came in to find Ambaro and Dhegdheer in the kitchen, bosoms nearly touching, nails and teeth bared, ready to pounce on each other. From what he could tell through the shouts of “Slut born of sluts!” and “Hussy!” Dhegdheer was ordering his mother out of the kitchen, and she was cursing and standing her ground, looking ready to spit in Dhegdheer’s face. Jama grabbed his mother’s arm and tried to pull her away. Dhegdheer’s sons, older and stronger than Jama, slunk into the kitchen, unable to ignore the shouting women any longer. Ambaro and Dhegdheer were now grappling with each other, pushing and shoving among the steaming pots, and Jama hustled the pans off the fire and put them out of harm’s way. Ambaro was younger, stronger, and a better fighter than the housebound Dhegdheer, and she pushed the older woman into a corner.

  “Soobah, soobah, come on,” jeered Ambaro.

  Dhegdheer’s oldest son grabbed hold of Ambaro and jostled her onto the floor.

  “Stop that shameful behavior,” he squeaked in his breaking voice.

  Seeing his mother lying on the floor, Jama without any thought picked up a pan of boiling soup and slung the steaming liquid in the boys’ direction. The soup fell short of their bodies but cascaded over their bare feet. Dhegdheer was beside herself. “Hoogayey waan balanbalay, my precious boys, beerkay! My own livers,” she keened. “May Allah cut you up into pieces, Jama, and throw you to the wild dogs.” Dhegdheer picked up a long butcher’s knife and began sharpening it. While Ambaro tried to wrench it out of her hands, Jama darted beneath their legs and escaped from the apartment.

  Shidane and Abdi slapped Jama on the back when he told them he was never going back to the Islaweyne house. Aden was a huge, dangerous playground for market boys and Shidane knew all of the secret nooks, crevices, holes, and storerooms that made up its unseen map. Together they could avoid older boys who would rob or beat them. Each morning they ambushed donkey carts to steal bread and woven baskets of honey, Jama and Shidane wrestling the young Arab drivers down while Abdi carried away what they needed. It was only when they became a gang that Jama realized Abdi was nearly deaf, he would put his ear right up to your mouth to compensate and hold your hands while he listened.

  As they sat on their rooftop, watching the setting sun turn the pools of water in the ancient tanks into infant stars, Jama and Abdi snuggled under an old sheet. Shidane laughed at their canoodling and they laughed at his big ears.

  “No wonder your poor uncle is so deaf! You have taken enough ears for both of you,” said Jama, grabbing hold of Shidane’s flapping ears.

  “You can talk!” exclaimed Shidane in response, pointing at Jama’s big white teeth. “Look at those tusks in your mouth! You could pull down a tree with them.”

  “You wish you had teeth like mine, rabbit ears. With a lucky gap like this in my teeth, you wait and see how rich I become. You would die for my teeth, admit it.” Jama displayed his teeth for them to envy.

  Ambaro had spent days holding her breath when Jama had disappeared, while Dhegdheer took quiet satisfaction from her pain. Mr. Islaweyne had allowed Ambaro to move into a tiny room in the apartment until he found another clansman or woman to take her in; he did not want to earn a bad name by throwing her out on the streets. Ambaro searched for Jama in dark, filthy alleys late at night, long after her twelve-hour shift had finished she was still looking, she went to his old haunts, asked around with the other market boys but they kept the stony silence of secret police when adults penetrated their world. She had no friends among the coffee women, and unlike the other Somali women she met at the water faucet or bought pastries from in the street, their troubles gushing forth at every opportunity, her anguish stayed locked up within her chest without release. Her pride would not allow her to broadcast her woes, her life would not become honey for gossips, who “Allah-ed” and bit their lips in front of her and laughed behind her back. She continued her late-night search on her own; Jama disappeared regularly but Ambaro had a panicky feeling that this time he would not come back. Her daughter, Kahawaris, began appearing in her dreams, and she hated dreaming of the dead.

  Unlike the Som
ali hawkers, coffee cleaners, beggars, or dancers who often abandoned four- and five-year-old boys on the street when their fathers absconded, she had guarded Jama as best as she could, and thought day and night, How can I keep my baby safe? They had come to Aden expecting an El Dorado where even the beggars wore gold but instead it was a dirty and dangerous place, heaving with strangers and their vices.

  Jama was the only family she had or wanted; she had not seen the rest since leaving for Aden. Ambaro had grown up in the care of her aunt after her mother, Ubah, died of smallpox. Izra’il, the angel of death, had barged through Ubah’s door fourteen times to spirit away her legion of children with diarrhea, petty accidents, coughs that had wracked tiny rib cages. Ubah had left one live child, a heartbroken, sickly little girl who haunted her grave, waiting for the Day of Judgment to arrive and restore her mother to her. Smallpox had laid its hand on Ambaro’s body but she had survived, wearing her scars as proof of her mother’s ghostly protection. As she grew older, Ambaro became a lean, silent young woman, beyond the jurisdiction of her father’s other wives; she wandered far away with the family goats and sheep. Grief for her mother and lost brothers and sisters kept her detached from the other members of the family, who feared her and worried that misfortune might lead her to perform some evil witchcraft on them. Ambaro’s eyes were too deep, too full of misery to be trustworthy. It was only Jinnow, the levelheaded matriarch of the family, who showed her any affection. Jinnow had delivered Ambaro into the world as a baby, whispering the call to prayer in the small shell of her ear. Jinnow had held the baby up to her mother, rubbed the blood off the child and revealed the brown birthmark on her cheek that earned her the old-fashioned name Ambaro.

  Guure the orphan grew up in the adjacent aqal with another elderly aunt, but while Ambaro was called “cursed” and “miserable,” he was petted and fawned over. He pulled Ambaro’s plaits and nicknamed her “Ameer,” heifer. One dry season, Guure went away with the camels an irritating, dry-kneed wastrel and came back a lissome poet with long eyelashes. She watched him for a long time before he noticed her, but then he began sneaking up behind her as she trekked to the well or collected firewood. She had always felt as thorny and barren as the desert that surrounded her, with snakes and cacti in her heart, but Guure brought rains that made the cacti flower.

  When Guure’s proposal of marriage was refused by Ambaro’s father, she pleaded with Jinnow to send word to Guure to meet her, and Jinnow, unable to deprive her of any happiness, acquiesced. Ambaro wrapped herself in her newest shawl, broke through the back of the thorn fence, and escaped into the night. Guure stood waiting under the great acacia as she planned, lithe and smiling, his skin shining in the moonlight. His brown afro formed a halo around his head and with his luminous white robes she felt she was running away with the archangel Jibreel. He had brought with him a cloth bundle. He kneeled down to open it and brought out a pomegranate, and a gold bangle stolen from his aunt; he passed these to Ambaro, kissing her hands as she took them. Then he removed a lute and pulled her down to sit next to him, the cloth underneath her. He plucked the strings sparsely, delicately, watching the shy smile on her face grow mischievously; he then played more confidently, easing out a soft melody. It sounded like spring, the twang of a blossom as it bursts out if its bud. They sat entwined until the moon and stars were hidden by clouds, leaving them with the freedom of the night.

  They were married the next day by a desolate saint’s tomb near the road to Burao, in a wedding witnessed by strangers and conducted by a rebellious sheikh who laughingly placed two goats in the role of the bride’s male guardians. They returned nervously to the family encampment, its girding of thorn branches torn in places by jackals, bloodstains and wool stretching away into the desert. The elders were furious, both for their disobedience in getting married and for damaging the fence, so they refused to give anything to the young couple, who were forced to build a ramshackle aqal of their own. Ambaro quickly learned that her husband was a hardened dreamer, always stuck in his head; he was the boy everyone loved but would not trust with their camels. Guure could not accept that his carefree youth was over; he still wanted to wander off with his friends, while all Ambaro wanted was a family of her own. Guure played the lute with all of his passion and attention but was listless and incompetent with the practical details of life. They had no livestock and lived on plain jowari grain, boiled and tasteless. Jinnow smuggled them small offerings of meat and ghee when possible but she could not stop tut-tutting at the predicament Ambaro had got herself into; she had wanted Guure and Ambaro to get married but not in this slapdash, hurried way. Jinnow’s disappointment was cutting to Ambaro, and in the blink of an eye, she became Guure’s judge, his overseer, his jailer; she followed him everywhere and dragged him home when necessary.

  When Jama arrived a year later in Ambaro’s eighteenth year, she hoped it would force Guure to start providing but instead he carried on endlessly combing his hair and playing his lute, singing his favorite song to Ambaro, “Ha I gabin oo I gooyn. Don’t forsake me or cut me off.” He occasionally dangled the baby from his thin fingers before Ambaro snatched Jama away. Ambaro carried both a knife and a stick from the magic wagar tree to protect her son from dangers seen and unseen—she was a fierce, militant mother, her sweet mellow core completely melted away. Ambaro tied the baby to her back and learned from Jinnow all the things that women did to survive, how to weave straw baskets, make perfume from frankincense and myrrh, sew blankets from Ethiopian cloth, intending to barter these items in neighboring settlements for food. Whatever Ambaro did, they remained destitute, and she was reduced to foraging in the countryside for plants and roots: dabayood, likeh, tamayulaq. When Guure began to spend his days chewing qat with young men from whom he caught the Motor Madness, Ambaro was ready to tear her hair out. He bored Ambaro with obsessive talk about cars and the clansmen who had gone to Sudan and earned big money driving Ferengis around. It all seemed hopeless to Ambaro, who had never seen a car and could not believe that they were anything more than the childish sorcery of foreigners. Ambaro tried desperately to extinguish this fire that was burning in Guure, but the more she criticized and ridiculed him, the more Guure clung to his dream and convinced himself that he must leave for Sudan. His talk stole the hope from her heart, and she wondered how he could desert his family so easily. He would hold her as she wept, but she knew only heartache lay ahead.

  Guure quietened down when a daughter arrived a year after Jama, a smiling golden child with big happy eyes that Ambaro named Kahawaris, after the glow of light before sunrise that heralded her birth. Kahawaris became the light of their lives, a baby whose beauty the other mothers envied and whose giggles rang through the camp. Jama had grown into a talkative little boy, always petting his little sister, accosting the adults with questions while he carried Kahawaris on his back: “Why are your toenails black?” “What made your beard orange?” With his two children pawing at him, complaining and crying with hunger each night, Guure promised that he would take any work he was given, even if it meant carrying carcasses from the slaughterhouse. He began to help Ambaro with the chores, scorning the jeers of his friends to collect water from the well and milk the goats alongside the women.

  Life carried on bearably like this until, after a long, exhausting day of collecting gum for her perfumes, Ambaro unstrapped her daughter from her back and found her limp and lifeless in the cloth sling. Ambaro screamed for Guure and he took the child from her arms and ran to Jinnow, who tried to rouse the baby with drops of ZamZam water and prayers and slaps.

  Ambaro’s soul emptied after her baby’s death, she wept in sunshine and moonlight, she refused to get up, to feed herself or Jama. She blamed Guure for making her carry a young baby while she bartered from settlement to settlement in the heat and dust. Ambaro had feared for Jama, as a baby she had constantly put her ear against his heart to check it was still beating, but he had thrived with her. Now she felt that she had failed Kahawaris, had been a bad mother to the
beautiful child, had become arrogant and careless. Guure struggled hopelessly to look after them. He fed and bathed Jama but he could not trade and barter like Ambaro, so they often went hungry or begged. He did not know the value of anything: Was a perfume vial worth two blankets or just one? How much grain should he ask for if he gave a woman a basket full of tamarind? The wily women cheated him and sent him away with curses. Guure’s father had died before he was born, so he had no idea what a father did or didn’t do, he just floundered along guiltily, frightened that Jama would also die. Finally, when a drought devastated the clan’s camels, sheep, and goats, people began to disappear: some to find work in Hargeisa, some to live with relatives in Aden. Families dissolved as people sought survival down every dirt track.

  Guure cupped Ambaro’s face in his hands and said, “Look, either I go and make a living for us or you do. What will it be?” Ambaro took his hands away and kept silent.

  That very same day, Guure set off on a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan. That was the last they saw of him, though they sometimes heard tales of his wanderings: clansmen told Ambaro that he was in Djibouti singing, in Eritrea fighting, in Sudan driving. She did not tell Jama these stories, not wanting to raise his hopes with mere rumors; only news of deaths and births could be trusted along these slippery streams of walking men. Ambaro waited and waited for Guure, not knowing if he had died, gone mad, met someone else. Her family demanded that she divorce him, the wadaads told her that she had been abandoned and was free, but still she waited. She went to Aden and its factories, hoping to earn enough to track him down. She cursed her admirers and sent them away in the hope that one day Guure would appear over the horizon with his lute strapped to his back.

  Returning to the Islaweynes’ house was too bitter a fruit for Jama to stomach; the bloated, pompous pig of a woman treated Jama and his mother like flies hovering around her heaped dinner plate. He had grown tired of making his small body even smaller so that false queen could feel like the air in the room was her sole preserve. Even his mother did nothing but give him a headache with her cursing, shouting, and smacking, and he stayed away longer than he intended because he was afraid of the beating he would eventually receive. Living on the streets intermittently from the age of six had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation; he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower back and taste it in the thick, dusty air. He thought from the primitive, knotted tangle of nerves at the base of his spine—like Adam, his needs were primal, to find food, find shelter, and avoid predators. Sleeping on roofs and streets had changed his sleep from the contented slumber of an infant, safe within his mother-sentried realm, to a jerky, half-awake unconsciousness, aware of mysterious voices and startling footsteps. Weeks came and went but Jama rarely knew where he would be eating or sleeping on any given night, there was no order to his life. Jama could easily imagine growing old and weak on these cruel streets, eventually being found one day, like other market boys he had seen, cold and stiff on the curb, a donkey cart carrying him away to an unmarked pauper’s grave outside town before stray dogs made a meal of him.