Maps (18 page)

During my brief sojourn in the land of pain, two things occurred: one, I lost myself in it (I wondered, was this why Misra suggested I was given a map of the globe and of the oceans?); two, I took hold of a different “self”, one that had no room and no space for Misra and no longer cared for her. I let go of Misra and, with self-abandon, roamed about in the newly discovered land, thinking not of her, but of pain. It rained a lot and the rain levelled the terrain which wiped out the readable maps, the recognizable landmarks and milestones. And there I met the children of sooterkin and I shook hands with them. I was introduced to my future, my destiny—indeed, somebody pointed it out to me, and there was no Misra. Or was I in the land of dreams?

The waters of the rain washed the slate on which I had written my prayers and the thunder drowned my chanting of the verses which praised the traditions of Islam. The world, crowded like Noah”s ark, lay under my feet. Lying on my back, contemplating the ceiling, I roamed in a state of stupor; I roamed in the darkness of a rainy night, my body soaked in pain; I roamed—spreading myself as though I were water; I roamed inside of my body, which was ablaze with the flames of an untold future. Then I heard a voice, I heard, loud and clear, a voice, peculiarly like my own. I heard, not the blabber of a child whose tongue stumbled on Misra's name, but that of a man, saying what, in essence, could be translated as “I am I!” And I was calmed by what Uncle Hilaal was later to call my “existential certainty”.

And I was asleep and alone.

And I was
suddenly
a bird in ascent, a bird, holding, in the clutch of its beak, the foreskin of a boy's circumcision; a bird, inside of which was folded up, like a map, the entire experience of the cosmos; a bird that had walked out of my human body and been metamorphosed into a dream-animal, free to fly as it pleased. I surveyed the world of which Misra had been an integral part from a reasonable height, after a dreamy flight that nearly took the breath out of me. And I noticed that her hand had been severed from the rest of her body and her head, not in the least plaintive, shouted, “Askar, what's the meaning of all this?”

It rained non-stop for hours and the darkness of the night was thick-bodied. I made sure I held a tighter grip on myself. Then I saw a figure in the distance, a figure standing tall as an obelisk. I walked in the direction of the figure, above whose head, clear as a halo, there now was a lantern. The nearer I moved to the figure, the further we got from each other. Wet, exhausted, my body ached and I walked and walked and walked, and it rained and rained and rained. I walked, holding my sarong at the edges, my body alert, my every step careful. Finally, I reached where the figure and the lantern had been: there was no figure, no statue, no lantern—only the remnants of a corpse, blown up in an explosion of some kind. I went here and there, collecting the unnamable parts of the blown-up person's body, until I got to where the head had dropped—and I screamed with fright.

I don't know what curses I shouted or uttered. All I can tell you is that I woke up, my body wet with sweat, my throat aching from crying and saying again and again and again, “Who am I? Who am I? Where am I? Where am I? Who am I?”

Misra was not there. I was alone.

And no one told me where I was, no one told me who I was.

VI

By the time I started to limp my way to places (although there was a slight pain between my legs) I noticed there was a halo of silence above many a person's head—an ominous silence, a silence punctuated by prayers and sacrificial offerings. I had never seen as many beasts sacrificed as I saw in the following few days, beasts whose meat was offered, with blessings, to the sheikhs who were invited to pray for the safe conduct of those whom Kallafo, our town, sent to the war front.

I asked Misra, “A war? And whom are we fighting?” In those days, everything and everybody was throbbing with inexplicable activity in so far as I was concerned and a number of people were said to be getting ready to marry Once married, the men went off, leaving behind them the dust of victory, the women whom they had just wed, their old parents and the very young. Not until weeks later did we see the full-blooded men in our midst and no strong men returned for long periods unless they were wounded and in need of medical attention. That was how I learnt where Aw-Adan had gone—to the war front. People sat next to the radio and names like Jigjiga, Harar, limey and Dire Dawa occurred frequently in their exchanges—which was when the atlases Uncle had given me became very useful to own. Most of the women were illiterate and had never seen or owned a map. And our room was turned into something like a war-room. We spread the maps on the tables and calculated how long it would take the Somali army to capture a given town and how far this was from us or from Mogadiscio or, for that matter, Addis Abeba.

It was only gradually, however, that it dawned on me that Misra's heart wasn't in it as much as mine or the other people's were. She was excited, of course, whenever any town or village fell to the Somalis, but she was exaggeratedly cautious, saying something like “How long will this victory last?”, or “Where will it take us to?”, or “What will the Russians do?” Somebody called her a “spoil-sport” once or twice and I heard many more wicked things said behind her back. Then, a few days later, I felt that the mood which prevailed was one of hostility towards her. I could sense that more and more people were coming less and less to our war-room. I remembered that she was different from us—that she wasn't a Somali like me and the others; I remembered how often people teased her about her pronunciation of Somali gutturals; I remembered about the warrior of whom she had spoken and of the saddled horse which had dropped its rider. And I, too, saw her in a different light. She wore a grim appearance and was ugly. I recalled a dream I had seen previously, a dream in which the finger of collective guilt was pointed at the Somaliness in me and the others. I asked: hasn't Misra chosen to be one of us? Hasn't she chosen to share with us our pain and pleasure? Now she was undecided whether to leave us or share our bitter destiny with us. She spoke of this too, although I do not think I understood it at the time. “
I
am an Ethiopian,” she said. But how was I to know what species an “Ethiopian” is? I asked the appropriate questions and got the appropriate answers. The image which has remained with me, is that of a country made up of patchworks—like a poor man's mantle. She wasn't decided whether to go back to the Highlands or stay she repeated. Although she no longer spoke or understood the language of the area of Ethiopia in which she was born.

I said, “I'll come with you.”

She greatly belied her pleasure by saying, after a long, long silence, during which she wiped away the tears which had stained her cheeks, “I will not want you to come with me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She turned towards me, her eyes aflame with hot tears. “Because it's not safe for you. They will kill you, my people will, without asking questions, without wanting to know your name or what our relationship is.”

I asked, “Your people, my people—what or who are these?”

“One day,” she said, speaking of a future in which we would meet, “one day, you will understand the distinction, you'll know who your people are and who mine are. One day,” she prophesied, speaking into that void of a future in which she hoped we would meet again,- “you will identify yourself with your people and identify me out of your community Who knows, you might even kill me to make your people's dream become a tangible reality.”

“Kill?” I asked.

“Yes. Kill. Murder. Loot. Rape. In the name of your people. Kill.”

I said, “One day, I might kill you?”

“Maybe,” she said, and walked out of the room.

I

I
n a month or so, especially now that his manhood was ringed with a healed circle, the orgies of self-questioning, which were his wont, gave way to a state in which he identified himself with the community at large. And he partook of the ecstasy of madness that struck the town of Kallafo, an ecstasy that expressed itself in a total self-abandon never known, never experienced in the history of the Somalis of the area. The war was on. At first, the war was mentioned in whispers and was spoken about as one talks of a certain calamity But what mattered to Askar was that it presaged, for him, a future maturer than he had awaited, that it predicted a future in which he would be provided with ample opportunities to prove that he was a man. In his mind, he didn't exclude that some day he might even be recruited as a member of the Western Somali Liberation Front, the front fighting for the liberation of the Ogaden from Ethiopian domination. Who knows, he thought, he could become, at such a tender age, the movement's flag-bearer; who knows, the Ethiopians might forcefully conscript him if the Somalis lost the war; who knows!

What mattered, he told himself, was that now he was at last a man, that he was totally detached from his mother-figure Misra, and weaned. In the process of looking for a substitute, he had found another—Somalia, his mother country It was as though something which began with the pain of a rite had ended in the joy of a greater self-discovery, one in which he held on to the milky breast of a common mother that belonged to him as much as anyone else. A generous mother, a many-breasted mother, a many-nippled mother, a mother who gave plenty of herself and demanded loyalty of one, loyalty to an ideal, allegiance to an idea, the notion of a nationhood—no more, and no less. And his tormented spirit was calmed the instant he walked down the same steps as everyone else, to encounter this common mother, to be embraced by her in joyful reunion, to be breast-fed and helped to rediscover in himself the need for a mother of a general kind.

In those days, Misra sat alone, immured and inert, right in the quiet anxiety of one who had just been transferred to a country alien to herself, a territory of whose earth one didn't eat mouthfuls when one was an infant, when one was but a mouth perpetually open, a mouth famished to the point that it would cry unless it was stuffed with anything—a handful of dirt, a piece of metal one's groping hand got hold of, anything and everything. Anyway, she sat, waiting (Askar didn't know for what or whom!); she sat mantled in her mourning garments; she sat friendless, now that Aw-Adan had gone, now that the men who used to lavish their lusty interest on her were away at the war front, fighting the Somali people's common enemy (she was not herself Somali and Askar by then knew what that meant); men who came home, who touched base every now and then, maybe for a day or two, and who, in haste, contracted matrimonies so they would leave behind themselves widows whose memories they hoped to inhabit, and children onto the end of whose given names theirs would be attached. In such an agitated air, the schools had to be closed and many families changed houses and a great many left for Mogadiscio, the capital of Somalia. And yes, there was much talk about “Somalia”, a country that was referred to as “Mother” in a tone suggesting a getting together of her and the Ogaden/child separated from hen To mark the progress each had made, Askar noted the mother and the child's efforts on the map Uncle had presented him with, just as he traced, on another mental chart, the uncoverable distance between Misra and himself. She began to lose weight; he, to grow it. She sat in a corner, sulking; he, as prominent as the map he read to the illiterates surrounding him, spoke knowl-edgeably, enthusiastically about the liberation war which his people were waging against Misra's people.

He was adrift (and so was the Somali nation everywhere) on a tide of total abandon. At least, he kept thinking to himself, staring at the map on the wall, there would be changes in the cartographer's view of the Horn of Africa. And so, with his felt pen, using his own body, he redrew the map of the Somali-speaking territories, copied it curve by curve, depression by depression. Which reminded him of his father's nickname: Xamari At last, he would be reunited with the city of Xamar from whence came his father's nickname.