Beyond all of the Africa clichés

An encounter with the British-Somali author Nadifa Mohamed....From Marko Martin

Please, no so-called world literature! "Not prätenziös and pathetic is the sigh, but still seems serious." The term has long been the equivalent label of 'world music', where everything as 'exotic' applies outside the western cultural area. "But Nadifa Mohamed was born in 1981 in Somalia Hargeisa and fled as a child with her family to the UK, not outraged

They also do not handled with the theses of intellectual intimidation icon Edward Said and the Hybriditäts Reflections of the theorist Homi Bhabha, whose mention but does so well in any halfway scholarly conversation about "post-colonial writing". 

This corresponded to the stories with a comfortable smile talking tapping the young woman and bring her in so far two novels with connoisseurship to atmospheric density, actually exactly like the local notion of the atavistic fear chaos beyond the EU regulation cocoons. 

Kitsch nearby including: "Three women whose destiny is irrevocably linked, could be girlfriends and at the end of a precarious alliance of survival close" - the German blurb Nadifa Mohammed describes novel "The Garden of Lost Souls" (CH Beck).

In reality, however, this book - the second of the author , who studied at Oxford History and Politics - a stunning and at the same time credible in every detail, even hyper-precise refutation of our west-even hate generic Köhler belief that only existential need people to true solidarity forcing. In the novel, the opposite is the case. And what experience its three protagonists, is a Dantesque hell out of heat, bustle, excrement, forced prostitution and betrayal.

The author sees from her window chair curiously into the gray Berlin skies and then says quietly, almost casually: "For that is another thing - the myth of the 'strong African woman' women from firewood pre-work to protect their children. worry about everything from marauding gangs, but are not 'strong', but be abused. And the permanent disaster around them it does not allow for even a second that they concede to the human right to weakness. "

Nadifa Mohamed and her family did not come as well as their fictional characters as Mogadishu, but from Hargeisa - since 1992 the capital of independent, though internationally unrecognized Somaliland de jure. And while prevail murder and manslaughter in the hull state of Somalia to the present day, it goes into the stable northern entity to peaceful - which, not least, benefited the author when she interviewed live for her novel there women and their concrete memories to base a gripping fiction made. Nadifa Mohamed formulated a precise analysis of their country. Thus, it is also present on the opinion pages of British newspapers, without having to be too good for such supposedly "Remote literature". She sends half coquettish smile in the room. "The chattering and eternal politicking is already more of a male domain in Somalia, during busy doing all the work on the women." If you believe the hymns of the British literary criticism, it has already proved with her debut novel its assertion Somalis were the most interesting CVs in the world.

Your upper body is prevented. "How wonderful," she says now, "that now so many immigrants or their children have become writers! Nothing would be sadder than when still only half a dozen novelists would have parts of the world re-pre-sen-tee-tion, in which millions and millions of people fully heterogeneous fates live. "

Nadifa Mohamed told by her father, the model of "Black Mamba Boy": The now 89-year-olds had once then slyly to the Italian colonial troops and as a sailor to Aden, before he happened upon the British "Runnymede Park" hired in 1947 who had to bring a notorious prison ship the desperate Jewish passengers of the "exodus" back to Europe, to the port of Hamburg.

"At that time," says Nadifa Mohamed, "saw my father for the first time in his life white people who really suffered. And he understood the decisive beyond traditional notions of race or clan affiliation."Universalism without Tremolo: The young Nadifa Mohamed is now one of its most exciting storytellers.

Nadifa Mohamed: The garden of the lost soul CH Beck, Munich, 269 pp., 19,95 €

This article originally was written in German language 

Source: welt.de