Exile: Her feet planted in Somaliland sand, an English school in her head

Nadifa Mohamed

By Feargus O’Sullivan

When writer Nadifa Mohamed returned to her Somaliland home town of Hargeisa in 2010 after 22 years’ absence, it was not her eyes that helped her locate her childhood home, but her feet.

“I was walking around the neighbourhood I was staying in and at one point I felt my legs sinking into the sand in the street. I remembered it straight away from when I was a child – that area is embedded in me, and everything fell into place.”

This anecdote of return and deep memory reveals a process that is at the heart of Ms Mohamed’s fiction. Now 31, she was prised away from Somaliland at the age of six, when her family fled the country and moved to the UK to escape the escalating civil war.

Her path to British literary success was fairly smooth: school in suburban London and graduation from St Hilda’s College Oxford were followed by a shortlisting for the Guardian First Book Award and an Orange Prize longlisting for her first novel, Black Mamba Boy.

Now Ms Mohamed has been endorsed by that most respected of literary commendations, publisher Granta’s decennial list of the best young British writers. She joins a group that has included Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Despite an adulthood and promising career firmly based in Britain, it is to her family’s Somaliland past that Ms Mohamed’s work consistently returns. She seeks to rediscover roots and memories made distant by migration, to sink her feet back into the sand of her past.

Lean and poetic, her writing attempts this feat by mixing invention with retold family anecdote, piecing together a narrative that connects fragments of the past with her imagination. Black Mamba Boy reimagined her father’s real life journey across Africa and the Middle East, searching for his own lost father. Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, due out this August, follows three Hargeisa women as Somaliland descends into civil war. It is a compelling snapshot of a city whose normal life is unravelling into violence and an elegy to the childhood friends and relatives Ms Mohamed left behind.

It is no coincidence that the imagery in these books sometimes has the dreamy vividness of brown-edged old photos – it is faded images like these that set her creative process into motion.

“Normally my writing starts with an image or two that I can’t get out of my head,” she says. “With Black Mamba Boy, I was haunted by this mental picture of a man on a ship, a sepia-toned image of a black guy staring out to sea. Another one was on three little boys in loincloths splashing around in the water, probably in Aden.”

The process of determining the identity of the people in these images and where they fit within the narrative is one that involves as much talking and listening as reading and writing.

While she cites South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee and Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma as influences, her greatest enthusiasm seems to be for less obviously literary inspirations.

“Music is a huge influence on me. When I was writing Black Mamba Boy, I listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong, partly because his deep, gravelly voice reminds me so much of my dad’s. The Nubian Egyptian singer Ali Hassan Kuban also blew me away – his music is like what I want to achieve with writing: it’s jagged, mad and fast and also sounds somehow ancient. In a way, it’s my soul music.”

Understandably for someone whose writing has family storytelling so close to its centre (though she insists that her work is not directly biographical) Ms Mohamed cites the cadences of Somaliland speech as key in shaping her style. She feels that a certain writerliness is a typical trait of everyday Somaliland talk.

“When I read other Somalis, the way of phrasing is very long sentences running on, images that pile on top of each other. Somaliland is very poetic, in a way that I’m only discovering right now in my own voice. People talk in a really very literary way there, much more than in the UK. Just listening in to a normal conversation between old women, they’re often masters language-wise. The depth of language is incredible – and this is often from people who can’t read.”

Despite the vividness of these voices in Ms Mohamed’s writing, her work thrives on distance and recollection. Agreeing that it might have been her family’s flight from war-torn Somalia that motivated her to become a writer, Ms Mohamed says her former homeland is a place she chooses to return to imaginatively rather than physically.

“It’s taken me a long time to accept that I won’t go back to Somaliland. When we first left, the move was always meant to be temporary and even recently I thought I’d go. But now I’ve come to realise that London is my home.”

This gradual realisation is perhaps typical of her generation of British Somalis, many of whom left their birth country during the civil war to escape anarchy that they assumed would be shortlived.

But joining contemporaries such as journalist Rageh Omaar and athlete Mo Farah, who have made highly visible contributions to British culture, it seems that Ms Mohamed’s future work may move on from Somaliland-based subjects to explore her inevitably complex relationship with her adoptive country.

The obsessive images shaping the contours of her third book – still very much at the planning stage – explore the writer’s early years in Britain. “I have in my head a big, grey Victorian school, like a camp or an institution, somewhere in London. She went to one such school here herself, she says, and it left an “indelible memory” for her: “that shock to my system of leaving my mother for the first time”.

Source: Financial Times