Maps (27 page)

One day, when she was busy with marking examination papers, you asked Salaado to explain something to you. She was gentle, as usual, but said she was otherwise occupied and suggested you ask Uncle to teach you for that and the following two days.

“It is his voice,” you said.

She didn't quite understand. “How do you mean? What is it about his voice that you don't like? Or does he frighten you? Tell me.”

You noted one thing in your brain—the fact that she didn't address you as Misra used to, didn't clothe her speeches with endearments, and yet you did not feel distanced from her, ever. Also, for whatever it was worth, you noted something else in your mind—the fact that
you
took a back seat, allowing others to take life's seats of prominence. You were not, in other words, the only one who existed, you were not the one around whom the sun, the moon, the stars, in short, the world, revolved.

“Answer me, Askar. What's it about Hilaal's voice that bothers you?” she said, holding your hands gently in hers.

You said, “It does not allow me to concentrate on what he is say-ing.”

“I still do not understand,” she said.

You tried to express yourself better, but realized that you hadn't the courage to speak the thoughts which crossed your mind. It was years later that you told Salaado that, “Just as the beauty of the world fades when compared with yours, all other voices and life's preoccupations are rendered inexistent when he speaks. His bodied voice appears before me as though it were another person. Looking at him, I find I cannot also concentrate what
the other
, i.e. the voice, is saying. Are you with me?”

“Yes,” she nodded, her voice almost failing her.

IV

Nowadays, you can afford to laugh at the thought of yourself resisting the temptation to pull at Uncle Hilaal's nose—pull at it and squeeze it teasingly, as one might a cute baby's cheeks—since you always believed he had a nose small as an infant's fist with his fat face, very much like a child's. You suspected it was his voice which held you at bay, his voice which held you at arm's distance, his voice which was strong, almost baritone, varying in levels as it did in registers and which you stored away in the depository of your memory so you could make use of it in old age and remember what he said to you, as much as to anyone else—a voice which you could replay as often as you pleased.

Of course, you cannot put dates to events, nor can you recall precisely when Uncle Hilaal said it and to whom. Possibly, it was when the Somalis were still victorious and the “Ethiopians” were in total disarray, fleeing “homewards” and leaving behind them cities which were intact; when her infantry escaped, leaving behind unused cartridges of ammunition. And you think it was then that he said, “The point is, who's an Ethiopian?”

Now what made you repeat to yourself the rhetorical question, “The point is, who's an Ethiopian?” Weren't you repeating it to yourself because in those days it gave you immense pleasure to mimic Uncle Hilaal's voice? Salaado happened to be standing near by. You know how adults like answering children's questions? For although your question wasn't addressed to anybody in particular, Salaado answered it. You weren't displeased, but you were startled. Politely, you listened to her talk as she pointed out the difference between the country which Menelik named Ethiopia—meaning in Greek “a person with a black face” (Salaado suspected it was a foreigner who named it Ethiopia)—and that which had been his power base until his army's occupation of the southern territories at the turn of the century. You were attentive and learning a great deal from Salaado when Uncle Hilaal joined you. He listened for a while before making his contribution.

Hilaal said, “Ethiopia is the generic name of an unclassified mass of different peoples, professing different religions, claiming to have descended from different ancestors. Therefore, ‘Ethiopia' becomes that generic notion, expansive, inclusive. Somali, if we come to it, is specific. That is, you are either a Somali or you aren't. Not so with ‘Ethiopian', or for that matter not so with ‘Nigerian', ‘Kenyan', ‘Sudanese' or ‘Zaïroise'. The name ‘Ethiopia' means the land of the dark race.”

“And Abyssinia?” asked (you think) Salaado.

Uncle Hilaal, disregarding the question, continued, “Did you know that Zaïre is the Portuguese word for river—which was perhaps how a Portuguese traveller named the country he happened to have been in—although there's nothing ‘authentically national' about it, as Sesse Seko would have us believe. ‘Nigeria', did you know, was named such by Lugard's mistress, again after the river Niger, and Sudan after the Blacks whose country it is. Somalia is unique. It is named after Somalis, who share a common ancestor and who speak the same language—Somali.”

“I said, what about Abyssinia?” asked Salaado with a certain anxiety.

He said, “Abyssinia, too, is a generic name, coming, as it does, from the Arabic word ‘Xabasha'—meaning Negro. Again, the country assumes a generic name—not specific. Before it became an empire, when it was but a small kingdom, it was called Abyssinia; later, when it expanded and became an empire, Ethiopia. Both names have generic qualities about them.”

“Now what are we to learn from these concepts? And what do they mean in terms of the war in the Horn?” she asked.

He thought for a long time. Then: “What is at war are the generic and the specific as concepts—the Soviet Union, the USA, the African countries who are members of the OAU support the generic as opposed to the specific. Obviously, they themselves belong to the generic kind.”

“But the specific is winning the war?” she put in.

He predicted, “Only temporarily.”

“How do you mean?”

Again he thought for a long time.

“The generification of Africa is a concept which the Ethiopian and other African governments whose peoples belong to different ethnic groupings and sources use, whenever it is challenged by secessionists and ethnic minorities living in their expansionist and inclusive boundaries. Only in logical propriety do Somalis win their case—the Somali, as a people, divided into two British Somalilands (one of them independent and now forming part of the Republic, the other at present known as Kenyan Somaliland); French Somaliland; Italian Somaliland (forming part of the present-day Republic—democratic or not!) and former French Somaliland (now the Republic of Djebouti). The Somali-speaking peoples have a case in wanting to form a state of their own nation … but… !” and, shrugging his shoulders, he fell silent.

“But what?” she wanted to know.

He smiled. “That's it precisely.”

Tense, she said, “But what?”

“It is the ‘but' which introduces an element of the uniqueness of the Somali case, as well as the generally accepted fear that if Somalis were allowed to get what they are after, then the Biafrans will want to try it again, the Masai will want their own republic, and the people of southern Sudan their own ‘generic' state. What escapes detractors of the great national dream is that Somalis have fought and will fight for the realization of their nationalist goals, but that the Masai haven't and aren't likely to; and that Somalis aren't the only ethnic minority in Ethiopia who are displeased with their low status in the Amharic-speak-ing people's Empire; or that the Somalis in Kenya, in the only British-held referendum, voted phenomenally highly, as a people deciding to be part, not of Kenya, but of the Republic. It is the ‘but' which stands in the way of the Somali.”

Naturally, you cannot imagine yourself pulling at the nose of someone whose life was an embodiment of ideas; whose voice was immensely larger than any mansion you had ever seen; and who lived in the contradictory roles of “Mother” to you and Salaado. Didn't you both rest your heads drowsily on his chest? Misra, in her limited way, taught you to separate the body from the soul; Salaado, the person from the personable; and Uncle Hilaal helped you home in on
the other
.

Now, do you remember when you asked, “But what do you do. Uncle, locked up in your study, day in day out?” Do you remember what answer you got—and if you were at all satisfied with it?

V

Your uncle's study faced east and, in the mornings, when you looked out of the window, the sun's brightness blinded you, and when you looked inside, you saw nothing but books, some heavy, some light to carry, some with pictures and some without. At any given time, there were a number of them open and he consulted them with concentration. You learnt, much later, that he had been researching into the psychological disturbances the war had caused in the lives of children and women. He never appeared keen on asking you questions. He knew you would speak, sooner or later; that you would tell him the dreams which had left impressions on your growing self; that you would, eventually, if given the chance to express yourself, enable him to put together his findings into the appropriate research categories he had been working on. Very patiently, he listened to you talk about Misra, hardly interrupting you, at times taking notes and at times not.

One day, together in his study, when he was explaining to you something about the deliberate distortion of the sizes of the continents (a distortion which made an essential difference to the size of Europe and Africa), you surprised him, and yourself too, by shouting, “Look, look!”

Uncle Hilaal saw a woman, visibly pregnant, chewing at something.

“She's eating earth,” you said. “Just like I used to.”

He failed to make you see the difference between the “earth” you used to eat mouthfuls of, and the cakes of clay which pregnant women nibble on. You turned on him and, with a suddenness which made him half laugh, you said, “The reason why the continent of Africa is smaller is because the adult, as well as the small among us, eat its earth—which obviously makes it shrink in size. Could that be it?”

Again, with the patience worthy of a scholar addressing a potentially very intelligent pupil, Uncle Hilaal explained the reasons to you, giving you the political implications as well as the imperialist intentions of the cartographers. He was still on the subject when the tumult of excitement took you over and you were bubbling with enthralment. Apparently, there was another revelation you wished to make. And he let you.

“Uncle, do you know what I did once?” you asked, pulling at his chin.

He said, “Tell me.”

“I menstruated.”

He was crestfallen.

“I menstruated one night when I was asleep. Just like women do. Just like Misra used to. I could put the difference between my menstruation and a woman's to the fact that I felt no pain whatsoever before or after; and that it happened to me only once.”

In total disbelief, “Only once?”

“Although, now and again, I have a strange feeling that there is
another
in me, one older than I—a woman. I have the conscious feeling of being spoken through, if you know what I mean. I feel as if I have allowed a woman older than I to live inside of me, and I speak not my words, my ideas, but hers. And during the time Fm spoken through, as it were, I am she—not I. And it pains to part with someone youVe allowed to dwell inside of you, because they have no life of their own, because they died young or some unforeseen disaster has cut their life short. In a way, there is a faint sense of unease in that I feel as if my mother's death was my birth, or, if you prefer, her death gave birth to me.

Your uncle got up from his chair and silently stood behind the window. Something claimed his attention and he moved away from you, disregarding all your attempts at reaching him. Until you started saying, “Fve never seen the woman of whom I speak thus, except once, and even then, I saw the back of her neck and no more. Although that has a striking similarity to the half-profiled photograph of the woman you say was my mother.”

He moved nervously about the room. “How old are you?” he asked.