Maps: A Novel

"You can certainly read it as a standalone, and I teach it as a standalone novel. Farah is a Somali writer who had been living in exile for decades at this point. His work is deeply political. It’s also incredibly sensitive to the political dynamics of the Horn of Africa. So this is a really different story of colonialism to the one we get in basic training—you know, which countries were where and what happened after the Berlin Conference . Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti all have a different colonial history less well known to readers of English literature—both between those nations and also with the relationship between Italy and France. Somalia’s largely Muslim population also complicates the postcolonial dynamics, particularly after the East African bombings of the late 1990s. So prior to September 11, there was already a lot of heat, internationally and militarily, in that part of the world, and what we would call counter-insurgency or anti-terrorism. Farah’s novels take up all of these questions really beautifully. I chose Maps for this conversation because I think it allegorises the complexity of colonial boundary drawing and what implications that has— linguistically, in terms of ethnonationalism, in terms of postcolonial conflicts inherited from these artificially drawn boundaries. There’s a way in which the West often tells a story of postcolonial failure. We even use the term ‘failed states’ to describe crises or vacuums of power, which are often direct results of neo-imperial intervention and economic coercion. It’s been extremely important to me to me, both in my own work and in the way that I teach other postcolonial writers, to open up that language and look at, for example, the CIA files on Somalia and conflict alongside a novel like Maps . Maps tells the story of confusion. It approaches its subject from the point of view of a child, and it does so not to soften or render digestible or easy the conflict, but in fact to highlight how incredibly grave the shifting borders of national identification are in these moments. “Love is rendered impossible under certain conditions of political exploitation” The child is adopted from the Ogaden, a contested space of Somali Ethiopia, and his relationship with his adoptive mother is an allegory of Ethiopian-Somali relations and how these dynamics work against and through national borders. It’s also a contested space in terms of loyalty to his other family members, his blood-relations. The plot emerges in these bizarre flushes of information; disorientation is part of the point of the novel. You get an incredibly strong grounding and education in the affect of postcolonial migrancy. What’s harder to identify is whether loyalties are permanent: whether a political position is one you can cleave to for a lifetime, or even a month. What has to change in order for political loyalties to shift? To whom can or should our work belong as revolutionary postcolonial subjects? Which leaders can we follow—and up to what point? The novel works through all of these questions via the relationship between this child Askar, whose name means ‘the great one’, and his mother. The mother’s body becomes a feminised and abused allegorisation or metonymy for the region. Not a national body, but a regional body, who—this is a spoiler—meets a terrible fate. It’s so beautifully rendered, for we then read the novel back for the sense in which the mother, Misra, whose name means ‘cosmos’ or ‘universe’, is being partitioned way before she encounters the political violence that will take her life in the end. This is a loyalty test and a loyalty punishment, but the motives and allegiances are deliberately obscured. The novel invites further research but it also one of those breath-taking books that works entirely on its own as well. One thing I love about the novel is that it’s not soft on anyone by obscuring those motives and allegiances. It just brings our mind to something different—not the headline version of a complex postcolonial history, but rather how the brutal border-legacies of colonialism ruin the intimate relations that we can have with others. And how love is rendered impossible under certain conditions of political exploitation. I love the novel so much for that. I am 100% sure that Farah is going to win the Nobel at some point. These books are magical, deep and like nothing else I’ve read before. Literally all of them. Don’t stop! Well—because you raise that issue, I will first say that Farah has a novel precisely about the conundrum or trap of international aid. It’s called Gifts . It’s funny, sharp, incisive, so good. It updates the 1980s story to a more 1990s scene of Somalia as a crisis space, and the international gaze. ‘What are the gifts of empire,’ is a question that is taken up with a razor wit in that book."