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A review by kylegarvey
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed
4.0
To dissect misogyny confronting Black Mamba Boy isn't even to dissect racism/xenophobia, and that's not even to dissect the scary/thrilling family evisceration we see. Mohamed tells the painful but good and deep story of her father's life in Yemen in the 1930s and 40s, when it was still under colonial rule by the British, and then his trek through Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, the Mediterranean, and then Britain.
In an account I guess half fictional and half true (but what is fiction if not fully true?), young boy Jama -- after dealing with his mother (Mira Nair's film Queen of Katwe is about the only non-Western maternal I've seen), his friend Abdi, and others in the city of Aden in Yemen -- decides to set out in search of Guure, his own long-missing father. Surprisingly lush masculine identity we stay with for a while then.
But everything's crisp, really lived-in, really quick and smart. I like how racial pressure is nicely unrolled into smaller (I guess) questions of colonial politics, but it's also in language of course (Somali, Arabic, English, Italian, whatnot), and then in education ("On hard benches the children were taught everything French and nothing about themselves; they were only dark slates to be written over with white chalk"). "Ferengi" are the whites in Africa and "Yahudi", I guess, is a slur for non-Somali Africans.
Jama meets various people of course, soaks up the positive and repels the negative mostly, thinks about it all subtly. A man named Idea he meets in Djibouti, a former teacher and now intellectual; then, an Italian soldier named Leon he meets in Ethiopia. The one-after-the-next, down-the-line, benevolent-and-then-cruel new center for each place, each chapter, it can seem a little wearying. But I don't know, maybe that's how you have to construct it, especially historical fiction about a boy's journey, I suppose.
The whole premise seems plenty to keep Black Mamba Boy afloat. From a woman looking at a father/son relationship, from a place of privilege looking at the roughness of decades past, the West can keep a fascist hold on East Africa. Jama's life darkens considerably along with all the other elements.
It's always bound to the ground, though, and that's what's true and fine about it. The Hajj, Mecca, Allah among the few references to Islam, and Louis Armstrong's "Go Down Moses" ("Pharaoh, let my people go") a tiny one to Christianity. It's mostly not devout at all: just a boy's life quotidian, terrestrial, real.
In an account I guess half fictional and half true (but what is fiction if not fully true?), young boy Jama -- after dealing with his mother (Mira Nair's film Queen of Katwe is about the only non-Western maternal I've seen), his friend Abdi, and others in the city of Aden in Yemen -- decides to set out in search of Guure, his own long-missing father. Surprisingly lush masculine identity we stay with for a while then.
But everything's crisp, really lived-in, really quick and smart. I like how racial pressure is nicely unrolled into smaller (I guess) questions of colonial politics, but it's also in language of course (Somali, Arabic, English, Italian, whatnot), and then in education ("On hard benches the children were taught everything French and nothing about themselves; they were only dark slates to be written over with white chalk"). "Ferengi" are the whites in Africa and "Yahudi", I guess, is a slur for non-Somali Africans.
Jama meets various people of course, soaks up the positive and repels the negative mostly, thinks about it all subtly. A man named Idea he meets in Djibouti, a former teacher and now intellectual; then, an Italian soldier named Leon he meets in Ethiopia. The one-after-the-next, down-the-line, benevolent-and-then-cruel new center for each place, each chapter, it can seem a little wearying. But I don't know, maybe that's how you have to construct it, especially historical fiction about a boy's journey, I suppose.
The whole premise seems plenty to keep Black Mamba Boy afloat. From a woman looking at a father/son relationship, from a place of privilege looking at the roughness of decades past, the West can keep a fascist hold on East Africa. Jama's life darkens considerably along with all the other elements.
It's always bound to the ground, though, and that's what's true and fine about it. The Hajj, Mecca, Allah among the few references to Islam, and Louis Armstrong's "Go Down Moses" ("Pharaoh, let my people go") a tiny one to Christianity. It's mostly not devout at all: just a boy's life quotidian, terrestrial, real.