Writing a Life into History, Writing Black Mamba Boy: Nadifa Mohamed in Conversation

Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), traces the incredible—and incredibly precarious—journey of Jama, a young, orphaned Somali boy, from childhood to adulthood, from his experience as a street urchin in Aden to those of an askari, sailor, and entrepreneur. Following the death of his mother, Jama proves himself a born survivor as he treks across the Horn of Africa in search of his father, Guure. When Guure is fatally injured in a car crash just before the much anticipated reunion, Jama continues his journey across and beyond the continent to make a life for himself. The novel thus takes us from Yemen in the 1930s across the breadth of Northeast Africa and parts of the Middle East—Hargeisa, then British Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, and Palestine—to a depressed late-1940s Wales, before the protagonist’s return to his wife and son in southwestern Eritrea, near Sudan. Drawing on the life experience of Nadifa Mohamed’s father, the narrative (in the British edition) is recounted by the implied author, Jama’s adult child, though not necessarily the infant he returns to at the end of the novel.¹

The book grew out of an oral history project and was initially conceived as her father’s biography, yet Nadifa Mohamed found herself gradually moving from life history to writing fiction to provide her protagonist with more psychological depth. It also allowed her to imaginatively insert moments of contemporary Somali history linked to her father’s tales, even if not of that period. By doing so, Mohamed has created an alternative narrative of history that not only encompasses her father’s personal journey in times of political struggle but also embraces the wider collective memory of the Somali people. And the text has yet more to offer. While placing her father’s story into the wider context of the region’s history—Europe’s colonial scramble and the eventual failure to build an Italian African Empire—the novel’s narrator also sets it against the backdrop of Greek and Roman mythology, sailor’s yarn, and African British immigrant life. As such, Black Mamba Boy is an intriguing mix of subaltern micro-history, diasporic life writing, novel of transformation, and grand epic tale.² The novel won the Betty Trask Prize in 2010, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. In spring 2013 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Somalia in 1981 and moved to Britain in 1986 to join her merchant marine father. On reading History and Politics at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, she began working on her father’s life history that was eventually published as her first novel, Black Mamba Boy. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in August 2013 by Simon & Schuster. In June 2012, Mohamed participated in the Second BIGSAS (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies) Festival of African and African-Diasporic Literature entitled Remembering Flash Forward: African Literature as Poetics in Motion. The festival focused on the intersection of memory and future in African and African-diasporic works; how memory influences visions of the future, and how images of the future shape memories.³ The following conversation took place on 17 June 2012, in Bayreuth, Germany, shortly before the author’s return to London.

Christine Matzke [CM]:

Thank you very much, Nadifa, for coming to Bayreuth and agreeing to do this last-minute interview. Could you tell me what inspired you to write this novel and how you went about the research?

Nadifa Mohamed [NM]:

It was a happy accident. It wasn’t a goal of mine to write a book. What happened is two things: firstly, I decided it was time to record my father’s life story. I did that in a series of interviews with him. I also started work for a film company. I think the film company came [End Page...