Black Mamba Boy (review)

Nadifa Mohamed's debut historical novel, Black Mamba Boy, follows the story of a Somali boy named Jama who spends the better part of two decades searching for a place he belongs. At the beginning of the novel, his mother dies unexpectedly in a squalid room in the Yemeni port city of Aden, in 1935. His troubadour father has already abandoned the family. Much of the novel chronicles Jama's quest to reunite with this man he knows only from stories and rumors, a man who "played the lute with all of his passion and attention but was listless and incompetent with the practical details of life." What results is a compelling drama that crisscrosses the geography of East Africa and the Middle East, continents disrupted by the Second World War, and ends with depression and alcoholism on the coast of England. The tension between Jama's two main desires—the first to affix his disparate family roots, the second a persistent, and often undermining, aspiration to obtain wealth—leads to a journey derailed by war, famine, and many personal tragedies of a smaller scale. As Jama travels to nearly a dozen different countries, several variations of the same cycle repeat: that Jama could live comfortably if he wasn't undermined by his quest to reunite a family that no longer exists, or that he could have a loving familial environment if he didn't leave in pursuit of his fortune.

Mohamed has described Black Mamba Boy as the memorialization of a generation of Somali boys struggling to survive, and the novel is largely based on the experience of her father. The title is derived from a pet name Jama was given by his mother, and the individual stories often have the qualities of tall tales. He rushes from adventure to adventure at breakneck speed, and the prose rarely slows enough to contemplate the meaning of what happens. Thus, Black Mamba Boy often fails to reach toward deeper levels of human experience because the focus is on moving from one point on the map to the next. It simply isn't structured in a way that allows the story to unfold any differently.

From the very first line Jama is "startled … out of his dream" by a dawn call to prayer. He awakes in a city of "dun-colored buildings," "wood smoke and infants' cries," and the stench of carrion. Jama is only six years old, and he survives in Aden by mostly criminal means as a "market boy." Once his mother dies, however—"everything powerful and vibrant about her had gone, only the worn-out machinery of her body remained"—Jama is rescued from Aden and shipped off to Somalia to live with relatives. A lot of work is done to present Aden as a rich and compelling setting, but the story cannot linger there. New and different adventures are to be had elsewhere.

In these early scenes Mohamed comes off as a writer more adept at small vignettes—such as when a woman is nearly lynched after she's accused of adultery—than scenes of sustained action or the larger movements of plot. Mohamed certainly has a talent for descriptive setting—with a diverse palette of urban, desert, and coastal terrains to transition between, the novel is consistently vivid—yet the space and lyricism devoted to piling on details can overwhelm the movement of the story. The expository language is rich, it's lush, but sometimes one or two near-perfect details are longed for when what we receive is five or six adequate ones. After a while the neglect of small but necessary plot movements begins to add up. As a consequence, the story often advances via divine coincidence rather than organic conceit. It's less about Jama overcoming, or failing to overcome, challenges and more about getting on to the next chapter by means of a picaresque miracle. When Jama is stranded, an oxcart or truck passes by to rescue him. When he faints in a strange metropolis, it's only to awaken in a cool...