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Summary
Summary
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a "market boy," a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother--alternately raging and loving--dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life's meager savings on a search for his never-seen father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama's extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two out of reach.
In his travels, Jama will witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search of working papers and a ship. Bursting with life and a rough joyfulness, Black Mamba Boy is debut novelist Nadifa Mohamed's vibrant, moving celebration of her family's own history.
Author Notes
Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somalia, in 1981 to a merchant marine father and a mother from a politically active family, and was trapped in exile when civil war erupted. She studied history and politics at Oxford, and has worked as a film researcher and scriptwriter.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mohamed's beautifully rendered debut, inspired by her father's life, opens in 1935 Aden, Yemen, where 11-year-old Jama and his mother subsist in precarious destitution: Jama spending his days on the streets with other "market boys" while his mother works long hours for little pay at a coffee factory. When his mother dies, Jama briefly returns to his family's home in Hargeisa before running away to search for his long-absent father, who he believes is in Sudan. His quest leads Jama into Italian-controlled Eritrea, where he joins Mussolini's Fascists in exchange for food and shelter, and Mohamed delivers graphic descriptions of the horrifically savage treatment the African askaris received at the hands of the Italians. After the Italians are deposed, Jama settles for a few years into village life, before his wanderings take him to Egypt. Jama is a charming protagonist whose peregrinations-assisted by clansmen, kind strangers, and ghostly visitations-are directed more by historical and biographical significance than by the demands of plot. Mohamed vividly recreates the complex atmosphere of the era, and her personal investment in the story gives it a passionate edge. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A young Somali racks up lots of miles in this combination coming-of-age/adventure story, the author's debut, set in the Horn of Africa in the 1930s.Can a snake bring good luck? Ambaro thought so. When the teenage Somali was pregnant, a black mamba nestled over her belly. This happened in Hargeisa, her ancestral home (it's also the author's birthplace). Her son Jama was born without complications, but the good luck failed to materialize. Her husband Guure, an impractical dreamer, left them to find work in Sudan. The novel opens in Aden, in Arabia, in 1935. Ambaro is working in a coffee factory; Jama is a scrappy 11-year-old, running the streets, until his mother sickens and dies, when relatives ship him back to Hargeisa. Somalis are sustained by a strong network of clans; they are also nomadic. Jama's family philosophy is to keep moving, and soon enough Jama leaves on a quest for his father. Whether on foot, by lorry, by train or by ship, Jama never stops travelingfirst to Djibouti, then Eritrea, and eventually, in the 1940s, to Egypt, Palestine and Europe. East Africa is controlled by the British, French and Italians; Mussolini's invading army is on the march. In Eritrea, Jama learns his father, a deserter from the Italian army, has been killed. His life has become a roller coaster. His parents' ghosts twice intervene to save him from death. With one glorious exception, an eccentric intellectual in Djibouti, the author shows little talent for characterization. Jama is a blank slate on which the author writes cultural and colonial history. When his father's ghost tells him to go to Egypt, he leaves his young Eritrean bride after one night. Later, in Palestine, he realizes he may be on a fool's errand, another "poster boy of failed migration." Pulled this way and that, Jama reflects Mohamed's own indecision, torn between naturalism and magic realism.Rich material in need of a firmer authorial hand.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Set on the rough streets of Yemen in 1935, Black Mamba Boy tells a slice of history that seems all too modern. When Jama and his mother are abandoned by his father, they move to Yemen to try and make a new life. Rejected by the relatives they live with, Jama spends most of his days on the street. When his mother dies young, she leaves him with 100 rupees, which he decides to spend searching for his father. His journey takes him over 1,000 miles. Like other heartbreaking tales of child abuse and abandonment, Black Mamba Boy can be hard to take at times. But this debut novel is worth reading through to the end.--Block, Marta Segal Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NADIFA MOHAMED'S ambitious first novel tells the story of a Somali orphan's Odyssey from Yemen to Djibouti, onward to Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, Marseille, Hamburg and Wales - and ultimately to an epiphany in London. Toward the end of this trek, the hero meets up with an old friend, with whom he competes "over who had walked the farthest, starved the longest, felt the most hopeless; they were athletes in the hardluck Olympics." Earlier, at a bus stop in Gaza, the hero comes across someone who is everything he doesn't want to be: Musa the Drunk, a homeless Somali man, "the poster boy of failed migration." Both moments reveal the weaknesses in this young novelist's phenomenal, fast-forward story. Mohamed, born in 1981, moved with her family to London from Somalia in 1986. "Black Mamba Boy" is based on her father's tales of his youthful peregrinations in East Africa and Europe during the 1930s and '40s. From the outset, there are many elements reminiscent of "Oliver Twist": a mother who dies young ( in this case when the protagonist is 11), a father who disappears (here on "a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan") and a falling-in with thieving child scavengers (in the Ma'alla district of Aden). In an Arab neighborhood where hunger is rampant and violence too easy, young Jama clings to the idea that he will one day find his father. And, as in Dickens, the sentimental threatens to purple a grim reality better left plainly told. A knife fight with a friend renders Jama "a true loner, a boy without a father, brothers, cousins or even friends, a wolf among hyenas. Jama slunk away, intending to walk and walk until he found himself at the end of the world or could just disappear into the foaming sea." A female relative comes to the rescue, taking Jama to his grandfather's compound in British-controlled Somaliland. But there's no grandfather in evidence. Instead Jama is surrounded by semihostile women, among them "a neglected third wife" and her "uncircumcised" daughter. Here it's worth pausing to note the differences between Mohamed's first novel and that of Somalia's internationally acclaimed master, Nuruddin Farah. That novel, "From a Crooked Rib," written in 1968, when Farah was 23, is told from the perspective of an 18-year-old Somali girl maimed by forced infibulation. Farah's account of his heroine's wanderings explores the depredations she endures, and in smothering any inherent melodrama he finds his story's raw power. But in "Black Mamba Boy," Mohamed presses hard on the buttons that cue the violins: hunger, backbreaking slaughterhouse work, the cheerless sorcery of the household women. As is often the case in this novel, a childish fight leads Jama to flee, this time for Djibouti. After falling asleep under a palm tree in one of the city's shantytowns, he awakens in the care of a couple who hail from a feuding Somali clan. Still, they welcome him with kindness, perhaps because the husband, an excellent chef and "the only male wife in Djibouti," finds in Jama the son he lost. When not cooking scrumptious meals, he's explaining socioeconomics on walks through neighborhoods where "the poor live above open sewers while the rich frolic in those European hotel pools, gormless, mindless, empty people." He pleads with Jama to stay, promising to teach him to read and write, but the boy says no: "He knew that he could not bear the betrayal of exchanging his real father for another." Jama soon arrives in a town on the border between Eritrea and Sudan. There he runs into a man on the street who claims to know his father: "Jama's heart fluttered around his rib cage as he drank in this blissful news." Apart from the problematic metaphor, this might seem an almost unbelievable turn of good luck. But not for Jama. The novel takes on a Job-like tenor. Jama comes down with malaria. An Italian official imprisons him in a chicken pen. His best friend resurfaces, only to be tortured and murdered by sadistic soldiers. Jama is nearly killed in a British missile attack. When he tries to stay put, locusts destroy his crops. What to do? Jama settles on becoming a troubadour, playing an African stringed instrument called a rababa - until one evening his father appears to him in an apparition and tells him to go to Egypt. He hangs out in Alexandria, waiting for a passport that never comes. Frustrated, he and a pal head to Port Said, a harbor rumored to be filled with jobs with the British merchant marine. But the Egyptian police arrest them, steal Jama's rababa and deport him to Sudan. The Sudanese reject him at the border and throw him into jail, where he befriends a Lebanese boxer who takes him to Palestine. It is there that Musa the Drunk makes his appearance. Jama sees the remnants of a "sharp, witty mind," now "pickled in gin and blunted by isolation." And only now does Jama consider that his restlessness may be problematic: "He could see his own life taking Musa's terrible trajectory, see himself forever poised to try the next place, only to belatedly grasp that the good life was not there. Jama looked at Musa and realized that not even a madman would have left everything he had on the advice of a ghost." AS in the passage describing the hardluck Olympics, Jama's encounter with Musa is an occasion when Mohamed might have listened more carefully to her own characters. She seems too often to be competing for the gold in several categories unconnected to Literary merit - number of countries visited, number of injustices violently dispensed, number of scenes of starvation abjectly depicted. Much of what occurs in the novel may have happened to her father in the early chapters of his extraordinary Life, but this is not sufficient reason for its inclusion. Even Jama seems to realize that his story may be unconvincing, perhaps just plain crazy. Had she dived deeply into just one city in this atlas of misery, Mohamed might have told us more about what it is like to be a scavenger child in Africa than this novel does. Perhaps one day, with her considerable talents, she will write such a book. Mohamed's novel is based on her fathers tales of his peregrinations in Africa and Europe in the '30s and '40s. Lorraine Adams's most recent novel is "The Room and the Chair."
Library Journal Review
Spanning the years 1935-47, this novel opens in Aden, Yemen, where 11-year-old Jama, a wild but smart Somali boy, lives with his mother. They live a hardscrabble existence with unfriendly relatives, having left more sympathetic clan members behind in Hargeisa. After a tragic loss, Jama begins his journey across Africa on a quest to find his father, who left the family years earlier to attempt to earn money. Jama travels mostly by foot, walking over 1000 miles, and we follow him through cities, the desert, and mountains of Africa and across oceans, to Germany and England. This is not a carefree travel adventure; Jama endures extreme hardships, making and losing friends and encountering great brutality and sadness along with incredible generosity and kindness from both strangers and his clan. Verdict A pleasure to read, with descriptive language that allows readers to envision themselves in the story, this novel shows a distinctly non-European way of life in mid-20th-century Africa that is captivating. Highly recommended.-Sarah Conrad Weisman, Corning Community Coll., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.