'The west should stop obsession with arbitrary boundaries in Africa'

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and lives in London. She is the author of Black Mamba Boy and The Orchard of Lost Souls. She spoke to our writer JAMES MURUA on the sidelines of the Hargeysa International Book Fair

How did your first book Black Mamba Boy come about?

By accident. I was working on a film project about a Somali sailor who was executed and I found out that my father knew him. I was interviewing him about the sailor and it turns that there was a strange and mysterious story about how they all ended up living in the UK. So my father told me about his life and we ended up going back to the countryside and the deserts in Hargeisa, Somaliland.

The story goes back one or two generations to my grandmother who was in her teens or twenties before she saw money for the first time. They lived in a non-cash economy. It was a biblical type of a story, a very ancient story but a family history at the same time. A family anthology.

I was really fascinated by it; suddenly my father and I had something there between us, this project. At first I wanted to write it as a biography, then it grew into a longer biography, then it turned into a novel and four and a half years later it was published.

After your first book was published. What happened next?

I had a two-book deal with Harper Collins so that had to be satisfied and I didn’t have an idea of what to write for my next novel. I had two images; one of an older woman in bed paralysed as war rages all around her and the other was a girl who is using the war and insecurity to break into homes and live a life that she has been deprived of, a Goldilocks kind of a story. Beyond that it was really difficult to know what the story was.

The Orchid of Lost Souls was very difficult for me as a reader — it was very brutal.

It was brutal. It was a brutal dictatorship followed by a brutal civil war. The impact on my family was horrendous with the older character situation based on my grandmother’s story — she was abandoned here in Hargeisa when the war broke out. There was no way of nullifying that. It is brutal and it was brutal.

I was struck by the part in the book where the young refugee girl Deqo lives with prostitutes who had colourful nicknames like China and Karl Marx. How did you go about doing that research?

It was partly an homage to The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison where two of the prostitutes were China and Poland. There are also different levels to it where Somalis are big on nicknames — they prefer them to their formal names. In this case, there is probably more cause for that if you are are doing something so stigmatising in society.

They see behind the veneer of society for those who walk around and pontificate and moralise and know it on a completely different level. I found that very interesting.

It is also a parallel to a Somali state that prostitutes itself to anyone that comes along; first it was the Russian and the communist block, then it was the Americans and then it was the Arabs. It is so kind of, here I am come and get me. The small level of prostitution that they were doing was completely swamped in the state that was doing a much bigger version of it.

How are your books doing on the continent and abroad?

They have travelled. They’ve travelled to Europe, to South America, to India and Australia. I’ve come to Somaliland a lot of times now. Black Mamba Boy is popular here but it’s just a question of getting the numbers and I’m sure if they get in they will sell really well. The book has the biggest waiting list here in Somaliland.

I’ve been to Nairobi to do a workshop with Kwani. I haven’t been with the book anywhere else on the continent. I was invited to Uganda but I couldn’t do it. I know that its available in Kenya and South Africa but I don’t think it’s in West Africa. It’s not really about me but about distribution; there’s a massive lack of it. There is also a huge issue with piracy.

Somaliland wants to be recognised as an independent nation. Do you have a position on that?

I support it. I think that it’s not even Somali and Somaliland. It is a global issue and particularly an African issue where countries are forced to sustain boundaries that don’t mean anything. So it’s like being in a bad marriage; I’d walk, I’d say goodbye. I don’t see the pressure, I don’t know why the west is obsessed with, in this case, maintaining these arbitrary boundaries.

Doesn’t make sense, it’s not even conducive to their aims. It’s kind of willful blindness to the reality. Somalia is maintained by foreign money and foreign troops and the consensus and the consent that a government and state needs is absent and it’s fragmenting even further. I think it’s better to go down to these very small blocks because it’s not working.

You have these young men in the diaspora who believe in a united Somalia and all machismo and nostalgia that has no bearing at all with the way the people live in the actual states.

You were one of the judges for the Miles Morland Foundation, which supports writers on the African continent with grants, last year. How was the experience for you? How does a prize like this help writers?

It was an interesting experience. It wouldn’t be something that I could do because I can produce work like that where you need to produce 10,000 words a month. The money is fantastic because as a writer you can find breathing space to write. It is a great reason for people who are prolific and want to spend six months of a year to get through to the end of a project.

It was a good experience judging the prize. I had encouraged people from Somaliland to apply but it was dominated by people from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, places where there is a strong middle class and already an appetite for literature. I would have liked to see more entries from smaller countries.

Why do you think there were fewer entries from these countries?

There were entries from Francophone and Lusophone countries but I’d imagine that Anglophone writers have easier access to it. The countries like South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria have stronger writers networks that can tell you what exists and how to apply and give you the confidence to apply.

Here there is less schooling in English. It is also to do with taste: South African tastes might be closer to British tastes than in Somaliland.

What next after your two-book deal?

I’m working on the movie as I mentioned earlier, doing the important development work on it.

What African writers are you reading right now?

I am reading Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking For Transwonderland and Blackass by A Igoni Barratt. I’m also reading Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation.