Maps by Nuruddin Farah

aware she had begun. What I wanted her to do was to talk about death in as much detail as was possible for a seven-year-old like myself to understand. I needn’t have reminded her that I had encountered death before, in the look of my mother, in the rigidity of her body. I needn’t have reminded her that, in so far as she was concerned, I had made myself, that 1 was my own creation and that upon me was bestowed, by myself of course, everything other mortals wished for in their dreams.
    â€œSo?” I challenged.
    She appeared dazed. Could it be because she could not recall telling me herself that when she first encountered my undiluted stare she thought that “I had made myself and had been my own creation!’”? There may have been other reasons. But she stared at me as though the world had shrunk to the ground beneath her weighty body and as though any memory of her would disappear with it too and she would die. Anyway, she was silent for a long, long, time. However, this silence was different from the previous silences in that she appeared frightened, afraid of my stare. And so she pulled at her dress, nervous.
    I said, “Death takes many forms in my head. Generally, it is donned all in white, robed in an Archangel’s garment into whose many-pocketed garment is dropped the day’s harvest of souls. I wonder if my mother and father’s souls ended up in the same pocket, just like a beloved wife is buried in the same tomb as her husband or a child its mother if they all die together. I wonder if I would have a soul to speak of had I died at birth—I instead of my mother.”
    Flabbergasted, she could only stare at me. And I continued: “I was ready to be born but it appears my mother was ready to die. Maybe I would have died if she hadn’t. And I suspect it wouldn’t be I telling this story, I suspect, as a matter of fact, the story wouldn’t be the same, not the subject matter. My death wouldn’t have earned me an obituary and my life wouldn’t have engaged anybody’s time and energy. You see, death ends all talk. From then on, death rules. Or, if you please, God.”
    Again, she stared at me in disbelief. She asked after the appropriate pause: “How old are you, Askar?”
    I replied, “I am seven.”
    â€œI might as well ask myself if Satan is older,” she said.
    â€œI am sorry?”
    â€œOh, never mind,” she said.
    Before long, she was herself again, mothering me, requesting that I bow down and subject my clothes for inspection, reminding me at one and the same time that I was very young, capable of “accidents”, unforeseen things, and that put her in control of the situation again and she was saying that I should change my clothes, etc., etc., etc. But: woe to me if she were in season. Then—well, that’s another story.
    V
    The sight of blood didn’t repel or frighten me. That of water, however small or large its body, attracted me. Water comforted me and I fell silent when in it, as though in reverence to its god. I splashed in it so that its crystals, clear as silver and just as lovely, flew up in the air, winged, like my imagination, until these balls of magic beauty were recalled back to the body from whence they had sprung. I could never determine my relationship with water. Not until I met my mother’s brother, who told me that water had the same sort of satanic fascination for my mother, Aria. She had endangered her own life so many times that in the end, he decided to teach her to swim. She was the only woman who knew how to swim, it being uncommon in Somalia for women to learn. Water, she had explained to him, gave her the mobility and space her fantasies required, and she used to begrudge the water in the ocean its moods of calm or rage, the water in the river the determination to return “home” in vaporous form or end in the bigger ocean,
    I asked myself often if this is what I