It simply isn't structured in a way that allows the story to unfold any differently.įrom the very first line Jama is "startled … out of his dream" by a dawn call to prayer. 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. He rushes from adventure to adventure at breakneck speed, and the prose rarely slows enough to contemplate the meaning of what happens. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. His troubadour father has already abandoned the family. At the beginning of the novel, his mother dies unexpectedly in a squalid room in the Yemeni port city of Aden, in 1935. 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.
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