Black Fiction: A review of Black Mamba Boy
Black Mamba Boy
by Nadifa Mohamed
Harper Collins; 288 pp; £12.99
A silent, venomous predator haunts the barren deserts of Northern Africa, but the deadly black mamba snake has blessed one boy with fortune. A snake gently caresses a terrified woman’s pregnant belly, leaving her unborn child unharmed: this child is Jama, the Black Mamba Boy himself. But luck soon deserts Jama, as he faces a life plagued by the painful absence of his father and the heartbreaking, premature death of his mother. Forced to grow up before his time and face a world in turmoil, Jama’s quest for his father carries him through the harsh, racially abusive Italian camps of Eritrea into Egypt, Sudan and Great Britain. His nomadic existence between 1935 and 1947 becomes a roller coaster of fear, loss and pain until Jama ultimately finds himself facing an unimaginable future of love and hope.
Reading Black Mamba Boy is an intense and relentless experience. The sprawling narrative recreates the suffocation of bombarded army encampments, revealing the brutal and graphic torture of Jama’s childhood friend Shidane and the bloody trauma of the slaughterhouse where Jama earns a few meagre funds. Reminiscent of Albert Camus’ semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, Le Premier Homme, Black Mamba Boy transforms the oral into the textual as Nadifa Mohamed elaborately reinterprets stories from her father’s life, exploring horrifically real historical events and individual destiny through a narrative that both tantalizes and torments. Happy memories, such as those of Shidane’s loving fellowship with his child-uncle and the adult Jama’s camaraderie with his Somali friends, relieve the drudgery of day-to-day survival, but these light-hearted moments at times fade so far into the shadows of inexorable desperation that they may be forgotten.
Black Mamba Boy may not be an emotionally easy read, but as an expansive text that juxtaposes family sagas alongside world history, it is a creation that revolutionizes the biographical form. Mohamed effectively frames an authentic story of war and loss with one man’s search for family, friendship, love, and the life he so craves. Black Mamba Boy advocates the individual, Jama’s perpetual solitude establishing an affinity between reader and protagonist that confirms the relevance, exuberance and significance of personal experience in the narrative. Intimate to the point of claustrophobia, this is an addictively harrowing story that subtly weaves a tale of sorrow and redemptive friendship, ensuring that readers are swept away on their own journey through foreign lands and terrifyingly turbulent times.
Superb review.
Shalom x