Mapped
From a Crooked Rib
Nuruddin Farah
Ebla, a young orphan nomad girl, flees an arranged marriage to an old man and journeys out of the Ogaden bushland to the town of Beledweyne and on to Mogadishu, where she is passed between husbands and struggles to claim some measure of freedom in a society that treats women as property. Farah's first novel, and a landmark of Somali literature, follows her across a real geography on the eve of independence: the pastoral interior, the river town, and the coastal capital.
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Maps
Nuruddin Farah
Farah's Somalia is a country arguing with its own map. An orphan boy is raised by a woman in the Ogaden, the Somali-speaking region held by Ethiopia, during the 1977 war for it; he is then sent south to the capital to grow up among relatives who debate blood, nation and belonging. The map stretches across the Horn, from the Shebelle valley around Kallafo to the ocean at Mogadishu, roughly eight hundred kilometres apart.
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