Maps

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.

Askar

Kallafo (Qallaafo), the Ogaden

Part One

The boy is born and raised here after his parents are gone, brought up by a woman who is not his mother in a frontier town of the Ogaden. The place matters because it is Somali in speech and Ethiopian on the map, the exact contradiction the novel keeps circling.

Part One

explicit Kallafo (Qallaafo, today spelled Kelafo) is a real town on the Shebelle in the Ogaden, the Somali-speaking region of eastern Ethiopia that Somalia disputed and briefly held in the 1977 war; coordinates mark the town.

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Askar

The Shebelle river at Kallafo

Part One

The river gives the childhood landscape its seasons of flood and drought and its farming life along the banks. It is also a thread that ties the inland Ogaden to the coast, since the same Shebelle bends south toward Somalia before it dies in the sand near the ocean.

Part One

explicit The Shebelle is a real river that runs through Kallafo in the Ogaden of Ethiopia, the disputed Somali region; the point marks the river as it passes the town, not a scene named to the metre.

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Askar

The family compound near Kallafo

Part One

The daily world of the small boy is a single household on the town's edge, where the woman raising him is the whole of his early life. We place it as a representative point beside Kallafo rather than a surveyed plot, since the novel keeps the home intimate rather than mapped.

Part One

inferred The household is not tied to a mapped address; this marks a representative point at the edge of Kallafo, which lies in the Ogaden of Ethiopia, the disputed Somali region.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗