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A short story is presented.
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Extract
Jama's Journey
Hargeisa, Somaliland, March 1936
THE CHAPERONE FINALLY RELEASED hi S hold on Jama's forearm, leaving a sweaty handprint on his skin. Jama's legs shook from the long journey in the back of the old lorry and he clasped both of his thighs in his hands to steady them while his clansman went to replenish his stash of qat. Jama had put up with the mushy green spittle and the acrid stink that had accompanied the ostrich catcher's habit for the day and night it took to cross the Red Sea by dhow and get from Aden to Hargeisa. Jama's bloated, gaseous stomach bulged out before him and he wondered why it stretched further and further the hungrier he got. For weeks after his mother's burial, his gut had contracted, cramped, made him vomit, given him diarrhoea, the pain slowing his steps to that of an old decrepit man. Every night he dreamt of his mother: she followed a caravan in the Somali desert, and he would follow, calling out her name, but she never turned around, the distance between them growing until she was a speck on the horizon. A clanswoman had found him huddled in an alley, covered in dust and blood. It took just three days for a human telephone network to locate his great-aunt Jinnow in Hargeisa and deliver Jama to her - or, rather, to this roadside where a group of men stood with their herd of camels, watching while the lorry overheated, its metal grill grimacing under an acacia tree.Jama looked around him; Somaliland was yellow, intensely yellow, a dirty yellow, with streaks of brown and green. There was no smell of food or incense or money drifting in the air as there was in Aden, there were no farms, no gardens, but there was a sharp sweetness he breathed in, something invigorating, intoxicating. This was his country, this was the same air his father and grandfathers had breathed, the same landscape that they had known. Heat shimmered above the ground, making the sparse vegetation look like a mirage that would dissolve if you reached out for it. The emptiness of the desert felt purifying and yet disturbing after the tumultuous humanity of Aden, deserts were the birthplaces of prophets but also the playgrounds of jinns and shape - shifters. He had heard from his mother that his own great-grandfather Eddoy had walked out of his family's encampment and into the sands; he had given no one word of where he was going, and was never seen again. Eddoy became one of the many bewitched by the shifting messages that were left among the dunes.Jama lay down under the acacia tree and spread his arms out; the sky covered him like a shroud and he felt cooled by the watery blueness washing over him. He awoke, disturbed by the sound of two voices above...See the full content of this document
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