[Wright is a senior lecturer in English at Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia. In the following essay, he analyzes the cultural and ethnic implications of Farah's Maps.]

Perhaps the most startling and unforeseen consequences of the recent breakup of Central and Eastern Europe have been the release of resurgent micronationalisms and a reversion to absolutist ideas of the “ethnic nation”: ideas that have habitually taken uncharitable views of “migrant” or “minority” cultures. No doubt, as the whole concept of “Soviet Literature” is gradually displaced, questions of national identity—Ukrainian, Kazakhstani, Azerbaijani—will be drawn up along exclusive ethnic, cultural, and religious lines as alternatives to those framed by political ideology and legated by Soviet imperialism. In fact, something much like this has already happened in another part of the world—on the African continent, where tribal nationalisms have long overridden the constructs of political geography, and African literature has recorded the process in some spectacular examples. The fiction of the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah is a nomadic fiction, drawing upon many cultural and religious sources and upon readings in many of the world's literatures. It is a living testament to the cultural mongrelization which has become a standard feature of the colonial and postcolonial world, and his strange novel of the 1976 war in the Ogaden, Maps, dramatizes the resistance to this phenomenon by resurrected ethnocentrisms. In this short article I propose to review Farah's treatment of the latter resistive process and the implications of cultural exclusiveness for his handling of personal, national, and sexual identity.

Maps is the story of Askar, an orphaned Somali child of the disputed Ogaden, and his shifting relationship with his adoptive mother Misra, an Oromo woman from the Ethiopian Highlands who is doubtfully accused of betraying the Somali army to the forces of her homeland during Ethiopia's reconquest of the Ogaden and is murdered by the Western Somali Liberation Front, of which Askar is a member. Indeed, on the last page of the novel Askar is arrested by the Mogadiscio police, presumably on suspicion of having had a hand in her murder. Askar's retrospective narrative, which is told by turns in the first, third, and speculative second person （“You are a question to yourself … You doubt, at times, if you exist outside your own thoughts”）, recounts the traumas and triumphs of his Ogadenese childhood spent with Misra and, more briefly, his adolescence in Mogadiscio with an adoptive uncle and aunt. The narrative is haunted throughout by memories and intuitions of his foster mother's physical presence and of a sometimes excruciating intimacy with her, dating from the crucial early years. This bodily closeness, which allows the motherless male child and the childless surrogate mother to live, complementarily, inside each other, later resists the abstract intellectual hatreds of creed and country that are awakened by the Somali-Ethiopian War in the Ogaden.

In this novel—not surprisingly in Farah's fiction, where domestic and political patriarchies are mutually reinforcing—the relations between a nation and its members are expressed through the roles of parents, or guardians, and children. The postcolonial nation is parented or, more precisely, foster-parented. Nationality categories are most accurately read through the positions assumed by the novel's various surrogate parents towards their charges. Conversely, the destabilization of these categories is perceived through a series of pseudoincestuous role-reversals that subvert these positions. The postcolonial territory of Askar's birth is, like Askar himself, without natural parentage. Neither is it self-creating, as Askar fancies himself to be—“I had made myself, as though I was my own creation” （23）—though it may have the opportunity to take charge of its own destiny. Such territories are, in reality, the imaginative constructs of colonial and postcolonial cartographers （British, Italian, Ethiopian, Somali）, conceived not biologically but intellectually: Askar, who is the human analogue of the Somali Ogaden, describes himself as “a creature given birth to by notions formulated in heads, a creature brought into being by ideas” （3）. Such creatures are adopted beings with adopted identities defined by adoptive parents, and Farah sustains the analogues between the child's ties with the family and the individual's more artificial ties with the nation only by replacing Askar's real parents with a range of surrogates and guardians. These are his foster-mother Misra who, albeit in a purely nominal way, represents the Ethiopian occupier; the childless Mogadiscio intellectuals Hilaal and Salaado, who represent the modern Somali Republic, seeking to complete itself by the addition of the motherless child of the Ogaden; the Koranic teacher Aw-Adan, who represents the unifying power of Islam; and the brutal Ogadenese Somali Uncle Qorrax. At the end of the book each of Askar/Ogaden's five guardians has had parts of him/herself chopped away. Misra undergoes a mastectomy （and is then murdered and mutilated, her heart torn out）; Hilaal has had a vasectomy, his wife Salaado a hysterectomy; Aw-Adan has had a leg amputated; and Qorrax has had blood exacted. These truncations seem to signify, allegorically, the further dismemberment and fragmentation of the Ogaden.

In the book's allegoric scheme Askar, representing the Ogaden, is born to two patriotic martyrs who give their lives for the cause of its liberation from Ethiopian occupation: his father dies on the day of his birth and his mother soon afterwards. He is thus the posthumous mythic offspring of Somali nationalist aspiration and the mother-Republic, and he signifies what is salvaged by his country from the colonial carve-up of the Horn of Africa （his mother's unread journal, predating Somali orthography, is written in Italian）. Askar-Ogaden is then, strangely, entrusted by her to the “enemy” in the form of the Oromo-Amhara woman Misra, who cannot be said to be of the same blood as the child, either in the matrilineal or ethnic sense. The child's budding nationalist aspirations are subsequently grounded in the special stifling, suffocating intimacy generated by the one-parent-one-child family, in which the gender-confused male child first identifies with and then seeks to exorcise the oppressively close maternal presence. As he grows up Askar feels a natural need to live a life independent of Misra and expresses the desire of each man to kill the “mother” in him: “To live, I will have to kill you” （57）. But these emotions get mixed up with a felt imperative to shoulder the burden of his biological inheritance, left him by his natural mother, by defending his country from the people of his nurturing mother, even though he has only the most theoretical sense of the former, compared with the intensely felt proximity of the latter. Askar has a strange obsession with the idea that there is “a woman living inside him,” but this has curiously little to do with Misra, the woman who is most physically present in his life. It seems rather to be tied up with an abstract guilt complex over the spectral figure of his biological mother, “she who claimed she ‘lived’ in him who had survived her” （105）, and whom he accuses himself of killing at his own birth: “I feel as if my mother's death was my birth, or, if you prefer, her death gave birth to me” （151）. The feeling is thus more filial than sexual: it is specifically the mother, rather than the woman in him, whom Askar desires to preserve.

At his circumcision, which is his first lesson in frontiers, Askar is ritually separated from Misra and begins to define his “specific” Somali adult maleness against his “generic” Ethiopian mother-figure （the terms are those of his uncle Hilaal, who argues that Somalis have their own unique and exclusive language, culture, and destiny, while “Ethiopia” is a “generic notion, expansive, inclusive,” being merely “the generic name of an unclassified mass of different peoples” [148]）. After his painful separation from his adoptive mother, he is given his first maps and calendars and these become the “mental charts” on which he measures, in time and space, both “the uncoverable distance between Misra and himself” （97） and the Somali advances and retreats in the Ogaden. Significantly, as the war in the Ogaden escalates, the seven-year-old Askar is physically removed to Mogadiscio and his childhood dependence on Misra comes to an end. Askar's first steps towards psychological independence have thus initiated, quite fortuitously, an involvement with his homeland's political independence, and from the moment of his arrival in the Somali capital, national military progress in the Ogaden is measured, symbolically, by the distance that has grown between the Somali child and the adoptive “Ethiopian” mother whose foreign presence within him he feels he must rid himself of. This physical distance between “your anatomy and mine” （18） becomes, increasingly, a perceptual distance between her physical reality and his mental image of her. When he meets her again in the capital years later, he feels “totally detached” and “weaned” from his “mother-figure,” for “in the process of looking for a substitute, he had found another—Somalia, his mother country” （96）. He now feels that he can espouse one of his rival adoptive mothers only by denying the other, and the earlier ominous words of his childhood, “To live, I will have to kill you,” now take on, in the quite different context of her suspected betrayal of the Somali army, the tone of patriotic duty. Yet his sense of his separate identity is continually undermined by his long and deep intimacy with Misra and, when placed beside this, his claims for the primacy within himself of his unknown biological mother are less than persuasive. Indeed, Askar is culturally formed and molded by Misra in his upbringing. For example, his fantasy that he is one of the race of epic miracle children who kill their mothers at birth is implanted in his mind by Misra's Oromo oral tales and folklore: thus, even the idea of his natural mother's special moral claim upon him derives, ironically, from the culture of his adoptive mother.

In the historical period covered by the novel Askar, like his beloved Ogaden, is separated from both his mothers—from his Somali motherland at his birth and from his Ethiopian stepmother at her death—and the latter separation, in the lives of both individual and nation, is the costlier affair. During the “tragic weekend” in which Russian-backed Ethiopian forces retake the Ogaden, six hundred Somali patriots are betrayed to the enemy and massacred, and among the refugees flooding into Mogadiscio is Misra, the one accused of the betrayal. Embarrassed by her arrival in the capital and by reports of her reputed treachery, Askar is then further traumatized by her final abduction and death at the hands of the Liberation Front （her mutilated corpse is fished out of the bay） and he falls mysteriously and evasively ill at each of these crisis points. It later transpires that one of the things he has been evading may be his own ill-defined complicity with Misra's murder, for which he is, apparently, detained and interrogated by the police at the end of the novel. In this respect Maps might be compared with Graham Swift's novel Waterland, in which the protagonist also tries to hide from himself （and from the reader） his involvement in a murder. The difference is that whereas Swift, a late modernist-realist, is concerned with the ultimate meaning of the deed performed by the guilty party and with the gradual revelation of his hidden traumas, Farah, in more postmodernist fashion, poses the ontological question of what it is that the narrator has done and is now concealing from himself or, indeed, whether he has done anything （which things are clear neither to the reader nor to the character himself）. There are, for example, two passages in Maps—where Askar pictures a soldier standing over a wounded woman with a blood-stained knife and then imagines himself a fish feeding from Misra's blood （211, 214）—which could be construed to mean that Askar, if not the initiator, was at least an accomplice in Misra's murder and dismemberment. But as both of these passages are presented in the form of dream sequences, it is difficult to say exactly what is happening or when, or at what level the images are meant to be read.

To return to the fable of national identity: the association of Misra with the foreign occupation of the Ogaden is ultimately a spurious one. She is, after all, an Amharic-speaking Oromo, not a full-blooded Ethiopian, and she has more natural affinity with the occupied zone than with the occupier. She is herself an occupied possession on Somali as on Ethiopian territory, a slave-girl sexually colonized by a host of “uncles”: the Ogaden's symbolic guardian is herself the guarded property, violated by various occupying patriarchal wardens. Also Misra, like Askar, is an uprooted orphan and her Oromo culture, like the Somali one, has been historically marginalized by its orality and oppressed by a literate Ethiopia. She is, in fact, doubly displaced: first as an Oromo living in Ethiopia and forced to speak the language of the dominant Amharic culture, and then as an “Ethiopian” reviled by Somali ethnocentrism. Ironically, Misra is, much more precisely than Askar, a fitting image of the Ogaden that she is accused of betraying. Like the Ogaden, she is brutally abused by Somali patriarchy, is raped by her supposed defenders （by a vengeful pack of Liberation Front patriots）, and is finally mutilated and dismembered, her heart torn out by war. For the bigoted members of the Liberation Front, who are convinced they need no proof of Misra's guilt, she is the diseased part of the Somali heritage, to be surgically removed （such is their perverse reading of her mastectomy）. But those who live fragmentarily, through a number of cultures as Misra does, always have missing parts of themselves elsewhere, on the other side of some border, whether in Mogadiscio or in Ethiopia. Misra is not a unitary being who can be comprehensively enclosed and defined by maps but represents the various parts of cultures and countries—Oromo, Ethiopian, Somali—which are to be found in mongrelized, migration-prone areas like the Ogaden. Farah has said that the Kallafo of his Ogaden childhood “boasted a Somali-speaking civilian population, a large Arab community engaged in business, as well as Amharic-speaking soldiers … recruited from all the ethnic groups of the Ethiopian empire” （“Childhood” 1264）. Askar likes to think of Ethiopia as a “patchwork country,” but it is really the Ogaden—crossed, as a veteran soldier remarks, by different waves of migrants twenty, fifty, or a hundred years apart over a period of centuries—which best expresses the hybridization of cultural reality. This irretrievable hybridization is most keenly represented in the novel by Misra.

Misra is the daughter of an Amhara nobleman and an Oromo servant. She lives with a Somali family, and has Qotto and Ethiopian lovers. Accordingly, she has access to and concourse with all of the fertile neighboring microcultures and tribal nationalisms by which the Ogaden is hedged around and diversified, in spite of its narrowly ethnocentric efforts to resist them. Creative energy, it seems, lives, liminally, along these borders: Askar notes that two-thirds of Somalia's major poets come from its marginal territories and that one such peripheral people, the Boran, provide the Mogadiscio mingis with its ceremonial language. Appropriately, the Ogaden, which is a collection of border territories, is symbolically entrusted by Askar's natural mother to a border person, to one of mixed descent and therefore with a choice of identities. This entrustment by a Somali woman to an Oromo servant-girl, reaching across artificial boundaries erected by male nationalistic obsessions, is done, it seems, in recognition of their common Cushitic heritage and interpenetrating cultures. The reputedly “specific” Somali culture which uncle Hilaal theorizes at length about is seen, in reality, to participate in a broader generic group and it is surely no accident that, for all his talk of Somali specificity, there are actually few “pure” Somalis in the novel and those who exist are surrounded by people of Oromo, Qotto, Boran, Adenese, Arab, and Ethiopian extraction. Misra's name exists in three of these languages and in its Somali form is an incomplete version of the Ethiopian “Misrat,” meaning “foundation of the earth.” Referring as it does to the elemental and non-partisan, unmapped and unfrontiered earth, it is an appropriately loose signifier for an area as diverse as the Ogaden.

Two key motifs in the novel contest this linguistic and cultural hybridization and play contrapuntally against them in the text: the first is incest, the second maps. Askar says quite early in the novel that Misra regards the fabric of Somali society as “basically incestuous.” In the course of his narrative incest becomes an expressive image of the narrow, inward-looking ethnocentrism of Somali culture, its failure to diversify itself by recognizing its kinship with neighboring peoples in a broader generic family. It is also used to demonstrate the way in which the patriarchal abuse of power in the Ogaden shores up micronational divisions among its chequered subjects. The region's paternal guardians seem to make a habit of abusing the foreign wards entrusted to their care and protection, thus committing a figurative incest and identifying the national or ethnic “other” as a mere object of degradation. The Somali boys are abused by the Adenese; the Ogadenese foster-child by the Islamic schoolteacher and lover of his adoptive mother; and the abducted Oromo girl Misra by the Somali patriarchs and the wealthy Muslim Abdullah who forces her to switch roles from adopted daughter to wife. In each case the child looks to its false foster-parent, as the Ogaden to its latest political guardian, for self-definition, moral example, and leadership. Instead he or she finds paternal and avuncular responsibilities betrayed and traditional relationships inverted: “uncles” become rapists, fathers husbands, daughters wives. Askar is himself complicit with this incestuous abuse of power. When Misra's nocturnal male visitors force themselves upon her in the Ogadenese household, the child's rage is clearly colored by an incestuous Oedipal envy of her violators. And it is significant that Misra allows herself to be blackmailed into sleeping with uncle Qorrax because only by so doing is she able to sleep with Askar, thus implicating the child in her own quasi-incestuous humiliation. Askar specifically likens himself to a “third leg” lying “somewhere between her [Misra's] opened legs” （24）; the image identifies him explicitly with the wooden leg that the crippled Aw-Adan removes before intercourse with Misra and thence, vicariously, with Aw-Adan's penis; and during her sexual climax Misra sighs the same endearments to her lover as the ones she uses to the child Askar （“my man!”）. Not surprisingly, the adolescent Askar is plagued by subconscious guilt over his physical attachment to his stepmother, and his elected psychological ruse for escaping this guilt is to externalize his incestuous desires and alienate them to Misra herself, thus turning the victim into the aggressor. To this end, he falsifies Misra's past, accusing her of murdering her adoptive father/husband “during an excessive orgy of copulation,” whereas the truth is that her guardian forced himself upon her and a likelier cause of death was the old man's sexual over-enthusiasm. The role of incestuous murderer is clearly more convenient for Askar's newly-adopted image of Misra as “enemy-barbarian.” More incredibly, he recasts an Ethiopian army captain with whom she enters into a sexual liaison during the invasion of the Ogaden as a half-brother, thus transferring his own incestuous desires to the lover and substituting for him in his own fantasies.

On the narrative level, Misra's relations with Askar are not entirely normal, being full of incestuous echoes like the ones mentioned above. But the Ogaden is symbolically entrusted to her because, in the Brechtian phrase, she is good for it, and its paternal guardians—be they Somali, Qotto or Amhara—clearly are not. “We're in each other's life now. No more wars. We're a family,” says uncle Hilaal as he hugs Askar to him, and in this he speaks, unconsciously, for the multicultural, mongrel spirit of the Ogaden, which desires only that its various guardians live at peace with its occupants and they with one another. Misra is the good guardian because, unlike her shifting political counterparts, she is sufficiently conversant with and tolerant of all her people's cultures to make allowance for their different partisan relevancies and myopias. She is the true mother who sees all the blind spots on her child's body and “soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean” （110–11）. When she admits to buying milk for the Ethiopian soldiers, she protests that “she was doing something for ‘her people,’” and then adds the comment, “the problem is, who are ‘my people’?” （184）. The phrase is, of course, deliberately ambiguous. Both sides are “her people” and she provides both with what they most need: milk for the Ethiopians, money for the Somalis. Misra serves all members of her larger, generic Ogaden “family,” giving to each what is good for them and overriding the incestuous inwardness of Somali ethnicity.

The second and stronger bastion of resistance to cultural and linguistic diversification is Askar's maps. Farah has said of the colonial maps of Africa that “we should redraw [them] according to our economic and psychological and social needs, and not accept the nonsensical frontiers carved out of our regions” （“Wretched” 54）. And yet it is no accident that Askar has a nostalgic hankering for the time, during World War Two, when all of the Somali territories except for Djibouti were united under a single, colonial administration: his own politico-linguistic map of Greater Somalia is, in reality, as much a fiction of cultural geography as the colonial maps were figments of political geography. History, Hilaal reminds us, is made by those who have access to sign-systems （168） and is imposed upon those who have not, and the coercive cartographic enclosures enforced by the newly-literate Somalis override sociopolitical （and, increasingly, cultural） divisions as the old Western imperial ones overrode ethnic and linguistic barriers. Their ethnocentric organization of political space is, arguably, as distortive of reality as the Mercator projection's Eurocentric organization of geographical space. The Somalis of the WSLF regard their people as united by language, divided by maps, and the independent nation-state of the Somali Republic imagines that its cultural-linguistic “specificity” gives it a unique claim on those territories where Somali, in one fashion or another, is still spoken. The chief objection to this new cartographic hegemony, after noting the shakiness of its political propositions, is that it claims to unite people who, both linguistically and in other respects, are becoming more and more diverse—who have in fact become irredeemably mongrelized—while it artificially sets apart other groups of people who, in reality, are much more closely bonded. In the former category are the Somalis scattered through Kenya and Tanzania, like the tutor of Cusmaan, Askar's intellectual mentor in Mogadiscio. These, when they are not speaking Swahili, use a bastardized, ungrammatical form of Somali similar to that spoken by the Ogadenese Somalis, and their subscription to Somali cultural values is as adulterated and compromised by the dominant host-cultures as is that of the Ogadenese marginal groups, the Oromo and Qotto, by the Somali one. Much closer to home, the Westernized urbanites of Mogadiscio, at the hub of the nation-state, do not identify closely with their Ogadenese brethren but snobbishly regard them not only as linguistically incompetent but also as lacking in self-sufficiency and wholeness. No sooner has Hilaal declared categorically that “you are either a Somali or you aren't” （148） than he proceeds to postulate a halfway classification of extraterritorial “unpersons” who cannot be admitted to a full Somali identity. All the indicators suggest that the linguistic homogeneity and cultural exclusiveness of Greater Somalia, if they ever existed, are rapidly disintegrating. Conversely, in the second category there is Misra, a non-ethnic Somali speaker who, though fully acculturated, is automatically mistrusted and is denied a place on her ward's identity papers that she has done more than enough to earn. Misra fosters a Somali child and teaches it its national language and folklore, slaves in a Somali-Ogaden household where she is sexually abused by Somali men, and is, at last, doubtfully accused of treachery by them and murdered. Meanwhile, in the same Greater Somalia where children are made to learn their genealogies by heart as proof of ethnicity （Lewis 10–11）, honorary citizenship is granted to another non-ethnic Somali, the sullen Qotto schoolteacher Aw-Adan, for no other reason than that his Arabic input into Somali culture is, politically, more acceptable than Misra's Amharic one （significantly it is Aw-Adan, whose loyalty is never questioned, who accuses Misra of treachery, thus, perhaps, making his own insecure position a little safer by denouncing another foreigner.

What is a Somali and what does it mean to be one? The question opens up a Pandora's box of political, ethnic, and moral quandaries. Is it to speak or to read the language, or to be born in the homeland or in one of its territories? （in fact, few of the novel's Somali speakers are Somalis by birth）. Is it to be a patriot in the cause of the Ogaden?—in which case what right has Qorrax, who openly collaborates with the Ethiopian conquerors, to his Somali identity? Who, if anyone, is fit to be political guardian of the disputed Ogaden territory to which Somalia lays claim? Who can claim to have “authored” it parentally? Certainly, the criteria for nationhood postulated by Askar, Hilaal and the WSLF patriots are as erratic and capricious as the Somali map of the Ogaden, which ignores its multilingual character and fifty per cent Amharic-speaking population. Little ground is left for belief in anything that could be described as a “pure,” “authentic,” or “natural” Somali identity. In one way or another, each of the novel's characters stands, like a girl-apparition in one of Askar's many dreams, “in a borrowed skin,” and the Somali map, in its peculiarly monolithic contours and fine disregard of multiculturalism, provides an inexact, inadequate model of reality. Maps, like the wars fought over them to redraw national terrains, distort and destroy, and they are, appropriately, attended by funeral images throughout the book. The “notional truths” expressed by the Somali maps correspond to the political actuality of the Horn of Africa as little as Askar's moral conception of Misra coincides with the real woman （Misra, significantly, has no understanding of maps）. Misra, like the political map of the territory of which she is the figurative custodian, is in his consciousness a suitably floating signifier, zoned into many stereotyped figures and rival fantasy embodiments: on one side, mother-martyr and victimized nation; on the other, wicked stepmother, betrayer, and national enemy. A nominal sense of reality so prevails over the actual, and the signifier over its referent, that at one point Askar even thinks of her as “a creature of his own invention” （107）, and it is difficult to say exactly what does constitute her reality, since she seems （like the Ogaden） to have her being solely through the guardians and wards who control her existence in one way or another.

Askar, the girl in his dream tells him, is “almost always satisfied with the surface of things … a mirror in which your features … may be reflected” （130）. For him Misra is an image of the Ogaden insofar as both are mirrors in which the beholder sees his own desires reflected, and maps, like mirrors, reflect the dispositions of their makers. “There is truth in maps,” Hilaal concedes but, aware of the dangers of ethnocentric myths, adds the rider: “The question is, does truth change? … The Ogaden, as Somali, is truth. To the Ethiopian map-maker, the Ogaden, as Somali, is untruth” （217–18）. In the novel's allegoric scheme Askar comes to represent a chauvinistic Somali concept of the Ogaden, as his real mother represents the dead dream of an ethnic nation, of “Mother Somalia” as the Ogaden's natural parent, “getting together” with “the Ogaden/child separated from her” （97）. Misra signifies a broader, hybrid, generic concept of the Ogaden as a place of mixed ethnicity, and her hybridization signifies everything that Askar must resist and destroy to realize his sectarian Somali dreams. “One day, you will identify yourself with your people and identify me out of your community,” she prophesies, “you might even kill me to make your people's dreams become a tangible reality” （95）. What Askar does is tantamount to these things. Together with his uncles, he “others” Misra, misogynistically and xenophobically, as woman and foreigner, as a sexual and political territory to be invaded and colonized; and this separative process, even as it destabilizes roles in the parent-child relationship, reaffirms divisive gender and nationality categories. Meanwhile, like Misra, the neutral ground of the disputed strip of land （“the foundation of the earth”） does not discriminate between its diverse occupying nationalities and the rival maps that overlay it like the layers of a palimpsest. The “truth” of maps is, finally, a highly subjective, ethnocentric kind of truth, and the stable identity presupposed by the idealistic vision of the map-maker non-existent.

Some recent writing from the postcolonial world, particularly that from the white Commonwealth of Australia and Canada （Malouf, Atwood, Kroetsch） has challenged the homogeneity of ethnocentric colonial discourses by projecting spaces other than those inscribed on the prevailing hegemonic map. These resistive readings celebrate the diversity and mixed ethnicity of formerly colonized cultures, previously ignored or stigmatized by the dominant colonial one, and indicate a shift away from cultural homogeneity. In the contemporary Africa of Maps, however, the new dominant discourse is itself insularly and oppressively ethnic. Ethnicity is here the hegemonic and reterritorializing power, not the revisioning agent or counterdiscourse: the regional map is the instrument of new, postcolonial ethnocentrisms and false cultural homogeneities forced upon a hybrid, mongrelized reality. Africa's internal imperialisms have taken over from where the alien, external ones left off. Farah's novel offers us new maps for old.

Works Cited

Farah, Nuruddin. “Childhood of My Schizophrenia.” The Times Literary Supplement 23 Nov. 1990: 1264.

———. Maps. London: Picador, 1986.

———. Interview with Patricia Morris. “Wretched Life.” Africa Events Sept. 1986: 54.

Lewis, I. M. A Modern History of Somalia: A Nation and State in the Horn of Africa. London: Longman, 1980.