[Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses. In the following brief essay, written in 1986, he traces the divisions central to Farah's Maps.]

Here is a starving child, there is a mad dog; feed her, bomb him … information about Africa reaches us, most of the time, through a series of filters which, by reducing the vast continent to a cluster of emotive slogans, succeed in denying us any sense of complexity, context, truth. But then, as Nuruddin Farah reminds us in his new novel [, Maps,] （his sixth）, the West was always rather arbitrary about the names it pinned to Africa: Nigeria was named for an imperialist's mistress, Ethiopia lazily derived from the Greek for ‘a person with a black face’.

For many years Farah, one of the finest of contemporary African novelists, has been bringing us a very different world. His Africa, most particularly his native Somalia, is in revolt against the long hegemony of cartographers and bestowers of names. To be a Somali is to be a people united by a language and divided by maps. Maps is a book about such political divisions, and the wars they cause （the conflict in the Ogaden is central to the story）; but what makes it a true and rich work of art is Farah's knowledge that the deepest divisions are those between men and women, and the rifts within the self. Maps charts the chasms of the soul.

An orphaned Somali baby, Askar, is found and raised in the Ogaden village of Kallefo by a non-Somali woman, Misra. The book's first movement—the musical term seems necessary—is a meditation on their relationship. He is a preternaturally wise child, and his growing up is at once mythical and sensual, punctuated by such strange images as the discovery of a man violating a hen. The passion and intimacy of what develops between Askar and Misra culminates in a surreal rite of blood, when the boy, just once, and inexplicably, menstruates.

Later, as a young man in Mogadiscio （its local name, Xamark, the red city, echoes and underlines the importance in the novel of blood）, he encounters Misra again. Now she is a woman under a dark cloud, accused of an act of treason that led to 600 people in Kallefo being executed by the Ethiopians. Askar, who is being drawn to the life of a Somali revolutionary fighter, is set at war with himself: will he find her guilty or not? She denies the treason; and, as Askar's uncle points out, ‘throughout history, men have blamed women for the ill luck they themselves have brought on their heads.’ The struggle inside Askar is that ancient struggle, and it is also an echo of the ‘real’ war, and of his own divisions and doubts. The resolution is ambiguous, but Askar does arrive at a certainty of sorts, a characterization of life as sacrifice, as blood.

Around the central narrative, Farah weaves a web of leitmotifs drawn from folk-tales and from dreams; and in the end it is this web in which the novel's strength is seen to reside, as the meaning of names, the remaking of history, meshes with nightmare and myth to form the basis of a new description of the world, and offers us new maps for old.