Kalaman wants desperately to be an ordinary, successful man--but this is not the fate that he has been cast. His grandfather Nonno says to him, "I named you Kalaman because it is a cul-de-sac of a name." He goes on, "Commonplace names need propping up." His grandfather Despite his moving into the capital, despite his technology job and his relationships with ordinary women, Kalaman is inextricably tied to people--Nonno and Sholoongo--who live in part in the extraordinary realm of the world.
As a boy, Kalaman, too, was interested in the stuff of legends.
"In those days I was interested in the origins of things, how rivers came into being and why they ran and where. I put a legion of questions to Nonno about where babies began and how, where the dead end up, and whether, once interred, the buried awoke in the dark of their tombs and were immediately reborn, and if so in what form, child or another grown up, or did they stay curled up, like baby snakes knocked senseless in the head?"
These are all questions that are the source of legends, questions from which emerge cosmology and myth. It is this same curiosity about the ways of the world that makes him infatuated with Sholoongo who, in the words of Kalaman's mother, "is forever digging, without a moment's break. Kalaman says, "At least Sholoongo and I shared a keenness of spirit, a genuine interest in the beginnings of things. She unravelled mysteries..." Yet Kalaman, as if gleaning too much into the layers of secrets contained in the answers to the questions he had as a boy, leaves them behind altogether and moves to the city where, he hopes, things are more simple.
Tales and proverbs abound in the story and in Farah's prose. Sholoongo tells Kalaman a folktale that "her father had learnt from a Nigerian fellow seaman." This folktale, then, is not specific to Somalia but partakes (Farah seems to tell us) of a more fundamental and universal human truth. The punch line of the folktale is the words of an unburied dead head saying to another skull, "Divulging secrets got me here, dead." Secrets, in this world, are something to be protected. Digging for them is a dangerous game.
These secrets, too, are tied to the impending doom of the war in Mogadiscio. Kalaman's mother, a scolding, attention-deprived woman, is terrified of the war. "My mother held the view that we were approaching a collapse. It was as if someone had sold an idea of doom to her and she bought it as offered, wholesale. And she started to acquire all manner of weapons, preparing herself and her family for the worst." His mother's knowledge of the war is not knowledge in the empirical sense, but something that she feels based on rumors and her gut wisdom. The war, then, exists in both the physical realm and the realm of the non-physical.
The non-physical wisdom is what is contained in these proverbs, folktales, legends and episodes of magic. Farah artfully weaves them into his own prose and that of his characters to reveal both the tension of the physical and non-physical realms, and the extent to which his characters live in both (whether they like it or not). This weave gives insight into the culture of Somalia generally, speaks to the context of the war itself in which old ways are colliding with new pressures, and creates a beautiful and fantastic backdrop against which to watch the personal fates of his characters unfold.
