When his mother dies, Jama flees Aden in search of his estranged father he is a boy on an epic and daunting journey, crossing unknown lands with little knowledge and less help. His is a story of constant heartache and loss. “Living on the streets intermittently from the age of six had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower back and taste it in the thick, dusty air.” Jama is accustomed to having to fend for himself he is impossibly tough and yet surprisingly tender-hearted. They were a roll call of infectious diseases, mangled limbs, and deformities.” “Market boys of all different hues, creeds, and languages gathered at the beach to play, bathe, and fight.

Jama lives on the margins of society, alternately embraced and cursed by his mother, spending days running errands and perpetrating petty thefts among the microcosm of market boys. “Jama was tired of always turning up a beggar at people’s doors, begging for someone’s leftover food, leftover attention, leftover love.” Nadifa Mohamed’s “Black Mamba Boy” is a sprawling, nomadic tale of Jama, a young Somali boy who goes on a quest to find his father and, ultimately, to find manhood. Our story begins when Jama is a preteen, living with his mother on the begrudged scraps of extended family.

Each person sitting passively or impatiently, wondering whether the tracks of their fate would take them on a clattering iron horse to their destination or would sweep them away on an invisible path to another world.” “Life is just this, Jama thought, a long journey, with lightness and darkness falling over you, companions all around on their own journeys.

Black Mamba Boy by Mohamed Nadifa