ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Somali author Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps, which represents a young boy named Askar growing up in the midst of the Ogaden war between Somalia and Ethiopia. The novel effectively represents the confusion in the main character’s mind concerning the outcomes of his own violent childhood fantasies and the brutal effects of the war. Askar’s oedipal phase—and his process of gaining independence from his Ethiopian mother-figure, Misra—painfully coincide with the war against Ethiopia, which turns her into a national enemy for Askar as a Somali citizen. Presented through a fragmented frame, the novel demonstrates Askar’s feelings of guilt as he subsequently blames his own emotions for Misra’s brutal murder, presumably committed by Somali forces. The novel further challenges the taboos of childhood innocence in the context of war propaganda and shows how childhood fantasies may overlap with violent historical events. I turn to Melanie Klein’s theory in this chapter, as psychoanalytic theory, including Klein’s, helps us to break the myth of childhood innocence, as it points toward children’s feelings of aggression against their parents, as well as toward the experience of guilt provoked by such aggression. But rather than merely reading the novel through a Kleinian lens, I am interested in analyzing how this complex, postmodern novel complicates simplistic distinctions between “bad” and “good” objects that Klein’s theory largely relies on. I argue instead that the novel, arising from a politically and historically complex postcolonial terrain, hyperbolically highlights the dangers of any simplistic rhetoric of splitting, whether it concerns enemy lines in war or parental images in fantasmatic war. By representing complex fantasmatic violence against parental figures in war situations, Farah’s novel can be read as a precursor to subsequent child-soldier narratives, which often highlight similar themes.
