Bleeding for the Mother(Land): Reading Testimonial Bodies in Nuruddin Farah's <em>Maps</em>

Abstract

This essay traces the ways in which damaged bodies function as readable traumatic testimonies of gendered and racialized postcolonial violence in Somalia. Characters in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps read and learn from each other’s marked bodies while simultaneously instructing the novel’s reader on how to read the narrative. The novel represents traumatic suffering in images of bodily illness and mutilation to signify hypochondriacal responses to the psychic violence that accompanies the physical violation wrought by neocolonialism. Characters’ bodies transgress patriarchal gender role and geographical boundaries, dismantling established constructions of postcolonial nation and personhood. Postcolonial motherhood becomes a new kind of subjectivity that transgresses both anatomical and national borders. As testimony, the narratives and marked bodies in Maps signify social change by suggesting new kinds of bodies rather than by reiterating the established alignment of birth and motherhood with the emerging nation. They suggest new ways of reading Anglophone African postcolonial literatures.