(Un)rooted spaces of belonging: migrant kinship structures in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy

Abstract

While African intercontinental migration to Western countries continues to receive vigorous scholarly attention in African literary studies, this article draws its focus to intracontinental migration during the 1930s and 1940s in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy (2010). After the protagonist Jama loses his mother, he searches for his father across East and North Africa in a quest to solidify his brittle familial bonds. As Jama constantly refashions his kinship bonds throughout his peregrinations, familial belonging lies at the thematic core of the narrative, which necessitates a more thorough discussion of family structures alongside Mohamed’s realistic portrayal of African geographies transformed by Italian and British colonization to better analyze how kinship operates as a mode of resistance against such forces. Considering Mohamed’s exploration of familial roles in different East African societies, I argue that this novel showcases how migration paradoxically destabilizes and reshapes traditional African family systems foiled by colonial violence. It does so by portraying Africans’ creative resilience in engendering new familial/communal spaces while concomitantly dislodging geographically fixed ideas of belonging. To deploy this analysis, I combine geocriticism and Black Geographies to examine how varied spaces and places shape the characters’ identities and the familial connections they construe. In making this argument, I demonstrate that families/communities mark belonging more significantly than citizenship in the context of migration and buttress space-making for East African migrants in Mohamed’s narrative.