through Nonno s cryptic unconscious must be elliptical at best, and one dimly suspects, as the American folk adage has it, that You Can't Get There From Here. Indeed, on even the more reputable American mental maps, Somalia lies merely in the rough vicinity of Sudan and Eritrea which is to say, judging by some early-summer segments of that royal road to the American psyche, the front page of the New York Times: somewhere between Recurrent Famine and Interethnic Feud. Somalia, Somalia . . . (dim visions of starving skeletons yield absentmindedly to shadows of khat-crazed clansmen): wasn't there some nasty business about Americans getting killed there a while back? The stuck collective memory is jogged loose by two resounding ambassadorial blasts, in whose aftermath the bewildered protestations of Kenyans and Tanzanians that theirs are peaceful countries can only ring hollow. For our vague recollection has now been clarified and confirmed: East is a violent, treacherous place. Moreover, regardless of how pitiful and helpless they might appear, no matter how selflessly and heroically we try to Restore Their Hope, we know that underneath it all, those ingrates over there hate us. (Hear those same Kenyans carping about FBI investigators' disregard for victims!) And that's why, in the case of our deadly peacekeeping adventure half a decade ago, we jumped in our troop-carriers and fled back home, leaving Somalia, one more backwater basket case we'd never tour again, to drop off the map of our consciousness. Yet it's in the nature of the repressed to return. Lately, that ragged memory of a nation has been insinuating itself into the subliminal reaches of the American mind not through the well-rutted routes of the front-page news (which all summer long with tiresome regularity dressed up doleful boilerplate as late-breaking bulletin, each lurid instance of political chaos and public-health crisis bent on reconfirming as an eternal river of rebellion and coup, butchery and genocide, plague and virus), but over the secluded back roads of the Arts and Culture section. Pioneering the way some time ago now was the celebrity fashion model Iman, in whose glamorously gaunt figure the harshness of famine morphed, mollified, into famine-chic. (She appears offstage, wickedly burlesqued, in a late chapter of Secrets.) But all these years later Iman is only in quotes, her allegiance belonging more properly to some bizarre hypernation of Benetton, to Planet Hollywood, to planet Fashion Cafe. A more plausible Somali cultural ambassador, then, might be the veteran singer (or, as her record jacket hopefully identifies her, Afro-Pop diva) Maryam Mursal, who made her first tour of North America this past summer, opening for the high-visibility Africa Fete in support of not one but two albums (one folkloric, the other high-tech pop) recorded for English rock star Peter Gabriel's prestigious world label, Real World. In liner notes and website hype, Real World's publicity mythologizes Mursal's harrowing seven-month exodus through the desert (traveling on donkeys, five children in tow) to eventual refuge in Denmark. The journalists covering her shows had obviously read their press kits, and dutifully played up the generic human pathos and personal indominability of her case, sentimentalizing her into an iconic Mama Afrika, beleaguered but surviving. The lesson that the Christian Science Monitor draws from Mursal's example (with words borrowed from a festival organizer) is that African countries who are known only for their political turmoil can also produce 'beautiful and wonderfully danceable music as well.' This is the benign flipside of the benighted view of Africa, a kind of well-meaningness that's just a hairbreadth away from condescension: Isn't it inspiring how those plucky Africans manage to make beauty even amid misery and squalor, or, less charitably, They may have made a mess of things, but they sure can dance. Even the indomitable Mursal is temporarily powerless against such facile representations. In a backstage interview with the same reporter on the second night of the tour her first real opportunity to speak to the American public, she must have Michael Eldridge teaches literature and culture at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. His essays have appeared in Diaspora and Transition, and he reviewed Nuruddin Farah's trilogy Variations on the Theme of an Dictatorship for In These Times in 1992.