A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy

This article argues that Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed's debut novel Black Mamba Boy and particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure hero and as representative of the young Somali men who fought for Mussolini and perished during the Second World War. The novel can be read as an adventure of Jama's travels across eastern Africa on a quest to find his father and as a historical account of the impact of the war on the region. These two aims, overtly identified by Mohamed, result in narrative strands that put different emphases on the representation of chronotopic space-time; the former - what we could call the adventure tale - foregrounds space and the protagonist's movement through space while the latter offers important commentary on the way in which this story's particular historical past writes the colonial present, that is, it focuses more on time and its impact on the characters. Black Mamba Boy interweaves the adventure tale with the historical narrative to tell a fascinating story of migration, loss and survival.