She reconstructed the story from the beginning. She worked it into a set of pyramids which served as foundations for one another. Out of this, she erected a construction of great solidity and strength. She then built mansions on top of it all, mansions large as her imagination and with lots of chambers that led off corridors in which she lost herself but which led her finally, when she chose to follow, to a secret back door in another wing of the building. She stood at a distance; she breathed deeply and took her time. She admired the result.

The silence widened and she entered the door which opened. She roamed about in the architecture of her thoughts. She found she had to repaint everything, replaster the walls and paper each pillar all over again. Now she covered every corner with a new coat to give the place a colorful purpose, as meaningful as the vision she had seen, paint fresh as a sweet dream, blue and beautiful here, white and sunny-bright there. To create effect, she marked where the walls met with a warning written in red: Stop and give heed: He is not all of us! She walked about aimlessly, stumbled upon a vase full of water and broke it. She ceased moving. Her mind segregated the dead from the living; she stared at the lily which had withered with the same deliberate indifference as the water that, like life, ran away to merge with another form of life. She decided to banish from her thoughts all things which had no immediate relevance.

And upon what she had reconstructed she superimposed a tapestry of patterns she herself had developed, none of which, to the best of her knowledge, had known precedents. This she believed would enable her to introduce fresh turns and curves in the rebuilding of this large structure, the reworking of the designs, the flowers and also the castle: her life!

She would allot a room to each of the names which had presented themselves to her. She would do that before the idéeconstruite fell in on her like a house of cards. But did she have enough rooms, did she have the space? Would she allow anybody to shift the furniture about, change, say, the position of a chair or a table? Would she let anyone make alterations in the day or the week? Would she consult anyone while ordering anything? And who would have access to all of this? Who would the guests be?

A room of one’s own. A country of one’s own. A century in which one was not a guest. A room in which one was not a guest. . . .

She had a room of her own. She was young and beautiful. By the standards of anyone anywhere in the world, she was well-read, one could even say she was very learned. Professionally, she was a journalist. She had taken a degree in literature, then applied her talent to writing for the press; she freelanced while still a student in Italy and when she returned to Somalia got a newspaper job. Two and a half years later she was appointed acting editor of the only daily in the country. She came into a head-on confrontation with the authorities over the paper’s editorial policy. She was sacked. A presidential decree forbade her to publish her writings inside the Somali Democratic Republic. So she directed her talent elsewhere: she decided to translate twenty world classics from six foreign languages into Somali. She was fluent in four European languages, her proficiency in Arabic was good and her understanding of Spanish was tolerably good. But since she wouldn’t be permitted to circulate these efforts of hers, since she couldn’t publish them because of the banning order, she decided to read them to her daughter Ubax. She gave them to her hot like maize cakes from the oven.

Ubax loved hearing about the Arabian prince in the Nights climbing flights of stairs up to the chamber of the waiting princess, the princess with the anxious look. Ubax also loved to listen to an Icelandic commoner buying the favour of the prince with a gift (Medina changed the gift from bear to horse and the snow to sand—“A country spread out,” she said, “like pages of sandpaper”), and would happily sit at her mother’s foot and wait for these stories to brown like onion in the pan of Medina’s creativity, gluttonous as only the very young can be, anxious like hunger, her joyous expressions delightful like the eyes of a young deer. (Her favourite story had been a folktale Medina adapted from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to which she had given the interpretative title “He.”) For two months, for three months, day in and day out, the two were together from morning till evening now that Medina did not go to work, now that she had fewer engagements to attend. And they would wait for Samater and celebrate his homecoming with the re- telling of what they had done, which stories they had told each other, who had come to visit them. Then one evening Samater did not return on time. He did not come home to hear how his wife and daughter had spent their time while he had been gone.

Ubax sensed a change in the atmosphere the following morning: not only did her mother stop baking new stories for her, she became unapproachable and entered into long conversations with a number of elderly men who called. Medina was unbearably difficult and answered to questions only “yes” or “no” and would not say any more. One dawn, two men came for Samater and took him away. Ubax rose with the sun and found her mother reading the daily newspaper which carried a large photograph of Samater on the first page. She later learnt that her father had been appointed Minister of Constructions. When he came home for lunch that day, Ubax was surprised to hear her parents’ raised voices; she was sad that they were not prepared to share their quarrel with her for they lapsed into a foreign language and this excluded her. Ubax asked: “What’s happening, Medina?” No answer. And there arrived a chauffer-driven car so Samater hardly needed to use the family car. Life was never the same after that.

Something else took place. An extra hand, a man, joined the household: an orderly who made himself useful as a gardener, a woodchopper and who helped the maid iron or wash clothes. Medina warned her daughter against talking openly with this man. But why? Her mother spoke evil of “informers an pederasts and boot-lickers.” Then six months or so later, Medina moved out. She left a house which was legally her own and moved into another which was in her brother’s name. Did she want to underline the temporariness of this move? Many people speculated as to what had happened, others made up their own versions of what had occurred.

A room of one’s own!

Copyright 1981, 1982, 1992 by Nuruddin Farah. All rights reserved.