Author: Sanya Noel

The fat graduand. The laughing ugly girl. But you would have laughed it off. And your father wouldn’t have stormed into college, with plain clothes policemen. No arresting a teacher for having struck you. No epileptic attacks, Maggie. No collapsing at your own graduation fourteen years later. We watch you walk to be given the power to read. You’re not a baby now, Maggie. You’re not a fat spoilt baby at all. You’re not ugly anymore, Maggie. You don’t twist your mouth when you speak. We’re not envious of your having gotten an epilepsy attack just when the teacher was…

In her debut historical novel, Black Mamba Boy, Somali novelist, Nadifa Mohamed follows the story of Jama which begins in the Yemeni port city of Aden. Jama loses his mother at a young age of ten and sets out to find his father on an almost blind journey. He sets out based not on facts about the whereabouts of his father but on rumours. His father, he’s heard, is in Juba, Sudan, but when he sets out, he does not even know what road leads to where. He can’t tell in what general direction Juba is and what road to…

He carried his devirginized penis in his hands to the lab and tried to restore all that had been lost. He then placed it on a table and used a magnifying glass to understand the reversibility of the devirginization process. The microscope wasn’t working, so he got an open ended spanner and a ball pein hammer and attempted to beat some sense into it relying on how old AM radios become worked and unworked by slightly tapping them. Then he tied it back into position with that open ended spanner and nobody knows whether it went back to normal or…