Writing Across Languages and Cultures. Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy

With her debut novel Black Mamba Boy, published in 2010 to much acclaim, Nadifa Mohamed has articulated in the increasingly diverse and thriving landscape of contemporary multicultural English fiction a distinct British Somali voice. Her work situates within an expanding body of literary works that reflects the multiplicity of the non-native cultures within multicultural Britain and has emerged out of the particular predicament of both first and second generation immigrant English writers.This contribution discussesthe ways in which the author weaves a tapestry of languages, cultures, personal and communal histories, aiming to challenge an enduring dynamic of marginal, peripheral stories disappearing from history. In Black Mamba boy Mohamed revisits the western tradition of the Bildungsroman novel and incorporates strategies of the African oral narrative, as she chronicles the coming of age process of her protagonist Jama. The initiation novel, concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist has often been favoured by postcolonial and bicultural writers to tell their stories of personal growth, within a context of migration and displacement.