Free Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah

wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. For a time, early on in her career, he’d been the only photographer she idolized. But the more Bella developed her own style, the wider the range of photographers she admired. Still, she remained partial to the photo, which reminded her of a painting. She had always believed that photography owes its existence to painting. “I would like my photographs to think of their favorite painters,” she said.
    The journalist pointed out that Somalis, whether male or female, are physically reserved. “They are undemonstrative. It is as if they have never heard of sexual freedom, with parents shying away from standing even half nude in front of their children. The body, whether female or male, is in chains.”
    Given the opportunity, and unlimited funding, the journalist asks, what photographic project would she be eager to embark on?
    Bella smiled and shook her head. “I wonder if there is any point in answering your question, which I take to be nothing but a sort of a trap.”
    â€œLet me ask it in a different way,” said the journalist. “Who would you rather be, a Sebastião Salgado or a Robert Mapplethorpe, given the chance?”
    â€œA Sebastião Salgado any day.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I would start my own series about the end of women’s manual labor,” Bella replied.
    The truth is, Bella did photograph her lovers in the nude before she was intimate with them, but she will never discuss this. She believes this affirms her power over them. As she prepares them to sit for her, she watches them from behind the camera lens, intently waiting and deliberately making them nervous before her finger presses the shutter.
    Nor does she share with her interviewer the shock and then the amusement she experienced when, in a hotel in New York where she was staying, she found a Mapplethorpe book of black male portraits in the nude where a Gideon Bible would normally be. Did she like what she saw? Did she think that what she saw was art? She wasn’t sure. Of course, she wouldn’t deny there was novelty in doing what Mapplethorpe did, and she admired the way he’d made his own niche, in both the market and the art of photography. But she wasn’t so sure that what he was doing was any different from the titillating nude photographs so many photographers had taken of so many women.
    â€œWho in your experience is the most difficult subject to photograph?” the journalist had asked.
    â€œThe eye of the camera sees what is in front of it, and it records the moment it captures truthfully,” Bella replied. “However, it may have difficulties in fronting impossible situations. My mother hated being photographed despite knowing that there was nothing more pleasing to me than taking her picture. So I would say she was the most impossible subject to photograph.”
    â€œAnd who is the most delightful subject to photograph?” the journalist asked.
    That one was easy. “Aar, my brother, and his children,” Bella had answered.

4.
    Bella knows that she is procrastinating, but she does not yet feel up to the enormous responsibilities that await her. She tells herself that until she has a better grip on her emotions she shouldn’t make contact with her niece and nephew. The folly of mourning, and thus confusing love with loss, is so natural in us humans that it can leave us physically and mentally unable to perform any of our usual tasks, let alone look after anyone else.
    She pulls her mobile phone out of her shoulder bag to ring Gunilla again. But she has scarcely dialed the long international number when the hotel phone on the bedside table rings, startling her. With her hand shaking and her head spinning with an array of conflicting fantasies—someone is ringing to tell her that Aar is injured but still alive; or it is Gunilla calling to tell her that Valerie has been released and is on a flight bound for