Nuruddin Farah 1945-

Somalian novelist, dramatist, and short story writer.

For additional information on Farah's career, see BLC, Ed. 1

INTRODUCTION

A Somali writer best known for novels that champion the oppressed, particularly women, Farah locates his narratives in the midst of his country's turbulent history, addressing the theme of the quest for individual freedom in the face of arbitrary power. Using a journalistic objectivity to comment on the political and social issues affecting his homeland, he does not preach a particular political vision. Instead, the history of colonization and turbulent border conflicts in Somalia, coupled with Farah's travels and educational opportunities, gives his writing access to a wide variety of cultures and enables him to write about Somalia with what critics have described as a detached perspective. He is best known for the trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1992), which centers on a fictional African regime led by the autocratic Major General Muhammad Siyad—referred to as the "General"—and the subsequent demise of democracy in Somalia. Overall, Farah's writings are considered unique because they are informed by the rich oral culture of Somalia and Farah's command of several languages, and his work has been praised for its vast intellectual depth, rich symbolism, poetic language, and epic and satirical elements.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in what was then the Italian territory of Somalia (the Italian and British territories were united to form the country of Somalia in 1960). The son of Hassan Farah, a merchant, Farah credits his mother, Aleeli, an oral poet, as being one of the most powerful and positive influences on his life. Growing up, he learned Somali, Amharic, Arabic, Italian, and English. From 1964 to 1966 he worked as a clerk for the Ministry of Education in Somalia, then attended Punjab University in India from 1966 to 1970, studying philosophy and literature. While in India, Farah wrote several plays, including A Dagger in Vacuum (1969), which was not approved by Somali government censors. That same year the Soviets backed General Siyad Barre in a bloodless coup to take over Somalia's government. Farah became critical of Barre's dictatorial regime, a sentiment he expressed in several of his novels. By the early 1970s Farah had returned to Somalia and had begun teaching comparative literature at Somali National University in Mogadishu; he suffered increasing harassment from authorities, however, over the publication of From a Crooked Rib in 1970, and Farah left for England in 1974, continuing his education at the University of London and the University of Essex. Upon the publication of A Naked Needle in 1976, which further offended the Barre government, Farah was warned not to return to Somalia or he would be jailed. From that point on Farah has lived in voluntary exile, serving as a resident writer or instructor in a number of countries, including the United States, Nigeria, Uganda, Italy, the Sudan, Gambia, and Germany. He has continued to write plays, short stories, and novels, winning the English-Speaking Union literary award in 1980 and the International Neustadt Prize in 1998. In 2006, Farah was living in Cape Town, South Africa, along with his wife and two children.

MAJOR WORKS

From a Crooked Rib, the first work of fiction to be published in English by a Somali author, examines the plight of women in traditional Islamic societies through the eyes of a young village girl, Ebla, as she struggles with issues of polygamy, arranged marriage, and female circumcision. Farah's next novel, the introspective A Naked Needle, focuses on protagonist Koschin's search for self-fulfillment and freedom within the political and social upheaval of contemporary Somalia. Koschin, a teacher who studied in England, struggles to remain free from all social, political, and personal obligations. Farah's next three novels are more overtly political. This trilogy, later published as Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, presents a picture of life under a dictator, depicting the suspicion and fear that plagues those living in a fascist state. Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) recounts the repressive military regime of Somalia but does not assert a specific ideological position. In the novel a political activist's attempts to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his twin brother are thwarted by his father, a former government interrogator and torturer. Sardines (1981) depicts life under the General's repressive regime while also examining the social barriers that limit Somali women and their quest for individuality and equality. The novel's central character is Medina, a young woman who, after losing her job as editor of a state-run newspaper, refuses to support the General's domestic policies and suffers at the hands of the government, her husband, and her mother-in-law. The final volume in the trilogy is Close Sesame (1982), the story of an aging tribal leader, Deeriye, who spent many years in prison for opposing both colonial and post-revolutionary governments. When Deeriye's son plots to overthrow the General's regime, Deeriye attempts to stop the coup himself.

Farah's next trilogy is a more loosely related group of novels than Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. Maps (1986) is set during Somalia's war against Ethiopia in the late 1970s and recounts the story of a Somali orphan, Askar, who is raised by an Ethiopian woman named Misra. The first part of the book centers on their relationship; the second part describes their later meeting during the Ogaden War, when Askar must judge Misra's guilt or innocence on the charge of treason. The novel explores several types of conflict: the political divisions caused by maps, the divisions between men and women, the divisions between nationalism and personal commitment, and the internal divisions between different parts of the self. In Gifts (1990), Farah returns to the theme of subjugation in Somali society. The female protagonist, Duniya, has spent her life and three marriages at the mercy of men and their gifts. Duniya's story becomes a metaphor for the plight of Third World nations, which are at the mercy of gifts from the First World. Secrets (1998) is set during the end of General Siyad Barre's rule, as Somalia begins to break into warring clans; the novel's main character searches for his origin and his true tribal clan.

In 2000 Farah turned to nonfiction, publishing Yesterday, Tomorrow, which is based on interviews with Somali refugees conducted between 1991 and 1998 and focuses on their sufferings at the hands of various overseers and their attempts to build new lives. Three years later Farah returned to fiction with Links (2003). The novel recounts the tale of Jeebleh, a husband and father living in New York who returns to Somalia after twenty years with a dual purpose: to visit his recently deceased mother's grave and to help recover a friend's child who has been abducted. Back in Somalia, Jeebleh is nearly overwhelmed by the changes in his homeland, including the presence of warlords who prey on the citizenry, but Jeebleh is determined to bring about the return of his friend's daughter. In 2007, Farah published the novel Knots, in which Cambara, fleeing from the grief of a failed marriage and the death of her son, returns to Somalia in search of her own identity and with the intent to take back the family home from a warlord.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critics have found evidence of both modernism and traditionalism in Farah's writings. In discussing the influence of Somalia's oral tradition on Farah's style, many critics acknowledge the powerful imagery, exotic symbolism, and textured language of his fiction, commenting that these traits evolved out of the rich poetic heritage of Somalia. In addition, scholars have begun to point to a shift toward postmodernism in Farah's later works. Derek Wright, documenting elements of postmodernism in Farah's novels, alleges that Farah's writings demonstrate "the literary and cultural rezoning habit that has become a distinctive mark of the Western postmodernist imagination," likening this fictional tendency to the reality of African territories arbitrarily carved up by colonial and postcolonial rulers. Simon Gikandi also argues that Farah, in his early writings, modeled his novels after African modernists like Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka yet changed course later on as he began to adopt the ideologies of avant-garde art. Other critics focus on the element of political commentary in Farah's work—especially in his Variations trilogy—but are quick to point out that Farah does not espouse a particular political ideology. "Farah is a moralist who does not convey a simple message but wants to provoke consciousness, to point at the consequences for all of the most intimate decisions and at the link between taken-for-granted family bonds and national or international conflicts," writes Jacqueline Bardolph. A number of reviewers also praise Farah for his stark and realistic depictions of African women's inferior status and their struggles for equality, a literary attribute that has led many scholars to acknowledge his presence among a select group of African writers who have done the greatest justice in championing human rights.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

A Dagger in Vacuum (drama) 1969

From a Crooked Rib (novel) 1970

The Offering (play) 1975

A Naked Needle (novel) 1976

A Spread of Butter (radio play) 1978

*Sweet and Sour Milk (novel) 1979

Tartar Delight (radio play) 1980

*Sardines (novel) 1981

*Close Sesame (novel) 1982

Yussuf and His Brothers (play) 1982

†Maps (novel) 1986

†Gifts (novel) 1990

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (trilogy of novels) 1992

†Secrets (novel) 1998

Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (nonfiction) 2000

Links (novel) 2003

Knots (novel) 2007

*These works are collectively referred to as Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, which was published in 1992.

†These works form a trilogy.

CRITICISM

Derek Wright (essay date spring 1997)

SOURCE: Wright, Derek. "Nations as Fictions: Postmodernism in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah." Critique 38, no. 3 (spring 1997): 193-204.

[In the following essay, Wright considers the postmodern features displayed in several of Farah's novels, including the trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Maps.]

The heterotopian "zone" has become one of the hallmarks of postmodernist fiction; and in one recent book on the subject, it has been suggested that, in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, the zone's multiple possibilities begin to have certain points of contact with historical reality:

Objectively, Latin America is a mosaic of dissimilar and, on the face of it, incompatible cultures, languages, world-views, landscapes, ecological zones. Its condition is, we might even say, intrinsically postmodernist. Even a "straight" realistic representation of the continent would have to take this multiplicity into account; and from such a representation to a postmodernist one is only a few short steps.

          (McHale 52)

Much of that observation is, of course, also true of Africa, whose countries are even more nakedly the results of competitive historical zoning, their irrational frontiers freaks of colonial whimsy, their identities accidents of naming, their ethnic and geographical spaces subordinated to the free play of colonial signifiers.

A glance at the political map of Africa will reveal that for every natural contour provided by a river or mountain range there are either one or two arbitrarily drawn straight lines, making some African states look like North American ones and taking as little account of ethnic and linguistic variations. The Federation of Nigeria, for example, is constituted from at least four distinct ethnic and three rival religious groups that speak over two hundred languages and dialects. Some of these, like the Yoruba of the Western region, in fact live everywhere in West Africa, regardless of nonsensical national boundaries, and have more natural affinity with their ethnic neighbors than with the other tribal groups with whom they have been forced into a spurious unity in their own country. Such nations are artificial intellectual constructs that have never had any natural homogeneity except in the minds of colo- nial governors-general and district officers. Their postcolonial histories—catastrophic in the case of Nigeria, whose diverse peoples have proved equally unable to live together or apart—and the doomed attempts to salvage ethnic nations like Biafra from the colonial carve-up have been, to a large extent, the legacies of imperial political cartography.

Arguably, the colonial concoction that issues in the postcolonial nation-state is everywhere an unreal zone insofar as it is a mere fiction of political geography—an imperial invention or imaginative construct that is more often than not, in Salman Rushdie's description of Q/Pakistan in Shame, "insufficiently imagined … a failure of the dreaming mind" (87). Exploiting the potential parallels between the political remaking and the fictional rewriting of history in the postcolonial era, Rushdie's own treatment of India and Pakistan in Midnight's Children and Shame suggests how readily nations that are themselves, in some sense, fictions lend themselves to the most arbitrary and indeterminate (and the most flamboyantly experimental) of fictional forms. The more unlikely and unimaginable the postcolonial history, the more improbable and wildly imagined is the novelist's reinvention and its narrative modes and devices. (One such device is the mythical collective-narrator, to whom the whole of his nation's postcolonial history happens or is revealed, thus identifying his autobiography with the history of the nation and making his consciousness the repository of the communal or racial memory: Rushdie's Saleem, Vassanji's Salim in The Gunny Sack, Farah's Askar in Maps, Awoonor's Amamu in This Earth, My Brother.)

Africa, more than most, has been peculiarly prone to the literary as to the political rezoning process, though its "intrinsically postmodernist" qualities have understandably been exploited in colonial and expatriate writing about Africa rather than in African writing itself. Notoriously, Africa has occupied in the European imagination a conceptual rather than a geographical space. It has been less an actual place than a protean literary zone that in Western fiction has been mined for its endless possibilities, serving as a screen for the projection of imperial fantasies of adventure and exploration (Rider Haggard's romances and their contemporary counterparts); as a void that, confused with its blank space on the imperial map, is made simultaneously to absorb the intruder's own imported nightmares and to provide him with an alibi for colonial occupation (Conrad's Heart of Darkness); and, more recently, as a playground for lexical and ontological improvisation (Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa or, with parodic deliberateness, as fodder for European fantasy-lore (Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman). Some of these writers, it has been noted, have been troubled by the ease with which Africa has been reinvented by the non-African author and by a resulting imperialism of the imagination that reenacts at a different level the political rezoning of the continent (McHale 54). Naturally, African authors themselves also have a stake in such concerns, particularly when, like the novelist Nuruddin Farah, they have skirmished with postmodernism in their own work. During its colonial and postcolonial history, Farah's native Somalia—a strange mixture of nomadic herdsman and cosmopolitan urban intellectuals—has seen its political and cultural space expropriated, in turn, by the British, Italians, Russians, and Americans, latterly with local reinforcement from the indigenous despotic regime.

It would be perverse to claim Farah as a thoroughgoing postmodernist or to try to limit him to any one school of writing, because his writing is as richly diverse in its origins as his personal background. Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in what was then Italian Somaliland, and was educated in the Ethiopian-ruled Ogaden and Mogadiscio and then at the British universities of Essex and London and the Punjab University of Chandigarh. English, his chosen medium of expression, is his fourth language, existing alongside Somali, Arabic, Amharic, and Italian. He comes, originally, from a nomadic tradition, and his travels, studies, and employments have been nomadic on a global scale: he has lived or held academic appointments in Italy, Germany, the United States, Nigeria, Gambia, Uganda, and the Sudan. He is thus one of Africa's most multicultural and multilingual writers, and his highly eclectic body of fiction draws freely on many cultural and religious sources and on readings in many of the world's literatures. It is a living testament to the process of cultural hybridization that is a standard feature of the postcolonial world. I propose in this article, however, to limit myself to some of the postmodernist tendencies at play in Farah's work, focusing on the points where postmodernism and postcolonialism appear to converge and paying special attention to the literary and cultural rezoning habit that has become a distinctive mark of the Western postmodernist imagination.

In particular, Farah's somber, nightmarish trilogy of novels, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, reveals many of the standard features of the postmodernist fiction: for example, the collapsing of ontological boundaries by multiple, superimposed orders of reality; the conspicuous and ingenious play of analogic motif and parallelism; the "transworld" identities of characters who reappear in novel after novel (and, as with the respectively adolescent and mature Eblas of From a Crooked Rib and Sardines, do not always correspond with their intertextual signifiers); and the favoring of fragmented, composite characters—spaces inhabited by multiple presences—over unitary personalities. The latter tendency is particularly marked in Sweet and Sour Milk, where confusions of identity amid a malaise of political misinformation cause Loyaan, during his investigation of his brother's death, to fear that he may not be an autonomous being, but perhaps really part of a composite fabrication put together from the literature of twins, a Siamese-soul called Soyaan-Loyaan, with interchangeable parts. In Sardines Farah provides not a collection of individuals but a syncretic portrait of Somali womanhood in which all the women, packed into the same suffocating social saradine tin, become aspects of one another, their characters interpenetrative and complementary. In Maps a number of boundaries—sexual, national and ontological—are straddled by the protagonist Askar, a child of the disputed territory of the Ogaden, and there is in this multilayered fiction a puzzling indeterminacy about where metaphor ends and literal reality starts; where mindscape passes into landscape, the personal into the public body, physiological into topographical space. In Maps the reductive elements in Askar's behavior, which are privileged by conventional psychological-realist readings (for example, his obsessed idea that his dead Somali mother still lives inside him), are countered by more expansive, postmodernist tendencies. Askar aspires to be, at once, male and female, "half-man, half-child," ethnocentric Somali and culturally hybrid Ogadenese. He also fancies himself to be both a real child and the epic miracle-child of his adoptive mother's oral tales, who was present at his own birth and born out of his mother's death (one who has "met death when not quite a being"). He claims to hold "simultaneously multiple citizenships of different kingdoms: that of the living and the dead; not to mention that of being an infant and an adult at the same time" (11). Like his prototypes, Grass's Oskar (= Askar) and Rushdie's Saleem, he is a liminal creature, an occupant of the between-worlds space of the zone. Like them, he is a composite construct assembled from diverse sources and finally, as he struggles on the last page of the novel to free himself of blame for his adoptive mother's death, fragmenting back into his constituent parts: defendant, plaintiff, juror, witness, judge, and audience. The dreamscape of the novel is the improbable space where alone these incongruous elements can co-exist.

In these novels Farah also shares concerns expressed by more conventional African authors who owe little or nothing to postmodernist writing. Like them, he is troubled by the imperial powers' zonal expropriation of Africa's political, ethnic, and cultural space in both the colonial and independence periods and, moreover, by the continuation and reinforcement of these territorializing habits by postcolonial African regimes. But it is in his treatment of that very process, and of those regimes' tyrannical imposition of arbitrary, quasi-fictional identities upon their nations, that Farah's work comes closest to postmodernist fiction. Such features are especially marked in Sweet and Sour Milk and Maps.

In Sweet and Sour Milk the General's dictatorship is built around a security corps of illiterate spies and informers working entirely in the oral medium (thus there are no arrest warrants, death certificates, or lists of detainees), and after a while, as I have demonstrated at length elsewhere (Wright 1989), the public oral code of discourse privileged by the regime begins to infiltrate Farah's own written text. The latter takes on, insidiously, the oral narrative's reconstructive and reinventive capacities, its talent for improvising alternative versions in the retelling of tales; its subsequently unstable order of meaning, susceptible to variation, omission, and shifts of emphasis; and, most dangerously in the present political context, the fluid indeterminacy and interpretative openness that follow inevitably from a form of discourse that is audience-oriented rather than performer-centered. In the next novel Sardines, the oralist Idil, who is the General's matriarchal representative on the domestic front, is fully at home in this many-versioned reality:

And by the time you were ready to ask her a question, you would discover that she had already moved on … she had changed residence and had nomaded away, impermanent….

          (7)

Idil's ball of thread rolled away…. She began to thread-draw in her mind a past with patterns different from the one she had the intention of re-narrating…. Idil counted the number of holes she had to jump in order to form a pattern.

          (78)

In the tangled webs of both the General's and Idil's oral texts the lacunae—the interpretative spaces and absences around the words—are as important as the words themselves: the anti-matter generated by the text is equal to its matter. The oral mode is, in a very postmodernist way, an uncentered or off-centered mode of discourse, subject to the law of the excluded middle, and there is in Sweet and Sour Milk a prevailing motif of uncenteredness that indexes its protagonist's psychological and philosophical dilemmas and Africa's crises of national identity to the vagaries of the oral convention. Here ontological traumas become part of a broader national and continental malaise.

In Margaritta's polemical monologue and in Loyaan's reflected responses Somalia, serving as a microcosm of modern Africa, is itself envisaged as a centerless and featureless void into which anything can be put and of which anything can be made. It is a space inhabited by many inauthentic foreign and indigenous presences but without any inner core of identity: after the British and Italian colonizers come "KGBs and CIA espionage networks" to take up residence alongside "wizardry and witchcraft and hair-burning rites of sorcery" and the "make-believe" lives of western-educated elites who turn Africa into "a textbook reproduction of European values and western thinking" (124, 148). The history of the ancient European world as presented through the twins' Italian education is a mass of solid documentation: "history as chiseled out of the harshness of rocks, come the Greeks themselves, the Sicilians, the Normans, the Arabs" (168). Meanwhile, "they were told they had no history" (131). Its past envisaged as an oral blank, Somalia has no history or, alternatively, has too much history and in too many variant versions for any of it to be certain. Its preliterate, pre-colonial history is conceived as an endlessly reinvented narrative, improvised over a factual vacuum and on which each successive regime plays its own variations before an obliging mass-audience. Its more recent, postcolonial history is reconstituted at the whim of dictators, frequently in terms of the flat, cartoonlike fictions that inform Keynaan's traditional, pre-heliocentric view of the universe—"the flat universe of Father's calculable dimensions" (106)—but even these are imitative of foreign propagandist practices: Loyaan refers us to the Hungarian Uprising and Prague Spring, and to the "official" government version's polarization of the population into heinous reactionary rebels and heroic "revolutionary" armies (103, 106).

Somalia's political uncenteredness is matched by the decentered lives of its intellectuals. Margaritta, limiting the relevance of her past affair with the minister in the matter of Soyaan's death, marginalizes her influence—"I am not central to all that has taken place" (228)—while Beydan has a recurring dream in which she is not only not the center-point but is not even there, and at his funeral "Soyaan [was] the centre of this festivity although, just like Beydan in her dream, he too wasn't there" (231). Because there is no route by which his writings might pass into the oral discourse privileged by the regime, Soyaan's fate will be to be remembered not by their complex truths but by the oral slogans that refashion him into a myth. These lives are not centered on themselves but are satellites of other forces, rotating in an interpretative void, and their meanings are not traceable to any single stable order of reality but float in a multiplicity of versions. In Sardines Medina's fictive reconstruction of a multiplicity of possible motives for her actions is perversely abetted by the plurality of oral versions that are rumored into circulation hot on the heels of the event. The manufacturer of this many-versioned malaise and the ringmaster of its peculiar epistemological circus is, of course, the General. Somalia's Islamic militarism is centered on key political and religious signs in a written code, but the General's substitution of his own personality for the constitution ("I am the constitution") and his bowdlerization of the Koran into a collection of slogans and hackneyed praise-songs ("There is no General like our General") has had the effect of decentering Somalia's political reality, placing phrases like "radical governments" and "revolutionary socialism" in parentheses and quotation marks that hold them at a remove from the real thing.

Farah has said in his recent essay "Why I Write" that "Somalia was a badly written play" and "Siyad Barre was its author…. he was also the play's main actor, its centre and theme; as an actor-producer, he played all the available roles" (1597). The more precise analogy that suggests itself in the novel is of the General as a species of debased oral performer; a malevolent, diabolically inventive kind of oral historian, ringing endless surprises and variations on the theme of silencing dissidents, fabricating imagined alternatives for the lives of his trampled victims and, with the help of men like Keynaan, breathing life into lies that travesty their real ones. An astute and wily performer, he serves up for his nation's oral epics, sung by his "griots in green," new "heroes and legendary figures about whom one tells stories to children and future generations" (183). The General's ideal audience, however, is not the active, contributing participants of the oral tradition but passive assenters who can rearrange themselves into any shape that is required: brainwashed buffoons mouthing official dogma; politi- cal stooges like Keynaan, men with no core of identity who will stoop to any baseness to ingratiate themselves with power; and beggars, who are compliantly impressionable and manipulable in all things. "Here was an audience willing to hear anything," says Loyaan of the latter. Appropriately, those who are most attuned to the General's protean oral reality are themselves adept shape-changers who, in one symbolic scene, actually transform themselves before Loyaan's eyes in response to the visitations of power: "The beggars no longer resembled the remnants of a plane-crash. No, they were the passengers of a third-class train, stirring forward, jerking, shaking, speaking.… Power had chosen to visit them. The Minister to the Presidency and his entourage of cars and security men had arrived" (229). Loyaan notes that beggars, unlike Beydan, Soyaan, and Margaritta, "are the centre of their dreams," but it is a hollow center, a void where identity should be, a blank ready to be moulded into any form.

Loyaan finally discovers, in one of the novel's crucial reflexive scenes, that there is really nothing behind this political reality, which is compared to a shoddily built, badly painted stage set: "Empty at my touch like a soap-bubble, everything reducible to nought, nothing. Inexistent at my remembering, like a dream" (143). Somali reality under the dictator constitutes not so much a slippery and confusing multiplicity of signs as a signless void, providing no forms in which coherent meanings can be expressed:

The night unrolled like a cotton thread, unfolding inch by inch; the night wove words of thready thoughts; the night stitched for him a blanket of comfort and warmth…. Every movement he heard had a meaning, and if it didn't he gave it one. The security men were following him and making sure he stayed indoors, in one version…. Then, right before Loyaan's and the world's eyes, all suddenly began to disintegrate like a worn-out piece of cloth a thick set of fingers has pulled asunder.

          (206, 210-11)

The sun's sudden dismantling of the "fabric of schemata," the text written upon the night by Loyaan's imagination, is indirectly an image of Farah's own text deconstructively unstitching itself. What looks like an unfolding of meaning turns out to be an unravelling of the entire fabric in which meaning should reside: the novel's ontological barriers are themselves breached and the proliferation of "versions" precludes the literary representation of reality as the discovery of indivisible truths. The oralized political plot to murder and mythologize Soyaan, apparently commandeered by the General, is finally unavailable to the narrative plot of the novel, and its details and motives fail to materialize. Behind the mystifying malaise of political misinformation, no verifiable reality is discernible.

That instability of meaning is felt even more acutely in Farah's most recent and most radical novel. Maps is the story of Askar, an orphaned Somali child of the disputed Ogaden, and his shifting relationship with his adoptive mother Misra, an Oromo woman from the Ethiopian highlands who at the climax of the novel is doubtfully accused of betraying the Somali army to the forces of her homeland during Ethiopia's reconquest of the Ogaden and is murdered by a partisan group of which Askar is a member. In the book's allegoric scheme, Askar, representing the Ogaden, is born to two patriotic martyrs who give their lives for the cause of its liberation from Ethiopian occupation: his father dies on the day of his birth and his mother soon afterward. He is thus, self-consciously, the posthumous mythic offspring of Somali nationalist aspiration and the mother-republic, and he signifies what is salvaged by his country from the colonial carve-up of the Horn of Africa (his mother's unread journal, predating Somali orthography, is written in Italian). In Maps the postcolonial nation is not so much parented as foster-parented: the privileged form of signification for the relations between a nation and its members—not surprisingly in Farah's fiction, where domestic and political patriarchies are mutually reinforcing—is to be found in the roles of surrogate parents and children. Nationality categories are best read through the positions that the novel's various guardians assume toward their charges, and the destabilization of these categories is, conversely, registered through a series of pseudoincestuous role-reversals that subvert these positions. The postcolonial territory of Askar's birth is, like Askar himself, without natural parentage (neither is it self-creating, as Askar fancies himself to be, though it has the opportunity to take charge of its own destiny). Such territories are, as Rushdie observed in Shame, the imaginative constructs of colonial and postcolonial cartographers (in this case, British, Italian, Ethiopian, and Somali). They are conceived not biologically but intellectually: Askar, who is the human analogue of the Somali Ogaden, describes himself as "a creature given birth to by notions formulated in heads" (3). Such creatures are adopted beings with adopted identities defined by adoptive parents, and Farah sustains the analogies between the child's ties with the family and the individual's more artificial ties with the nation only by replacing Askar's real parents with a range of surrogates and guardians. These are his foster-mother Misra who, albeit in a purely nominal way, represents the Ethiopian occupier; the childless Mogadiscio intellectuals Hilaal and Salaado who represent the modern Somali Republic, seeking to complete itself by the addition of the motherless male child of the Ogaden; the Koranic schoolteacher Aw-Adan, who represents the unifying power of Islam; and the Ogadenese Somali, Uncle Qorrax. At the end of the book all of Askar/Ogaden's five guardians have had parts of themselves chopped away—by, respectively, mastectomy, vasectomy, hysterectomy, amputation, and exaction of blood—and these truncations seem to signify, allegorically, the dismemberment of the Ogaden and the further fragmentation of the territories of Greater Somalia.

Askar is himself a principal agent in the artificial imposition of identity that is a part of this allegorizing process, most particularly through his use of maps. Farah has said of the colonial maps of Africa that "we should redraw [them] according to our economic and psychological and social needs, and not accept the nonsensical frontiers carved out of our regions" ("Wretched Life" 54). And yet it is no accident that Askar has a nostalgic hankering for the time, during World War II, when all of the Somali territories except for Djibouti were under a single, colonial administration: his own politico-linguistic map of Greater Somalia is, in reality, as much a fiction of cultural geography as the colonial maps were figments of political geography. History, Hilaal reminds us, is made by those who have access to sign-systems (168) and is imposed upon those who have not, and the coercive cartographic enclosures enforced by the newly literate Somalis override sociopolitical (and, increasingly, cultural) divisions as the old Western imperial ones overrode ethnic and linguistic barriers; their ethnocentric organization of political space is, arguably, as distortive of reality as the Mercator projection's Eurocentric organization of geographical space. The members of the Western Somali Liberation Front, to which Askar belongs, regard their people as united by language, divided by maps, and the independent nation-state of the Somali Republic imagines that its cultural-linguistic "specificity" gives it a unique claim on those territories where Somali, in one fashion or another, is still spoken. The chief objection to this new cartographic hegemony, after noting the shakiness of its political propositions, is that it claims to unite people who, both linguistically and in other respects, are becoming more and more diverse—who have in fact become irredeemably mongrelized—while it artificially sets apart other groups of people who, in reality, are much more closely bonded. In the former category are the Somalis scattered through Kenya and Tanzania who, when they are not speaking Swahili, use a bastardized, ungrammatical form of Somali similar to that spoken by the Ogadenese Somalis, and whose subscription to Somali cultural values is as adulterated and compromised by the dominant host-cultures as is that of the Ogadenese marginal groups, the Oromo and Qotto, by the Somali one. (All the indicators suggest that the linguistic homogeneity and cultural exclusiveness of Greater Somalia, if they ever existed, are rapidly disintegrating.) Conversely, in the second category there is Misra, a nonethnic Somali speaker who, though fully acculturated, is automatically mistrusted and is denied a place on her ward's identity papers, while honorary citizenship is granted to another nonethnic Somali, the sullen Qotto schoolteacher Aw-Adan, for no other reason than that his Arabic input into Somali culture is, politically, more acceptable than Misra's Amharic one.

What is a Somali, and what does it mean to be one? The question opens up a Pandora's box of political, ethnic, and moral quandaries. Is it to speak or to read the language, or to be born in the homeland or in one of its territories? In fact, few of the novel's Somali speakers are Somalis by birth, most are Qotto, Oromo, Boran, or Adenese. Is it to be a patriot in the cause of the Ogaden? In which case what right has Qorrax, who openly collaborates with the Ethiopian conquerors, to his Somali identity? Who, if anyone, is fit to be awarded parental authorship or political guardianship of the disputed Ogaden territory to which Somalia lays claim? Certainly, the criteria for nationhood postulated by Askar, Hilaal, and the patriots of the Western Somali Liberation Front are, like the Somali map of the Ogaden that ignores its multilingual character and fifty percent Amharic-speaking population, increasingly erratic and capricious, leaving little ground for belief in anything that could be described as a "pure," "authentic," or "natural" Somali identity. In one way or another, each of the characters mapped by the narrative stands, like the girl in Askar's dream, "in a borrowed skin," and the Somali map, in its peculiarly monolithic contours and fine disregard for multiculturalism, provides an inexact, inadequate model of reality. Maps, like the wars fought over them to redraw national terrains, distort and destroy (they are attended by funereal images throughout the book). The "notional truths" expressed by the Somali maps correspond to the political actuality of the Horn of Africa as little as Askar's moral conception of Misra coincides with the real woman (Misra, significantly, has no understanding of maps). But Askar's consciousness is our map in the novel, his the conceptual space that annexes and determines the signified reality. Consequently, in this protragonal consciousness Misra, like the political map of the territory of which she is the figurative custodian, is a suitably floating signifier, zoned into many stereotyped figures and rival fantasy embodiments: on one side, mother-martyr and victimized nation; on the other, wicked stepmother, betrayer, and national enemy. A nominal sense of reality so prevails over the actual, the signifier over its referent, that Askar even thinks of her at one point as "a creature of his own invention" (107); and it is difficult to say exactly what does constitute her reality, or if a coherent reality has been provided for her to resist Askar's ontological inversion, because she seems to live (like the Ogaden) solely through the guardians and wards who control her existence in one way or another.

Not only does Askar not know, and not only is he unable to reveal, what Misra is; more bewilderingly, he does not know what it is that he has done to her. The text of Map is surrounded by epigraphs about the necessity and inevitability of doubt, but Farah is not concerned in this novel with epistemological questions about the ultimate meaning of the deeds performed by the guilty party and with the gradual revelation of his hidden traumas (as is, for example, a late modernist-realist like Graham Swift in Waterland). Rather, he is breaching ontological defenses by posing the problems of what it is that the narrator has done and is now concealing from himself or, indeed, whether he has done anything (which things are not clear to the reader or to the character), and how, if at all, these things can be made known. There are two dream sequences in Maps (211, 214-15) that could be interpreted to mean that Askar was at least an accomplice in Misra's murder and dismemberment, but it is difficult to say exactly what is happening in either of these passages and at what level their images of cannibalistic violence and bloodshed are meant to be read.

If Askar has little success in finding an authorizing parent-nation to authentically "engender" his homeland territory, he is even less successful in his use of Misra to "gender" the nation along falsely heroic, patriotic lines. Askar refers the reader to a Somali poet's fable of national identity in which Somalia, portrayed as a beautiful woman, freely accepts the advances of five suitors. These represent the original five territories of Greater Somalia, and three of the children she conceives by each of them miscarry: namely, the three provinces (one of them the Ogaden) that were not absorbed into the Somali republic at independence. The figure in the novel whose personal history approximates most closely the archetype in the fable is, ironically, the non-Somali Misra, who is also pursued by five men, some of them from the disputed homeland territories. Only in Misra's case, she is the object of their largely unwanted sexual attentions. These are the Amhara abductor of her childhood; the wealthy Muslim who adopts her and then forces her to become his wife; the Qotto teacher Aw-Adan who exploits her sexually and finally betrays her; Askar's brutal Ogadenese uncle Qorrax; and the Ethiopian captain with whom she forms a liaison in the Ogaden war. In Misra's story the miscarriages become the abortions forced upon her by Qorrax and Aw-Adan. In each relationship Misra is an enslaved victim of patriarchal tyranny rather than a free agent. The point of Farah's self-subverting use of the fable is that no woman in the Horn of Africa, whether Somali, Oromo, or Ethiopian, can serve in a signifying system that genders national freedom in such spurious idealized terms. It is, moreover, significant that although the political tenor of the fable's metaphor connotes an expansive, unifying generosity, it is eclipsed by its sexual vehicle which more in line with prevailing Somali male psychology, presents the woman as promiscuous and treacherous. The Somali poets, Misra reminds Askar, obsessively stereotype woman as a betrayer. In the words of Askar's schoolmates, "if she isn't your mother, your sister or your wife, a woman is a whore" (98). The nation is disingenuously gendered as an imaginary woman, for whom lives must be laid down, by patriots like Askar who in fact despise the real women in their daily lives. Once again, Askar's fictionalizing of the nation has missed the mark, falling wide of what little "objective reality" is constituted by the narrative.

Askar, the girl in his dream tells him, is "almost always satisfied with the surface of things … a mirror in which your features … may be reflected" (130). For him Misra is an image of the Ogaden insofar as both are mirrors in which the beholder sees his own desires reflected. Maps, like mirrors, reflect the dispositions of their makers. "There is truth in maps," Hilaal concedes, but aware of the dangers of pursuing chauvinistic myths of ethnic nations, he adds the rider: "The question is, does truth change? … The Ogaden, as Somali, is truth. To the Ethiopian map-maker, the Ogaden, as Somali, is untruth" (217-18). Meanwhile, like the "real" Misra (whose name means "the foundation of the earth"), the neutral ground of the disputed strip of land does not discriminate between its diverse occupying nationalities and the rival maps that overlay it like the layers of a palimpsest. Whatever the true nature of the external reality that they contour, the "truth" of maps is, finally, a highly subjective, ethnocentric kind of truth, and the stable identity presupposed by the idealist vision of the mapmaker nonexistent.

Some recent writing from the postcolonial world, particularly that from the white Commonwealth of Australia and from Canada (Malouf, Atwood, Kroetsch), has challenged the homogeneity of ethnocentric colonial discourses by projecting spaces other than, or ar- ticulating spaces between, those inscribed on the prevailing hegemonic map. These resistive readings celebrate the diversity and mixed ethnicity of formerly colonized cultures, previously ignored or stigmatized by the dominant colonial one, and indicate a shift away from cultural homogeneity. In the contemporary Africa of Maps, however, the dominant discourse, as delivered by Askar, is itself insularly and oppressively ethnic. Farah demonstrates how ethnicity has become the new hegemonic and reterritorializing power and ceased to be the revisioning agent or counterdiscourse. Askar's regional map is the instrument of new, postcolonial ethnocentrisms and false cultural homogeneities forced upon a hybrid, mongrelized reality. Africa's internal imperialisms, it seems, have taken over where the alien, external ones left off. As Rushdie puts it in his review of the work ("Farah," 202), Farah's novel offers us "new maps for old."

Works Cited

Farah, Nuruddin. Close Sesame. London: Allison, 1983.

———. Maps. London: Picador, 1986.

———. Sardines. 1981. London: Heinemann, 1982.

———. Sweet and Sour Milk. 1979. London: Heinemann, 1980.

———. "Why I Write." Third World Quarterly 10.4 (1988): 1591-99.

———. "Wretched Life." Interview with Patricia Morris. Africa Events, September 1986: 54.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.

Rushdie, Salman. "Nuruddin Farah" (1986), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays & Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991. 201-02.

———. Shame. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.

Wright, Derek. "Unwritable Realities: The Orality of Power in Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24.1 (1989): 185-92.

Simon Gikandi (essay date autumn 1998)

SOURCE: Gikandi, Simon. "Nuruddin Farah and Postcolonial Textuality." World Literature Today 72, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 753-58.

[In the following essay, Gikandi acknowledges "the significance of modernism in Farah's early works" and then investigates "how [the author] turns to the politics of the avant-garde as a way of superseding the culture of modernity and the esthetic of modernism."]

Nuruddin Farah emerged as an important writer at a time when the African literary tradition had overcome the euphoria of the early days of independence (the late 1950s and early 1960s) but had not fully come to terms with the disenchantment of postcolonial politics in the 1970s. While the primary subject of his novels has consistently been the process by which nationalist euphoria became transformed into a discourse of loss and mourning, Farah's works have never been imprisoned either by the foundational moments of African literature, whose primary concern was the emergence of a form of writing that could will the new African nation into being, or by that fateful historic moment, often represented by events such as the Somali military coup of 1969, when writers and politicians seemed to have parted paths. Locating Farah's works on the cusp between the euphoria and disenchantment that has come to define post-colonial culture in Africa is important for two main reasons. First, while the nationalist generation of African writers was obsessed with the relation between writing and the national imagination, Farah's early novels seem to take this association for granted; his attraction to modernist forms of writing was one way of going beyond the discourse of cultural nationalism and identity. Second, while the literature of disenchantment saw its task as that of rescuing art from the corrupt institutions established and patronized by the state, Farah's early novels were predicated on the belief that whereas art could perhaps act as a form of resistance against political dictatorship, it could not be entirely liberated from the politics of everyday life.

If it has taken long for Farah to be recognized as an important modern writer, this is perhaps because his novels seem to want to perform an impossible task: that of bringing the tradition of nationalist literature into a productive confrontation with the art of postcolonial failure. While the careers of other major African novelists—most notably Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o—have been defined by an explicit movement away from the ideologies of cultural nationalism to a radical critique of the postcolonial state, Farah's works are unique in their contemporaneous representation of both positions. In Farah's early novels in particular, the mapping, endorsement, and critique of nationalism is represented against the background of postcolonial decay and the utopian possibilities held up both by the Somali poetic tradition and a modern culture. In these works, terms such as modern and tradition, which have been the central paradigms in some of the most powerful commentaries on African literature, are constantly blurred and deauthorized.

In an attempt to explain the politics of time in Farah's novels—the inscription of the foundational moments of African nationalism and its radical critique—scholars of African literature have often explained it in terms of the unique character of Somali nationalism and its unusual relation to the culture of colonialism. The complex history of the Somali nation—and its truncated nationalism—is, of course, a major concern in Farah's works; but the novelist is also troubled by his own (dis)location within the African tradition of letters, because what makes his country different, especially within an East African context, is the multiplicity of its cultural and historical influences. Somalia is connected to other East African countries through what one may call the experience and trope of Diaspora (a substantial portion of its people live in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya); but it is connected, through Islam and its geographic location at the Horn of Africa, to the Arabian peninsula and the Indian subcontinent. Both the British and the Italians colonized the country, and its elite culture reflects the influences of these imperial powers. Against this background, the sources of Farah's art and imagination are multiple and complex. Like many members of the second generation of postcolonial African writers, Farah, in his fiction, does not seem to be troubled by its identity: his artistic sources are an eclectic mixture of Somali oral traditions, Italian culture, and Anglo-Irish modernism; he is as much at home in Chinua Achebe's realistic and mythical narratives as he is in the high modernism of Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo.

Still, there is no question that, in spite of his attempts to provide his readers with a realistic representation of Somalia under colonialism and the Siyad Barre military dictatorship, Farah is more comfortable with ostensibly high-modernist forms than he is with traditional realism. As I have already suggested, he started writing at a moment in African literary history when the realistic narrative of national restoration, discernible in the great novels of the 1950s and early 1960s, was at a point of crisis. It is precisely because of his awareness of the limits of realism in African writing that Farah turned to the esthetic of modernism. Except for his first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), which flirts with realistic forms, Farah's major works were written under the shadow of European and African modernism. Modernist writers such as Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats provide the epigraphs that frame his novels. His favorite African writers, whose works are constantly echoed in the early novels, are Soyinka and Ayi Kwei Armah, the great African modernists.

Yet, in spite the proliferation of the modernist style in Farah's works, and his intertextual relation to modernism, there is an unusual conjuncture of tradition and modernity (used here as both cultural and literary terms) in his oeuvre. Farah's early novels are notable for their affiliation with European modernists; at the same time, however, students of these works are constantly reminded of their imbrication in the world of Somali oral culture, especially "the legendary oral poets of his Ogaden childhood" (Wright, 68). The constant invocation of Somali oral poetry in Farah's very modernist novels is significant for two reasons. First, his constant appeal to the authority of oral culture calls attention to the limits of modernism itself in the representation of the labyrinthine world of African politics, a world in which distinctions between literacy and orality are not as clear-cut as they might first appear to be. Quite often, Farah values the oral tradition as a possible conduit to a world beyond colonialism and the politics of the postcolonial state. Second, because Farah seeks to use his novels to critique the world associated with the traditional values sustained by orality, especially where they have become complicitous with the culture of silence promoted by the postcolonial state, he invokes modernism as a counterpoint to tradition itself.

For these two reasons, Farah's novels seem to be located at an interesting caesura: they are loaded with the weight of Somali oral culture, but they seek to go beyond the temporality of tradition; they derive their force and their identity from a powerful intertextual relation with modernist texts, but they are also conscious of the exhaustion of modernity and modernism, of the inability of the modern esthetic to account for, or resist, the corrupt politics of the postcolonial state. For the rest of this essay, I want to argue that Farah's early works are attempts by the author to emplace himself within—and then transcend—the tradition of African modernism associated with some of his important precursors such as Wole Soyinka. I want to then argue that Farah's works can best be located at a point, often associated with the avant-garde, where the two political traditions represented in his works—the culture of the Somali state and the esthetic of African modernism—are pushed to their limits. In order to understand this breakdown, this function of tradition as a place of loss (Benjamin, 133), we need to recognize the significance of modernism in Farah's early works and then see how he turns to the politics of the avant-garde as a way of superseding the culture of modernity and the esthetic of modernism.

The uses of modernism.

Farah turns to modernism in order to provide a critique of the idea of the Somali nation and the traditions associated with it. Given the fact that he began writing at a time when there was a general consensus that the ideals of nationalism had been betrayed by the postcolonial state, it is not surprising that Farah's first works sought to deconstruct the notion of tradition as the foundation of nationalism. Readers of his early novels are rarely surprised by the constant use of the technique of modernism to call into question the association between tradition and nation (see Benjamin, 135). In From a Crooked Rib, for example, Ebla's movement in time and space is essentially marked by her struggle to release herself from the worlds of both Somali tradition and postcolonial modernity. The novel opens with a powerful invocation of the world of Somali culture, represented through the consciousness of an elder man who seeks to be the custodian of "tribal" memory and the traditional weltanschauung. But the old man's attempts to recuperate the values of this world and to endow it with a teleology is almost immediately undermined by two ostensibly unrelated factors: a modernist style that privileges an interiorized private narrative over the collective myths of the Somali people, and the representation of Ebla as a subject alienated from the hearth, what the Somali call Jes (8-9). Although the novel is set on the eve of Somali independence, its primary occupation is not with new beginnings or historical continuity, but rather with Ebla's ressentiment. While the elderly man who opens the novel is defined by his attachment to old memories and places, and thus seeks to recuperate old Somali traditions so that they can be deployed in the name of the new nation, Ebla's narrative is generated by her uneasy relationship to this tradition, especially the imprisonment of women within it. Her ressentiment is most apparent in her desire to escape her female identity—"She wished she were not a woman" (11)—and to break out of "the ropes society had wrapped around her and to be free and be herself" (12).

In Farah's deployment of the figure of woman as the agent of disenchantment with the political culture of the emerging Somali nation, we have a compelling critique of one of the most powerful tropes of African nationalism: the association of woman with tradition, nation, and nature. Farah begins with the basic premise that the site of tradition, as it is represented in oral narratives and collective memories, is itself already colonized by men (14, 15). As she walks along the dusty road on her way to Mogadishu, Ebla appears to other travelers to be a figure of nature ("Ebla was nature, nature had become personified in her" [19]); but Farah undermines this association of woman and nature by surrounding it with images and figures of silence and death that question the notion of woman as the embodiment of nature. For when she is reduced to nature, Ebla is deprived of her subjectivity and is cut down to the objectified world around her (19, 20). Her search for a new identity and self-consciousness sometimes parallels Somalia's quest for a new identity, one located somewhere between tradition and modernity, but at no point in the novel is she represented as the symbol of the nation. Indeed, her story is often at odds with the narrative of Somali independence; to Ebla, the euphoria of this seminal moment—"We shall prosper and the Gentiles will perish"—does not "mean much" (111).

Farah's desire to valorize the new and modern in counterdistinction to tradition is complicated somewhat by the culture of the postcolonial state: the Somali state appropriates both tradition (in its claim to be the custodian of the Jes) and modernity (in its adoption of a rhetoric of progress and revolution). The state's dual appropriation of the sites of tradition and modernity is, however, paroled by the author's own ambivalent relation to Somali tradition. Farah may have begun his writing career with the explicit aim of deconstructing the state's claim to be the custodian of tradition and revolution (a claim that was most pronounced in the years of the military dictatorship), but he also valued the world of Somali oral culture both as an important source of formal materials for his works and as the possible basis of an identity. His dilemma, especially at the beginning of his career, was how to differentiate those aspects of tradition that had been used to justify divisive and destructive clan politics and those that could be used to resist the dictatorship.

The second and third parts of From a Crooked Rib represent this paradox powerfully. After running away from her family Jes, Ebla arrives in the city of Mogadishu determined to be an independent woman. Once in the city, however, she discovers that she cannot survive as an independent woman without entering into patriarchal social structures that replicate the Jes she left behind, structures built around ideas of family, kinship, marriage, and the dominance of men. Indeed, Ebla's tragedy arises from the fact that she left her village to escape from her imprisonment as a woman only to discover that, in spite of its modern façade, the city functions according to the same patriarchal rules. If she constantly "wished more than anything else that she was not a woman" (97), it is because she realizes that the practices that give "woman" value within traditional culture (childbirth and sexual intercourse, for example) are accompanied by unprecedented pain and violence (97-99). At the same time, however, it is only by being a woman and a wife that she can be recognized by her culture and be accorded the dignity and sense of identity she deserves. Her tragedy arises from the fact that once she conjoins life, love, and marriage as the only source of her identity, Ebla ends up rein- forcing the fatalistic logic that she had set out to transcend when she left her family (125, 126).

As with many African writers of his generation, Farah's novels are located within one of the central paradoxes of the modern esthetic and its temporality: a concern, even obsession, with a present time that is held hostage to the past, a past often associated with either "tribal" tyranny or colonialism. As scholars of modernism have been arguing over the years, this paradox is represented in two closely related questions in the modern novel: is the representation of a new temporality only possible through the forgetting of the past, of history, and experience? And can art carry the passion for modernity without being overwhelmed and corrupted by the process of modernization? (see Compagnon, 31-32). The usual modernist response to these questions was either to develop "the rhetoric of rupture and the myth of an absolute beginning" (see Compagnon, 31) or to valorize the Nietzschean myth of homelessness (die Heimatlosen or "the homeless"; see Benjamin, 136).

The political context in which Farah's novels were produced, not to mention his own political project, was bound to complicate both these tactics: the military dictatorship had already appropriated the rhetoric of new beginnings and modernization, while intellectuals who promoted a culture of Heimatlosen were, in effect, dismissed as agents of European nihilism and decadence. In A Naked Needle (1976) and Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) Farah's challenge was to use his novels to rescue the rhetoric of new beginnings from the dictatorship, and he could only do so by representing the subject's Heimatlosen as an oppositional mode, what Andrew Benjamin has described as "a refusal that creates the frame for an understanding … of the modern" (137).

This process is most apparent in A Naked Needle, where the central character, Koschin, locates himself in a scatological world in which time itself has been "done in" (1). Koschin opens the novel by evacuating himself from temporality: "He feels he is hungered, deadened by and quarantined by time, which is an enemy not easy to conquer" (2). He identifies his location outside time and space both as the source of his identity and as a tragedy; it is by repressing memories and experiences from his past and "forfeiting" knowledge of the language which locates him in a specific time and place (45) that he acquires a transcendental position from which he can guide his readers through the complicated world of Somali politics. In other words, it is precisely because of his alienation from the world and the class he inhabits that Koschin is able to create a frame for understanding Somalia and a language for representing its political landscape: "I feel alone, and lonely in the midst of a large crowd of this nature, after my own fashion…. I feel lonely in midst of intellectuals of whom I am supposed to be one" (133). By adopting this transcendental position, Koschin is able to establish his identity—and authority as a writer—above and beyond both traditional Somali culture and the modernizing ideologies of the Somali state.

But if Farah is unique among African modernists for his refusal to seek a position of critique within traditional culture or to oppose the modernizing rhetoric of the state through the language of traditional culture, it is because he recognizes how indigenous traditions "have themselves been implicated in the new political tribulations and terrors of the independent state" (Wright, 68). The most obvious example of this collaboration between indigenous traditions and the instruments of postcolonial power is to be found in Sweet and Sour Milk, where the family patriarch is also a policeman and informer, one willing to be used by the state as an instrument of controlling dissidence in his own family. Unable to find value in the old world associated with the fathers, and threatened by the practices of a patria that replicates state authority (the dictator represents himself as the father of the nation), Farah's dissident characters often live in an existential or surreal world, frequently at odds with their own selves. My contention here is that Farah is attracted to modernism and modernist style because its unfinished and fragmented nature seems to parallel the narrative of the postcolonial state, while its reflexivity and circularity provide him with a language of social critique.

The temptation of the avant-garde.

Farah's modernism is not in itself unique among African writers of the 1970s. Indeed, the persistent echoing of the works of African modernists (Soyinka, Armah, and Ouologuem) in Farah's early novels is the most obvious acknowledgment of his indebtedness to this aspect of the African literary tradition. What makes Farah different from his precursors is his attraction to the futuristic esthetic ideologies of the avant-garde, an attraction that is manifested in at least three aspects of his esthetic that demand closer scrutiny than they have so far received: his promotion of the innovative and revolutionary power of art against the culture of the state; the privileging of form over content; and the use of art to dissolve and hence pluralize the postcolonial experience. In dealing with all three aspects, Farah's novels are caught between the need to present art—and the ideologies it promotes—as simul- taneously affirmative and autonomous (able to promote a world beyond the reified culture of modernity) and destructive and negative (imprisoned in the world it represents and thus unable to escape from the culture of the modern state).

Art, of course, occupies a special place in Farah's oeuvre. Its presence is marked by the constant use of epigraphs, especially from the works of modernist writers, which prefigure the author's major concern with the state of the individual in modern culture and establish his affiliation, in a self-conscious, self-referential manner, with the culture of modernism. Farah's use of epigraphs is not uniform, however: in From a Crooked Rib, for example, epigraphs are used as essentially decorative stylistic elements, whereas in A Naked Needle, Sweet and Sour Milk, and Sardines they are part of a more complex configuration of intertextual references which, when considered together, constitute an artistic or esthetic site of representation, one that is presented as an alternative to the culture of the postcolonial state. In other words, Farah uses intertextuality as part of a formal strategy through which readers are dissociated from dominant norms and values but are also presented with an affirmative program in which art promotes the utopian possibilities of society.

In the first instance, Farah's subjects, who are already alienated from social totality and themselves, turn to other texts to construct a point of reference and identity. This is especially the case in A Naked Needle, where Koschin, who has deliberately alienated himself from postcolonial politics and their notions of time and space, conceives the books he reads as both an anchor for his self and a more tangible frame of reference than Somalia. It is not by accident that Koschin turns to texts when he is most disconnected from the cultural and geographic spaces he would like to occupy but cannot because they have been colonized by the regime. On a visit to his native city of Kismayu, for example, Koschin realizes that he has forfeited the mode of knowledge and identity that is often derived from the Heimat—language, tradition, and experience. In compensation, he hunts down Wole Soyinka's 1965 classic The Interpreters, "his favorite novel of the year" (46), where he finds a character (Sekoni) with a worldview with which he can identify (144). It is through such texts that Koschin negotiates and inscribes some of his most important social and romantic relationships (52), and it is through an intertextual reference to other African writers that Koschin finds the language for representing his own society. Thus when he represents Somalia in terms of refuse, describing it as "a big sandy toilet," and conceiving its capital as "the slaughter-house turned city" (21), readers of African literature will quickly recognize the reference to Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

The second use of intertextuality—the citation and recitation of other writers to explore the utopian possibilities of postcolonial society—is perhaps not as apparent as the first but it is equally significant, for it is through the citation of other texts that Farah's subjects construct an artistic world which seeks to transcend the politics of everyday life in Somalia. If modernist style reinforces Koschin's sense of homelessness, as we saw in the previous section, art provides a stable home and refuge for what is described (in A Naked Needle ) as his twisted and tormented mind (66). The novel contains many examples of art as the source of the connections and values the subject finds lacking in his society: a painting on a wall in Mogadishu is done in a style "reminding Koschin of an Antillean immigrant's drawing of Trimurti that he saw in a London exhibition" (60). Overwhelmed by everyday life in Somalia, he wishes he were the Mali emperor, Kankhan Musa, on his historic medieval pilgrimage to Mecca, obviously read in a Mande epic (49). And against the communicative mess created by the bureaucratic state, he seeks a knowable community in the library, often escaping from his friends to seek solace among writers (56).

The same pattern—the opposition between the state bureaucracy and the individual act of reading—is repeated in Sweet and Sour Milk and Sardines (1982). In the former novel, the struggle over the meaning of Soyaan's death, which pits his twin brother Loyaan against the Somali dictatorship, is presented essentially as a struggle over interpretation. In his death, the dissident has no value for either the dictatorship or its opponents, except in the meaning of the cabalistic texts he leaves behind and the symbolic use of his dead body (38, 53); forgotten in his corporeality, Soyaan is privileged as a text that both sides can deploy in their struggle to control the meaning of everyday politics. Indeed, the whole significance of Soyaan's death depends on the continual blurring of the dead body and the enigmatic texts it left behind. In the absence of a postmortem on the body (62), the texts seem to contain all the questions and answers sought by the two functions: "Why did the General's régime wish to recruit Soyaan, a man already dead? Why was it that they felt the need to fabricate the story about his last words being ‘Labour is Honour’—both key nouns in the affair?" (76).

On the surface, the response to these questions appears clear to Loyaan and his friends: by claiming Soyaan's words for his own pseudorevolution, the General wants to control the deceased's soul and use it as an instrument for legitimizing his own discredited regime (81). But the issue is complicated by the fact that what the regime seeks to claim is not Soyaan's soul but rather his words, not the resurrection of his body as an embodiment of its ideals but rather the precise meaning of a single phrase—"Labour is Honour"—left in his mass of writings. It is as if the legitimacy of the regime depends on its ability to colonize the words of its opponents. Why is this the case? Why does a regime presided over by an illiterate general seem to consider textuality so central to its hegemony?

We can respond to these questions by first calling attention to the significance of the "scene of reading" as a site of oppositionality (Chambers, xiv): for families and individuals threatened by the coercive mechanisms of the state, the act of reading mediates social intercourse; the exchange of fictional narratives becomes a means of creating a cultural space in which the threatened self and its enabling institutions (the family, the marriage, the filial relationship) can maintain their integrity. In Sweet and Sour Milk, for example, Loyaan spends the last hours of his life seeking sanctuary in Neruda's Machu Picchu (17). In Sardines the writing and narration of stories, their exchange between Medina and her daughter Ubax, is a private way of countering the public sphere colonized by dictatorship. Denied a public forum for airing her views, Medina uses texts not simply to express herself, but also to construct what she calls, echoing Virginia Woolf, a room of her own (33). The paradox here, of course, is that textuality is valued—and policed by the regime—because of its capacity to create an alternative Lebenswelt (life-world) to the culture promoted and sustained by the postcolonial state. Indeed, a central theme in Sardines is the confrontation that arises when the state tries to repress the utopian possibilities that texts represent.

And where does the project of the African avant-garde fit into this struggle over postcolonial textuality? Like other members of the African avant-garde, the dissidents in Farah's novel are products of what the main characters in Sardines call the "fabled year of '68" (89), a moment valued because it held the possibility that culture and theory—hence textuality—could be used to create a revolutionary space beyond the reach of the bureaucratic state. The utopian possibility of art or culture is implicit in those moments in Sardines when the narratives proffered by the Somali state are juxtaposed with avant-garde texts that are notorious for pushing tradition to its limits. Quite often in A Naked Needle, as in many of Farah's novels, the state orchestrates narratives that overwhelm both implied and real readers with what is aptly described as the "turbulence of terror" (119). There is the story Medina tells about Somali-American parents who commit suicide when their daughter is forcibly circumcised and married off to a "tribal chief" (91-93), and there is the terrible story about Amina's rape and the state's attempt to use it to repress dissent (116-18). But in spite of the terror they generate, these stories are told and retold—by and among the victims—against the background provided by the affirmative culture that binds them together: John Coltrane, Tagore, and Ginsberg. In retelling the stories of their torture and multilation, the victims seek to control the terms in which their life stories are told and to proffer texts that provide them with security and identity above the mechanics of state power and oppressive traditions.

Yet it is always difficult to argue for a radical separation between the oppressive traditions patronized by the state and avant-garde art, because, as Derek Wright has observed, even in their most modernist form, Farah's works also seem to recuperate certain aspects of Somali culture (especially poetry) as a site of freedom. One cannot hence make the argument, often made about the modernist tradition, that Farah turns to modernism in search of an esthetic authority that is inherent in art's autonomy from the politics of the everyday. It is perhaps easier to advance the claim that what makes Farah an important part of the African avant-garde is the fact that his art seeks to deconstruct tradition in order to go beyond the terms established by nationalism, which often saw traditionalism as its own condition of possibility. If it is true, as Andrew Benjamin has argued, that the avant-garde is to be situated "beyond a mere negative response to tradition" (134), then Farah's works need to be read as attempts to reset the terms by which tradition has been understood in African literature by extending it to include not only the obvious aspects of Somali oral tradition that are so important to him, but also the canon of African literature, the art forms of the African disapora, Asian poetry and religion, and European high culture. Farah's political referent is local (his novels rarely go beyond the politics of his native Somalia); but in his intertextual relation to other traditions, he is perhaps the most cosmopolitan African writer. It is through intertextuality that he extends his literary and philosophical referents to make postcolonial Somali culture part of a cosmopolitan discourse that is a crucial ingredient of what it means to be African in the modern world.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Andrew. Art, Mimesis and Avant-garde. London. Routledge. 1991.

Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Compagnon, Antoine. The Five Paradoxes of Modernity, New York. Columbia University Press. 1994.

Farah, Nuruddin. From a Crooked Rib. London. Heinemann. 1970.

———. A Naked Needle. London. Heinemann. 1976.

———. Sardines. London. Heinemann. 1982.

———. Sweet and Sour Milk. London. Heinemann. 1980.

Wright, Derek. New Directions in African Fiction. New York. Twayne. 1997.

Jacqueline Bardolph (essay date spring 2000)

SOURCE: Bardolph, Jacqueline. "On Nuruddin Farah." Research in African Literatures 31, no. 1 (spring 2000): 119-21.

[In the following essay, Bardolph enumerates the reasons why Farah should be considered a "major novelist."]

The International Neustadt Prize was conferred in 1998 to Somali author Nuruddin Farah by a jury of writers from all over the world. Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Czeslaw Milosz have been among the recipients, altogether fifteen of them, eleven of whom were later awarded the Nobel. After the prize given to Assia Djebar, it is another recognition of the importance of African literature on the world scene. One can think of many reasons that justify such a distinction.

In themselves, some features of the life and personality of this novelist are unusual, yet represent a sort of summary of the troubles and strifes of many artists from the African continent. An unusual life, since Farah had to live in exile, under threat from the dictator Siyad Barre, for over twenty years. All that time, he kept alive the "country in his mind," in his books, only to discover a shattered nation when he finally came back to Mogadiscio in 1996. His life is unusual in the number of languages, alphabets, and world views that shaped him as a youth: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, English, Italian, Punjabi, to which he later added other African and European languages. Ironically, his first novel, serialized in the daily paper in the newly transcribed Somali, was promptly silenced by the regime. He then chose to write in English, the language left by the temporary connection of Northern Somalia with Britain. He thus finds himself with a small readership at home, no support from a nation or from Commonwealth institutions: an isolated position that he turned into a source of strength. More unusual even is his attitude: in all his travels for over two decades, he has chosen not to settle in either Britain or the US, although he has often taught or been resident writer there for short periods. The nomad has no roots, but an African space that is home, and his space has been Nigeria, the Sudan, Gambia, and now South Africa.

Journalists are often fascinated by this unusual life: yet the writers of the Neustadt have certainly chosen to award this distinction for the simple reason that his books are good. For a long time he was considered a writer's writer, admired by his peers, praised by Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and many others, but not part of the canon and not very familiar in Africa or anglophone countries. True, the novels were not easy to find and they were thought to be rather difficult for secondary schools, but demanding works have a lasting power that is now finally being recognized outside the world of specialists. One can think of three main reasons the text could be considered baffling, not easy to classify—three reasons that are at the core of their lasting power on readers.

Farah's novels have a way of never reflecting dominant accepted thinking. From his first novel, his stance has not been the expected one. From a Crooked Rib is the story of a young country woman who comes to town to escape from marriage to an old man. The simple tale has been read as a national allegory or as a feminist tract. Probably true, but one has to face the fact that the plot is a disturbing reversal of the usual moralistic Jane-comes-to-town story: Ebla finds herself as a person and lives happily off two different men. Where is the lesson? This early text, at once earnest and ironical, already acts like a riddle.

The two trilogies are the impressive achievement of the years of exile. In the first, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, one would think that attacking dictatorships is a fairly consensual theme. Yet there is moral comfort in the position of victim, as the novels aim to demonstrate, from the Somali example, that arbitrary power begins inside the home. Along Reichian lines, Farah not only shows how violence and cowardice are bred in a patriarchal society (Sweet and Sour Milk ), but even how matriarchs condone and extend the system, when, for example, a grandmother insists on her grand-daughter's excision (Sardines ). He also examines the ethics and real effective- ness of armed resistance to tyranny: what has the Quran to say in such a plight (Close Sesame )? The questions are asked and no one, young or old, man or woman, is exempt from facing up to fundamental choices, in daily life as in moments of heroism.

After the comparatively easy topic of dictators, Farah tackles burning issues, those that divide and create civil wars: the next three novels examine the components of identity as they are embodied at all levels, from the most intimate feelings to kinship systems and to the concept of nation. Maps evokes land and frontiers, and the price paid in blood for keeping them. Gifts gives many examples of the responsibility entailed in accepting presents, whether in a couple or in the extended family, or as international aid: what is lost is not just honor, but freedom. One must remember that the indictment was written in 1986, when donated rice was being unloaded in his country…. And Secrets, set at the start of the civil war in Somalia, explores even deeper, goes into the core of political or personal loyalties: the hero has to come to terms with the moment of his conception to decide where his loyalty lies, what the real power of the blood of the father is. Farah knows the controversial nature of the central question asked here, in a background of ethnic and lineage warfare: is my first loyalty to truth or to my brother? The fictional characters at all levels—men or women, teenagers or sick old men—are true agents, faced at one time with a choice that is ethical as well as political. Farah is a moralist who does not convey a simple message but wants to provoke consciousness, to point at the consequences for all of the most intimate decisions and at the link between taken-for-granted family bonds and national or international conflicts.

Another characteristic of his production is the sheer skill of the writing. The craft of storytelling is mastered and even foregrounded in the display of a wide range of technical devices that change totally from book to book. When he plays with a plurality of narrative voices in each story, it is not an image of postmodern relativism but an invitation to listen to all sides, or to "see the world as a mask dancing." For instance, in Maps we side with Askar and also with his foster mother Misra, excluded from his nationalist fervor because she is an Oromo, a stranger who speaks Somali with an accent. In a sophisticated system of collage, he displays a plurality of texts: folk tales, articles, prose poetry, Quranic verses. The blend is at times incongruous: one may prefer the uneven disturbing texture of the first trilogy to the smoother polyphony of the second, yet once again this contemporary technique is no futile display but a recreation of the mixed narratives of present-day Africa. Above all, he has been able to create surprise by the unsual variety of his protagonists, as if each time the distance from autobiography allowed the writer a closer emotional involvement with the central consciousness. In Farah's company, the reader has seen the world in turn from the point of view of women—uncannily real to many a woman reader: a young peasant (Crooked ) and a journalist (Sardines ), a generous mature midwife (Gifts ) and a cynical survivor (Secrets ). His men are just as varied, with a baby's first perceptions in Maps, or two contrasted portraits of old men: the meditative, pious Deeriye, a most remarkable creation in Close Sesame, and the mischievous sensualist of Secrets. Each carefully crafted novel proposes a new structure, a new tone, a new angle in the reconstruction on the Somali scene: how is one to choose between the dignified Muslim world of Close Sesame, the warmth and tentative joy of Gifts, the sarcastic humor of Secrets ?

Finally, Farah's work is distinctive because, for all its varied modes, it has created an imaginary world that is immediately recognizable, and that is the mark of the major novelist. Like the learned poets of Somali oral tradition, he uses stylistic ornaments, comparisons of all types, sometimes incongruous or comic, sometimes of an amazing poetic precision. Images from the natural world give form to the stories. Animals, winds, and spirits inhabit the dreams of the characters, feature in descriptive vignettes, are echoed in the tales and myths, and crop up in daily conversations. "Magic realism" would not be a useful label to account for a fictional world where myth and poetry just as much as the explicit intellectual questioning contribute in exploring the totality of human experience. The many books evoked or quoted, the sensuous intimate descriptions of bodies eating or making love, the birds, the stars, the water of legends and dreams are on one and the same level of experience. Because of this unified vision, the novels bring to the dialogue with world fiction a distinctly African voice, a Somali voice. Like Somali poetry, their tone can be in turn humorous, sarcastic; their mode is at once sensuous, political, mythical.

In his eight novels so far, Farah has never tired of experimenting with different forms and genres. Like a good storyteller, he wants to surprise, by impersonality a variety of voices, by using the resources of the romance or the thriller to keep us guessing. Like a good storyteller, he does not underestimate our capac- ity to react and think as free moral agents. The tale is a riddle and all the meaning is not obvious at first reading. He risks losing us at times—he has so many references—but we come back for more, because the enigmashe entertains us with are of the unsettling kind that aim at transforming our vision. A coherent, ambitious body of work, a singular voice: the jury has acknowledged this gift from Africa to contemporary world literature.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Bardolph, Jacqueline. "Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah's Two Trilogies." World Literature Today 72, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 727-32.

Analyzes how the siblings in Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and the trilogy of novels comprised of Maps, Gifts, and Secrets reveal the development of Farah's political ideology and contribute to the complexity of the novels, which lend themselves to humanistic as well as allegorical interpretations.

Ishmaili, Rashidah. "Encountering Nuruddin Farah." Black Renaissance 6, no. 3 (spring/summer 2006): 10-17.

Offers a brief biography of the author and a short analysis of some of his writings. Also reveals Farah's thoughts on such subjects as his writing routine, his indebtedness to the women in his life, his identity as an African, and his literary influences, and includes an interview with Dr. Allessandra De Maio, Farah's Italian translator.

Ntalindwa, Raymond. "Linkages of History in the Narrative of Close Sesame." Journal of African Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (December 1999): 187-202.

Proposes that Deeriye, the protagonist of Close Sesame, provides a symbolic correlation between the colonial and postcolonial dictatorships of Somalia.

Williams, R. John. "‘Doing History’: Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk, Subaltern Studies, and the Postcolonial Trajectory of Silence." Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4 (winter 2006): 161-76.

Maintains that "Farah's text [Sweet and Sour Milk] uses the trope of ‘silence’ to dramatize the potentially fruitful (and problematic) process of writing histories ‘from below’."

Additional coverage of Farah's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African Writers; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1:2; Black Writers, Eds. 2, 3; Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 106; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 81, 148; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 53, 137; Contemporary Novelists Eds. 4, 5, 6, 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 125; DISCovering Authors Modules: Multicultural Authors; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century Ed. 3; Literature Resource Center; and World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2.