Copyright 1999 Times Mirror CompanyLos Angeles Times

A Fragmented Homeland, a Vocal Critic;

A Somali Writer Disects his Country's Civil War, Dictatorial Past, and Neocolonial Present

by Lisa Meyer


"A woman has a son who refuses to speak," writer Nuruddin Farah says, recounting an African folk tale. "The boy is 10 years old, and he has never uttered a single word. So his mother prays, 'God, make my son speak.' When he finally does, he asks his mother, 'Should we make love?' So she prays, 'My dear God, make him fall silent.' "

After he published his first novel, "From a Crooked Rib" (Heinemann, 1970), Farah says, he felt like that 10-year-old boy. Some people in Somalia, his native land, wanted to silence him for uttering what nobody was supposed to say. He criticized the harmful ways women were treated in his country. Years later, he finished a trilogy, "Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship" (Graywolf Press, 1992), which exposed the corruption of Somalian dictator Gen. Siad Barre, who ruled during the '70s and '80s. Members of his regime harassed Farah and even tried to kill him. They beat and tortured his family and friends.

But Farah refused to keep quiet.

He became persona non grata in Somalia and went into exile in America, Europe and other African countries. For almost two decades, however, Farah has hovered about Somalia, continually imagining it in fragmented narratives that break down traditional definitions and offer inconclusive endings.

"A novelist lets go of inhibitions," he explains, "and speaks the minds of people whose desires are intimidated and restrained. The imagination is given free reign."

Banned Works Are Secretly Translated

Now residing in Nigeria, Farah, 52, is a multilingual fiction writer and playwright who does all of his work in English. He is the first African to win the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1998), a biennial award that is considered by some to be second only to the Nobel Prize. His stories have become dissident tracts, banned in Somalia, but kept alive like samizdat: Admirers secretly recite his work and illegally translate it into Somali. In August, Arcade will reissue the first two novels of Farah's most recent trilogy: "Maps," (Pantheon Books, 1986), "Gifts" (Serif, 1993) and "Secrets" (Arcade, 1998). This will be the first time "Gifts" has been published in America.

Recently, Farah risked a visit to his homeland and discovered that the smaller unit of the clan had succeeded where the larger unit of nationhood had failed, and chaos and infighting plagued the land. "When Siad Barre was in power, it was easy to know who one's enemy was," Farah recalled in a lengthy conversation not long ago. "Now things are much more difficult. There are so many mini-Siad Barres . . . and I won't take sides."

His trip allowed Farah to finish "Secrets." During the trip, he discovered that Somalia is "an offspring of contradictions." His main character in "Secrets," Sholoongo, embodies this contradiction. She is powerful and pathetic, insane and conniving, a rebel and a victim.

"If you look at Sholoongo," Farah says softly and carefully, "it is easy to see how colonial powers came, raped and abandoned the person whom they raped and humiliated, abandoning them without love, abandoning them without even listening to their narratives, or being interested in their future."

Sholoongo, a shaman who can change shapes, represents one way a neocolonial subject survives: by having several identities in the public and private realm.

" A neocolonial subject is born into uncertainty, lives in uncertainty, dies in uncertainty and operates on the frontiers of uncertainty," Farah says. " A neocolonial subject is a person who is told, 'You are not who you are.' "

As a result, neocolonial subjects cannot tell their own tales, Farah says, sitting on the edge of his chair, wearing a red silk shirt over a black turtleneck that matches his pants. Gray hair speckles his mustache and sideburns. Because neocolonial subjects are trapped in cultural narratives that are not theirs, he explains, they must step outside themselves in order to speak.

So it is not a surprise that many of Farah's characters are psychically fragmented, telling fictions in a futile attempt to protect themselves against these colonial narratives.

Neocolonial subjects are like Scheherazade in "Arabian Nights," spinning tales to survive, Farah says. "There is a continuous borrowing from the future. You borrow from the future because today is not certain."

Like Farah, his characters live in liminal spaces: between ideologies, between home and exile, between dreams and realism. "For me, none of these boundaries exist," he says, peering above his bifocals and narrowing his moist brown eyes. He makes slow circles with his hands, as if trying to inscribe what he says into the air. "They don't exist in my mind, and they don't exist in my real life. So in my work, I try to collapse them."

As a result, his writing fuses what are traditionally considered opposites: men and women, humans and animals, developed and Third World nations. Such a vision is a product of his education in Somalian and Western traditions.

"I see my work as allowing me to live in two worlds simultaneously," he says. "My writing gives me the possibility of combining my two sides."

Farah calls his recent trilogy "body novels": works that investigate how socioeconomic environments affect not only a person's concept of his or her own body, but also the body itself: In Somalia, people have been starved, tortured, beaten and killed. In these works, he shows that neocolonial subjects are guests not only in their own countries and psyches, but also in their own skin.

"The state is always interfering in the lives of people," Farah says. "Not only does it interfere with one's dreams, aspirations and expectations, but one may actually be taken into a prison cell, detained and tortured, and one cannot complain because one does not own one's life, one's destiny, one's future and one's body."

Farah recalls a story of a man who was raped in prison and wanted to cut off his tongue so that he could never tell what happened to him. "So rather than kill the dictator or take revenge on those people who've done this to him," Farah explains, "the neocolonial subject amputates himself or herself."

Books Show Different Aspects of His Homeland

Farah describes "Secrets" as representing "an internal implosion that is a result of an external war." "Maps," the first novel in this trilogy, depicts the war, and "Gifts," the second novel, portrays the country's subsequent economic ruin.

"Gifts" also maintains that Somalia sold its soul to superpowers for economic assistance. Farah believes that humanitarian aid from developed nations often translates into cultural domination. Moreover, the assistance renders Somalia dependent and therefore unable to mature as a nation.

" Temporary emergency donations are welcome only when there is peace in Somalia," Farah says, "and when those donations are used toward the reconstruction of the infrastructures of the country."

Farah believes that if America had not intervened during Somalia's civil war in the early '90s, the country's crises would have ended years ago. "The best way of handling the Somali situation is to let Somalis come to some kind of agreement," Farah says, " and be allowed to reconstruct themselves."

In part, Farah blames the Western media. "Many of the journalists who are sent to Somalia fall back on cliches," Farah says, and because they fail to depict the complexity of Somalia and its people, the rest of the world sees the nation only the way that the colonial powers wish it to be portrayed. "I write in order to provide an alternative to the propaganda put out by the Somali state," Farah says, "and to the cliches offered in Western media."

Farah also writes in order to put the people of his country in history books--however divided, unnamed or fragmented the portrait. He includes a vision of the future. "When there is a dictatorship, people are so obsessed with their daily living that they can't think of a future. So the writer becomes the dreamer who dreams for the nation, who says, " 'This is where we ought to be.' "

But any seed that he plants in his writing will take a long time to bear fruit, Farah says, realizing that he is fortunate to have escaped the "many who have contributed to the planting . . . but did not survive to gather the harvest."

Return to NomadNet Front Page