Bawdy Politic
by Greg Tate
What is the African novel to you? More specifically that of the
postcolonial Somalian variety? Secrets by Nuruddin Farah
offers a redefinition of continental literature if your standard
reference is Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, and Emecheta. Not least
because Farah's depictions of sex and lust defy the conventional
reticence about graphic depictions of carnal knowledge. Secrets
has big themes galore--the disintegration of cultural memory,
the corrupting influence of politics on identity and interpersonal
relations, the demonization of independent-minded women, class
warfare, civil war, and the war against nature--but for Farah,
exploring these ideas demands examining what people do when they're
hot and bothered. Farah, now exiled in Nigeria, became persona
non grata in Somalia upon publication of his third novel two
decades ago. He returned home for the first time in as many years
just prior to finishing Secrets. The novel's transgressive bent
and cultural indiscretions will likely retarnish his local image.
The range of sexual practices and sexual angst Farah tunnels
through his narrative is broad--menstruation-drinking, masturbation,
homosexuality, bisexuality, voyeurism, penis-size envy, pedophilia,
impotence, and bestiality.
The notion that sex and greed drive the world is a common enough
tenet of European and American fiction, but a significant body
of African fiction places more emphasis on the role of the individual
in history than the case-history of the individual. The unbashedly
bawdy Farah casually flips the script, inverting the usual ratio
of social realism to psychosexual analysis. Secrets is a novel
drenched in vomit, excrescence, blood, sperm, scandals, and entrails.
It both titillates and irritates, daring to be read as a prophecy
of Somalian apocalypse and as pornography.
Farah surgically examines his protagonist Kalaman's childhood
traumas and existential unraveling. Secretly suckled (and molested)
by his mother's best friend, the mud-hut madame Arbaco, the seven-year-old
Kalaman one day becomes emboldened to unzip himself when he finds
Arbaco bathing. Her scathing response scars him for life.
''What do you want me to do with this ugly bit of male flesh?
Looks to me like the extra sixth finger of a child just born,
so small.''
''I want to father your baby.''
''Zip up. I think I know just the right person who has the right
kind of hole to accommodate your tininess.''
Our conversation had a profound effect on my subsequent relations
with other human beings. It would take a long time before I could
approach any other woman.
Structurally circumlocutious, Secrets is a narrative snake set
on eating its own tail. It begins and ends with the same sentence
(''One corpse. Three secrets.''), whipping and writhing about
in concentric circles that split off and reform in ways which
eventually provide all Farah's major characters with first-person
psychic renderings and reckonings. His luminous syntax transforms
even the most oblique passages into sensual experiences: ''Nonno's
voice was like water seeping in. It found space in Kalaman's
skull, in which it formed puddles....In the riverflowing in Kalaman's
head, a voice cast a gauntlet which was afloat with thoughts,
thoughts as immense as the corpse of a dead hippo, buoying up
other memories the years had buried under water.''
The title of Farah's book refers to a significant disclosure
about Kalaman's paternity and his depressive mother, but it could
also be read as pointing up the author's fascination with the
power of undisclosed information to disfigure souls and derail
nations. Loose lips may sink ships, but in Farah's novel tight
lips drown in their own bile. In this regard, Farah masterfully
connects the dots between Kalaman's trauma and that of his politically
scarred nation. Wailing along underneath the peccadilloes is
a cry of social horror not far removed from that found in Gogol
and Dostoyevsky. Kalaman's inability to procure guidance from
his ambitious mother is mirrored by the general citizenry's inability
to derive the same from their avaricious leaders. Fidow, whom
young Kalaman observes in a pedophilic sex act with his friend
Timir, dies at the hands of an avenging elephant after poaching
her family for Hong Kong smugglers; the adult Timir dies from
a car bomb after procuring a young mother to be his servant at
slave wages.
Kalaman reads as a Somalian Woody Allen, a flailing nebbish caught
in a tangled web of cultural betrayal and sexual anxiety. The
child Kalaman's quest for forbidden knowledge (about his parents'
sex life most of all) puts him under the control of a prepubescent
seductress, Sholoongo, who swears she'll make a baby for him
if he will drink from her menstrual blood. The book's early focus
on Sholoongo deliciously misleads us to assume Kalaman's problems
belong to the cliched realm of the bewitched tribal male, but
Farah uses Sholoongo as a catalyst for Kalaman to delve into
his own origins. His guide is his grandfather, Nonno, a randy
shaman who cantankerously spouts poetic riddles as wisdom and
laments over his formerly Marxist country's resurgent runaway
clan wars and market-driven degeneracy.
An antitribalist who still worships the ancestors, nature, and
Sufic number systems, Nonno is the novel's bewildering antihero
and clearest conscience, particularly when it comes to explicating
the rationale behind taboos and the ways of Sholoongo.
''I should like to put forth one heretical notion,'' Nonno said.
''That what sets humans apart from other animals is not the generic
ability to speak, or that we are capable of thinking in complicated
mathematical equations, no. It is in the human's obedience to
a set of tenets governing an overall behavior....I cannot imagine
a world without taboos, a culture without its notion of right
and wrong....
''You cut your finger, you have a kind of blood. But that blood
is different from the blood which defines a kinship. But a finger
dipped in a woman's monthly elevates a waste to the status of
a lust: that is a taboo.''
Nonno is the book's most vivid character because he has the most
modern heart, most ancient soul, and the best sex scene--an assault
by Sholoongo on his near dead body precipitates a resurrection
involving all his bodily parts and bodily functions. He becomes
in his moral complexity the author's surrogate, loudly lamenting
a Somalia exploited out of a grounded past, principled present,
or hopeful future.
As unblinking parables about black communities collapsing under
the weight of superheroic myths of black indestructibility, Farah's
Secrets and Toni Morrison's Paradise make for compelling transatlantic
companion pieces by distraught genius composers. Having realized
that the road of African liberation has become a washed-out bridge,
both authors stand knee-deep in the internecine bullshit flagging
down all neo-African cultures that are shotgunning their way
into the next century--morally blinded, politically confused,
culturally schizophrenic, and heedless of cosmic or human laws
of retribution.