[In the following review, Sullivan discusses the disparity between the images of Somalis presented in the media and the characters fleshed out in Farah's latest trilogy of novels, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship.]

First published more than a decade ago in Great Britain, Somali writer Nuruddin Farah's Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship has recently appeared in print for the first time in the United States. Meanwhile, the American media indicates connections between the West's former lack of attention to Somalia and its catastrophic condition today. Recognitions of past inattentiveness ironically coincide. As do present appearances: The news feeds us images of the Somali as the anonymous victim of starvation; the Variations depict Somali intellectuals—financially comfortable, well fed, and living in fear of death by torture rather than famine.

Farah's subtle and persistent use of the theme of spoiled nourishment as a metaphor for the corruption of the state is disturbingly prescient in this regard. All three of his titles refer to food. The wasteful slaughtering of cattle by Italian colonialists as a kind of punishment is a memory of landmark symbolic significance in Close Sesame. And the first novel in the series begins with a poisoning.

When Sweet and Sour Milk opens, Soyaan, a former economic advisor to the General, has been given something to eat that doesn't agree with him. He is soon pronounced dead of “complications.” The euphemism is telling. His twin brother Loyaan, sure that Soyaan has been killed for political reasons, attempts to investigate the circumstances of his death. As he discovers the degree to which his brother opposed the General's regime, he watches that regime mythologize his brother's memory, transforming a political liability into a figure of national heroism.

Soyaan is one of ten undercover activists who form a core group of characters in the trilogy. Not entirely known even to each other, all are involved in an apparent plot to take down the dictator. True to his characters' vow of secrecy, Farah never reveals the details of this plot; nor do his stories pay much attention to exactly how and why his characters would institute reform if it were to succeed. Farah's omissions point to the double binds of suppression in an environment where information is a liability. A document disappears from a safe deposit box along with the former owner of the key. The key, the box, and the disappearance overwhelm the words that were locked up. These peripheral factors generate more illicit information. The subject of the politics in question is overwhelmed by the issue of how it will be constructed.

IN SECLUSION

Farah effectively treats this problematic interplay between necessary strategies of self-protective silence and critical disclosure in Sardines. The novel centers around Medina, a prominent journalist who is barred from her profession after a short-lived stint as editor of the nation's only newspaper, during which she prints unprintably factual news. Her response is to retire into voluntary reclusion. While this decision alienates her, it also frees her to work on translating world literature into Somalian and her muted experience into thought. Medina's thwarted reportage re-emerges in an altered form, as a poetic stream of fantasy and memory.

The main character of Close Sesame has also left a public life for a private one. A respected tribal leader and former political prisoner, the aging Deeriye now lives almost solely for his dreamlike sessions with Allah and with his dead wife, and receives premonitions of future trauma while napping in his room. Close Sesame plays with the notion of madness as sanity, blurring boundaries between Deeriye's political astuteness and his visionary dreams. The two finally merge in the culminating scene, which is all the more effective for being notably outside the omniscient narrator's scope; abruptly recounted after the fact according to unreliable hearsay. At the point where Deeriye finally and violently confronts the Dictator, we are denied access to his thoughts and feelings; reminded, instead, that we're consuming a reconstructed and gap-ridden version of events. The reader is led to confront the dictatorship's pernicious erasures through the effects of an indeterminate narrative.

Farah writes with an acute sense of poetry and a faithfulness to the visceral quality of mundane detail. His characters are fully fleshed out as individuals, while the Somalis who waste away before our eyes remain nameless, engraved in silence on the same paper we use to line litter boxes and start fires. Burned into memory or not, the severity of these images of suffering makes them hard to digest as anything but symbols, representations of the mute inescapability of body when it has lost all the weight of character and history. The absence of a bridge between this apparently empty shell of devastation and the rich culture Farah describes may mark another notable inattention.