SOURCE: “Nuruddin Farah—Tribalism, Orality, and Postcolonial Ultimate Reality and Meaning in Contemporary Somalia,” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning, Vol. 19, No. 3, September, 1996, pp. 189–205.

[In the following essay, Hawley discusses the roles of politics, tribalism, and religion in Farah's novels and traces how the author portrays the search for an ultimate reality.]

‘Everybody had turned the foundling into what they thought they wanted, or lacked.’

—Nuruddin Farah, Gifts, 128.

1. INTRODUCTION

Few would contest the observation of Matthew Horsman and Andrew Marshall that ‘fragmentation within existing nation-states—along ethnic, linguistic and religious lines—is occurring in eastern Europe, in Africa and in the states of the former Soviet Union’; that even in the ‘traditional nation-states’, as the authors describe them, ‘tribalism is growing. Scots in the United Kingdom, Catalans and the Basques in Spain, and Lombards in Italy are increasingly vigorous in their demands for an even greater measure of self-administration’. Some would perhaps wish to qualify the reasons that Horsman and Marshall offer to explain this phenomenon but, again, most would agree that those who participate in this resurgence of tribal consciousness ‘seek a level of comfort in their communities to withstand the complexity and atomization that modern capitalism has wrought on their lives and to free themselves from domination by “alien” elites’ （Horsman, 1994, p. 185）. But if this search for ‘comfort’—which one might interpret as a search for meaning—is a regressive and relatively recent event in some countries, in many parts of the world where nation-states have been arbitrarily carved out of a map by colonizing powers, such tribalism continues less as a vehicle for personal liberation and more as the very mechanism for domination by native elites. This is especially true in a country like Somalia, where factional battles resist national coalescence. The question citizens of such an inchoate country must ask themselves, in terms of their personal and national search for meaning, is how to find a voice, how to find an audience, how to begin a dialogue from which a consensus may emerge. Must each citizen remain a foundling, seeking an individual and national identity that has not been imposed by others?

While granting that it would be simplistic to propose that all ‘postcolonial’ peoples are seeking the same ultimate reality, it will be the purpose of this paper to suggest that in Nuruddin Farah of Somalia, roadblocks to the search for ultimate meaning dominate his fiction in a way typical of many third-world novelists. As Barbara Harlow points out, for writers such as Amilcar Cabral （the leader of the Guinea-Bissau liberation movement and a major theoretician of African resistance and liberation struggles） and Ghassan Kanafani （author of Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966）, the resistance movement and the armed struggle for national liberation were to accomplish the political and economic liberation of the people from the thrall of imperialism. But they were also expected to bring about, in that process, a revolutionary transformation of existing social structures. Whether in liberating women from traditional tasks, organizing democratic processes of decision-making and counsel, building schools or training cadres of peasants and workers, the ‘armed liberation struggle’, as Cabral says [in 1973, p. 55], ‘is not only a product of culture, but a determinant of culture’ （Harlow, 1987, pp. 11–12）.

This suggests that belief in a particular ultimate reality （whether sacred or, in Marxist-inspired revolutions, profane—or, perhaps, so deferred as to become at least ethereal） that might be construed as a product of culture inspires in many of these politically-committed writers a revolt against the more rarified aesthetic concerns of western novelists in favor of a decision to reshape society and, in the process, to unearth the foundation of that culture's ultimate meaning. I will argue that this project defines Nuruddin Farah's corpus, most obviously in his trilogy jointly entitled Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. At the heart of his interrogation of Somali culture is his examination of the tectonic friction between self-definition and tribal loyalty, between nation-building and diurnal obligations. He is especially noteworthy because of his interest in his country's transition from an oral to a written culture. The place of the word, and principally the revealed word of Allah, in such an age of change, directs the reader to the central questions of meaning that preoccupy both the author and his characters. Who can speak in such countries, and to what effect?

1.1 NURUDDIN FARAH

Nuruddin Farah was born in Baidoa in 1945, in what was then Italian Somaliland. The British and Italian territories were united in 1960 to form Somalia. Farah grew up, therefore, understanding Italian （he now lives principally in Italy） and English, the language in which he writes his novels. He worked for the Department of Education and then went to India and attended the University of Chandigarh to study literature and philosophy. While there he wrote plays and his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, which was one of the earliest African novels written by a male that clearly portrayed the inequities that women endured in Somalia and, by implication, throughout most of Africa. His interest in women's rights continued, as seen especially in Sardines, the second novel of his political trilogy. But his focus was to broaden a bit when he returned to Somalia in 1969, for this was the year that Major-General Siyad Barre staged a bloodless coup and, with Soviet assistance, imposed a system of ‘scientific socialism’ on the country.

Farah quickly grew to hate this regime, with its near deification of Siyad Barre; it produced, as he describes it in Sweet and Sour Milk,

a nation regimented, militarised. A nation disciplined and forced to obey the iron-hand directing the orchestra of moans and groans. … The politics of mystification kept everybody at bay. People were kept in their separate compartments of ignorance about what happened to other people and what became of other things.

（Farah, 1992C, pp. 190, 198–99）

The regime became symbolic in Farah's mind for all such rulers throughout Africa—men who played one faction against another to maintain personal power, and who encouraged narrow tribal interests in opposition to the broader national concerns. When Farah wrote the novel in Somali, the views he embodied sufficiently alarmed the new government that the serialization of Sweet and Sour Milk was suppressed. He next wrote A Naked Needle, a novel with autobiographical overtones about a disaffected teacher. Before it was published in 1976 he had moved to Britain to study theater. Upon the publication of the novel he was warned that if he were to return to Somalia he would be imprisoned for thirty years.

1.2 SOCIAL DEVOLUTION

It became clear to Farah that a generational crisis faced his homeland: those who were his parents' age who had stronger faith in traditional Islam were being pushed aside; those of his own generation, who were now assuming important positions in society, found themselves disaffected from the religion of their parents; those of his children's generation were the least rooted of all, and found themselves metaphorically set adrift in an increasingly secular society—almost like spiritual orphans.

2. THE THREE POLITICAL NOVELS OF NURUDDIN FARAH

It was at this point that he turned his attention more pointedly upon the Siyad Barre regime, producing three novels （Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame） whose characters become enmeshed in ‘the General's’ political machinery. The General is the unifying focus of the three books and it is clear he would like to be the ground of ultimate meaning for the people whose lives he dominates. Running throughout the first book of the series, Sweet and Sour Milk, is the sacrilegious phrase ‘Labour is honour and there is no General but our General’ （Farah, 1992C, p. 97）—Farah's none-too-subtle suggestion that military might has sought to take the place of the power of Allah. Throughout Farah's writing there is a cynical suspicion of political action, since in a tribal context it is so quickly corrupted.

The trilogy traces the fates of eleven members of a resistance movement who have vowed to do whatever they can to overthrow the General's regime: Ahmed-Wellie （he apparently betrays the group）, Jibriil （dies in an assassination attempt）, Koschin （imprisoned and reduced by torture to an automaton）, Mahad （imprisoned）, Medina （silenced and portrayed as a scandalous woman）, Mukhtaar （killed）, Mursal （killed in an unsuccessful suicide bombing）, Samater （co-opted by being made a minister in the General's government）, Siciliano （imprisoned）, Soyaan （apparently poisoned by Soviet agents） and his twin brother Loyaan, who attempts to take his place in the movement （exiled to Belgrade as an ambassador）. Although their plotting proves to be ineffective in overthrowing the General, their resistance to his presentation of himself as the center of meaning for Somalis offers readers something of a negative theology: though they do not assert an alternative ‘god’, they at least can say what their god is not.

The novels center around the personal struggle that faces each member of the group, and show how their decisions effect members of their families. The books give no sense that these decisions have any effect on the larger society, or any significant effect on the General himself, who maintains control as easily under the Soviets in the first two novels as he does under the Americans in the third. Similarly condemned by Farah is the General's version of socialism and of democracy, since both are manipulated to serve the ends of totalitarianism. The General never personally appears in the novels—his is an absence around which all the characters must define themselves. Again, a kind of negative theology seems to play into this theme of absence, since Allah's enduring presence in the lives of Farah's powerless characters seems to indict the form of power that a secular regime embraces. The activities of the revolutionary Movement never fully materialize in the narrative. These remain shady happenings as if taking place in an alternative universe that somehow influences the real world that Farah describes. We hear about it all secondhand, off the cuff, muffled by sobs, interrupted, misinterpreted. The reader, like the characters themselves, is victimized by that offstage world of history and finds in the narratological world of Farah's creation whatever meaning may be possible. In other words, Farah's characters learn （and teach） the lesson that imagination, while ineffective against the political powers that control one's environment, is powerful in providing a shape for one's vision of self. As will be seen, religion in such a context offers much the same paradoxical hope as do other forms of imagination.

Emphasizing Farah's implied suggestion that ‘movements’ and tribal loyalties neither significantly ameliorate the conditions in which we must function nor, perhaps ironically, protect us from the necessity of individual choice, the novelist devotes the bulk of the first and third novel in the series to characters who do not belong to the Movement itself and who do not draw their power from the machinations around them.

2.1 SWEET AND SOUR MILK

Sweet and Sour Milk begins with the death of Soyaan, one of the revolutionaries, who dies in the arms of his twin brother. Loyaan then seeks to discern the cause of his brother's death, the ideological purposes to which the General is putting that death, and the consequent responsibilities that he has to counter the official rewriting of his brother's ‘meaning’ in the eyes of the common people. Whereas Soyaan went to his death defying the General, his dead body has been confiscated by the state and he has been posthumously honoured as a national hero who respected the regime. The novel focuses on Loyaan's struggle to understand the cause of his brother's death, and the meaning of his life. Farah's purpose in the novel seems to be to show the conscientization of an individual: Loyaan ultimately decides to take his brother's place in the struggle. The fact that the choice is rendered ‘meaningless’ by the General's decision to exile Loyaan as an ambassador to Belgrade does not significantly diminish the importance of the process whereby Loyaan moved into the struggle itself. The book, therefore, has the existentialist overtones informing Camus' Myth of Sisyphus: once the character has become enlightened, the burden of choice becomes heavier, inescapable, self-defining. There is no one to lift it from the character's shoulders. But with the enlightenment comes the transformation of the absurd into the tragic.

2.2 CLOSE SESAME

The third book in the series, Close Sesame, emerges principally through the consciousness of Deeriye, an elderly and devout Muslim whose son, Mursal, is one of the members of the Movement. In an interview Farah noted that ‘I think that Close Sesame is probably the one novel that will outlive all my other novels. … It is difficult to explain why it is that I am more attached to [it] than to the others’ （Pajalich, 1993, p. 69）. Deeriye was once a ‘player’ in the political game, having defied the Italians during their occupation. But his defiance was akin to conscientious objection, a Gandhian non-violent resistance and refusal to cooperate with the imposing power. As chieftain he bore full responsibility for this decision, and he was imprisoned for twelve years. At the same time, his decision resulted in the Italians slaughtering the tribe's cattle and causing starvation among his family—while he ate well in jail. Again, as with Loyaan's exile, the power of the institution seems to have been to render the personal choice meaningless or destructive of innocents （and innocence）.

2.3 SARDINES

The middle book in the series, Sardines, orchestrates more members of the Movement itself, focusing principally on Medina, one of the few politically-active women, and on her husband, Samater. The story allows Farah to show a woman revolutionary behaving something like the women of Aristophanes' Lysistrata: she separates from her husband until he lives up to his responsibilities as a man, resigns from his cushy and corrupting position as a member of the regime, and silences his reactionary mother. Her decision does, therefore, have a desired effect and weakens the General's power in one very small area. But this is a minuscule grain of sand compared to what the General has done to her: she is a very well-educated woman and had been one of the few involved in publishing in the country; her punishment for spreading incendiary ideas has been a type of silencing—she is forbidden to publish anything other than children's literature.

3. TRADITIONAL RELIGION AS PORTRAYED IN FARAH'S NOVELS

The role of Islam in this world of institutionalized frustration is significant and Farah's approach is respectful. Nuruddin Farah's own understanding of ultimate reality and meaning does not necessarily squarely coincide with that of conservative Islam. He does note that ‘Islam is most peculiarly more tolerant of Christianity than Christianity is of Islam. … I would accuse Christians of being intolerant when it comes to other religions and of accusing Muslims of being fundamentalists’, but he admits, as well, that ‘there are many varieties of Islam too, and there is more enmity between Muslims than there is between Christians’ （Pajalich, 1993, p. 65）. Of those in the trilogy who call themselves Muslims there seem to be three categories: （1） the cynical politicians, （2） the self-enslaved fanatics, （3） and the devout. There are those characters who use the trappings of religion for political ends, and they are roundly condemned; the General, of course, heads this list. In fact, in Sweet and Sour Milk Loyaan eventually discerns that his brother was killed because he answered honestly when the General asked if his rule was supported by the Koran. There are those characters who use their religion to absolve themselves from involvement in the world around them, or who use their interpretation of its precepts to discipline the more creative and more daring among their family members. The most conspicuous member of this group is Idil, Samater's mother in Sardines. She attempts to enforce the discipline that has been imposed on her daughter-in-law, Medina, and plays to the hilt the stereotype of a vindictive mother-in-law. But the characters in the final category （the devout） abound, and one plays the foil to Idil: Fatima, Medina's mother, is actually far more religiously observant than Idil, more conservative in her daily life, and completely genuine in her attempt to live the teachings of her religion without condemning those around her. Of similar simplicity and religious honesty is Ebla, the central character in From a Crooked Rib, who travels from the countryside to Mogadiscio and meets with a good deal of sorrow. In Sardines she attempts to transfer all her love, which is grounded in her religious sense, to her troubled and worldly daughter, Sagal. But Farah's most striking portrayal of the results of a long life of sincere devotion to Allah and to the teachings of Muhammed is the central character of Close Sesame, Deeriye. Sixty-nine years of age, asthmatic and nearsighted, his faith remains unshaken.

He bent double, murmuring a series of sanative phrases, breathed with lungs of gratitude and meant for the ears of his Creator. … The beads again. A litany of Koranic verses. As he counted and re-counted the ninety-nine names of Allah, as he multiplied and subtracted the number of times he had said them, he realized that the world outside had begun to wake up. … And then he prayed: ‘O Allah who art just, give us true peace, bless us with the inner tranquillity that Thou art, make us apprehend the enemy within us, deliver us, help us, O Allah, descend from the greater heights of selfishness, help us reach and be content with what we have or who we are: weak and helpless without thy guidance. … Help us, O Allah, help us find peace in ourselves, in our friends, in our families and in our neighbours.’ He held out his hands, rubbed them together, brought them closer to his face and spat a salivaless emission of breath and （with the prayer beads still in the grip of the index and middle fingers） rinsed his face in his dry but blessed open palms. Then he recited a mumbled Faatixa. With all this done, his features cast in worshipful mould, silent, reverent, he got up, caught the prayer rug by the corner and hung it on the nail on the wall above his bed.

（Farah, 1992A, pp. 4–5）

In the course of this novel Deeriye's son, the last of the revolutionaries, is killed in his attempt to assassinate the General. Apparently unshaken in his faith by this loss, Deeriye nonetheless seems to take on the younger generation's philosophy of violence—where necessary. He borrows a military uniform and a handgun, goes to see the General, and is himself killed when he attempts to withdraw the gun from his pocket: he has, instead, pulled out his prayer beads. Even in death he willy-nilly embodies the Gandhian principles that had ruled his life. His out-thrust symbol of Islamic devotion, Farah seems to suggest, is what will ultimately overthrow the General. At any rate, in the closing pages of the novel the populace recognizes his greatness and his spiritual strength—a power that means more than the brute force that controls the profane world around them. If the General's approach seems to hold them variously in his sway, ultimately even the General and his minions must answer to one more powerful than they. In the meantime, whether devout or cynical, the people of Somalia live under the reign of a tyrant.

Such a repressive regime, coupled to the wider world's profane philosophy, quickly exhausts the idealism of its citizens. The response of the younger generation to religion is embodied in the exchange between Zeinab, Deeriye's daughter, and her father: ‘Excuse me’, said Deeriye, ‘I'll see you later’. ‘The muezzin calls’, said Zeinab, ‘and you cannot not answer’. ‘Earnest praying is a vocation, my father used to say’, Deeriye said. ‘And is that what my father says?’ she said. He did not rise to her challenge. He said, ‘I will see you later’ （Farah, 1992A, pp. 186–87）. He goes off to pray; she does not.

4. PORTRAYAL OF POLITICS IN FARAH'S TRILOGY

Throughout the trilogy Farah portrays the younger （that is, thirty-something） generation as action-minded, well-educated, generally well-travelled and cosmopolitan, but sadly lacking in a moral center or clear sense of what might be called ultimate reality and meaning. They have become politicized at the expense of their moral grounding. Deeriye and those of his children's generation come to much the same end, but Deeriye does so with the sense that, in the larger scheme, his life has been meaningful. Zeinab and her generation do not share that assurance. Farah is interested in charting the effects of modernity and neocolonialism on the members of his own generation （Zeinab's generation）—those who have been faced with an increasingly secularized world, a national oppressive government, and few roadmaps that would suggest a direction in which to take oneself and, by extension, one's ‘emerging’ nation. Though the details of the Movement that plays itself out in the background of this trilogy are sketchy, the reader will recognize in the various deaths and career collapses of its members a bravery that should have produced more impressive results: these, after all, are some of the best-educated and highest-placed members of the younger generation. Instead, the only hope for mobilization of a larger percentage of the population comes （and only paradoxically and somewhere off in the future） through Deeriye's almost ludicrous assassination （or suicide?） attempt. He, of course, is a member of the older generation whose time, one would have though, had passed.

The trilogy targets those aspects of the historical Somalian modus vivendi that perpetuate patriarchal dominance. ‘The reason why I have always fought against authoritarianism’, he writes,

even when it comes from Somalian traditional society, is that if we accept authoritarian rule within our own societies, then we must also per force accept authoritarian rule coming from outside. Democracy suggests equality, and there must be equality, we mustn't say we （men） would rule women ruthlessly, unkindly, undemocratically but we would not want the Italians to come and colonize us. We shouldn't colonize other peoples. There is a hierarchy of injustice, and the weaker the person the more likely for that weaker person to do more harm to those persons who are weaker than he. For example, in societies where there is political terrorism, the weakest animal is the one who suffers most. In Somalia, for example, we usually chase children who have always been hit. If you have a small child who is about eight and who comes home and his parents hit him, and he goes out and another person who is more powerful hits him, and they go about doing nothing because they can't come home for fear of being hit … well, they are more likely to be tempted to chase a dog. This is the spiral of violence, a product of this hierarchy of injustice.

（Pajalich, 1993, pp. 63–64）

Farah thus returns again and again to his despair over the Balkanising effects of tribal patriotism within a new nation like Somalia. Farah's trilogy has overtones of a Kafkaesque subterranean web of interconnecting, inscrutable happenings, wheels within wheels, that move without apparent causality or purpose. The members of Farah's generation, many of whom would naturally be the strongest leaders of their society, eventually fill the role of beaten children so eloquently described by the author: they are beaten by the evacuation of meaning from their most idealistic actions. The reader ultimately shares the debilitating confusion and malaise of the characters who begin with determination, and who end as demoralized isolates cut off from whatever trans-tribal hopes might enlist their energies in a national Movement. If one is not a member of the General's tribe, there is little possibility of ‘networking’ in an effective way to change society. On the other hand, if one is a member of the General's tribe the suasive charms of wallowing in one's potential dominance of others, of playing along with one's own family preeminence, are practically irresistible.

5. VALORIZING THE WORD

Coupled to this tradition of tribal loyalty is Farah's ambivalence toward his country's oral traditions, which record the highest aspirations of its people but which also serve as the most effective agent for social control. Somalia has a long and vibrant history of oral literature, and its poetry fills the pages of the trilogy. Deeriye, especially, quotes from Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, a legendary warrior poet, and Sultan Wiil Waal, ruler of Jigjigga. This tendency to ‘live’ the poetry of an earlier age, however, and to find sustenance and a meaningful thread of continuity in memorized verses seems, much like the tenets of Islam, to belong to Deeriye's passing generation and not so obviously to that of the members of the Movement. The Somali language had no accepted script and was, therefore, only oral until the early 1970s. In an interesting parallel to the observation that the fascists at least kept the trains running on time, the imposition of a script came very shortly after the imposition of Siyad Barre's regime. Thus, from a novelist's point of view, the movement from a fluid, personal, performance-based culture that may be suggested by orature, to a regimented, standardized, and anonymous culture that may be suggested by written ‘literature’ almost inevitably suggests a devolution rather than the liberating modernization that most westerners would immediately champion.

It is good to recall that the Koran was transmitted to the illiterate Mohammed without the aid of the written word. Nonetheless, a romanticized version of oral culture raised to its highest literary form, （and regardless of its obvious value in the lives of characters like Deeriye）, overlooks the negative aspects of word-of-mouth communication in a tribal and/or tyrannical culture. Farah expends a great deal of energy in demonstrating the consequences of the horrible power of the spoken word to distort, obfuscate, disempower.

In his excellent analysis of this aspect of the trilogy, Derek Wright notes that

reality in the oral society is unwritten, unwritable and, ultimately, unknowable … The indeterminacy of oral modes of interpretation make it difficult to distinguish between the true and the imaginary, between what does and does not exist. … The political-criminal plot launched against Soyaan [in Sweet and Sour Milk] by an oral-based dictatorship and hunted down by Loyaan is, in the last analysis, unwritable and never materializes. Accordingly, the narrative plot eventually runs out unresolvedly in loose ends or, rather, unstitches itself deconstructively in the penultimate chapter and unravels in a welter of conflicting oral testimony.

（Wright, 1989, pp. 188, 190）

‘What I like to do, in telling a story’, Farah writes,

is to study the numerous facets of a tale and to allow very many different competing views to be heard … coexisting with the contradictions. … I don't imagine that there is any single voice, so this is why my novels are multi-voiced.

（Pajalich, 1993, pp. 63–64）

But, like life itself, his books written in this polyphony generally enact the confusion that their characters endure at the hands of a regime that manipulates the truth by misspeaking, lying, telling half-truths, using a variety of speakers to broadcast conflicting interpretations of events that did or did not happen. And, as Barbara Turfan points out, ‘the feeling of an omnipresent uncertainty and tension is deftly evoked also in conversations, conversations which leave out more than they include but form, with the speaker's unspoken thoughts, a continuous stream to which the reader, but not the other participants, has access’ （Turfan, 1989, p. 174）. The result among the people is frustration, suspicion of each other, and paralysis. The misuse of speech, and the consequences of this manipulation, begin early: in Close Sesame a little boy is sent with a message that has a dubious source. Can it be believed? ‘The little boy's voice grew faint the moment he realized all these eyes were focused on him: for eyes which could hear frightened him; eyes which could register the movement of lips; eyes which could betray; sell information they deciphered. A young boy of eight carrying an important message: a history to be relived through … politics again’ （Farah, 1992A, p. 105）.

By manipulating the powerful forces of social control inherent in an oral culture the General's regime undermines another of the strengths of the people. But this is not as it could be. As M. M. G. Mugo, Kavetsa Adagala and others have shown, true orature traditionally works as a reminder of the demands for human rights—demands that would challenge any totalitarian system. Adagala notes that there are two types of orature in Africa, each reflecting the era and political system from which it arises: the first is feudal-oriented, in which there exists not only division of labour, but also division of society into classes （Adagala, 1985, p. xiii）. In these narratives the focus is on the struggle between these social classes. The second form of orature is communal-oriented, and in these ‘the social relationships depicted show the communal nature of society: people work together to overcome the difficulties in life and to fulfil their material needs’ （Ibid, p. xii）. In this latter form, the group, the family and the community feature prominently. Mugo points out that in these stories the narrator

would view reality as constituting layers upon layers of interrelated co-existence. There is the individual, the corporate personality and the collective group. There is the family unit, the extended family, the clan and the community. There is the inner ‘world’ of the personality—the sound, the heart, the intellect, the imagination, etc. There is also the outer ‘world’ of being—the physical human appearance. Then there is the outside world—the environment, the natural world and the physical features that define it. The utmost circle of the outer world defines the world ‘up there’—the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky and the rest of the elements.

（Mugo, 1991, pp. 12–13）

Considering the remarkable lack of harmony in the lives of most of Farah's characters, and their ultimate isolation from one another, it is significant to note that, in Mugo's view of traditional communal-oriented orature, ‘all the layers of the “human onion structure” must harmonize or the world will step out of measured rhythm and cause chaos. An individual can only fully be if he or she is a part of the collective group’ （Ibid, p. 13）.

Such traditions are easily corrupted by a regime interested only in preservation of its own tribe in opposition to all others in the nation, since, in the world of orature, one becomes one's brother's keeper. The emphasis on collectivity and interdependence can be transformed into spying. But, at its best, orature is, in Mugo's words, ‘antithetical to individualism, egocentricity, isolationism, alienation, cutthroat competition and so on’ （Ibid, p. 14）. The artist assumes a special interactive role in society, giving voice to community concerns and also reminding the community of their dreams and responsibilities. Again, Mugo:

Over and above the responsibility of exposing, satirizing and denouncing antisocial behaviour and the abuse of human rights, he or she was also expected to inspire those struggling against injustice to change the oppressive conditions facing them. He or she was expected to point out alternatives and options that would help the oppressed to eradicate an oppressive system and create a more humane world in which they could reach a full realization of themselves as whole, dignified human beings.

（Ibid, p. 22）

If the tales were sometimes sexist, pro-patriarchal, and warlike （Mugo, 1991, p. 38）, they were also used to castigate society and bring it to its senses. It is against this cultural background that Farah valorizes such characters as Khaliif in Close Sesame.

Lest there be any misunderstanding of Farah's true target—all misuse of the word whether spoken or written—the novels demonstrate that in a totalitarian state print can be similarly manipulated—rendered, in fact, a more enduring form of ‘gossip’ that constructs a totalitarian hermeneutic. In Sweet and Sour Milk, even though Soyaan has been a member of the Movement that opposed the regime, and even though it appears that he has been killed by the General's agents （or by the Soviets who support the General at this time）, following his death he is declared a national hero—an artifact like the type moved about the page by a printer telling the ‘history’ of his country:

‘Soyaan is from this day onwards state property and will be treated as such. They've come for and have taken his file. I worked on the file last night. Soyaan: a property of the state.’

‘Property of the state?’

‘Yes. He is the property of the General.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They are rewriting your family's history, Soyaan's and the whole lot. Like the Russians rewrote Lenin's, Stalin's or that of any of the heroes their system created to survive subversion from within or without. They will need your cooperation, I am sure.’

‘That they won't get.’

‘I wouldn't be so certain.’

（Farah, 1992C, pp. 106–107）

Consequently, if the written word can be as deceitful as the spoken, Farah must find new avenues for ‘truth’ to break through in his pressurized society. This he finds in the ongoing tradition of the revealed words of the religious prophet—seen to be living, effective, and motivating in the lives of Deeriye and several of the other characters—and in the ‘crazed’ words of a political ‘prophet’, who is similarly motivated by religion.

Running throughout Close Sesame, and acting much like the crazed and blinded confidantes in King Lear, is Khaliif, a former highly-placed civil servant who one night simply becomes a madman. Such a member of the totalitarian regime can say the forbidden because he is not taken seriously by the powerful. He is nonetheless recognized by Deeriye and principal characters in the novel as a reliable source of truth—even if that truth remains the inscrutable aphorisms of a Delphic oracle:

Now, sitting in the sun's brightness, Deeriye started: he could hear Khaliif's magical voice, complemented by some welcoming remarks, like a chorus, from a small crowd that had already gathered to listen. Deeriye craned forward. Khaliif did not suggest a broken man on the fringes of society; nor an alienated man whose mind buzzed with mysterious messages so far undeciphered; nor a man invalidated by or overburdened with guilt. No; his demeanour forestalled everyone's fear, prediction or worry: he sold to everybody the very thing no one was prepared to buy, and bought from everybody the very thing no one was ready to sell. His discourse was clear, grammatical and logical:

‘There are wicked houses in which live wicked men and wicked women. Truth must be owned up. We are God's children; the wicked of whom I speak are Satan's offspring. And night plots conspiracies daylight never reveals.’ And he held his hands together in a namastee, clowned a bit, entertained the younger members of the audience by doing a somersault, a karate ghost-dance, and then returned to his peaceful corner and fell quiet. Applause. He curtsied; grinning, grateful and graceful.

（Farah, 1992A, pp. 16–17）

Khaliif's untrumpeted appearance is always remarkable, providing a focal point for the creation of a possible Somali society that remains free to hear the truth about itself from a sincere Islamic point of view. Surrounded by children as well as by thoughtful adults, Khaliif's undisputed personal marginalization allows his message to cut through the devious plots by a government intent on dissipating the disturbing idealism of the younger generation. It is the content rather than the form that is of importance, as Fiona Sparrow suggests: ‘His authority as prophet cannot be attributed to a return to oral traditions after fruitless years spent relying on written forms’ （Sparrow, 1989, p. 170）. The power comes from a word that is neither written nor spoken—but revealed.

Khaliif remains on the margin, however. Farah does not hold out easy optimism; he constantly counters hope with a heavy dose of realism. He begins the concluding section of Sardines with this ominous quotation from Franz Kafka: ‘The crow maintains that a single crow could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows’ （Farah, 1992B, p. 202）. Perhaps in a totalitarian regime, one that is in transition from a far simpler age to one of multicultural confusion and challenge, the most that an artist can offer is inscrutability, a holding in abeyance of finality. Ever-suspended in the air, perhaps one's characters and oneself must simply try to negotiate a personal integrity that respects the traditions in which one was raised. In that context, Farah concludes his trilogy with questions, simple questions of a mother with simple hopes in the face of a violent world:

Would his body be given to her for burial? she wondered to herself, as she cringed, for she now heard Natasha and Samawade crying to each other in another room. Would Mursal's corpse be handed over too so she could have them buried side by side in the same tomb—so they could continue uninterrupted the dialogue they had begun? At least, she thought, looking up and seeing Natasha and Samawade in the doorway, sobbing in chorus, at least neither died an anonymous death—and that was heroic.

（Farah, 1992A, p. 237）

6. CONCLUSION

Thus, in his trilogy, Farah shows the crippling effect of totalitarianism and the devastating impact of secularization on his own cosmopolitan ‘second’ generation of citizens of the new state. His characters, even when they somehow gain access to the reins of power, have little sense of common purpose and, therefore, little occasion to display a commitment to any ultimate reality or meaning. It is little wonder that a mother would find solace in the fantasy that her child's death, at least, was not anonymous: increasingly, the child's life had been emptied of defining characteristics. What Farah's fictionalized older generation might lament as the passing of tribal affiliations that had provided, however narrowly, a sense of identity and purpose, the author's own generation might simply recognize as, on the one hand, the gratefully-welcomed but long-delayed collapse of the tribal structure and, on the other hand, its replacement by a sense of drift away from traditional moorings: the meaningless freedom to enter into the larger modern world of massive international business conglomerates, intolerance of the powerless, and avoidance of eccentric self-definition.

6.1 GIVING THE ORPHAN A NAME

In the works that followed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, at any rate, Farah focuses his attention less obsessively on ‘the General’ and the imposition of this man's tribal defensiveness on the entire nation, and instead makes a foundling child the center of his attention. The child becomes symbolic at once of the new nation in search of a parent who will be neither a colonizing foster father nor a neocolonial patriarch, and symbolic as well of Farah's own generation of deracinated Somalis. Maps （1986） and Gifts （1993） move in these new directions, and they seem to have brought to a close, at least for awhile, Farah's work in the novel form. He is reportedly at work now on a journalistic account of Somalis living abroad, having apparently concluded that the Somali that he has been describing all these years while in exile himself has been increasingly a world of his imagination—increasingly the projection of his inner world of turmoil over the implications of the life forced upon his generation of writers from postcolonial countries （Pajalich, 1993, p. 71）.

Maps is Farah's most complex novel, in which an orphan named Askar from the disputed Ogaden region ultimately betrays his adopted mother, Misra, who is Ethiopian. It is, therefore, literally a novel dealing with ‘border’ identities, where one's nationality changes from one war to the next. The novel demonstrates this increasing mongrelization of national identity; as Askar notes, speaking to himself,

You doubt, at times, if you exist outside your own thoughts, outside your own head, Misra's or your own. It appears as though you were a creature given birth to by notions formulated in heads, a creature brought into being by ideas. … you wonder if your existence is readily differentiable from creatures of fiction whom habit has taught one to talk of as if they were one's closest friends.

（Farah, 1986, p. 3）

As Derek Wright observes,

In the book's parabolic scheme Askar, representing the Ogaden, is born to two patriotic martyrs who give their lives for the cause of its liberation from Ethiopian liberation: his father dies on the day of his birth and his mother soon afterwards. He is thus the posthumous mythic offspring of Somali nationalist aspiration and the motherland of the Republic.

（Wright, 1994, p. 110）

But this identity must shift as the world ‘re-maps’ him. The question that seems to haunt the novel is one which exiled writers like Farah must frequently ponder: whose geometry plots one's identity? Whose values outline one's perimeter?

In its multiple layers of complexity the book ridicules the patriarchy that is everywhere attacked by Farah's novels. There is, in Wright's view,

a habitual erosion of the public into the personal, and of topographical into physiological space, which allows Askar to view the political destiny and military fortunes of the nation, analogically, through his adoptive mother's biological rhythms.

（Ibid, p. 108）

How this is achieved is ingenious, resulting in ‘the first African novel of the body’ （Ibid, p. 118）. But it is important to note that the body in question is Misra's. Typical of Farah, the woman is portrayed as victimized by the males—and betrayed by her adopted son for his own misguided ethnic dreams. In fact, Askar assumes the reigns of heuristic control, becoming a mapmaker. In this role he asserts an oppressive ethnicity and suppresses his own hybridized identity in favor of an imposed national uniformity. No longer truly identifiable with his natural parents and their traditions, Askar escapes the discomfort of a complex existential situation by embracing a new hegemony. Like several of the plotters in Farah's earlier trilogy, this member of the younger generation sacrifices his integrity along with his ambiguity.

The novel opens with a telling quotation from Socrates: ‘Living begins when you start doubting everything that came before you’, followed immediately by one from Charles Dickens: ‘No children for me. Give me grown-ups’. One suspects that the latter is tongue-in-cheek; the former, completely sincere. In Dickens, after all, adults prey on children, and in Farah one sees a similar pattern: his adults seem frequently enough to be those who cannot stand the unsettling demands of Socrates' injunction. The challenge is presented to Askar late in the book by his uncle: ‘He said, “Tell me, Askar. Do you find truth in the maps you draw? … Do you carve out of your soul the invented truth of the maps you draw? Or does the daily truth match, for you, the reality you draw and the maps others draw? … The question is, does truth change?”’ （Farah, 1986, pp. 216–217）. To illustrate the implications of his rhetorical question the uncle points to a map of Somalia and concludes, ‘“There is truth in maps. The Ogaden, as Somali, is truth. To the Ethiopian map-maker, the Ogaden, as Somali, is untruth”’ （Ibid, p. 218）. As Derek Wright concludes from this passage, ‘the stable identity presupposed by the idealistic vision of the map-maker [is] non-existent’ （Wright, 1994, p. 120）. But few are able to live with the openness demanded by a resistance to such ‘maps’.

Gifts is a cautionary tale that appears to be a meditation on the demands placed by First World countries when they offer ‘gifts’ of financial aid to Third World countries—but ends as an indictment of those who implicitly reject the gifts of Allah by acting on their fears and their petty bickering rather than on their ideals. At the center of the story is another apparent orphan, around whom all the characters project a meaning. Who is he, and from where does he come? Should he be welcomed or shunned? And to whom is he ‘offered’ as gift; who has the right to claim him? Almost as if the bickering of the adults convinces Allah to take back the gift he had offered, the foundling child dies halfway through the novel. In this first of his books to be published in Africa for an African audience, this ‘truncation’ of the plot stylistically has the same effect on his readers as it does on the characters themselves: as in Dickens's Dombey and Son, with the death of young Paul, we are offered a figure who appears to be the center of meaning in the novel, and then, after we begin to invest our imaginations in a projection of what that meaning might, in fact, be, the center does not hold. Things fall apart. We are left without a central focus, and our sense that we understand is suddenly confused.

The sense of closure that Western rationality so desires is, in fact, represented as premature, falsely static in the human context. Duniya, the child's temporary guardian, knows this at story's end—which, emphatically, does not end. ‘As the others engaged in polite talk’, Farah writes,

Duniya thought to herself that little is revealed to oneself directly. Revelations are received from out of a mist of doubts, in caves, in the dark, out of a child's mouth, or via the wise utterances of an elderly or mad person. She decided that her own epiphanic instant had occurred at a moment, on a morning, when a story chose to tell itself to her, through her, a story whose clarity was contained in the creative utterance, Let there be a man, and there was a story.

（Farah, 1993, pp. 240–241）

The notion that truth—the truth of one's identity, the truths of history—cannot remain fixed, this is an idea that runs through Farah's novels as the converse of the notion that the fascistic imposition of one tribe over another is unnatural, untrue. Deeriye, in Close Sesame, had pondered the role of the individual in what one might call the narrative of history. ‘Time was the travel’, he imagines,

the journey each undertook so that another arrived, because each would eventually reach his or her destination having become another. … Time was also the abyss with the open door. … Time was history: and history was a shy little thing hiding in the folds of its robe a giant: i.e. a little boy … burdened with a message heavier than his years. …

（Farah, 1992A, pp. 94–95）

6.2 HYBRIDIZED REALITY RATHER THAN ULTIMATE REALITY

But if that message is to be anything more than a profane political plan to supplant one unjust ruler with another, if it is to transform its hearers by revealing a sacred truth that somehow steps outside time, there seems little appreciation of such a possibility in the world of Farah's generation. On the other hand, Farah seems to offer Deeriye as an alternative to the General. This character maintains his patriarchal role without becoming a dictator in his household. As Maggi Philips notes,

though one part of his life is devoted to Allah, he is also a benign and monogamous patriarch who, after his dear wife's death and toward the end of his own days, is still genuinely interested and concerned in family and social matters. Moreover, Deeriye's family brings different points of view together into a unit that advocates equality between generations, sexes and different ethnic roots: there is the religious Deeriye, the legal Mursal, the scientific Zeinab, the celestial Nadiifa, the Jewish daughter-in-law Natasha, and Samawade, the young and innocent translator. On a metaphorical level, Deeriye's storytelling places the family cluster within the traditional continuum that carries oral wisdom through generations, while Nadiifa's spiritual leadership provides a channel for sacred wisdom to illuminate the family's secular state.

（Philips, 1996, p. 5）

Deeriye has enough trust in Allah that he can allow his family to enter the abyss, knowing that time is but one more creation. Those who cannot share this sacred covenant have less peaceful lives. Many readers will conclude that Nuruddin Farah, and many other exiled intellectuals like him, write because they are still seeking an ultimate meaning to explain this bricolage that is their hybridized reality.

References

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——— 1993. Gifts. London: Serif.

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——— 1994. The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies.