Читать книгу The Disorder of Things - John Masterson - Страница 19

In Daybreak is Near, Ahmed focuses on the ‘complexity of metaphorical language’. He cites Adonis who suggests, ‘metaphor does not allow a final and definitive answer, because it is in itself a battleground of semantic contradictions. It remains a begetter of questions, an agent of disruption, in contrast to the type of knowledge which aspires to certainty’ (Ahmed 1996: 5). If this notion of disruption is akin to Kwame Appiah’s statement on the academic function in In My Father’s House, it also corresponds with the figurative fecundity of shifting body politics throughout Sweet and Sour Milk (Appiah 1992: 290). With Soyaan dead, the remaining family members argue over the post-mortem. This not only allows the reader to explore the supposed schisms between traditional and modern medical practices (Qumman refuses to have her son’s body carved up in accordance with her belief in the Koran’s ‘uncomplicated’ edicts), but also establishes the prevailing aura of confinement. In a revealing early aside, Loyaan establishes the dialectic between Soyaan’s corpse and the polymorphous nature of narrative by demanding his deceased brother yield up his secrets: ‘would a post-mortem examination have told us something you wouldn’t want us told? ... What if we had you cut up and restitched ... would that reveal an untoward secret?’ (S&SM: 20). If Ahmed’s invocation of Adonis is reconfigured in corporeal terms, it becomes clear how some of the most prescient aspects of Farah’s critique are refracted through this bodily prism.

For commentators such as I.M. Lewis and Alice Hashim, corporeal motifs are irresistible when it comes to describing the Somali (dis)order of things. In A Modern History of the Somali, for instance, Lewis states that ‘Somalis sometimes speak about their diminished nationalism ... in a way that recalls patients whose limbs have been amputated but still “feel” intact. Theirs is a phantom-limb view of their dismembered body politic’ (Lewis 2002: ix). Similarly, for Hashim in The Fallen State – Dissonance, Dictatorship and Death in Somalia, ‘[predatory] rule in Somalia was the last resort of a failed state ... [it] represented a terminally ill condition for the State was in the throes of a struggle for survival’ (Hashim 1997: 4). In Sweet and Sour Milk, Soyaan also frames his critique of the General’s gulag-esque state in fleshy terms: ‘if we cannot totally remove the hernia of inefficiency ... we might as well try to make the pimples of the body-politic bleed’ (S&SM: 81). This reliance on body imagery sees Farah tread a tightrope between his own and/or his protagonists’ imagistic indulgence (Amin and Gaddafi are represented with entrails garlanding their necks, S&SM: 90), whilst allowing him to suggest how it offers the regenerative promise of escape from the labyrinth. Wright’s attention to the counter-hegemonic significance of these fleshy metaphors is critical:

Recurring images of wombs, fertilizing sperm, foetuses and eggs are not merely symbolic of the aborted hopes of the 1969 Revolution or of the faith in the future which is pinned to the creative energies of Somalia’s women. They also appear to represent the private bodily and sexual realities over which the state has no claim of ownership, that tender pragmatism of the flesh which becomes the only touchstone, the only tangible thing individuals have to hold onto in the enveloping malaise. (Wright 1994: 65)

As with all of Farah’s touchstones, however, the desiring and disciplined body is locked in a fraught relationship with power. Soyaan’s fatal poisoning may be the catalyst in a corporeal continuum that unfurls across this first trilogy and throughout Farah’s oeuvre. Yet, as with Loyaan’s investigative search, it is the very nature of this unravelling process that is significant. If Marco and baby Soyaan (son of Keynaan’s young second wife Beydan) embody the regenerative hope of delivering Somalia anew, as do Ubax in Sardines, Samawade in Close Sesame and, perhaps more problematically, Askar in Maps, Farah is eager to juxtapose them with figures, often grandparents, who represent the sacrifices of and for history. As Adam maintains, ‘new generations will bury the old, the Soyaans the Keynaans ... The establishment of a new order will not give any one person the responsibility for final solutions, and indeed will preclude such absoluteness in favour of the endless provisionality of group agreement’ (Adam 2002: 343). A key figure in this respect is Qumman. A focus on her besieged body allows Farah to present his centrifugal critique of power, something that intensifies across successive novels. It is also signalled, in two very different but mutually enabling contexts, by Chowers and Hashim. For Chowers, ‘if discourse is the centripetal mode of our language, literature is the centrifugal one’ (Chowers 2004: 159). For Hashim, ‘the centrifugal aspect of Somaliness prevailed over the centripetal’ (Hashim 1997: 4). I build on these interventions to show how relationships between bodies, designs and the shaping of world views in Farah’s fiction are influenced by these centrifugal forces.

Mother to the twins and their younger sister Ladan, Qumann allows Farah to reflect on the embodied and enduring suffering of women. In so doing, he introduces the reader to evermore chilling features of the Grand Patriarch’s hegemony: ‘it was as if different parts of her had been dismantled at puberty and reassembled, in a rush, at old age. Also, today, she had bruises. Her forehead had bled and dried. There was a scar a night old on her head as well’ (S&SM: 23). The source of this beating, meted out the night of Soyaan’s death, is Keynaan. As becomes clear, it is one episode in a disturbingly long line:

Whenever some superior officer humiliated him, he came and was aggressive to the twins and his wife. He would flog them, he would beat them – big, and powerful that he was, the Grand Patriarch whose authority drenched his powerless victims with the blood of his lashes. She would wait until the twins grew up, she confided to a neighbour. She would wait ... Society, on top of it, required women to be tolerant, to be receptive, to be receiving – and forgiving ... Keynaan and his generation have never known women ... Soyaan would argue. (S&SM: 84)

With a loaded reference to being ‘on top of it’, Farah renders the patriarchal society Keynaan represents to be as sexually aggressive as it is overbearing. As Ahmed maintains, Farah’s preoccupations with the sovereignty of the female body and the punitive relationship between authoritarian power and patriarchy have endured since From a Crooked Rib (Ahmed 1996: 78).

Whilst the embodied focus is unequivocal here, commentators have been less eager to explore the attendant ambivalences that distinguish portraits of figures such as Qumman. In turn, the nuances of Farah’s critique of individual and collective responsibility, and its correspondence to his overarching concern with power, have not been afforded the attention they deserve. It is ironic that Qumman should alert Loyaan to the shadowy figure of Ahmed-Wellie and his tribal affiliations with the General (‘Cousins only twice removed, that man’s father and the General’, S&SM: 79), as it is Ahmed-Wellie in turn who dismisses her world view:

‘Qumman is simply a woman who feels threatened by Beydan and Margaritta; Beydan ... being the wife Keynaan prefers and also because Soyaan supposedly ate poisoned food at her place; Margaritta because she represents the type of woman Qumman’s generation detests’ ... Qumman detested young, educated, ‘liberated women, the Margarittas, the Medinas.’ Well, that simplified things, thought he. (S&SM: 164)

Loyaan’s final comment is deliberately deceptive. What at first appears an oasis of order in the midst of textual chaos is in fact the primary target of Farah’s critique. Once again, complications abound at the narrative and national levels because little is simple. The order of things can only be challenged once this reductive view has been dismissed. Elsewhere, it is revealed how Qumman despises Beydan for being a woman of ‘inferior tribal breeding’ (S&SM: 56) when she comes to pay her respects following Soyaan’s death.

Complications define relationships in generational and clan terms alike. The essential point is that ways of being and seeing govern the world at both individual and societal levels. Turfan’s critique of the Group as unconcerned with the plight of their fellow countrymen becomes more problematic when taking into account their impassioned discussions of competing ideologies within various domestic settings. From Farah’s perspective, the Machiavellian General derives power simply by replicating the disciplinary designs found within the homes of figures such as Qumman. Once again, therefore, Foucault’s comments in ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ have a certain resonance:

I heard someone talking about power the other day ... He observed that the famous ‘absolute’ monarchy in reality had nothing absolute about it. In fact it consisted of a number of islands of dispersed power, some of them functioning as geographical spaces, others as pyramids, others as bodies, or through the influence of familial systems, kinship networks and so forth. (Foucault 1980a: 207)

Transposing this in relation to Farah’s work, we might substitute ‘absolute monarchy’ for ‘absolute dictatorship’. Divide-and-rule tactics at the macrological level are seen as distorting the logic behind social organisation in a clan-based society where power is conceived in all its pyramidal complexity. This preoccupation with world views and/as disciplinary designs is similarly explored through the figure of Keynaan.

Described as if he were a Foucauldian delinquent, Keynaan is perhaps the most morally reprehensible figure in Variations: ‘a former police inspector, a man forced to retire because of scandalous inconveniences he had created for the regime ... An informer, a daily gatherer of spoken indiscretions, an ‘earservant’ of the National Security Service since he was semi-literate’ (S&SM: 9). Commentators have written extensively on the oppressive dialectics of family and state in Farah’s work. It is, however, a critique that benefits from the kind of Foucauldian supplement offered by Dubravka Juraga: ‘[Farah’s] view of the function of the family as a tool of official oppression closely parallels Foucault’s description of the bourgeois family of Victorian England as a focal point for power relations in a society’ (Juraga 2002: 294). Before Soyaan dabbled in subversive memorandums, it was the abuse suffered by his mother that ignited his Oedipal/political conviction to usurp his father and all he could be seen to represent. Whilst body politics provide the unequivocal, if besieged, base of Farah’s novels, they are also a gateway into considering the broader interplay of ideas that preoccupy him. As Alden and Tremaine suggest, ‘to enter into [the Group of 10’s] world as a reader ... is to enter into a discourse of ideas imagined as flesh and blood, a lived debate, one that goes on both among and within characters’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 45). This conceptual contest is exemplified in an exchange between Keynaan and Loyaan.

Like Idil in Sardines, Keynaan offers a scathing critique of the intelligentsia’s incompetence: ‘no young man of your age that I know has ever appeared as ‘dangerous priority’ on the list drawn up by the Security ... You have no common ideology for which you fight. You have no organised protest ... you are no threat ... The General fears tribal chieftains or men of his age. Not you, nor Soyaan, nor anyone of your Generation’ (S&SM: 91). It is revealing that this episode emerges immediately before the end of Part One, with Part Two being introduced by the pivotal Wilhelm Reich epigraph: ‘in the figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument of power’ (S&SM: 95). Keynaan’s indictment strikes a dispiriting blow to the Group’s insurgent aspirations. Whilst lacking the wisdom of Deeriye in Close Sesame or the compassion of Nonno in Secrets, Keynaan does display an awareness of ‘power as a system’, in turn showing how he and the General play their patriarchal parts in it. As such, his accusation that the Group effectively represents an ideological void against the General’s manipulation of existing social structures and affiliations is pertinent. The spectre of total despair, however, is in turn challenged by this portrait of counter-hegemonic fallibility, with Farah keeping his focus firmly on the incremental processes of resistance.

Farah places this confrontation at the close of Part One. If this suggests his critical convictions, it also indicates the centrality of designs within the trilogy as a whole. Having argued about Keynaan’s role in Soyaan’s death and the subsequent reappropriation of his legacy, Loyaan identifies a familiarly savage glint in his father’s eye. It reminds Loyaan of an incident in the twins’ childhood, when Keynaan slashed the ball the boys were playing with. This memory, which is presented early and recurs throughout the text, recalls Soyaan’s promise that ‘I will kill him. When I am old enough to use a knife. I will’ (S&SM: 94), before returning to the narrative present in which Keynaan announces to brotherless Loyaan, ‘I am the father. It is my prerogative to give life and death as I find fit. I’ve chosen to breathe life into Soyaan. And remember one thing, Loyaan: if I decide to cut you in two, I can. The law of this land invests in men of my age the power. I am the Grand Patriarch’ (S&SM: 94). With this flourish, Keynaan departs, leaving the reader in little doubt as to the despotic comparisons between domestic and national patriarchs. As Adam maintains, ‘[Keynaan’s] attitude to women (always a touchstone for enlightenment in Farah) parallels that of the General to his subjects: it is tyrannous, dismissive of their capacities and proprietorial of their role’ (Adam 2002: 340). Elsewhere, Fanon has drawn attention to this patriarchy/power dynamic. In The Invention of Somalia, Ahmed, amongst others, considers how Fanonian thought might be transposed within a Somali context (Ahmed 1995: 149). In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon declares that ‘there are close connections between the structure of the family and the structure of the nation. Militarization and the centralization of authority in a country automatically entail a resurgence of the authority of the father’ (Fanon 1967: 141–142). To maintain a Foucauldian perspective, it is necessary to note a key divergence, as discussed in The History of Sexuality: ‘the father in the family is not the “representative” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family’ (Foucault 1990: 100). If Farah’s position exists somewhere between these two statements, his most compelling critique comes from what appear to be the textual margins.

When Keynaan bursts his sons’ ball, it heralds ‘the age of challenge. The age of growth’ (S&SM: 94). It is a statement applicable to both protagonists within this text and the Group’s general socio-political development. The dialectical progress of history rests on struggle and it is this process that fascinates author and reader throughout Variations. Accordingly, Patricia Alden’s Sardines note can be applied to the trilogy as a whole: ‘with Medina the positive and negative perspectives are located within history: the unresolved questions involve evaluating the efficacy of her actions in history, and this efficacy cannot be established’ (Alden 2002: 379). The destructive intent with which Keynaan wields the knife recalls the painful infibulation undergone by Somali women. The connections between patriarchal power at both micro and macro levels of governance are pronounced. Indeed, the novel implies that it is Keynaan’s dismissal of body politics as a touchstone for the Group that might eventually constitute his undoing and that of the system itself. When he accuses Loyaan’s young generation of having no coherent ideology, he omits mention of the embodied political concepts upon which their loftier insurgent aspirations are based: the right of corporeal sovereignty and respect for individual liberties. As Juraga suggests, this familial conflict allows Loyaan to gain a clearer insight into power as system. Foucauldian parallels remain striking:

Farah suggests that the authoritarian structure of the Somali family makes Somali society inherently susceptible to political oppression. In that he parallels Foucault, who points out that in bourgeois Europe the family organization is used to support other ‘maneuvers’ of the larger alliances of power in the society. In a sense, the family acts as a ‘back-up’ to other strategies of power by enacting the power hierarchy already existing in the society. (Juraga 2002: 289)

Keynaan destroys the ball the twins used to imagine their universe in an apocalyptic precursor to Askar’s vision of a globe without boundaries in Maps. Whilst this symbol is self-explanatory, it captures the central relationship between micrological and macrological designs of and on power. Ideologies are oftentimes conceived in geometric terms in Variations, and it is Loyaan’s recollection of the words his brother used to articulate the divergent world views of father and twins that will come to haunt the trilogy. They also express the fundamental imperatives of Farah’s critique of power: ‘not so much generational as they are qualitative – the differences between us twins and our father. My father grew up with the idea that the universe is flat; we, that it is round ... We believe that his are exclusive, that they are flat (and therefore uninteresting) as the universe his insularities tie him to’ (S&SM: 83). Such degrees of difference or ‘potential’, to borrow from Foucault once more, remain critical. Effectively, Keynaan’s conceptual failure lies in his refusal to acknowledge the presence of alternative geometries. He thus replicates the General’s propagandistic power. Loyaan internalises his brother’s sentiments. His description of appeals to a lofty figure eradicating complications and answering all questions offers a portrait of despotic deity crossed with omniscient detective and omnipotent prison warder aloft his watchtower:

‘My father sees himself as a miniature creature in a flat world dominated by a God-figure high and huge as any mountain anyone has ever seen ... When you confront him with a question of universal character, his answer is tailor-made, he will say: ‘Only Allah knows, only Allah.’ A miniature creature dependent upon his creator to answer his questions. Suddenly, however, he behaves as if he were the most powerful of men, the biggest. Suddenly, he is, as Soyaan called him, the Grand Patriarch.’(S&SM: 83)

The image of detached, surveying power conjures up spectres of Foucault. As such, it informs the remainder of this analysis.