Читать книгу The Disorder of Things - John Masterson - Страница 8

Born on 24 November 1945 in Baidoa, a southern Somali city then under Italian control, Nuruddin Farah’s story was entangled with the contested national narrative from a young age. In 1947, his family moved to Kallafo in the Ogaden region, soon to be ceded to Ethiopia by the British. As I discuss below, Farah’s most critically and commercially acclaimed novel, Maps (1986), is set against the backdrop of the Ogaden War (1977–1978) between Somalia and Ethiopia. Following an earlier conflict in the region after Independence in 1960, Farah’s family was compelled to move to the capital, Mogadiscio¹. To a significant degree, therefore, the constant dislocations and relocations that defined this formative period have had a profound impact on his literary vision. As I argue throughout this book, Farah’s obsession with disputed borders, whether cartographic or conceptual, derives from intimately personal and intensely political contexts. Similarly, whilst adept in various genres and languages, it is arguably the complex notion of being ‘at home’ that casts the longest shadow over Farah’s own story and, by extension, his fictional and non-fictional work. After receiving his BA in Literature and Philosophy from Punjab University, India in 1969, Farah returned to his native Somalia following the military coup that brought Siyad Barre to power. It was during his time teaching at the National University of Somalia, as well as in some of Mogadiscio’s secondary schools, that Farah published his first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970). Focusing on the trials and tribulations of a stoic female protagonist Ebla, who moves from rural village to the metropolis, the text establishes some of the enduring political and ethical concerns that have preoccupied Farah throughout his career of more than forty years. If this initiated his attempt to speak the truth to power, in the Saidian sense, his literary activities in the mid – to late seventies would see him fall foul of Barre’s regime and its censors.

Following the suspension of his Somali-language novel Tallow Waa Telee Ma, which was serialised in a national newspaper in 1973, Farah was awarded a UNESCO grant to pursue his postgraduate studies. He left for England the following year, establishing a temporary intellectual home at Essex. His departure from Somalia would prove pivotal in more ways than one. In 1976, Farah published his second English language novel, A Naked Needle. A satirical, if sobering portrait of an increasingly authoritarian society, the book inevitably met with the disapproval of Barre’s regime. Following a fortuitous phone call home to his brother, who warned him of the controversy stirred by A Naked Needle, Farah avoided a return to incarceration or worse. That this conversation took place whilst he was in Rome, en route to Somalia, is significant. Farah would effectively remain in transit for much of his life, not returning to Somalia until 1996. Whilst Farah has frequently reflected on the personal toll exacted by such a separation, he has also suggested that this distance allows him to be more productive as well as refining his writerly and political vision. In ‘A Country in Exile’, for instance, he maintains that ‘[a]lthough one often links a person in exile to a faraway locality, the fact is I felt more joined to my writing than to any country with a specific territoriality’ (Farah 1992: 5). It is therefore notable that, whilst his novels regularly feature protagonists whose routes take in former colonial centres, whether British or Italian, or neo-colonial hubs such as the United States or Canada, his fictions remain rooted, however precariously, in Somalia’s contested soil. Farah’s oft-cited comment to this effect (‘I have tried to keep my country alive by writing about it’) is once more resonant in both intimately personal and intensely political terms, particularly when considered in relation to Somalia’s turbulent postcolonial narrative. A fascination with the ways in which this personal/political dialectic is negotiated throughout Farah’s writing informs much of what follows.

The eighties saw Farah living and working in locations as diverse as Los Angeles and Khartoum, Bayreuth and Kampala. It was also a time of great literary productivity. Following an appointment as Visiting Reader at the University of Jos, Nigeria, Farah continued his itinerant journey across Africa, moving to Gambia in 1984 and then to Sudan following the publication of Maps. In the early nineties, during a spell teaching at Makerere University in Uganda, Farah once again fell foul of the political powers-that-be. After the Swedish-language publication of Gavor (Gifts) in 1990, Farah resigned his position following criticism by President Museveni. If this got the decade off to a rather inauspicious start, 1991 was a year of watershed moments. Whilst Farah collected the Tucholsky Literary Award in Stockholm, it was Siyad Barre’s fall from power that had the most significant impact on his life and work. In the post-Barre power vacuum, uncertainty about Somalia’s political future mounted, culminating in the failed U.S.-led intervention Operation Restore Hope. America’s military misadventures in the Horn of Africa would provide the backdrop for Farah’s first, post-9/11 novel, Links (2004). As helicopters burned and bodies were beaten in Mogadiscio, Farah found comparative stability in Nigeria following the birth of a daughter and a son. After spells in other parts of the continent and beyond, one of his next journeys would prove particularly decisive. Following Barre’s death in Abuja in 1995, Farah returned to Somalia after 22 years in exile. An emotional homecoming, the 1996 trip allowed him to witness firsthand how much his country had changed and its people had suffered since his own departure in the seventies. These experiences fed into the writing and publication of Secrets, the final instalment of the Blood in the Sun trilogy that began with Maps. After years of uprooting, Farah and his family settled in Cape Town in 1999.

Whilst my own journeys have been freely willed and much more modest in comparison with Farah’s, I use the concluding section of this study to reflect on how a meeting with him in Cape Town in 2011 galvanised this project anew. Following my relocation to South Africa in 2010, questions of home, roots and routes have assumed particular burdens of significance, both personally and professionally. In its own, necessarily ‘unhomely’ way, Farah’s work continues to have a resonant power. What I will argue throughout this book, however, is that it is the manner in which he marries the intimately personal with the intensely political that distinguishes his finest writing. If this can be seen to both pass comment on and reflect the various ruptures that have defined his own narrative as well as that of Somalia, I explore how and why it is underpinned by an enduring set of ethical and political convictions. Having offered a contextual overview of Farah’s own narrative, marked as it has been by locations, dislocations and relocations, the remainder of this introduction explores why a discursive marriage between his work and that of Michel Foucault is so enabling.