Son ofSomalia

Nuriddin Farah's notes from a troubled homeland

by Johnette Rodriguez

Somalia has always been a land of dichotomies and contradictions. In the middle of the first millennium, Arabs brought the religion of Islam to the nomadic tribes in Africa's eastern horn. In the 19th century, Britain claimed its northern hills and Italy its southern plains. After the triumph of independence in 1960, the Somali government quickly dissolved into a brutal 21-year dictatorship, followed by multiple civil wars, tens of thousands dying of starvation and a failed "peace-keeping mission" by U.S. troops-it remains a country ruled by the chaos and violence of feuding clans. Throughout its history, Somalia has had difficulty figuring out who it is and where its soul lies.

In another anomaly, one of Somalia's own, Nuriddin Farah, who grew up speaking Somali but reading and writing Arabic, Italian, Amharic and English -- Somali did not have a written language until 1972 -- was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, second only to the Nobel in prestige. (Other Neustadt laureates, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Czeslaw Milosz and Octavio Paz have gone on to capture the Nobel.) In 1966, Farah became the first Somali to publish a novel; he went on to win acclaim for his first trilogy of novels, collectively called "Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship" (Sweet and Sour Milk, 1979; Sardines, 1981; and Close Sesame, 1983).

His books also garnered him detention, death threats and a 20-year exile from his homeland. Writing all but one of his books in English, Farah has made it his life-long project "to keep my country alive by writing about it." His most recent trilogy, Blood In the Sun, does just that. Published out of order in this country, the latest novel, Secrets (1998), was shortlisted on many U.S. "best of the year" lists for 1998. Then, in the fall of 1999, the previous two, Maps (1986) and Gifts (1993) FARAH, from cover

were brought out almost simultaneously by Arcade Publishing and they too jumped onto many critics' list of favorites for last year.

A writer-in-residence at Brown University in 1991, Farah was back at Brown last week to read from the newest trilogy and also from a non-fiction book, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora, published in January by Cassell. A self-described nomad, Farah, at 54, has lived, studied and taught in 20 countries, and currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife and two young children.

Yet Farah always kept a ticket to Somalia in his pocket, and in 1996, he returned to Mogadishu for a six-week visit. He had earlier expressed his fervent wish for such a return with a mixture of hope and resignation: "Either they will run out of bullets or they will run out of the enthusiasm to kill each other or they will get tired or they will remember that they used to love each other before."

Those words infuse the books in Farah's latest trilogy with a sense of urgency from the author, a need to pull from inside himself the oft-conflicted feelings one has toward one's family and by extension, one's country. Those feelings exist on many levels: the roiling, underground physical sense of connection, a bond of loyalty that is often overlooked or under-valued; the intellectual link to past influences and life-shaping forces; and, most difficult to unravel, the emotional entanglements of childhood memories, household stories and family secrets, both known and unknown.

Farah draws on all of the above, spinning out narratives that exist now in dream, now in daylight, always against the backdrop of the political upheaval in Somalia, always colored with the brush of an African's broad palette-here a folktale, there a legend, here a dragonfly that offers a blessing, there a crow that portends death. Symbolism abounds, tying together the progression of the characters with the developments in their country, but those overlays never seem intrusive nor polemical. In a long line of oral poets, including his mother, Farah is an eloquent storyteller, with metaphors sometimes understated and sometimes spun out in startling mini-poems.

In Maps, the orphan Askar struggles to understand his heritage and that of the Ethiopian woman, Misra, who adopts him. In Gifts, Duniiya examines her capacity to give and receive love, as well pondering the nature of gifts in general. And in Secrets, Kalaman's search for his origins leads to a briar patch of twisted paths and connections.

"Gifts is the least self-conscious novel I have done in many years," Farah commented last week. "It's partly a love story and partly about how people in societies that have so little create a community and share.

Farah's newest book, Yesterday, Tomorrow, is a collection of interviews with Somalis whom he talked to in Kenya and Ethiopia, as they were fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu in early '91, as well as refugees he tracked down in six European countries over the past nine years -- he interviewed a total of 450 people.

Some of the first people he talked to were his own parents, his sister, his first son, families who had lived a middle-class life and one day, Farah relates, "people came when you were sitting down for lunch and said, `Hand over the keys to your house.' " His sister recalled that they left "the floors unswept, the dishes unwashed and their future undone" and ran as fast as they could.

Farah shook his head slowly, his soft voice edged with sorrow, when asked how he reacted to returning to Mogadishu in '96: "It was tragic. You come to a city and it's all destroyed. What was more tragic was that I couldn't do anything."

He dismisses the idea that his books are what he does, for he feels strongly that people need something more immediate and less solitary than reading. So, wherever he travels, he tries to gather Somali people together for discussions. There are 15,000 Somalis in Sweden, for example, and five days before his reading at Brown he talked to a large group of them and debated with them. He also did 51/2 hours of radio and TV programs while in Sweden.

"The reason it's hard for me to get more involved politically," Farah explained, "is that it's very dirty, too much blood, too much murderous instinct going on. When people have a gun and all they understand is the power of the gun, it's dangerous. I'm not the first to die, and I'm not really worried about these things. But the criminal is no longer someone else. It's your brother, your classmate, your in-law who killed someone. They don't trust you when you say, `peace.' That's the problem of civil wars. It's quite difficult to disentangle."

Looking toward the future, Farah believes that things will settle down in the next two to five years in Somalia, and he reiterates that people must take the time to try to understand each other.

"It had more or less come to its natural end when the Americans came in," he remarked. "Then they muddied the water, as is the case with powerful people. Someone with boots on doesn't see the small insects. They couldn't see. It was good intentions, but it didn't work."

Farah's analysis of the continuing wars in Somalia is twofold: too many people are making money off the wars, and there are too many external forces, such as Ethiopia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq, who are supporting particular factions within the country. While there, Farah asked a warlord, whose brother had been a student of his, what it would take to make him quit, and he replied, "About $7500 -- I would go farm, if I were guaranteed that nobody would kill me."

"These people are not from the middle class," Farah emphasized. "They are eavesdroppers, voyeurs on middle-class values. They are usually people who haven't finished secondary school. The majority of the people are willing to make peace. But these people know that when the gun is no longer a factor, they will be pushed aside. They want some guarantees."

As Farah points out, situations in Kosovo, Bosnia, even South Africa, make it clear that such guarantees are hard to arrive at and harder still to maintain. Yet his books continue to speak for those thousands who haven't had a chance to tell their stories. Whether rendered in the eloquent, oft poetic language of his novels or the wrenching narratives in Yesterday, Tomorrow, Farah's writing opens up a whole world to his readers and, in laying out his country's troubled past and present, he keeps alive its hopes for the future.