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A Country in Exile
This entry covers the life and career of Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. It summarizes the major themes of his creative work – such as gender, politics, and national identity in Somalia – with particular attention to From a Crooked Rib (1970) and Maps (1986). It also covers Farah's cosmopolitan writing career in Africa, Europe, and the United States.
Addressing five texts by four Somali authors-Nuruddin Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000) and North of Dawn (2018) in juxtaposition with three novels by female Somali authors, i.e. Safi Abdi's Offspring of Paradise (2003), Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother (201; Italian original 2007) and Igiaba Scego's Adua (English translation 2017, Italian original 2015)- this article assesses the work these texts do to enhance contemporary understanding of the complex, evolving phenomenon that is the diasporic Somali presence in Western Europe, focusing on Somali men. How do the authors portray and (implicitly or overtly) evaluate how diasporic male Somalis cope in foreign, non-Muslim and culturally Western environments-against the backdrop of Somalia's state collapse and social disintegration? Somali men's experiences have generally been given less attention than those of their female counterparts, hence the focus here on male-gendered characters. This focus serves to link the two Nuruddin Farah texts and the three novels by Somali women-a textual grouping and focus not previously attempted in critical studies of Farah's work. This brief essay assesses the five texts' respective combinations of evaluative evocation, affective intensity and epistemological detail, approaching these works as complementing social science researchers' efforts in depicting diasporic Somali men's lives. By deepening understanding of the impact of the diaspora on individual Somali men, the five texts convey significant psychological, social and moral insights into lives of Somali men in foreign contexts.
This article explores the role of the returnee protagonist in selected works of Nuruddin Farah. Nadine Gordimer described Farah as "one of the real interpreters" of Africa and this article argues that Farah's returnees operate as interpreters themselves, their liminality working to mediate between international readers and "local" subject matter. However, it also observes that Farah, who spent decades in exile, is often as preoccupied with writing non-belonging as he is with rendering Somalia itself. Farah's returnee narratives are, broadly, novels of redress, in which characters enact their return in an attempt to seek out the missing, rebuild the lost or reclaim the stolen, with imperfect results. In exploring these variations on homecoming, the paper investigates the ways in which Farah's body of work reflects shifts in identity politics over time, and the unique pressures these shifts exert on the homecoming arc.
During his exile, Nuruddin Farah believed that he would return to a democratic Somalia once Muhammed Siyad Barre had been removed from power. However, this vision was lost when civil war followed the dictator's fall. Since then, Farah has made several return visits to Somalia. He claims in interviews and articles that he continues to care about Somalia whereas others have abandoned the country. The emotional engagement that Farah shows in his book on Somali refugees, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora emerges again in his Past Imperfect trilogy. This can be seen in the ways in which older Somali characters interact with a younger generation, seeking to instruct, develop and protect them. This shows a certain anxiety about influence. It is as if Farah is attempting to re-assert his long-held position as the pre-eminent author and interpreter of Somalia and the Somali diaspora during a period in which there has been a proliferation of literary writing by younger Somalis. This essay examines Farah's trajectory from exile to cosmopolitan writer and his anxiety in the Past Imperfect trilogy and other writing. It further considers whether there are constructive linkages between Farah's work and that of selected younger Somali writers.
Somali citizens, both at home and abroad, have been reduced to a life of uncertainty, instability and insecurity. This article considers Somalis as part of the 'precariat' (as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Standing, and others). Drawing on critical terrorism and trauma scholarship, the article gauges the experiences of the precariat subject, highlighting how these experiences affect the daily lives of the Somali migrant community in Nuruddin Farah's North of Dawn (2018). The aim of this article is to consider the relationship among precarity, extremism and the postcolonial émigré with regard to the contingent and fractious relations established by and between the Somali migrant characters and their hosts in the novel. Whereas predominant framings of precarity are characterized by labor insecurity, lack of any stable economic identity, and the fear of losing what one has, my argument in this article is that extremism is both a response to and attendant agent of precarity as presented in the novel. My contention is that Farah engages the precariat as extremist in the narrative present of the novel, highlighting the ways in which those that face social identification and marginalization are both at risk and risky to others.
Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother is a fictional depiction of the lives of the Somali immigrant community displaced by civil war following the ousting from power of President Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia in 1991. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of dislocation, this article considers Ali Farah's diasporic imagination as presenting the reader with a scenario where Somali immigrants fail to identify themselves with Somalia as a place they can call home. Instead, they strive to reinvent themselves as “a country in exile”. I read Ali Farah's narrative as particularly effective in creating words and images that convey the wounds borne by Somalis as they leave their natal home, and as they try to make sense of their interstitial selves in Europe and North America. These wounds are both physical and psychological, and lead to the alienation and traumatisation of the dispossessed bodies. I reference Homi Bhabha's concept of “DissemiNation” to explore how the trope of the scattering and gathering of Somalis is imagined in Ali Farah's semiautobiographical novel.
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