Farah, Nuruddin

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Nuruddin Farah

Somali writer Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) is one of Africa's most acclaimed contemporary writers, as well as the sole Somali author whose works have achieved international renown. Farah has lived in exile from his homeland since 1976, when the content of his second novel was deemed treasonous by Somalia's ruling dictatorship. After learning that he was persona non grata that day in Rome in 1976, he vowed that “if I couldn't go back home then I would systematically make the rest of Africa my country,” he explained in a Publishers Weekly interview with Stephen Gray.

Farah was born on November 24, 1945, in the southcentral Somali city of Baidoa. At the time of his birth, the area was under British jurisdiction in the months just following World War II; prior to this, Somalia had been a colonial possession of Italy, along with neighboring Ethiopia and, beyond that, the nation of Eritrea. The alliances and animosities in this region, known as the Horn of Africa, along with decisions made by foreign powers in this postwar era, would play a large role in shaping the long and deadly descent into chaos that marked Somalia's late twentieth-century history.

Studied in India

In addition to his first language, Somali, Farah became fluent in English, Italian, Arabic, and Amharic—the predominant tongue of Ethiopia—reflecting the cosmopolitan, multicultural nature of the region. Somalia's capital was Mogadishu, which had been a trading port connected to the Indian subcontinent since the first century C.E. Farah's father, Hassan, was a merchant, and his mother, Aleeli, was a poet whose work was presented orally, according to the literary tradition of Somalia at the time. The Somali tongue, part of the Cushitic family of languages spoken in the Horn of Africa, was not codified into a written language until the early 1970s, just when Farah was beginning his career as a writer.

Farah attended school in Kallafo, a city located in Ogaden, which was a largely Somali-populated region that bordered Ethiopia and figured prominently in a long-running dispute between the two nations. His family had settled there when he was a toddler, but when the border war flared up once again, they were forced to flee to Mogadishu. As a young man, he took a job as a clerk-typist with Somalia's Ministry of Education in 1964, but two years later went to Punjab University in Chandigarh, India, to spend the next three years studying philosophy, literature, and sociology.

Farah returned to Somalia in 1969, the same year that a military coup led by a Somali army officer, General Siad Barre (1919-1995), ousted the regime which had administered the country since the World War II era, installed when the area achieved independence from Britain. Initially Marxist in fervor and progressive in outlook, the new Barre regime was greeted with enthusiasm by many young Somalis, Farah among them, for its revolutionary goals. One of Barre's first official acts, for example, was to end the reliance on colonial languages in Somalia's educational system, and he ordered linguists to rush a written form of the Somali language into development.

Published First Novel

Though Farah initially took a job as a secondary school teacher when he returned from India, he was also aiming for a literary career, and in 1970 his first novel, From a CrookedRib, was published in English by the Heinemann publishing house in London as part of its influential African Writers Series. Farah's story centers on Ebla, a young Somali woman who struggles to break free of the constraints that keep her from an independent life and will force her into an arranged marriage. He took the title of the novel from a well-known Somali proverb, “God created woman from a crooked rib; and any one who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it,” according to an article that appeared in London's Independent in 2005.”

In the early 1970s, Farah taught comparative literature at the university level in Mogadishu while working on his second novel, which for a time was serialized in a new Somalilanguage newspaper but then halted. This would be the sole work that he wrote in the Somali language. The Barre regime, now firmly allied with the Soviet Union, was becoming an increasingly repressive one, and Farah decided to leave for a time in order to study playwriting in England. He spent time at the University of London and the University of Essex, and in 1976 served a stint at London's acclaimed Royal Court Theatre. His next book, A Naked Needle, appeared that same year under the Heinemann imprint. Its plot centers around a marriage discussed between a teacher in Mogadishu and an English girl he meets while studying abroad. When she arrives in Somalia, the young, idealistic Somali has second thoughts about the interracial match.

Forced into Exile

A Naked Needle contained descriptions of life in contemporary Somalia that the Barre regime deemed unacceptable, and this precipitated the events that would change Farah's life in a major way. In 1976 he was at the Fiumicino airport in Rome awaiting a flight home to Somalia, and he phoned his brother in Mogadishu to arrange an airport pickup. His brother warned him not to board the plane, telling him that the authorities were so incensed about his novel that it was advisable to instead “forget Somalia,” and to “think of it as if it no longer exists for you,” Farah recalled during an interview with Maya Jaggi in the London Guardian. From that point forward, Farah lived in several African nations, including Uganda, the Gambia, and Nigeria. Freed from the fear of political reprisals, he began writing a trilogy called “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship.” The first novel was Sweet and Sour Milk, published in Britain in 1979. The story centers on Loyaan, a dentist who learns that the recent death of his twin brother was tied to the latter's underground political activities in opposition to an authoritarian regime of a ruler known only as “the General.”

Maps Lauded by Academia

Farah's next novel in the trilogy was Sardines, published in 1981. Its protagonist is Medina, a former journalist who finds herself in trouble with the General's regime. In the third and final work, Close Sesame, a man is released from prison after decades of political dissent under various regimes. When he learns that his son is now involved in a coup plot, he attempts to halt the ill-conceived plan. Close Sesame appeared in 1982, the same year that all three works in the first trilogy first appeared in print in the United States. By this point Farah had become well-known in European literary circles, and he emerged as an important new discovery among American academics in 1986 with Maps, the first in his “Blood in the Sun” trilogy. The work attracted major attention in academia, and immediately became part of the standard reading list for courses on postcolonial literature.

Maps focuses on the coming of age of Askar, who is a boy in Ogaden before moving to Mogadishu during his teens. “At the same time as he discovers the ‘territory of pain’ connected with the necessary separations that lead to manhood, he becomes aware of the border conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia,” explained Jacqueline Bardolph in an essay on Farah that appeared in Research in African Literatures. “The two themes, the personal and the political, are woven in a complex manner, all the more striking as the narrative sequences follow one another in the first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘he.’ ”

Won Neustadt Prize

In 1996 Farah was finally able to return to Somalia for the first time in 22 years, when he made a brief visit to family members who had remained there. Barre had finally been ousted in January of 1991, but the country had erupted into civil war in the interim. In 1998 Farah won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a highly prestigious literary award given by the University of Oklahoma and its journal, World Literature Today. With its $40,000 prize purse, the Neustadt is considered the literary world's second most coveted honor after the Nobel Prize. Farah joined an impressive list of past Neustadt recipients, including Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (born 1927) and Poland's Czes?aw Mi?osz (1911-2004).

Later in 1998 Farah moved to Capetown, South Africa, with his wife, Nigerian academic Amina Mama, with whom he has a son. Secrets, the second work in his “Blood in the Sun” trilogy, also appeared that year. Again, the story features a powerful female protagonist, in this case Sholoongo, who is abandoned by her mother and raised by lions, later moves to New York City, and returns to Somalia in the early 1990s, just as Barre's dictatorship is winding down. The third work in Farah's trilogy was Gifts, which appeared in 1999. Its protagonist is Duniya, a nurse who worries about her family as Somalia's civil war looms. She also recalls her own struggle for independence as a young woman, when a marriage to an elderly blind man was arranged by her family.

Farah began a new trilogy in 2004 with Links, the story of Jeebleh, a Somali immigrant to the United States who returns to his homeland after two decades' absence. He becomes enmeshed in the terror experienced by the family of his longtime friend, whose young daughter appears to have been kidnapped by the local warlord. The next work in the trilogy was 2007's Knots. Its heroine is Cambara, a Somali immigrant to Canada whose young son has drowned in a swimming pool because of the negligence of her adulterous husband. Griefstricken, she returns to Mogadishu determined to retake possession of her family's former home, now the lair of one of the notorious warlords who dominated Somali politics until just before the novel's actual publication.

Briefly Ventured into Diplomacy

The author himself reluctantly returned once again to Somalia when he was asked to serve as go-between to settle a conflict between the transitional government and an Islamic fundamentalist group. His mission was unsuccessful, but he wrote of it in a 2007 New York Times article titled “My Life as a Diplomat,” in which he concluded that “the only way out of the current impasse is to resume dialogue between the two principal parties to the conflict. I now know from personal experience how difficult this is.”

Farah also spoke about the experience in an interview with Jeffrey Brown of News Hour, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news program. Brown asked Farah about an oft-repeated quote the author had made many years before, when he asserted that his mission was “to keep my country alive by writing about it.” Farah replied, “When I said that, I was a young man. You could say that, being young, I was also ambitious. I dreamt that this is what I was going to do. And now that I am older, the only thing I can say is that I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way.”