Nuruddin Farah Narration technique

Somali Studies: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal for Somali Studies, , 2021

Throughout his fiction, essays, and interviews, Nuruddin Farah, who was declared "persona non grata" in 1976 by Siad Barre and who has returned to Somalia only a few times since then, elucidates the advantages of being in exile and its benefits to his fiction. Nonetheless, as much as Farah celebrates exile, his fiction has suffered from Farah being outside of Somalia, especially observable in certain gaps in relation to day-today life and the evolving political scene in Somalia. Exile has isolated Farah from witnessing firsthand the unraveling and the rebuilding of Somalia and severed him from what he writes about, reducing him to 'a [mere] capsule of ideas,' to quote Farah himself. Thus, by juxtaposing the advantages and the shortcomings of exile in Nuruddin Farah's case, this essay emphasizes how exile can be a multifaceted and, at times, contradictory experience.

Somalia, a country in the Horn of Africa; is wrought with multiplex conflictive issues like dictatorship, clan conflagrations, tribal animosity, and racial altercations. The menace of racism, dictatorship, tribalism and other aligned issues have rendered Somalia economically hollow, politically unstable, and volatile in the context of overall conditions. Racism in the shape of clannish skirmishes and communal confrontations in Somalia is one of the obnoxious and detrimental issues that have made it a failed state. Many writers have depicted this issue of racism through their writings. Nuruddin Farah is one of the outspoken Somalian novelists who dauntlessly denigrate racism in Somalia through his novels. Nuruddin Farah is a very prolific novelist. He has many novels to his credit that contain issues of patriarchal oppression, gender inequality, and racism. The paper attempts to show through the textual study of the novel how Nuruddin Farah projects racism and civil war in Somalia through his much acclaimed and polemical novel Cross Bones.

2009

The subject conceived as “individual” is a sustained focus across the novels of Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah. This thesis locates a reading of individualism in Farah’s novels in the context of the historical and philosophical development of modern identity in the societies of the North-Atlantic. It relies primarily on the analysis of philosopher, Charles Taylor, who proposes that individualism makes modern identity an historically unprecedented mode of conceiving the person. By individualism, Taylor refers to the inward location of moral sources in orientation around which the self is constituted. Nonindividualist conceptions of the self locate moral horizons external to the subject thereby defined. The novel appears to be the most significant cultural form which mutually constitutes modern subjectivity. This is suggested by the centrality of the Bildungsroman sub-genre which fundamentally determines the form of the novel. Farah’s work spans the historical development of the novel ...

Hiiraan online, 2025

The story of Somalia does not open like a dusty record book—it bursts forth like a storm on the horizon, alive with cries of resistance and the heartbeat of a people who would not be broken. Between 1948 and 1950, in distant capitals under the dim glow of chandeliers, foreign powers weighed Somalia’s fate like traders over spoils, debating whether to return it to Italy’s grasp, their whispers dripping with betrayal as though the nation were nothing more than a discarded piece of empire.

English Studies in Africa, 2016

This article compares the representation of Somali Islamic culture in the work of two contemporary diasporic Somali intellectuals: the novelist Nuruddin Farah and the politician, philosopher and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Farah’s novels and Ali’s autobiographical and philosophical writings both fall into the category of ‘engaged literature’, seeking a positive change for their troubled country. While both are critical of gender relations in Islam and express liberal and feminist views, their attitudes to Islam have different nuances and work at different levels. The article shows that despite their differences, both Ali and Farah embrace the values of liberal humanism, replacing the pious Muslim believer with the doubting and questioning Enlightenment individual, posing a challenge to the traditional Muslim identity. The difficult question that both seek to answer is how Islam can be modernized to fit the needs of contemporary Somalia and whether Enlightenment’s secular values – especially the idea of the self as the ethical source – can or should replace the Islamic ethics centred around Allah.

Wardheernews, 2020

This paper explores the union of tradition and modernity in the leading genres of contemporary Somali literature; i.e. how this literature utilises techniques and materials derived from traditional oral literature to deal with coplex issues of contemporary society.

Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 2020

Introduction 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 (Jaggi 1), and the idea of literature as interpretation can be extended to describe the contribution of many of his central characters in explicating Somalia. Perhaps as a consequence of his own long exile, Nuruddin Farah's work is concerned with ideas of home and away, and with the conflict between individuality and belonging. This article will focus on a recurring figure in his fiction, namely the returnee. Farah's depiction of return is of a creative process, in which the returnees themselves must construct the version of home to which they wish to return. In this way, the novels conform to Edward Said's observation from Reflections on Exile, that "no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible" (489). In the case of Farah's novels, the idea of "a full return" is not only impossible, but dangerous, as Farah contrasts the ambivalence of his protagonists with totalizing notions of nation and belonging. Conflicted notions of allegiance are therefore not only a side effect of exile, but form part of an ethical imperative to resist the weaponization of identity employed by the sectarian groups who have battled for primacy in Somalia: namely, the dictatorship of General Muhammed Siyad Barre, clan militias and al-Shabaab, My discussion will revolve around the Past Imperfect trilogy, in which different protagonists return from abroad to grapple with what has become of Somalia in the period of their absence. These novels are set during successive revolutions of the "carousel of politics" (Crossbones 243). Links is set just after the fall of the Somali dictator, when new allegiances and leaders are coming to light in Mogadishu. Knots depicts the rule of clan-affiliated warlords and the rise of Islamic law, while Crossbones is set in the era of Somali piracy. Pervading the trilogy is a sense of incompleteness, and this unfinished quality is significant in two ways. Firstly, it contributes to the idea of Somalia as so complex as to be inexplicable. A complete picture of the country, Farah seems to argue, is impossible to render and dangerous to claim. In addition, the trilogy provides a rumination on the nature of return itself, which must always be partial and "putative" (Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora 48), if ethical engagement is to be maintained. Nuruddin Farah: Variations on the theme of return 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.

Web dossier African Studies Center Leiden (2020). To commemorate Somalia’s independence and give broader visibility to newly acquired Somali works in Leiden, I curated a Somali Day and compiled this web dossier which surveys Somali literature and its far-reaching connections in East Africa, Indian Ocean and the diaspora.

Somalian society is exorbitantly patriarchal in structure, thereupon unrelentingly atrocious and unjust in its dealings with women. It is one of the hellacious places for women to live in. In Somalia women are subjected to many heinous crimes like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), rape, and objectification. The rights and freedom of indigenous women are plundered and unjustly compromised. The rights of women are fobbed off by men in Somalia through the agency of manifold repressive institutions and exploitative ideologies like polygamy, clannish attitude, male chauvinism, and dictatorship. Somalian women are in double-bind, on the one hand, they are subjugated and suppressed by the internal patriarchy and on the other they are abused and wronged by the dictatorial governance. The most inhuman and humiliating treatment meted out to women in Somalia is forced marriage or what we call wife-barter. This is exemplified in a situation whereby a girl is coercively given out in marriage without her due consultations. In some cases women barter is likened to sales of horses, cattle or even goats; young girls are treated like capital assets or commodities and are bartered off for the worth of domestic animals. This brutal patriarchal and feudalistic code makes women chattels in their society. There is an outright resistance by women against this exploitative patriarchal social setup. Women in Somalia are now rebelling against the patriarchal power structures in order to liberate themselves and their posterity from the shackles of this patriarchal subjugation. The article proposes to show in the light of the two novels: From a Crooked Rib (1970) and Sardines (1981) how Nuruddin Farah contests the female oppression in Somalia and how

Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, 2020