Are There Secrets in Secrets? Round Table on Nuruddin Farah.
By Said S. Samatar
"Industriousness," so goes a venerable Somali aphorism, "never comes home empty-handed." No author has ever more strikingly demonstrated the truth of this aphorism than Nuruddin Farah whose prodigious history has taken the world by storm. Secrets, his eighth novel, is the latest evidence of Farah's energy and industrial output. The prodigious output has had its intimidating effects in African writing circles, to judge by the odes on the cover of this book. That he is now the laureate of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature should redound to the good of his already established reputation as "one of the world's great writers." The award represents a personal triumph for Farah, a vindication for his fiction, and, most important, a victory for a badly demoralized Somalia that one of the "sons of her soil" should be so rarely honored. As a fellow Somali myself, I should crave to be counted as one of his principal cheerleaders, applauding him on and on to higher and higher heights. But sentimental fellow feeling is one thing; integrity in assessing a work of fiction is another; and on the latter basis it must be said that Secrets arouses, at least in this reader, certain concerns of context and credibility. I shall examine these by and by.
Set against the background of civil-war Somalia, Secrets, a novel of luxuriant prose and strange similes--"grins as self-conscious as a sparrow dipping its head in the river's mist"--attempts to recount a family saga, that of the Nonno clan, in multiple angles of vision and in a maddening maze of mechanical metaphors.The tale begins in Mogadishu, Somalia's once charming but now ruined capital, where Kalaman, the protagonist, offers us a slice of his early insouciant coming-of-age and then takes a leap, without transition, to his growth into a thirty-three-year-old up-and-coming Somali yuppie, who runs a successful enterprise as a computer programmer. Grandpa Nonno, nicknamed Matukade, or "He-Who-Never-Prays," possesses a dilapidated estate, composed of a bungalow and numerous acres of not unpleasant woodlands, on the banks of the Shebeele, or "River of Leopards." He had, we are told, run south in the early decades of the century from the former British Somaliland Protectorate for reasons that are unsaid. Nonno's son, and Kalaman's father, Yaqut, earns his upkeep as an engraver of headstones for graves. Macabre enough. Yaqut's wife Damac, Kalaman's putative mother, is a "four-breasted" boneless wonder, who has made well off enough on the "beads trade" to own a vehicle for movement, and a firearm for self-defense against marauding militias.
Second in significance to the Nonnos are Madoobe, or the Black, and his pair of progeny--Sholoongo, a "shape-shifting" witch of a lass "with animal powers," "raised by a lioness"; and Madoobe's son Timir who, among other improbabilities, holds office as an "active member of the American gay movement." Then there is Fidow, Nonno's general hand man, wild honey collector, crocodile trapper, elephant poacher, and goer of "both ways in sexual matters." This just about closes the circle of significant characters in Secrets. [End Page 137].
As to the events in Secrets, it must be said that not much happens. There is no character development, there is no plot, there is no sign of humans doing things to other humans to stir the reader's admiration, pity, or scorn. There is only a cloud of verbiage. In the end a work of fiction must stand--or fall--by the measure of its plausibility. Judged on this criterion, Secrets fails to measure up. To offer a running sample of the various grounds for complaint: first, there are the elementary errors: dibqaloo', hanqaraloo', or hangaraloo' (all three Somali for "scorpion") is misnamed as "hangaroole." This should have been a petty objection if the dibqaloo' didn't play a central role in the folk myth employed to carry the story forward. Arraweello, the archetypal Queen of Somali mythology in pre-Islamic matriarchal Somalia is misrendered throughout as Carraweello. Now suppose a Yoruba novelist of note in a book on the Yoruba persistently got the name of Oduduwa wrong. Would not such occasion a few raised eyebrows?
More serious: the English idioms and utterances that Farah selects to depict his chosen slice of Somali experience sit rather awkwardly with Somali life and lore, to say nothing of Somali literary temper and tastes. Consider, for example, these snippets of dialogue taken randomly from the first four or so pages:
"Now why on earth did we not think of that?"
"I gather that Sholoongo was delivered [. . .] ."
"I cannot vouch for its truth [ . . .]."
"I named you Kalaman because it is a cul-de-sac of a name."
And a little later:
"We are damned if we do, and damned if we don't." (Emphasis added in all cases).
These are all nice idioms. The trouble is that they are fiercely foreign to Somali speech mannerisms. To put them in the mouth of a Somali is positively a literary abomination.
Apparently unwilling--maybe unable--to squeeze out of English the corresponding sound and syntax of Somali speechifying, Farah packs in, higgledy-piggledy, the accents, idioms, even mannerisms, of the British Isles. The result is charmingly comical, making the creatures that populate Secrets sound rather like a party of British dandies out on a picnic in the Bounds Green suburb of London. Take a look: Kalaman in quarrel with grandpa utters aloud: "The cheek of it all!" (280). Can anyone, in the know, imagine a Somali saying the above? And this: "If they pitied me, it would be because I was the poor sod who hadn't a blood family to be loyal to . . ." (237). The poor sod! Is this not a Britishism? Kalaman the child, not the grown-up, is made to say: "Where other boys' braggadocio underlined for me their overly [. . .]" (8). Braggadocio in the mouth of a Somali child?
Secrets sports a legion of Americanisms, too. In fact, it could be said justly that the language of Secrets is roughly evenly divided between Britishisms and Americanisms to the outrage of the reader appreciative of the violence done to the Somali style of speaking. Sample: "The Lord knows he had a plethora of these phrases, shibboleths pointing to his nervous or joyous state" [End Page 138] (5). Shibboleth? How did the "eight-plus-year-old" Kalaman come to acquire this Hebrew-English idiom? "I dared not betray Sholoongo, my secret-sharer [here Joseph Conrad sneaks in!] whose daredevilry never ceased to amaze me" (8). Imagine a Somali child making side-bar allusions to a novella of Joseph Conrad's! And daredevilry? The pity is that there is a reservoir of corresponding native Somali idioms that Farah could have easily rendered in English, and into which he is unwilling--maybe unable--to dip. And: "[. . .] Barni would hang around all day if need be, patient like a groupie waiting for an instant's sight of her idol" (10). Groupie? How did this Americanism get into the mouth of a Somali child?
Then there is the problem of misplaced events, objects, and historical chronology: Arbaco, a barely sedentarized "floater," makes this remarkable analogy: "If you make it into the big league, they pay you a lot [. . .]" (222). Did she learn about the terminology of American sports lingo among the camels in the desert?! And Kalaman holding forth on the superiority of his moral probity over the warlords: ". . . f I were one the vigilantes [sic] or besotted with the idea of power like the cowboy politicians?" Instead of "cowboy," why not "camelboy" (since the camel reigns supreme in Somalia) so as to ground the sentiment in the local color of its environment, instead of borrowing an Americanism? It is this kind of consistent failure to contextualize that undermines the text. Equally extraordinarily, Madoobe, or Blackie, is portrayed as having made "his living taming wild horses, which he exported to the Middle East and out of which, it was rumored, he made a mint" (10). Only one problem: there are precious few horses, wild or domestic, left in Somalia. I've written at length about horses and horse culture in Somalia, and while there used to be a great horse population in the country, it is all but extinct nowadays from the combination of the increasing dessication of the environment and the introduction of motorized transport that has made the horse irrelevant. Today there are about three spots where horses exist in any appreciable numbers: the valley of Nuggal in eastern Somalia, the coastal region around 'Eel-Buur, and the environs of Harrodigeet in Ogaa.deen country. For the rest, nothing--certainly not in Afgoi.
In the nineteenth century, the American navy imported camels from Morocco for transport use in the American southwest, but the project failed on account of the inhospitable climate, and the last solitary camel was sighted wandering listlessly in the desert wilds of New Mexico. Now imagine that an American novelist in a work set in New Mexico (circa 1900) has a character "making a mint" out of breaking camels! And this: "I hurt in the eyes," he said. "Summer one moment, and on its heels a sudden winter, with frostbite more bitter than any the world has known." There is no summer or winter in Somalia, indeed none of the four seasons of European culture; there are only the dry and wet seasons--more dry than wet. (And "frostbite" in equator-sun-scorched Somalia where there is not even a word for snow, let alone frostbite.) And yet Farah's Somalis are projected as seasoned Alaskans waxing sagely on the existential angst of "frostbites."
Still more intriguing: Grandpa Nonno admires grandchild Kalaman's teeth: "As I prepared myself to light a cigarette, I remarked how, with the [End Page 139] residual tobacco stains removed, Kalaman's teeth looked TV-commercial clean." There has never been a TV-station in Afgoi, indeed only briefly in Mogadishu, in the mid-eighties. Where would the village-bound Nonno have seen TV commercials? And the barely literate Arbaco delivers herself of this pointer: "It will be great fun to fill the tyrant's boots. It is good for my CV." Only one rub: the word "CV," as well as the concept, does not exist in Somali culture, and only the small staff in the ministries who are able to read Italian or English--which Arbaco is not--would have come across it. In Farah's pen, pastoral Somalia is made to sound, amazingly, like a Manhattan-style bureaucracy! And Grandpa Nonno pontificates:
"The Prophet Mohammed [sic] was once asked to define Allah. Responding to the question, the Prophet said God is different from any Ident ity kit that a human being is capable of constructing!" (104)
Identikit: identity + kit--a darling twaddle of the anti-narrative brigade--in the mouth of Muhammad? Why, Farah's Prophet Muhammad sounds, remarkably, like a latter-day postmodernist steeped in the argot of deconstructionism!
Then there is the matter of "Complexification." Farah's style is characterized by an alternation of brilliant verbal executions that achieve the poetic, and a barrage of rancid mouth-fillers that deteriorate into pompous verbosity. A sample of the former:
I suggested Arbaco and I find a place out of his earshot so we could talk in peace. I drove away fast, the tires of my vehicle stirring so much dust you would have thought that a horde of hippopotami was having a wrestling bout with elephants. (229)
Or:
When Arbaco reemerged she wasn't alone. A man with whom she had a kind of conspiratorial harmony was with her, the type of harmony informed by corruption. I could tell that they didn't trust each other either, like accomplices in a murder having no faith in one another. The man, who was sixty if a day, had about him the air of a blackmailer. (227)
Even the sternest detractor has to concede that by such passages as the above Farah achieves verbal deftness of immeasurable elegance. Secrets contains many such literary gems. At his best Farah so deploys language as to construct breathtakingly bucolic lyrics, a stunning achievement in which not a syntax, not a syllable, nay, not even an accent, misses the mark. At such moments the reader must feel immensely rewarded.
But at his worst, Farah plunges into the muddy pond of verbal gobbledygook. Take any page of Secrets and you will find, guaranteed, the weirdest of sentence-constructions since Adam babbled his first halting syllables in the Garden of Eden. Sample: Young Kalaman is instructing us on how his name was coined: "The K was joined to an L, then marked with the appropriate vowel-point for the sound he wished to achieve: accents of [End Page 140] focus, of a skirmished relevance" (238). What in Allah's name--or Waaq's (sky-god), for that matter--is "a skirmished relevance"? And: "The ants marked my body with polygonal and polyhedral messages." Polygonal and polyhedral? What purpose do these mouth-jammers serve, other than to complexify?
Farah seems to have a thing for the big and obscure word--i.e., for "weeping" he deploys "lachrymose"; for "car," "jalopy"; and for "general manager," "factotum." A corollary of the itch to complexify is the urge to overwrite, and overwrite, and overwrite. Child Kalaman explains his gullet's reaction to a chilled drink of tamarind: "My larynx loosened up, so did my pharynx, my voice organs bounced into action, with the Adam's apple jerking to life, functioning with the ease of a recently greased engine" (3). This child talks too grown-up; also the sentence might have worked more effectively if Farah stopped it right after "loosened up" and deleted the frothy coda. Indeed it is frothy codas that have conspired to ruin Secrets. Undoubtedly Farah would have benefited by his editors cutting out every third sentence at random to make the effort learner, tidier, and therefore aesthetically more rewarding.
The second major issue that arises out of reading Secrets relates to the absence in it of a sustaining core--a skeleton around which to hang the various strands of thematic devices in order to propel the story forward. So the text keeps falling back on itself in a circular tangle of overwriting. In the first half of the account, Farah seeks an anchoring center in phantasmagoria. Hence the allegorical naming of his characters: Kalaman (split mind), Nonno (Italian for grandfather), Damac (Desire), Qalin (Pen), Fidow (Evening), and so on; and the providential name-giving crow that comes down from the sky as a Somali deus ex machina to cry out "Kalaman!" on the instant of the child's birth. There are also various and sundry allusions in the rehashing of the Somali myth of the Milky Way, or Dhabaha 'Irka. But he leaves out (maybe doesn't know of) the key component of the Road-of-the-Sky cosmology, namely, Awrka 'Irka, or the Camel of the Sky whose tail got pulled off from the weight of so many folk hanging from it, causing an entire clan to plunge down to earth--this a Somali version of the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.
When the Milky Way myth fails to rescue Secrets, Farah tries magical realism, of a sort reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are invading armies of locusts, termites, birds of all manner doing bizarre things, geckos, lizards, snakes, and the ubiquitous scorpion--conundrums. The elephant in Secrets that crosses "international boundaries" to avenge himself on the poacher Fidow is every bit as fantastical as the "Jews of Amsterdam" invading García Márquez's mythical South American forest republic. But the Buendia clan in One Hundred Years do rather better as an incarnation of allegory than do the Nonnos in Secrets. When the magical realism in its turn doesn't work, Farah dusts up astrology, this perhaps as a concession to the Psychic Friends Network, but it, too, doesn't do the trick, so resort is had to numerology (last thirty pages or so), and when the numbers, too, don't add up, Secrets collapses into a soupy Islamic theology. Altogether a work in despair. [End Page 141]
Another cause for alarm is the growing cancer of bestiality in Farah's recent fiction. In 1990 (1991?) in St. Louis at the ASA's annual convention, a party of Somalis (including me) went to cheer him on. We were all rooting for him pridefully, as a native son made good. To the discomfiture of the Somalis in the audience--maybe to others, too--Farah, reading an extract from one of the books--Maps?--embarked on an extended graphic description of a stud of a man banging away at a cow. The reading went on ad nauseam, replete with gruntings, groanings, mooings, and mumblings--in short, all manner of man-cow love noises . . . until the fellow beside me lurched forward and whimpered in a shaky voice, "Where is the men's room? I fear I want to vomit." In Secrets Farah has this:
Now his nakedness was prominent with an erection. In a moment he was standing behind a heifer, saying something, his voice even. The nearer I got to him and the young cow, the clearer his voice was, only I couldn't decipher his words, maybe because he was speaking to the cow in a coded tongue, comparable to children's private babble. Was he appeasing the cow's beastly instincts by talking to her in a secret language? (16)
One cannot cavil at the employment of bestiality as a thematic technique; after all, a fictionist has his fictional license, but the bestiality here does nothing for the narrative structure. It is merely a paste-on. In any case, if Farah wishes to present the Somalis as a race of recidivist bestialists, it is his authorial prerogative to do so. But then he should not have picked on the poor cow, a minority species in the land, but rather on the proud camel since Somalia is decidedly a camel country.
There are, too, the gratuitous crudities: does not the reader weary of being reminded of grandpa Nonno's "large member"? For his part Nonno is an octogenarian Peeping Tom who delights in secretly--and voyeuristically--eyeing the jerkings off of grandchild Kalaman. Then Kalaman reminisces of childhood when a bad head cold oppressed him and father Yaqut came to the rescue: "When I couldn't breathe because my nasal passages were clogged, my father took my nose in his mouth and, at a single drag, sucked the unease out of me, phlegm and mucus and all." I called my doctor to inquire if this was technically possible. He assured me it was not. Which means Farah sojourns in the realm of the unbelievable even in relating an obscenity. The objection here is not to the crudity per se: no African work is ever cruder than Ayi Kwei Armah's classic The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born or a European effort earthier than James Joyce's Dubliners. The difference is that the crudities in the latter text are part of a craft designed to lift them off to sublime beauties. Farah's is just lumped on.
Farah is hailed by the publisher of Secrets as having "a life-long project"--that of "keep[ing] my country alive by writing about it." Would that he had done so. The Somali civil war (in its clan massacres, mass starvations, international interventions, in the muddlings of Operation Restore Hope, the draggings of the dead bodies of American Rangers--in short, in its evocation of the very apocalypse) constitutes an epic tale crying for an oracular pen to give it a tongue. It remains the untold secret. [End Page 142] Which introduces the subject of secrets in Secrets. The word "secret" jumps out at the reader practically in every page, indeed almost every paragraph. In Farah's telling, the universe is crawling with secrets: locusts have secrets, as do termites, as does the scorpion, as does the "belly" of a dead hippo, as does Sholoongo's culture of "lice in a jelly jar," as do her monthlies, as does the gang-rape of Damac, as does Kalaman's birth from this violation, and so on . . . until upon the word the wearied reader screams out with Horatio: "There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this, my lord!" Only in the last sentence of the last page do you discover the god-awful secret--that there are no secrets in Secrets.
All in all, this is a fiercely non-Somali novel. But what does this matter beside the charging juggernaut of a fearsome will power? Calvin Coolidge: "Press on. Nothing can take the place of persistence. TALENT will not; the world is full of unsuccessful people with talent. GENIUS will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. EDUCATION alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Farah has persistence and determination in abundance. And therein lies the guarantee of his fame.
Said S. Samatar is Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
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