Is Nuruddin Farah another Ayaan Xirsi in the making?

[nuune]

Soomaalidu waa dad cajjiib ah, horta hubsiinyadu hal baa la siistaa baa horey loo yiri, ee bal yaan la danbaabin dadoow meel cidla ah ayaad dhammaantiinba ka wada didsantihiin.

[JUSTICE]

What's with you people and Nurdin, you all should be proud that you have a somali writer. Well I know some do, but lets see the bright side of his views.

I haven't read any of his books, but I would be happy to grap one of his books to see what the fuss is all about. Actually this thread made me think about buying his books.

If he portrayed his characters in bad images, then its fine , its fiction after all, and anything is possible, he can't write all good things, after all people are not the same, and somalis, have the baaaad and the gooood. So if he portrayed more bad than good, then there must be some things he wants to point out. The images in the books should be shoking, it adds more spice to the story.

 

Go Nurdin

[NGONGE]

Again, lazy dear. I implore you to work on your writing style and delivery of ideas. A vulgar know-nothing child could spit out an insult (or putdown) as the one you came up with. I mean fancy accusing someone of being a drunk! It’s an embarrassing mistake by a supposedly educated person (are you by the way? Or is it fashionable to employ trailer-trash language these days?).

 

I actually like your writing style. Despite all evidence to the contrary you actually do have the ability to string two sentences together. Alas, the real shame is in the contents of those sentences! Now, I know you would not believe it but I actually want to help you out here. Rather than breaking your neck in the desire to be a tomboy that throws out insults at will, I’d like to see you acting like a real lady.

 

Again, I repeat, I don’t wish to engage in futile arguments with you. What I do when I address you at all times is advice you and show you the way to be a nice well brought up lady that does not insult her elders (since you chose to make an elder out of me) with words about drink habits and other nonsense. It is all about the style and elegance of the words, my dear. Work on that and I’ll be more than happy to let you pull on my shirt sleeves as much as you like. As things stand though, you’ll only get them dirty with your grubby hands.

 

Now are you ready to be a good little girl and say the words: Yes adeer. Sorry adeer? Come on, I know there is a nice innocent little girl behind all that italic rage.

 

** Awaits a breakthrough **

[Taliban]

Originally posted by JUSTICE:

I haven't read any of his books, but I would be happy to grap one of his books to see what the fuss is all about. Actually this thread made me think about buying his books.

If you can stomach Nuruddin's tales of bestiality and other forms of abominable sex, then more power to you.

[JUSTICE]

^^ why not

I will

[ElPunto]

^What a funny thread!

[NASSIR]

FOR YOUR PERUSAL it is hard to access this document.

 

D oing History”: Nuruddin Farah’s

Sweet and Sour Milk, Subaltern Studies,

and the Postcolonial Trajectory of Silence

R. John Williams

University of California, Irvine

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Sweet and Sour Milk, which should be understood as

both a political and literary text, “does history,” which is not to say that it

merely “tells” the history of postcolonial Somalia, but that it participates

in a kind of historiography that is, to borrow a phrase from Edward Said,

both “frankly revisionist” and “fiercely theoretical and intellectually insurrectionary.”

In this paper, using the theoretical work of a group of Indian

historians, collected in the journal of Subaltern Studies over the past two

decades, I show how Nuruddin Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk uses the trope

of “silence” to dramatize the potentially fruitful (and problematic) process

of writing histories “from below.”

 

H ow exactly should we read Nuruddin Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk? Is it

strictly a political novel? Or are we justified in analyzing merely its aesthetic,

literary qualities? On the one hand, Sweet and Sour Milk dramatizes

the troubling nationalist betrayal that authors like Frantz Fanon have identified

as “the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of

the colonial period” (152). And in pointing to the invidious nature of this transfer,

Farah is undoubtedly political and postcolonial. On the other hand, one must

remember that Farah is not simply writing anti-neocolonialist propaganda or even

journalism, but rather “literature,” and he thus participates in an entire system

of contingent conventions, including techniques such as imaginative reconstruction,

layered heteroglossia, artistic license, and irony—elements that necessarily

complicate attempts to pinpoint the precise political “meaning” in Farah’s text.1

Thus, for some, Farah’s work is evidence of a specific culture and political situation,

while for others it represents a specific kind of “literariness,” not necessarily

confined to its implied locale.

162 • Research in African Liter ature s

Readers of literary theorist Wolfgang Iser may perhaps identify these two

trajectories as the dominant “trends” associated with the analysis of literature: on

the one hand, there is an “attempt to grasp what is literary about it.” On the other

hand, there is “the view of it as a representation of society” (x). Both of these methodologies,

however, have severe limitations. According to Iser, the first method

takes literature and “hypostatizes it,” that is, makes it into a separate, distinct

object, somehow divorced from the mind and historical situation of the author. The

second method—viewing literature as a mere representation of society—reduces

literature “to the status of a document.”2

I introduce this dichotomy not because I intend to enter the debate, but rather

because I think both forms of investigation imply that Farah’s text does something,

rather than just means something. It is my argument that Sweet and Sour Milk,

which is both political and literary, “does history,” which is not to say that it merely

“tells” the history of postcolonial Somalia, but that it participates in a kind of historiography

that is, to borrow a phrase from Edward Said, both “frankly revisionist”

and “fiercely theoretical and intellectually insurrectionary” (v). In this paper,

using the theoretical work of a group of Indian historians collected in the journal

of Subaltern Studies over the past two decades, I intend to show how Farah’s text

uses the trope of “silence” to dramatize the potentially fruitful (and problematic)

process of writing histories “from below.”

The global, intellectual endeavor now commonly referred to as “Subaltern

Studies” actually began in the early 1980s, the work of a relatively small group of

revisionary Indian historiographers who published in a journal by the same name.3

In 1988, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak collected and anthologized

selections from the first five volumes of Subaltern Studies, which quickly became an

important text for radical historians throughout the world, though especially so in

Latin America and the United States. The reference to Edward Said in the previous

paragraph is important here because in the context of his argument on the “fiercely

insurrectionary” nature of these Indian historiographers he makes an important

connection between the work of postcolonialism and the work of Subaltern Studies—

a connection that is important to my discussion of Sweet and Sour Milk as a

work that both dramatizes and reproduces revisionary historiography. In his introduction

to Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, Vinayak Chaturvedi points

out that it was Said’s foreword to Selected Subaltern Studies that finally solidified the

connection between postcolonial scholarship and the Subaltern Studies collective.

One could argue, of course, that it was a comparison just waiting to happen.

The thematic tensions between the lower classes and the national elite portrayed

in the work of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Ranajit Guha’s Elementary

Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, for example, seem uncannily similar.

The former is often referred to as the foundational text in postcolonial studies,

while the latter is unquestionably one of the first and most important texts in

Subaltern Studies. And while Fanon relies heavily on the implications of race

and psychoanalysis, and Guha remains concerned primarily with historiography,

there are several broad concerns that unite the two: as Said says, “None of the Subaltern

Studies scholars [and we could add the postcolonial scholars] is anything

less than a critical student of Karl Marx” (x). Thus, it makes sense to see Said’s

Foreword as a look “forward” toward the more general postcolonial concerns in

Subaltern Studies.

R. John Williams • 163

But first, a point of clarification: it is not my plan to compare the “facts” represented

in Sweet and Sour Milk with the “facts” represented in the same historical

period in Somalia, and proceed to measure their adequacy or “fidelity” to some

“real” and knowable final event or series of events. Such a process would at the

very least invoke the suspicious (if expedient) ontological category of “Truth”—a

task well beyond the scope of this study.4

Here I intend to focus more on the question of Farah’s “doing history,” which,

as I use it here, implies two things: First, to “do things to history,” (as in “do a

number on history”)—which is essentially revisionary; and second, to “do things

that history does” (that is, produce a kind of text whose effects are similar to—

though not entirely the same as—those of history, which has important discursive

potential to change minds and attitudes). Thus, Sweet and Sour Milk should not be

read as history, but it should be read as doing history. I emphasize this difference

because I think it provides a necessary distance for our analysis, something that

will keep us from reducing Farah’s text, as Iser says, “to the status of a document,”

and, I hope, keep us from falling into the trap of historically deterministic discussions

of literature, and from the endless, perhaps useless, debates about just how

“accurate” a novel is in terms of the “reality” portrayed. The objective, then, is not

to simply judge just how much Farah’s text reflects reality, but rather to evaluate

to what degree its imaginative interventions into historiography dramatize the

potential to shape reality. And in determining that degree I appeal to the work of

the Subaltern Studies collective because, whether one agrees with their findings

or not, their approach to Indian historiography has had real and lasting effects on

the overall shape of Indian history.5

Before proceeding to a discussion of Farah’s text, I would like to turn to

the trope of “silence” as it relates to the overall objectives and methodology of

Subaltern Studies. As I see it operating in Subaltern Studies, “silence” forms the

basis for a three-part trajectory: 1) There is an imposition of silence by a colonial

or neocolonial state through mechanisms such as official historiography and

middle-class discursive hegemony—a process fueled by domination and greed.

This forced silence is largely the domain of the colonial elite, and is manifested in

the entire field of discursive power in venues of official historiography, literature,

journalism, documentation, etc. 2) An insurrectionary act of drawing attention to

that silence, calling it out, mapping its genealogy, and identifying the hypocrisy

of its boundaries—a process fueled by resentment. 3) A revisionary act of speaking

from that silence, giving it a voice, an identity, and eliminating its absence—a

process motivated by optimism (however naive). These last two trajectories are the

domain of the postcolonial/subaltern scholar, writer, citizen, or intellectual. The

processes and strategies invoked here take on similar shapes, mainly in revisionary

historiography, literature, theater, etc., though they most often involve rereading

documents that were intended to convey something entirely different, and

infusing them with new significance—in short, inserting irony where none was

intended.6 As C.A. Bayly describes it, “the Subalterns’ forte has generally lain in

rereading, and mounting an internal critique, of the police reports, administrative

memoranda, newspapers and accounts by colonial officials and the literate, which

earlier historians had used for different purposes” (117).

In this three-part outline we see the underlying theoretical goal of Subaltern

Studies. Much of the seductiveness of these studies, and part of the reason

164 • Research in African Liter ature s

that Subaltern Studies has become so well-traveled, is that by c*****ng ways that

“silence” is first, employed, second, signaled or exposed, and third, eliminated or

overcome, we are actually c*****ng a theory of change. This is why, not coincidentally,

Spivak introduces Selected Subaltern Studies by arguing “The work of the

Subaltern Studies group offers a theory of change” (3). And, I argue, in introducing

this theory of change, the subaltern studies collective engages in the process

of “doing” history.

Guha, for example, makes it quite clear that the discourse of counterinsurgency

in colonial India effectively silenced any trace of rebel consciousness in the

Indian peasantry. Notice, for example, Guha’s language in “On Some Aspects

of the Historiography of Colonial India” where he explains that the domain of

subaltern politics demonstrates an entire “index of an important historical truth,

that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation” (5; emphasis in the

original). It takes very little imagination to see this national “failure to speak” as

a moment of institutionally sanctioned silence. And Guha’s attempts “to acknowledge

the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion,” which he says necessarily

involves attributing “a consciousness to him,” are precisely attempts to uncover

silence and give it a voice. Furthermore, in his explicit nod to Mao Zedong’s illfated

attempt at introducing a multiplicity of “voices,” Guha writes, “It is the study

of this failure [of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation] which constitutes the

central problematic of the historiography of colonial India. There is no one given way

of investigating this problematic. Let a hundred flowers blossom and we don’t

mind even the weeds.”7 The point here is that Guha seems optimistically eager to

allow for a sudden resurrection or flowering of “voices.” It is, in a sense, a call to

eliminate the silence of the subaltern.8

In a later, more reflective essay entitled “The Small Voice of History,” Guha

talks about the need for the Subaltern to develop an extra sensitive “ear” for certain

“small voices” that he says are “drowned in the noise of statist commands” (3). For

Guha, statism is the sinister vehicle for inflicting silence, and Subaltern Studies is

the means to overcome that silence:

It is up to us to make that extra effort, develop the special skills and above all

cultivate the disposition to hear these voices and interact with them. For they

have many stories to tell—stories which for their complexity are unequalled

by statist discourse and indeed opposed to its abstract and oversimplifying

modes. (3)

Readers of Subaltern Studies should keep in mind that although the descriptive

language of the Subalterns is often quite different, the underlying revisionary

impulse, and its implicit move along the postcolonial trajectory of silence, is more

or less the same. Partha Chatterjee, for example, argues that the task of the Subaltern

involves a “filling up” where there is “emptiness” (79). Rosalind O’Hanlon

expands Chatterjee’s metaphor, explaining that the Subaltern’s objective is one of

“making an absence into presences, of peopling a vacant space with figures” (79).

Gyan Prakash talks of the Subaltern’s attempt to “disclose [sometimes he uses

the word “recover” (240)] that which is concealed” (180). Sumit Sarkar assigns the

Subaltern the job of “widening horizons” in historical research (302). Said talks of

the Subaltern’s penchant for restoring “missing narratives” (vii). Spivak similarly

R. John Williams • 165

points to the Subaltern’s desire to counteract the “sanctioned ignorance” of colonial

and neo-colonial historiography (6). David Arnold argues that one of the

central characteristics of the notion of subalternity was “that such groups lacked

autonomy” (30). But whether one speaks of learning to hear “small” voices, letting

hidden flowers bloom, filling up emptinesses, disclosing what has been concealed,

widening horizons, restoring missing narratives, counteracting officially imposed

ignorance, restoring autonomy, or simply giving a voice to the heretofore voiceless,

one is essentially articulating the same revisionary impulse to write history

“from below,” which, I argue, is an impulse that consistently operates within the

aforementioned postcolonial trajectory of “silence.”

Before examining how this silence operates in Farah’s novel, it is important to

point out that most discussions of Sweet and Sour Milk explore the elements of the

novel that deconstruct the familiar oppositions of family and state. Derek Wright’s

insightful essay “Fathers and Sons,” for example, argues that Sweet and Sour Milk

exposes ways that the traditionally patriarchal structures of family, buttressed by

the religious authority of Islam, and further strengthened by the boundary-forming

structures of clan, are intricately complicit with the larger, more powerful

authority of the modern police state (45). In a similar vein, Jacqueline Bardolph

vividly illustrates how brothers and sisters in Farah’s two trilogies “enjoy a privileged

mode of communication, exchanging secrets in complete trust, much more

freely than with their spouses or parents,” which in turn displays important links

between freedom and protection (727).

Some scholars have also begun to explore Farah’s interventions into the

larger concerns of African literature and postcolonial theory. For example, when

Farah won the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, World Literature

Today devoted an entire volume to Farah’s work, including Simon Gikandl’s essay

“Nuruddin Farah and Postcolonial Textuality,” in which GikandI points to an

important feature of Farah’s literature that approximates what I have outlined

above regarding the postcolonial trajectory of “silence”:

If it has taken long for Farah to be recognized as an important modern writer,

this is perhaps because his novels seem to want to perform an impossible task:

that of bringing the tradition of nationalist literature into a productive confrontation

with the art of postcolonial failure. While the careers of other major

African novelists—most notably Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—have

been defined by an explicit movement away from the ideologies of cultural

nationalism to a radical critique of the postcolonial state, Farah’s works are

unique in their contemporaneous representation of both positions. In Farah’s

early novels in particular, the mapping, endorsement, and critique of nationalism

is represented against the background of postcolonial decay and the utopian

possibilities held up both by the Somali poetic tradition and a modern culture.

In these works, terms such as modern and tradition, which have been the central

paradigms in some of the most powerful commentaries on African literature,

are constantly blurred and deauthorized. (753)

What Gikandi so brilliantly identifies as a “productive confrontation with the art

of postcolonial failure,” through the constant “blurring” and “deauthorizing” of

tradition and modernity, could also be understood as an important intervention

with the postcolonial trajectory of silence. Such a framework, I argue, is especially

166 • Research in African Liter ature s

helpful in reading Sweet and Sour Milk, since silence in that novel plays a crucial

role in not only the thematic development of the narrative, but also in allowing us

to understand the book’s more powerful revisionary and insurrectionary qualities;

in short, how the novel “does history.”

Farah’s novel begins with a violent imposition of silence. Soyaan, an official

in the Somali national government, who we find out later has been secretly plotting

resistance movements, is lying on a bed at his mother’s home, violently ill,

his stomach churning. Questions immediately crowd his thoughts: “What had

he eaten? With whom had he eaten? What poisonous food had he been given?”

(1). Soyaan will not recover from this illness, and the portrayal of his death has

important symbolic repercussions in the novel, but before he dies, we are introduced

to a few more equally important characters, members of Soyann’s family:

his twin brother, Loyaan, and his father, Keynaan. Both of these characters take

on a specific symbolic signficance as the story unfolds. Loyaan becomes the crux

of resistance in the novel as he searches for the reasons behind his brother’s death,

and Keynaan typifies the traitorous neo-colonial sycophant who “sells out” to the

seductiveness of the “independent” dictatorship of Somalia. Soyaan’s relationship

to these two characters, and the distinct shape he assumes in their memories after

his death eventually determines the relative volume of his posthumous silence.

Indeed, silence is ominously everywhere in this first chapter. At one point,

Keynaan has come to see Soyaan, whose stomach pains are growing worse by

the minute. Farah makes it clear that Soyaan is hardly pleased with his father’s

visit: “Of late,” he writes, “the two had been on very bad terms” (9). The terms

are complicated, but basically revolve around Soyaan’s refusal to fund yet

another marriage for his father who has begun courting a girl as young as his

daughter. When Keynaan enters the room, their conversation becomes terse and

flippant, eventually deteriorating into silence. Soyaan’s reaction is interesting:

“Silence. He couldn’t take it, Soyaan couldn’t. His itching nerve, Soyaan’s inner

impatience hazarded a move: he switched the radio on. He turned the volume

unnecessarily loud. Keynaan, to be heard, spoke at the top of his voice. When

his throat pained, Keynaan turned the volume down” (9). This exchange is small,

but hardly incidental to Farah’s overarching thematic concerns. Soyaan reacts to

the silence almost violently, and his father (the symbolic puppet of hypocritical

nationalism in this novel) starts to shout, eventually reducing Soyaan’s rebellious

noise to silence. When their conversation resumes, the poisoned Soyaan

begins renouncing the dictatorship, hiccupping violently. To his father: “ ‘Is this

Africa or is this Stalin’s Russia? I am disgusted. As soon as I feel better, I promise

you. . . .’ He hiccupped” (10). Keynaan responds by warning Soyaan to relent, to

stop putting his neck on the line, to play it safe and abandon this insurrectionary

attitude. Soyaan refuses, and the hiccups become more violent:

“As soon as I feel better, I hic will hic . . . .”

“Have a glass of cold water.”

Hiccup. “No.” (10)

Keynaan leaves him, and Soyaan’s brother, Loyaan, arrives and is with him during

his last moments. Here Soyaan’s hiccups become so violent that speech becomes

extremely difficult:

R. John Williams • 167

“And how is Father?”

“He was hic here a while ago.”

“A powerless hic patriarch, the grandest of them hic all. We are on the worst

of hic terms.”

“On account of [his new wife] Beyden?”

“Not only that.”

“What?”

“The Politics of confronhictation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The demystificahiction of inhicformation. Tell the hic masses in the simplest

of terms what is happening. Demystify hic politics. Empty those heads

filled with tons of rhetoric. Uncover whether hiding hic behind pregnant letters

such as KGB, CIA , or other hic wicked alphabet of mysteries hic. Do you hic

understand now hic?”

Soyaan’s eyes were trained on Loyaan. “I’m not sure if I do.”

A smile. A hiccup. Then:

“You will in hic time.” (15).

This is not an easy passage to read. The hiccups, temporary seizures of voice—seizures

in both senses of the word—puncture the text with stoppages, blockages,

and Soyaan’s eloquence gets difficult to decipher. Phrases like “Uncover whether

hiding behind pregnant letters . . .” seem especially fragmented, confused, and

ambiguous. Uncover whether what is hiding? Soyaan’s addled conversation with

Loyaan becomes, literally, a moment of an enforced “failure to speak,” a silence that

has been inflicted on Soyaan, deployed by the state through the poison in his body.

And Soyaan’s death, the final silencing of his voice ends on this same note:

“First, the warmth went out of Soyaan’s hand. Then the brightness out of his

eyes. Everything assumed an artificial quietness, for an unbroken fraction of a

second.

A nd Soyaan hiccupped his last.” (16)

It is not coincidental to this story that Soyaan’s murder involves a systematic

silencing of his voice, or, as the text has it, the imposition of “an artificial quietness.”

Farah’s portrayal of Soyaan’s death dramatizes the inevitable seizure of a

dissenting voice in a neocolonial dictatorship.

The broken, difficult speech of Soyaan’s final moments becomes even more

interesting when we contrast it with the official version of his last words. In an

insidious, though admittedly brilliant move to silence Soyaan’s dissenting voice,

the official media of the state immediately canonizes him as a national hero,

faithful to the General even in death. When the Minister to the Presidency comes

to see the body of Soyaan, he asks Loyaan pointedly about his last words: “Did

Soyaan—God bless his soul—not stumble on the words ‘LA BOUR IS HONOUR’,

just before he breathed his last? Did he not?” (43). Loyaan is naturally puzzled by

the Minister’s question, but when the official radio news program begins the next

day with “A few words of eulogy about Soyaan the Revolutionary,” words that

include his final, supposedly pure and loyal, thoughts that “Labour is Honour,”

things begin to make more sense to Loyaan (61).

168 • Research in African Liter ature s

The grand machinery of official historiography eventually kicks into full gear,

and the broken, seizure-induced speech of Soyaan is replaced by reports of his

eloquent and final revolutionary thoughts. Loyaan reads in the official newspaper:

A carrier of the Revolutionary Torch; the Standard-bearer of Scientific Socialism;

an advocate of Justice and Social Equality; a Believer in the General’s interpretation

of the country’s needs: Soyaan Keynaan, Allah bless him, died two days ago.

He died a premature death. He died, and his last words were praiseful of the

General’s policies: “Labour is honour and there is no General but our General. . . .

The supreme Revolutionary Council has decided to name a street after Soyaan,

the Hero of the Revolution. And on his tomb will be inscribed in gold the words:

‘Labour is honour and there is no General but our General.9

Notice also Keynaan’s testimony of his son’s final moments. In the same article,

Keynaan testifies in an interview that “took up the available columns of the middle

page” that Soyaan

remained to his last second an exemplary revolutionary who believed, without

reservation, in the leadership of the General. . . . As for his last words, I was

there by his bedside when he said them, when he spoke these words of wisdom.

I was there. “LA BOUR IS HONOUR AND THERE IS NO GENERAL BUT OUR

GENERAL .” (98)

Here the reconstruction of Soyaan’s final words becomes progressively articulate

and metaphorically propagandistic. It begins with a seemingly simple phrase,

“Labour is Honour,” related by an official voice over the radio. It then becomes,

“Labour is Honour, and there is no General but our General,” a phrase that has

important theological echoes in Islam. And finally, it is amplified in loud capital

letters: LA BOUR IS HONOUR AND THERE IS NO GENERAL BUT OUR

GENERAL .” It becomes, in short, the opposite of silence—and it is precisely how

elite historiography works.10 Later in the novel, a local official confides to Loyaan:

“[T]hey are rewriting your family’s history, Soyaan’s and the whole lot like the

Russians rewrote Lenin’s, Stalin’s or that of any of the heroes their system created

to survive subversion from within or without. They will need your co-operation,

I am sure” (106–07).

Meanwhile, Loyaan has become aware that in the last weeks before his death

Soyaan had written a series of insurrectionary memorandums, exposing damning

evidence of corruption in the General’s regime. It then becomes Loyaan’s quest to

locate and resurrect these memos, attempting to reclaim his brother’s history, and,

in effect, restore his voice. It becomes a fight for his “soul” (109).

To read Sweet and Sour Milk as a dramatization of this trajectory of silence

is also consistent with the more traditional interpretations of the novel. As mentioned

before, one of the most obvious, and most often examined themes in this

novel is the relationship of the family and the dictatorship. The domestic and the

national become the two most important realms of patriarchy in this novel, the

former often justifying and reinforcing the latter. As Keynaan reminds his son:

“I am the father. It is my prerogative to give life and death as I find fit. I’ve chosen

to breathe life into Soyaan. And remember one thing, Loyaan: if I decide this

minute to cut you in two, I can. The law of this land invests in men of my age the

R. John Williams • 169

power. I am the Grand Patriarch” (94). There are obvious religious implications in

Keynaan’s warning, which forms yet another realm of patriarchy in this novel.11

And, to make the connection between the domestic and the national even more

obvious, Farah begins section two of the novel with this epigraph by Wilhelm

Reich: “In the figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in

every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument of power”

(95). Clearly, then, Farah sees the structures of patriarchy as intimately connected

to the forms of power that grant nations their sovereignty. It makes perfect sense,

then, that the form of Soyaan’s official history would be manifested in his father’s

testimony. That is to say, the silence imposed on Soyaan’s insurrectionary agenda

comes directly from his father. The paternalism of the state becomes the perfect

tool for infantalizing (and thereby silencing) Soyaan.

This patriarchal imposition of silence may help to explain the significance

of another event in the novel, a scene that seems inserted somewhat anecdotally,

between ellipses. In this scene Loyaan and his deceased brother’s former lover,

Margaritta, are at a restaurant discussing Soyaan’s memory. What happens next

is important:

A little girl of barely four, with not a stitch of clothing on, entered the restaurant

and went straight to the table at which Loyaan and Margaritta were seated. She

picked up Loyaan’s glass, and, with one single choking gulp, sent the fruit juice

down her noisy throat. Margaritta and Loyaan silently stared at her, whereas

the waiter came down upon her with a subordinate’s unjustified fury. With one

wise move, lifting her hand, Margaritta managed to arrest the man’s raised arm:

she told him to leave the little girl alone. The little girl, for her part, walked out

defiant and silent as when she had entered. She behaved as though she had done

nothing wrong. She looked at the furious waiter just before she disappeared into

the howling dust and wind of the night. Loyaan and Margaritta were impressed.

(118; emphasis added)

This entire scene occurs in silence. The only speaker, really, is the waiter, and he

is soon silenced by a silent gesture from Margaritta. We see a child, “defiant and

silent,” expressly ignoring her “place” in society, and proceeding within that

silence to subvert the conventions that would starve her. The child does not speak,

is not allowed to speak, but remains defiant.

Later in the novel Loyaan is not only impressed by this silent defiance, but

actually learns from it, allowing it to become an important part of his subversive

and revisionary tactics. When Loyaan arrives at the office of the Minister to confront

him about his brother’s death, he sits in a chair, allowing his mind to wander.

“Nothing, no idea, not a thought. Loyaan and the Minster avoided each other’s

eyes. Then a cynosure of his wandering gaze: the globe. Keynaan. Soyaan and

Loyaan as children. The Memorandums. What Soyaan said or didn’t say” (175). The

phrase “Soyaan and Loyaan as children” is most likely intended to reflect Loyaan’s

thoughts on when they were children, as Loyaan will often reflect on events from

his childhood interaction with his father and brother. But the phrase could also

be taken as a simile, that is, Soyaan and Loyaan as if they were children, as if

appropriated by a violent paternalistic apparatus intending to silence them. But

like the little girl in the previous passage, Loyaan is determined to respond with

silent defiance. After some initial small talk, a silent gloom settles over Loyaan’s

170 • Research in African Liter ature s

conversation with the Minister: “Now where does one start? Answer: with silence.

Make him nervous, give him no chance to know what you’ve come for. He will speak. He will

begin fidgeting in his throne of temporary convenience. He will tremble with worry. Start

with silence. End with silence.”12 Eventually the Minister breaks the awkward silence

by informing Loyaan that his father, Keynaan, has been “rehabilitated,” and will

soon be working for the state again. Loyaan’s response: “Silence. Bait thrown. A

pause long enough to elicit Loyaan’s comment, to allure his trapped mind to say

something ‘against’ his father” (176). The Minister then tells Loyaan that Keynaan

has been arguing that the street named after Soyaan should be widely trafficked,

“In the good view of the public.” He asks Soyaan what he thinks. “Silence. You have

no thoughts on this, Loyaan. You have none. Not until you’ve heard a good reason why a

street is to be named after Soyaan” (177).

Eventually, however, Loyaan recognizes that he will have to respond. His

thoughts at this point are interesting: “Loyaan would now have to say something.

Take your time, though. Be the inconvenience he never imagined you could be. Look at

him cross and uncross his legs nervously. Look at his anxious face. Power is in your hand”

(177). When Loyaan finally does speak, he informs the Minister that he knows of

the Memorandums that Soyaan wrote before his death. Here, then, Loyaan moves

from the contentious exposition of silence, that is, from drawing attention to the

silence and making it known, to actually introducing documents that will revise

the silenced history and give it a voice. Soyaan, though dead and gone, suddenly

has the potential for speech again, and the Minister reacts with fury: “The Minister

leaned forward. ‘You have the Memorandums? Do you have the Memorandums?’ ”

(181). To which Loyaan’s reply is somewhat ambiguous: “The wrong set of people,

a group of jealous friends. . . .” The Minister responds with “irrepressible anger”:

“What is all this? Do you or don’t you have the Memorandums?”

“If you calm down, Mr. Minister, everything will become clear.”

The Minister threw his pen across the room in rage. His face when still silent,

fell into wrinkles reminiscent of an ants’ nest into which and out of which

flowed unholy thoughts—un-whole! (181; emphasis added)

Now things are suddenly inverted, and the word “silent” is used in reference to the

Minister, in this case the organ of the national historiography, the effects of that

silence wrinkling the Minister’s face into inhuman and voiceless forms.

In these passages, Farah provides a brilliant dramatization of the process

of anti-neocolonialist historiography, which is essentially what the Subaltern

Studies scholars have been trying to do all along: recovering a silenced subject by

amplifying its silence, drawing attention to it, and then eliminating it by giving it

a voice, and allowing it to speak. Loyaan’s silent intimidation of the Minister, and

his exposing and unveiling certain gaps and absences in his nation’s history is

Farah’s way of drawing our attention to the “small voices” of history, of “recovering

that which is concealed,” of “filling up emptiness,” of “making absences into

presences,” and of recuperating “missing stories.” In other words, Sweet and Sour

Milk is a drama of restor(y)ing the past.

Now having outlined this three-part trajectory of silence, and having tried to

show that it forms the basic structural impulse of Subaltern Studies, and having

pointed to its striking dramatization in Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk, I would like

R. John Williams • 171

to turn and puncture that argument, break it down, and attempt to complicate

its deceptive simplicity. But before launching into a critique of my own (arguably

oversimplistic) three-part trajectory of silence, I will point out that there

is certainly nothing wrong with creating simple, structural paradigms, testing

them out, and then moving on to complicate and dissect them. If anything, that

is what has really happened in Subaltern Studies. For example, in the years since

the first volumes of Subaltern Studies were published, the term “subaltern” itself

has been both useful as a classifying term, and subject to poignant complications.

Notice Arnold’s attempt to gauge the usefulness of Gramsci’s term in the context

of Guha’s work:

This bipartite division [between subaltern and elite] of a society as complexly

hierarchical as that of colonial India is not without its problems. To take but

one obvious example, the rich peasants who appear as subalterns in their relations

with a landed elite of the zamindar type are in themselves an elite in their

dominant relations with the poorer rural strata of landless laborers and village

artisanal and service groups. Any given society may divide in different ways

in different situations, but, consistent with Gramsci’s theorization, the central

problematic is seen to lie in the fundamental and persistent division of society

between the subordinate, laboring, cultivating groups and the classes that

exercise economic and political domination over them. (34–35)

In other words, of course, there are problems with an equation as simple as A/B,

but there is something useful in starting with such an equation, particularly if it

is used to launch more complicated and interesting critiques.

There have been several Subaltern Studies scholars who have drawn attention

to the problematic nature of attempting to simply give a voice to “silence.” In

“Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial

South Asia” O’Hanlon raises the obvious question of from where, exactly, these

new “voices” are to emerge. That is, within what subjectivity are these new, or

forgotten voices to be reconstructed? In her words, “how are we to configure

their presence, if it is not to be in terms of liberal humanist notions of subjectivity

and agency [?]”13 By situating her critique among Marxist debates in a European

context, O’Hanlon argues that “the problem of experience, separated from that of

agency, might be more fruitfully thought without the notion of universal human

subjectivities” (74). Exactly what she means by differentiating “experience” and

“agency” is perhaps less interesting here than is her move to complicate what she

understands as the fundamental—and fundamentally simple—paradigm of Subaltern

Studies. By ignoring these complications, she says, we run the risk of simply

lapsing into “classic” forms of “liberal humanism” (80).

Of course, one could also argue, perhaps with an appeal to Spivak’s machiavellian

“strategic essentialism,” that there is something ultimately more practical

and necessary in simple constructions like my three-part trajectory of silence.

Such an argument, however, is perhaps a misunderstanding of Spivak’s initial

argument, though my purpose is not to try to clarify Spivak on this point, except

to say that her own essays in Subaltern Studies seem to dramatize the necessary

move away from paradigmatic strategic essentialism. O’Hanlon, however, refuses

to see this, and thus allows her own complication of the paradigm to serve as a

warning against Spivak. O’Hanlon writes, “[W]e should certainly hesitate before

172 • Research in African Liter ature s

accepting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s suggestion,” even though in the context

of Spivak’s essay, her now-famous phrase is always descriptive rather than prescriptive.

My point here is not that O’Hanlon is wrong, or that Spivak is right, but

rather that both of them seem to be doing two things: 1) pointing to something

useful—though decidedly simple and essentialist—in the early Subaltern Studies

paradigm, and 2) making an attempt to introduce new and creative ways to

complicate that earlier simplicity. And they are certainly not alone. C.A. Bayly

similarly argues,

Down almost to the very bottom of society every subaltern was an elite to

someone lower than him. [. . .] Stressing the autonomy of ‘the peasant,’ as the

Subaltern authors have done, has served a valuable purpose in enriching what

was in danger of becoming a somewhat mechanical and abstract historiography.

Simply to stress that autonomy, as they are sometimes inclined to do, however, is

not very helpful in any attempt to specify the nature of historical change. (126)

Here, again, we see a characterization of an early paradigm’s simplicity and usefulness,

followed by suggestions for complication and revision.14 Prakash follows

suit by arguing that the early Subaltern Studies strategies were able to “break

the undivided entity of India into a multiplicity of changing positions which are

then treated as the effects of power relations” (179), but then goes on to argue that

we must move beyond such simple “foundational” histories, toward something

supposedly more heterogeneous and “post-foundational” (174–75).

The main complications that emerge are as follows (and I will use O’Hanlon

as an example of each): First, the recognition that in the elimination of certain

silences, other silences are enforced or ignored, or that, more simply put, not

everyone can talk at once. In O’Hanlon words, we must be wary of the possibility

that the construction of a peasant community involves “the suppression of those

not counting as the ‘individuals’ [. . .] women, untouchables, laborers and so on”

(98). Second, that in attempting to give voice to that silent “other” we run the risk

of simply speaking for and from ourselves. As O’Hanlon argues, “we must ask

ourselves whether we are in danger in using it [that is, the textual space opened

up by the new “voice”] to turn the silence of the subaltern into speech, but to

make their words address our own concerns, and to render their figures in our

own self-image” (96).

So how does Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk hold up under this necessary complication?

How do these problematics alter our understanding of the novel as a

dramatization of the tripartite postcolonial trajectory of silence? The answer to

that question is that Sweet and Sour Milk is still quite useful, and can quite easily

sustain a more complicated, “post-foundational” reading, though in some of

these complications we may be going beyond questions of authorial intent. First,

we should point out that the characters in Farah’s novel are hardly successful in

restoring a “voice” to Soyaan. In the end of the novel, Loyaan is offered a “position”

in the government somewhere out of the country. The reader is not quite sure,

however, whether that “position” will involve Loyaan’s murder (they told Soyaan

the same thing before his death), or whether he will actually capitulate, becoming

yet another silenced victim, and move abroad where he cannot cause any more

trouble. Either way, however, the optimistic notion that Soyaan’s voice could be

R. John Williams • 173

restored, that his “silence” could be overcome, is certainly put into question at the

end of the novel. We hardly end on an optimistic note of recovered “voice.”

There is also another element of Farah’s novel that radically dramatizes the

more complicated situation we have introduced, though it is here that Farah may

disagree with our reading. I am speaking of the fact that although Farah’s novel

appears six years after the establishment of an official Somali script, Sweet and

Sour Milk is written in English, further alienating the text from any more general

or subaltern readership in Somalia. How is it, we might ask Farah, that Sweet and

Sour Milk, a literary text of significant complexity and insurrectionary impulses, is

written in the language of a colonial elite? Now, one could argue, as does Chinua

Achebe in 1975, that English remains the most important vehicle for the possibility

of an “African” literature:

Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position

to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because

it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful

value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice which may

yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good

with it. (58)

But while the transnational possibilities of English are undeniable, the question

of the actual readership in English, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues in Decolonizing

the Mind, is not quite as easy to explain. That is, there can be no denying that the

predominant venue for Farah’s work is predominantly the “West.” Who, exactly,

is Farah trying to convince in this novel? Who is it that finally hears the “silence”

that he has pointed to here? It may be that the eradication of silence is as much a

process of “hearing” as it is a question of voice.

NOTES

1. Heteroglossia is an English approximation of the Russian raznorecie (literally

translated as “multilanguagedness”), introduced by M. M. Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination

(259–422). The term refers to the necessary tension and competition between the

linguistic and discursive multiplicity of a given people and the official though often

superficial “unity” of a national discourse. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a literary

genre is best able to exploit the deconstructive effects of heteroglossia. One could

also include in this list of qualities inherent in literature the articulation of a “minor”

language as articulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (see ch. 10). For

a discussion on figurative language in literature, and a general theorization of the

“imaginary,” see Miller, On Literature ch. 2: “Literature as Virtual Reality.”

2. See x–xi. Iser thus attempts to solve the problem by introducing a third category:

“Because this interaction [between fiction and reality] produces far more than just a

contrast between the two, we might do better to discard the old opposition of fiction

and reality altogether, and to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive, and

what we shall henceforth call the imaginary. It is out of this triad that the text arises” (1).

According to Iser, the real benefit of viewing literature this way is that it frees us from

the need for a metaphysical, transcendental position when making an analysis: “The

old opposition between fiction and reality presupposed a tacit knowledge of what constituted

each of them, with the fiction being basically characterized by the absence of

those attributes that defined the real” (2). This “tacit knowledge” implies a nontextual

174 • Research in African Liter ature s

element that a community must agree upon in order to successfully delineate the fiction

from the reality in the text, which is always a metaphysical position. My contention

that Farah’s text “does history” is an attempt to acknowledge the necessarily imaginative

procedures of revisionary historiography.

3. The word “subaltern,” borrowed from Antonio Gramsci and sometimes used

to refer to a concept as vague as the “people,” is usually defined by Subaltern Studies

scholars in contrast to the term “elite,” which in a colonial or postcolonial situation

signifies “dominant groups, foreign as well as indigenous” (Said 44). The “subaltern,”

then, representa “the demographic difference between the total Indian population and

all those [. . .] described as ‘elite.’ Some of these classes and groups such as the lesser

rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper-middle peasants who

‘naturally’ ranked among the ‘people’ and the ‘subaltern,’ could under certain circumstances

act for the ‘elite,’ as explained above, and therefore be classified as such in some

local or regional situations—an ambiguity which it is up to the historian to sort out on

the basis of a close and judicious reading of his evidence” (44). The difference between

Subaltern Studies and Subaltern Studies in current discourse can also be confusing. As

I am using it here, Subaltern Studies refers to the specific work published in the journal

by that name in India, while Subaltern Studies refers more generally to the work done

by historians who have contributed to the journal, but who have often done substantial

historiography outside the journal as well. Ranajit Guha, for example, was one of the

founding editors of Subaltern Studies, but has also published several monographs that

could be categorized under the more general rubric of Subaltern Studies.

4. I n this sense, I am referring to the inherent problems in characterizing history

as the “truth” of what happened “out there.” As Richard Rorty argues, “We need to

make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that

truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to

say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes

which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is out there is simply to

say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of

human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be

out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot

so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are

not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false” (5). In other words, there is no

history outside of language and discourse, so the question of “truth” in historiography

will always be mediated by human contingency.

5. One could even argue that works of “fiction” like Farah’s may be every bit as

revisionary and insurrectionary as works of “history” like those of the Subaltern

Studies scholars. In fact, since Farah’s work is “literature” and therefore already “nonfoundational,”

it is perhaps not quite as troubled by the kinds of critique that Prakash

identifies in the work of some historians (see Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist

Histories”). Thus, this ability to launch a critique of the “real” from the perspective of

the “imaginary” becomes the strength of work like Farah, who, in the words of Jacqueline

Bardolph, “as created an imaginary world that is immediately recognizable”

(“On Nuruddin Farah” 120).

6. See p. 6, emphasis in the original. One could argue, though I do not have the

time or space to do it here, that because the Subaltern Studies collective involved a

process of insurrectionary ironization, it was able to “travel” more than other theories

of revisionary historiographies have. For a related discussion, see Chakrabarty,

Habitations of Modernity.

7. The quote could be read as a somewhat ironic revision of Mao, since, clearly, Mao

did mind the “weeds,” and imprisoned and killed quite a few of them after launching

the Anti-Rightist campaign in the late 1950s.

R. John Williams • 175

8. Following Guha’s lead, Dipesh Chakrabarty even points out that paying attention

to “silence” actually comprises one of his most basic methodologies as a scholar

of subalternity: “[R]uling-class documents often used for historical reconstructions

of working-class conditions can be read both for what they say and for their ‘silences’ ”

(“Conditions” 179; emphasis added).

9. See p. 97. If there were time and space, we could perhaps connect the “event” of

Soyaan’s death (and its subsequent theorization) to Shahid Amin’s brilliant work, Event,

Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992. As Amin points out, the violence of Chauri

Chaura is immediately appropriated by official historiography, made into a didactic

metaphor and carefully inscribed in the local collective memory. Likewise, in Farah’s

text, Soyaan’s death becomes instantaneously a metaphor, and his father’s “memory”

of the event becomes crucial for the official historiography.

10. For a detailed examination of the discursive mechanics of elite (as opposed to

subaltern) historiography, see Guha, “On Some Aspects” and “The Prose of Counter-

Insurgency,” both collected in Selected Subaltern Studies.

11. O ne should also remember yet another realm of patriarchy implicated in this

story, namely, the international. Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments makes it

clear that the authoritarianism of colonialism was always couched in paternalistic

rhetoric (17).

12. See 175–76. Italics are in the original, unless otherwise noted.

13. See p. 74. Raising a very similar concern, Kamala Visweswaran takes as her

“starting point the problematics of retrieving speech, and of constituting certain

gendered subjects as subaltern” (84). In asking how certain forms of subalternity are

“inflected by gender,” Visweswaran acknowledges the necessarily complex reality of

constituting or recovering the “small voices” that other Subalterns (like Guha and

Chatterjee) seem confident they can locate, identify, and amplify.

14. Bayly makes an interesting move as well that seems to characterize much of

Subaltern Studies “revision”—the move to discussing Subaltern Studies scholars in

the third person (e.g., They were on the right track, however naïve, but they should

revise according to my new and creative complications). This is something endemic

to the move to complicate Subaltern Studies—scholars speaking of themselves as

marginalized, as subaltern to the Subaltern.

WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet On

Creation Day. New York: Anchor, 1975. 5–62.

Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992. Berkeley: U of California

P, 1995.

Arnold, David. “Gramsci and Peasant Subalterneity in India.” Chaturvedi, Mapping 24–49.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Bardolph, Jacqueline. “On Nuruddin Farah.” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (2000):

119–21.

. “Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah’s Two Trilogies.” World Literature

Today 4.2 (1998): 727–32.

Bayly, C. A.“Rallying Around the Subaltern.” Chatavurdi, Mapping 116–26.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions.” Guha

and Spivak 179–232.

. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 2002.

176 • Research in African Liter ature s

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1993.

Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso,

2000. vii–xix.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963.

Farah, Nuruddin. Sweet and Sour Milk. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1992.

Gikandl, Simon. “Nuruddin Farah and Postcolonial Textuality.” World Literature Today

4.2 (1998): 753–58.

Guha, Ranajit. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” Guha and Spivak 45–88. Guha,

Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New

York: Oxford UP, 1988.

. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Chaturvedi, Mapping

1–7.

. “The Small Voice of History.” Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History

and Society. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 1–12.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: C*****ng Literary Anthropology. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins P, 1993.

Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing

the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey,

1986.

O’Hanlon, Rosalind. “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance

in Colonial South Asia.” Chaturvedi, Mapping 72–115.

Prakash, Gyan. “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives

from Indian Historiography.” Chaturvedi, Mapping 163–90.

. “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook.” Chaturvedi,

Mapping 220–38.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.

Said, Edward W. Selected Subaltern Studies. Foreword. Guha and Spivak v–x.

Sarkar, Sumit. “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies.” Chaturvedi, Mapping

300–23.

Spivak, Gayatori Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.”

Guha and Spivak 3–32.

Wright, Derek. The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies,

1994.

Visweswaran, Kamala. “Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and

Its Historiography.” Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society.

Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 83–125.

• • • • •

[Taliban]

Yesterday, Nuruddin Farah was interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on NewsHour of the PBS channel. Once again, Nuruddin was spinning his twisted view of Islam, Somali women and the veil. This is an excerpt of the interview:

 

JEFFREY BROWN: That Somalia, that Mogadishu of your youth comes through, through this character coming back there. But what she finds is a -- it seems like a real clash now of, I guess, of histories, a clash of the old, of that Somalia, and a new place, that is both violent, where there's a rise of Islam. It seems like a very, very different place.

 

NURUDDIN FARAH: Sure. Well, let me tell you the rise of Islam in Somalia. This is a more recent phenomena, recent in the sense of in the past 15, 16 years.

 

This is the consequence of many, many Somalis becoming jobless in the era of Siad Barre and many of them ending up working in the Gulf countries, in Saudi Arabia and in the Emirates, and there learning ways of worship that are very, very different from the way we used to practice Islam.

 

And then they have come back, some of these people, with the idea of the veil. We did not have in our tradition -- there was no veil, no veil until the 1980s.

 

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/jan-june07/farah_02-27.html

 

You can listen to or watch the interview in audio and video formats.

[Abdulladiif Al-Fiqih]

Nuruddin Farah and Louise Erdrich in Conversion

 

Suday March 4

3:30-5:30 pm

Cowles Auditorium

 

H. H Humphrey Center

 

 

Kobtan iskeen hadii aan duqa su'aal uqabto

[nuune]

^^ lool, kobta uu ka hadli doono ma Koonfur Afrikaa mise waa meel kale

[sheherazade]

Self-righteous mumbo jumbo. Everyone's a cleric these days. Maxaa dad diinta nacaya as a result.

[Abdulladiif Al-Fiqih]

Nuune, kobtuu ka-hadlidoono waa kobtan

 

Minneapolis ma-aha kobtaas koonfur afrika

 

Adigu ma-kobtan baad joogtaa mise kobtaas Nuunow?

[Taliban]

Originally posted by sheherazade:

Self-righteous mumbo jumbo. Everyone's a cleric these days.

This is about legitimate criticism, not "self-righteousness", "holier-than-thouness", "judging someone" or other terms the West taught moderate Muslims in order to dismiss legitimate criticism.

[sheherazade]

^is qor, did you recognise yourself in my words or did you want to speak for the sake of as per or both?

[Taliban]

Originally posted by sheherazade:

did you recognise yourself in my words or did you want to speak for the sake of as per or both?

You will ban me if I don't answer?