Books on Somalia: start your reading tour with The World's Most Dangerous Place; The Orchard of Lost Souls; and Crossbones.

[Admin]

 

 

Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah

Set in Somalia around the 2006 US-backed Ethiopian invasion, the final volume in Farah's Past Imperfect trilogy can be read as a standalone novel. This absorbing story puts a human face to the tragedy of a failed state.

 

Three members of a Somali-American family return to find their homeland imploding under an Islamist regime in control of the capital, Mogadishu, as war nears and piracy proliferates off the coast of breakaway Puntland. Foreign correspondent Malik has come to write about political conflict and piracy; his father-in-law, Jeebleh, is re-establishing contact with old friends who he hopes will protect Malik and ease his path; and Malik's elder brother, Ahl, is searching for a stepson thought to have joined the Islamist militia on advice from an imam in his Minnesota hometown.

 

Farah skilfully evokes the paranoia and desperation that stalks the fragmented country, where trust is in short supply and good people find themselves unable to steer it away from self-destruction.

 

This is an impassioned insider's portrayal of present-day Somalia, and of lives blighted by relentless violence and civil war.

 

Somalia's most famous novelist went into exile in the 1970s, during the rule of the dictator Siad Barre. He now lives in the US and South Africa, but has vowed "to keep my country alive by writing about it".

The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

On the eve of the civil war in the late 1980s, two women and a girl in Hargeisa, north-western Somalia, find themselves caught up in the turbulence as their lives intersect.

 

In this story of conflict and survival, events unfold through the eyes of Deqo, a nine-year-old orphan born and raised in a refugee camp, who ran away and is now cared for by prostitutes; Kawsar, an elderly, grieving widow bedridden after being beaten at a police station; and Filsan, a zealous young soldier from Mogadishu, here to help suppress the growing rebellion against the dictatorship. All three are wrestling with memories of lost loved ones.

 

In a chapter on each revealing their past, Mohamed sensitively builds her cast of strong, self-empowered female characters.

 

As the revolt grows and the army moves "not just to black out the city but to silence it", the civil war's first "orgy of violence [is] enacted". But amid the harrowing events taking place, the author inserts a ray of hope.

 

Mohamed succeeds in achieving her stated goal of "[elucidating] Somali history for a wider audience". The author, born in Hargeisa (now in Somaliland), came to Britain with her family aged five – a temporary move made permanent by the civil war.

The World's Most Dangerous Place by James Fergusson

Under the attention-seeking title is a perceptive and engaging account of Somalia's descent into violence and lawlessness. The country has not had a properly functioning central government since the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre in 1991. Meanwhile, it has seen seemingly endless clan warfare, abrutal Islamist insurgency, foreign military interventions, famine, pervasive corruption, piracy and – unsurprisingly – the flight of about 2 million people abroad.

 

The civil war is known locally as "the destruction", and one source tells the author that wherever the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out to in the world, they return nightly to stable in Somalia.

 

Fergusson travels within Somalia and beyond, also visiting the peaceful but unrecognised Republic of Somaliland; the breakaway region of Puntland, home to a lucrative piracy industry; and Somali diaspora in the US and UK.

 

He explores the backstory essential to understanding how the country gained its unenviable reputation as "the world's most failed state", and why peace and security in Somalia matter far beyond its borders.

 

Fergusson detects reasons for optimism, with the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabaab Islamists in retreat, piracy reduced, bustling markets, Somalis returning from abroad, and politics and law and order slowly re-emerging.

 

Source: The Guardian

http://www.somaliaonline.com/books-on-somalia-start-your-reading-tour-with-the-worlds-most-dangerous-place-the-orchard-of-lost-souls-and-crossbones/

[Alpha Blondy]

Somali literary figures continue to denigrate our collective will. titles such as ''Crossbones '' and ''The Orchard of Lost Souls'' la yaab ma leh. they are worst than the white voyeurs. this does not surprise.