The Disorder of Things

A Foucauldian Approach To The Work Of Nuruddin Farah

John Masterson

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781868148431
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nuruddin Farah is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated voices in contemporary world literature. Michel Foucault is revered as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, with his discursive legacy providing inspiration for scholars working in a range of interdisciplinary fields. The Disorder of Things offers a reading of the Somali novelist through the prism of the French philosopher. The book argues that the preoccupations that have remained central throughout Farah's forty year career, including political autocracy, female infibulation, border conflicts, international aid and development, civil war, transnational migration and the Horn of Africa's place in a so-called 'axis of evil', can be mapped onto some key concerns in Foucault's writing most notably Foucault's theoretical turn from 'disciplinary' to 'biopolitical' power. In both the colonial past and the postcolonial present, Somalia is typically represented as an incubator of disorder: whether in relation to internecine conflict, international terrorism or contemporary piracy. Through his work, both fictional and non-fictional, Farah strives to present alternative stories to an expanding global readership. The Disorder of Things analyses the politics and poetics that underpin this literary project, beginning with Farah's first fictional cycle, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979-1983), and ending with his Past Imperfect trilogy (2004-2011). Farah's writing calls for a more refined, substantial reading of our current geo-political situation. As such, it both warrants and compels the kind of critical engagement foregrounded throughout The Disorder of Things. This book will appeal to students, academics and general readers with an interest in the interdisciplinary study of literature. Its engagement with theorists, drawn from postcolonial, feminist and development studies, set against the backdrop of a host of philosophical and sociological discourses, shows how such intellectual cross-fertilisation can enliven a single-author study.

1

Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method

For myself, I prefer to utilise the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.

(Michel Foucault – ‘Prison Talk’, 1980: 53–54)

I wrote The Offering for the University of Essex, for my M.A. thesis ... on the day I was to submit it I had a conflict, an open, theatrical clash with one of my lecturers, and I used bad language, or she used bad language. And then I walked out and never went back to collect the degree.

(Nuruddin Farah – ‘How Can We Talk of Democracy?’, 2002a: 40)

University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions. The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you’re writing about. Some people write about schools, groups of artists, historical trends or political tendencies ... but usually one central figure emerges.

(Patricia Duncker – Hallucinating Foucault, 1997: 4–5)

ON RARE OCCASIONS, YOU STUMBLE ACROSS A TEXT THAT MAKES YOU smile and wince at the same time. Such was my experience with Patricia Duncker’s debut novel. Her anonymous student protagonist obsesses over and finally locates errant author Paul Michel in a provincial French asylum. He subsequently helps him escape, sleeps with him and, various twists of fate later, attends his funeral. Beyond its intrigues of plot and character, Duncker’s novel succeeds in representing the problematic, because human, aspect of research. Before his meeting with Paul Michel, her protagonist has only a tepid passion for academic investigation. It is only when researcher and researched collide that he feels his work truly begins to ‘mean’ anything. When the scholar uncovers previously confidential correspondence between his author and namesake Michel Foucault, the analogy between university library and madhouse appears even starker: ‘Paul Michel was a novelist and Foucault was a philosopher, but there were uncanny links between them’ (Duncker 1997: 6). In the final reckoning, Paul Michel explains how the young scholar might achieve a healthier balance in life, within the university and beyond: ‘I make the same demands of people and fictional texts, petit – that they should be open-ended, carry within them the possibility of being and of changing whoever it is they encounter’ (Duncker 1997: 111).

In my case, the truth has not been quite as strange as fiction. The long shadow cast by Foucault throughout Duncker’s novel has, however, had a similarly profound effect on my writing and thinking. Without much by way of gentle introduction, the first lecture I attended as an undergraduate at the University of Essex began with a reading of the striking description that opens Discipline and Punish. Forced to imagine Damiens’ dismembered body, as I also struggled to deal with novice nerves, induced a queasiness I took to be synonymous with university life. Whilst I cannot recall the rest of the lecture, this graphic depiction had a marked impact. Years later, and in a different academic setting, a similar feeling set in after reading visceral descriptions of menstruation, as well as sexual and political violence in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps. From this experience, an interest in forging the ‘uncanny links’ identified by Duncker’s narrator was born. I began hallucinating Foucault once more and, on discovering the Somali author had spent a period as a graduate student at my old institution, an eerie inevitability began to charge the dialogic impulse behind this book. With a view to pushing beyond the personal, however, this introduction indicates how I intend to avoid the maddening pitfalls of Duncker’s imagined reader.

Whilst the remainder of this chapter provides a discursive foundation for the study as a whole, particularly in terms of why I believe Foucault’s work offers an enabling lens through which to view Farah’s, I begin by introducing the Somali writer. This also allows me to establish what this book is not. In no sense is The Disorder of Things a literary biography. Whilst Farah is a subject worthy of such an endeavour, I make no claims to it here. In establishing a platform for what follows, however, I suggest that the peculiarities of Farah’s own narrative, particularly the manner in which he has negotiated his own exile from Somalia as well as a series of transnational wanderings, necessarily informs his oeuvre.

Locating Farah

Born on 24 November 1945 in Baidoa, a southern Somali city then under Italian control, Nuruddin Farah’s story was entangled with the contested national narrative from a young age. In 1947, his family moved to Kallafo in the Ogaden region, soon to be ceded to Ethiopia by the British. As I discuss below, Farah’s most critically and commercially acclaimed novel, Maps (1986), is set against the backdrop of the Ogaden War (1977–1978) between Somalia and Ethiopia. Following an earlier conflict in the region after Independence in 1960, Farah’s family was compelled to move to the capital, Mogadiscio¹. To a significant degree, therefore, the constant dislocations and relocations that defined this formative period have had a profound impact on his literary vision. As I argue throughout this book, Farah’s obsession with disputed borders, whether cartographic or conceptual, derives from intimately personal and intensely political contexts. Similarly, whilst adept in various genres and languages, it is arguably the complex notion of being ‘at home’ that casts the longest shadow over Farah’s own story and, by extension, his fictional and non-fictional work. After receiving his BA in Literature and Philosophy from Punjab University, India in 1969, Farah returned to his native Somalia following the military coup that brought Siyad Barre to power. It was during his time teaching at the National University of Somalia, as well as in some of Mogadiscio’s secondary schools, that Farah published his first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970). Focusing on the trials and tribulations of a stoic female protagonist Ebla, who moves from rural village to the metropolis, the text establishes some of the enduring political and ethical concerns that have preoccupied Farah throughout his career of more than forty years. If this initiated his attempt to speak the truth to power, in the Saidian sense, his literary activities in the mid – to late seventies would see him fall foul of Barre’s regime and its censors.

Following the suspension of his Somali-language novel Tallow Waa Telee Ma, which was serialised in a national newspaper in 1973, Farah was awarded a UNESCO grant to pursue his postgraduate studies. He left for England the following year, establishing a temporary intellectual home at Essex. His departure from Somalia would prove pivotal in more ways than one. In 1976, Farah published his second English language novel, A Naked Needle. A satirical, if sobering portrait of an increasingly authoritarian society, the book inevitably met with the disapproval of Barre’s regime. Following a fortuitous phone call home to his brother, who warned him of the controversy stirred by A Naked Needle, Farah avoided a return to incarceration or worse. That this conversation took place whilst he was in Rome, en route to Somalia, is significant. Farah would effectively remain in transit for much of his life, not returning to Somalia until 1996. Whilst Farah has frequently reflected on the personal toll exacted by such a separation, he has also suggested that this distance allows him to be more productive as well as refining his writerly and political vision. In ‘A Country in Exile’, for instance, he maintains that ‘[a]lthough one often links a person in exile to a faraway locality, the fact is I felt more joined to my writing than to any country with a specific territoriality’ (Farah 1992: 5). It is therefore notable that, whilst his novels regularly feature protagonists whose routes take in former colonial centres, whether British or Italian, or neo-colonial hubs such as the United States or Canada, his fictions remain rooted, however precariously, in Somalia’s contested soil. Farah’s oft-cited comment to this effect (‘I have tried to keep my country alive by writing about it’) is once more resonant in both intimately personal and intensely political terms, particularly when considered in relation to Somalia’s turbulent postcolonial narrative. A fascination with the ways in which this personal/political dialectic is negotiated throughout Farah’s writing informs much of what follows.

The eighties saw Farah living and working in locations as diverse as Los Angeles and Khartoum, Bayreuth and Kampala. It was also a time of great literary productivity. Following an appointment as Visiting Reader at the University of Jos, Nigeria, Farah continued his itinerant journey across Africa, moving to Gambia in 1984 and then to Sudan following the publication of Maps. In the early nineties, during a spell teaching at Makerere University in Uganda, Farah once again fell foul of the political powers-that-be. After the Swedish-language publication of Gavor (Gifts) in 1990, Farah resigned his position following criticism by President Museveni. If this got the decade off to a rather inauspicious start, 1991 was a year of watershed moments. Whilst Farah collected the Tucholsky Literary Award in Stockholm, it was Siyad Barre’s fall from power that had the most significant impact on his life and work. In the post-Barre power vacuum, uncertainty about Somalia’s political future mounted, culminating in the failed U.S.-led intervention Operation Restore Hope. America’s military misadventures in the Horn of Africa would provide the backdrop for Farah’s first, post-9/11 novel, Links (2004). As helicopters burned and bodies were beaten in Mogadiscio, Farah found comparative stability in Nigeria following the birth of a daughter and a son. After spells in other parts of the continent and beyond, one of his next journeys would prove particularly decisive. Following Barre’s death in Abuja in 1995, Farah returned to Somalia after 22 years in exile. An emotional homecoming, the 1996 trip allowed him to witness firsthand how much his country had changed and its people had suffered since his own departure in the seventies. These experiences fed into the writing and publication of Secrets, the final instalment of the Blood in the Sun trilogy that began with Maps. After years of uprooting, Farah and his family settled in Cape Town in 1999.

Whilst my own journeys have been freely willed and much more modest in comparison with Farah’s, I use the concluding section of this study to reflect on how a meeting with him in Cape Town in 2011 galvanised this project anew. Following my relocation to South Africa in 2010, questions of home, roots and routes have assumed particular burdens of significance, both personally and professionally. In its own, necessarily ‘unhomely’ way, Farah’s work continues to have a resonant power. What I will argue throughout this book, however, is that it is the manner in which he marries the intimately personal with the intensely political that distinguishes his finest writing. If this can be seen to both pass comment on and reflect the various ruptures that have defined his own narrative as well as that of Somalia, I explore how and why it is underpinned by an enduring set of ethical and political convictions. Having offered a contextual overview of Farah’s own narrative, marked as it has been by locations, dislocations and relocations, the remainder of this introduction explores why a discursive marriage between his work and that of Michel Foucault is so enabling.

Why Farah? Why Foucault? Why Now?

Throughout this contrapuntal study, I explore how Foucault’s reflections on power, body, resistance, disciplinary institutions and biopower might be seen in productive conjunction with some of the most urgent concerns of Farah’s oeuvre. These preoccupations have endured since From a Crooked Rib to Crossbones, a text that appeared in South Africa in 2012. Whilst my analytical approach builds on the idea that there are a series of ‘uncanny links’ between their respective projects, it is important to foreground the book’s commitment to investigating sites of potential convergence and divergence. In what follows, therefore, I focus on some of the key theoretical coordinates of the study as a whole. I consider how pioneers working in predominantly postcolonial and feminist fields have readily accepted the challenge to salvage rather than savage Foucault for their own ends. The lessons taken from their work are salutary, inspiring me too to make Foucault groan and protest in what, at first sight, may seem unfamiliar settings. As I claim throughout this book, many of the ‘open-ended’ qualities that characterise Foucault’s speculations are analogous with Farah’s work. Whilst the latter has been the subject of fine single-author studies and critical compendiums, The Disorder of Things strives for something different. For a writer who is often spoken about in the same breath as Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, Farah warrants the same theoretically substantive engagement afforded to them. My contention, therefore, is that the at-once ethical and political imperatives underpinning Farah’s writing, fictional and non-fictional, invite his readers to situate it within more interdisciplinary, Foucauldian-inflected frameworks.

As such, my approach, here and throughout The Disorder of Things, takes its lead from Sam Binkley’s sense of multiple Foucaults: ‘[h]ave changing times required that we discard our old Foucaults and invent new ones, or are there parts we can save, parts we should revise, or previously neglected parts we should draw to the fore and emphasize?’ (Binkley 2010: xi). Building on this, I argue that both Farah’s fictive and Foucault’s discursive concerns morph and evolve as they shift from one key text to another. As such, Foucault’s more identifiably ‘literary’ concerns, such as the ‘death of the author’, are less significant for the purposes of this study than his privileging of particular sites, spaces and discourses concerning discipline and power. Whilst, particularly when it comes to engaging with Farah’s Blood in the Sun trilogy (comprising Maps, Gifts and Secrets), I consider contentious issues of authorship, its premature or otherwise demise and readerly responsibility, the analyses that follow are inspired by Foucault in a broader sense. This is the figure whose interventions and legacy have proved critical catalysts for writers and thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Ann Laura Stoler, V.Y. Mudimbe and Alexander Butchart, to name only a few of those who inform this discussion. My primary interest, therefore, lies in exploring the extent to which the comparative reader can map certain key developments within Farah’s oeuvre in relation to similarly key negotiations in Foucault’s thinking and writing. When it comes to examining Farah’s first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979–1983), for instance, I suggest how its claustrophobic, quasi-Orwellian portrait of life under autocratic rule can usefully be read in light of early Foucauldian interventions. In drawing on Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization in particular, I argue that an awareness of Farah and Foucault’s respective concerns with the use and abuse of power within what can be seen as carceral societies need not result in an airbrushing of contextual or other crucial differences. As my engagement with a range of secondary sources suggests, the manifest blind spots that, for many, blight Foucault’s vi...