writer
Personal Information
Born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia; son of Hassan (a merchant) and Aleeli (a poet); married Chitra Muliyil, 1970, (divorced in 1972); children: Koschin (son); remarried in 1992; children: Abyan (daughter) and Kaahiye (son).
Education: Graduated from Punjab University in Chandigarh, India, 1970; postgraduate studies in theater at the University of London, attached to the Royal Court Theater, 1974-75; continued studies at the University of Essex.
Career
Associate professor at the University of Ibadan in Jos, Nigeria; first short story printed, 1965; wrote play, A Dagger in Vacuum, 1969; published first novel, From a Crooked Rib, 1970; Somali-language novel, Tallow Waa Talee Ma, serialized in a government newspaper, 1973; produced play, The Offering, in Essex; published novel, A Naked Needle, 1976; published novel Sweet and Sour Milk, 1979; relocated to Los Angeles and wrote film scripts; published novel Sardines, 1981; taught at the University of Bayreuth in West Germany; went to live in Nigeria; play, Yussuf and His Brothers, produced in Jos, Nigeria, 1982; published novel, Close Sesame, 1983; moved to Gambia; published novel, Maps, 1986; moved to Khartoum, Sudan, and later to Kampala, Uganda; published novel, Secrets, 1998; novels translated into 12 languages.
Life's Work
Before the 1991 collapse of the dictatorship in his country, Somalia, novelist and playwright Nuruddin Farah was forced to live in exile. Still, Farah became one of Africa's most influential authors. Although the multilingual, nomadic writer has admitted that he feels at home "everywhere," he also believes he feels closer to Somalia the longer he is away from it. In "In Praise of Exile," an essay he wrote in 1998, Farah described his work in this way: "My novels are about states of exile; about women shivering in the cruel cold in a world ruled by men; about the commoner denied justice; about a torturer tortured by guilt, his own conscience; about a traitor betrayed." These words come from a man who has lived in Europe, the U.S., and particularly in African countries other then his own. While in exile, Farah began what became a lifelong literary project--keeping his country alive by writing about it.
Farah's fictional works reflect his deep sympathy towards women in Somali society and explore feminist themes. Several of his novels are told from a woman's point of view. Many of his tales focus on the history and politics of Somalia, the role of the privileged intelligentsia, the corruption of the political elite, and the repressive quality of the Somali Revolution. In his works he is especially critical of the regime of Siyad Barre, the iron-fisted dictator who ruled Somalia for 21 years. But Farah is a writer who has been widely influenced by international culture. Farah himself has said that his work probably has more in common with works by writers from South Asia with Islamic backgrounds--Salman Rushdie, for instance, who called Farah "one of the finest contemporary African novelists"--than with African writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Farah's parents' linguistic and temperamental differences ultimately contributed to the shaping of one of his primary literary themes. As he told his audience during his lecture upon receiving the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998, "...Language, and what uses we make of it, is the longest distance between two persons, the one a poet, sensitive, committed to ideas larger than herself, the other despondently despotic, a patriarch willing to submit the world to the authority of his whim."
Farah's eight novels, which include two trilogies, have been translated into twelve languages. Starting in 1990 Farah received various fellowships, prizes, and honors. He was awarded the German Academic Exchange Service fellowship to Berlin, which enabled him to finish a first draft of Secrets. He received the Tucholsky Prize for work as a literary exile in Stockholm, Sweden. Gifts won the Best Novel Award in Zimbabwe, and the French edition won the St. Malo Literary Festival award and was named Book of the Month for all libraries in France. The Premio Cavour was awarded to the Italian edition of Close Sesame. He was chosen as the laureate of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. This prize, according to The New York Times, is "widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel." Farah has been praised by other notable writers. South African novelist Nadine Gordimer described him as "one of the real interpreters of experience on our troubled continent," while Chinua Achebe observed that Farah "excels in giving voice to tragedy in remote places of the world that speak directly and familiarly out to our own hearts."
Nuruddin Farah was born in Baidoa, Somalia (what was then Italian Somaliland), to Hassan, a Muslim merchant, and Aleeli, a poet, in 1945. Two years later, his family resettled in Kallafo, in British-occupied Ogaden, which later came under Ethiopian control. In 1963, three years after Somalia gained its independence from Italy and the United Kingdom, Farah's family moved to Mogadiscio (Mogadishu), Somalia, to avoid the war raging in Ogaden. Growing up in an ethnically and linguistically mixed area and listening to his self-assured, articulate mother who recited poems aloud, Farah quickly became fascinated with languages and literature. He spoke Somali with his family, but at school he learned Amharic, Italian, Arabic, and English.
In 1965, after finishing secondary school in Somalia, Farah wrote his first short story in English because Somali was not yet a written language. He also worked as a clerk-typist at the Ministry of Education. A year later he went to India to study literature and philosophy at Punjab University in Chandigarh. He lived in India for three or four years. He returned to Somalia for six months, where he wrote a play called A Dagger in Vacuum, but was denied a license to produce it. In 1970, after receiving his BA from Punjab University, he married Chitra Muliyil, an Indian student, and they soon had a son, Koschin. During the early 1970s Farah taught secondary school in Somalia and lectured on comparative literature at the Afgoi College of Education.
Became Africa's First Feminist Writer
In 1970 his debut novel, From a Crooked Rib, was published in English. It was the first fictional work by a Somali writer to be printed in English. Because of its subject matter, Farah was hailed by essayist Kirsten Holst Petersen in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature as "the first feminist writer to come out of Africa" who "describes and analyzes women as victims of male subjugation...." From a Crooked Rib empathetically portrayed a Somali woman trapped within a restraining, traditional Somali society. In the story, the main character, Ebla, flees an arranged marriage to an elderly man and forfeits her ties to her nomadic clan. She winds up living alone in the city, without legal protection, and becomes a prostitute. Farah's book is highly critical of Islamic law and nomadic life as it pertains to the low position of women in traditional Somali society. Unfortunately for Farah, this novel was published at the time of the Somalian Revolution, of which he also was critical. The revolution brought the autocratic Major General Siyad Barre to power and swept away democracy in Somalia. This brought Farah face to face with the issue of censorship. In 1973, the serialization in a government newspaper of Tallow Waa Talee Ma, a novel by Farah written in Somali, which had just been made into an official written language, was cut short by government censors.
A year later Farah won a UNESCO fellowship and departed for England, leaving behind his ex-wife and son and beginning 22 years of exile from Somalia. In 1974 and 1975 Farah nourished his interest in theater by studying it as a postgraduate at the University of London, which was attached to Royal Court Theater, and at the University of Essex. One of his plays, The Offering, was produced at the University of Essex. While Farah was living in Italy in the late 1970s, another of his plays, A Spread of Butter, was broadcast by the BBC African Service.
In 1976, his second novel, A Naked Needle, was published, after being held by the publisher because of political uncertainty in Somalia. Farah eventually rejected the book, possibly because of this censorship, but he also was displeased with it because he felt it did not effectively expose the corruption and abuses of Siyad Barre's regime. The novel dealt with a westernized intellectual young man, named after Farah's son, whose search for a comfortable life in Somalia after the revolution is jeopardized by the arrival of a former girlfriend from England, who plans to marry him. It depicts the discussions among the educated elite in the capital, the "privilegentzia," and the experimental hopes in the new "revolution." As with his previous novel, it deals in part with the plight of women in a Muslim society, be they eastern or western. Critical reaction to the book was mixed. On a positive note, Reinhard W. Sander was quoted as saying in Black Literature Criticism that this novel was "perhaps the most self-searching to have come out of post-independence Africa."
Criticized Somalian Revolution and Dictatorship
In 1979 Farah published Sweet and Sour Milk, the first novel of a trilogy known as Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. The book, which later won the English-Speaking Union Literary Award, made its author persona non grata in his native Somalia. It centers around a political activist who tries to uncover the reason for his twin brother's mysterious death and is prevented from doing so by his father, a former government interrogator and torturer. The repressive nature of the Somali revolution is apparent in this novel. Reviewers have noted that it is reminiscent of Franz Kafka in its view of a totalitarianism that depends on silence and betrayal for its survival. About Sweet and Sour Milk Robert McDowell wrote in African Writers, "This story of institutional hardship and personal betrayal is heavy with symbolism. Each chapter, for instance, begins with a poetic description of the natural world...that wraps characters and circumstances in a shroud of dramatic hostility." McDowell added, "In Sweet and Sour Milk, the most artfully constructed novel in his first completed trilogy, Farah has created a major political novel of lasting value."
Farah's next novel in the trilogy, Sardines, published in 1981, paints a portrait of life under "the General's" regime. The story depicts a world dominated by the tyrant; his secret police are everywhere, security goons dog the innocent, and people disappear. The novel centers around a new breed of westernized Somali woman who fights to make her way in a male, hierarchically-dominated world in order to find "a room of one's own, a country of one's own, a century in which one [is] not a guest." Farah's heroine, Medina, is a journalist who is fired from her editorial job at Somalia's sole newspaper because she refuses to publish the speeches of the General. At the same time she flees from the home of her husband because she is terrified that his mother, who upholds traditions laid down by males, is going to have their daughter circumcised.
In Sardines Farah's female characters discuss female circumcision with surprising candor. Medina, who has endured circumcision, tells a friend: "If they mutilate you at eight or nine, they open you up with a rusty knife the night they marry you off...Life for a circumcised woman is a series of de-flowering pains, delivery pains, and re-stitching pains." Wrote Charles R. Larson in World Literature Today, "No novelist has written as profoundly about the African woman's struggle for equality as has Nuruddin Farah." Other critics noted Farah's creative use of language. "Farah [sic] is a disturbing writer whose linguistic inventiveness sometimes overpowers author and reader alike,"Faith Pullin wrote in British Book News. "But, in terms of vitality, compassion and the ability to take literary risks, his talent demands recognition." While working on a draft of the last novel in the trilogy, Farah taught and lived in West Germany. He later moved to Jos in Nigeria, where he was an instructor at the University of Ibadan. His play, Yussuf and His Brothers, was staged in Jos.
Farah published the last novel of the trilogy, Close Sesame, in 1983. In this book Farah again focuses on themes of crushed political idealism and tyranny, but from a man's viewpoint, while using the English language in a way that is uniquely his own. The novel focuses on an elderly nationalist and political idealist who has spent years in jail for opposing the British and Italian colonial governments. The hero also has been imprisoned for his opposition to the Somalian, dictatorial-style, post-revolutionary government. After getting out of jail he leaves the protection of his children and tries to do away with the ruling General. For this he is shot to death by the Presidential Guard.
Peter Lewis wrote in the London Magazine, "Close Sesame analyses the betrayal of African aspirations in the postcolonial period: the appalling abuse of power, the breakdown of national unity in the face of tribal rivalry, and the systematic violation of language itself, so that such words as 'democratic' and 'socialist' are as perverted as 'pacification', for example, was in the colonial era." As for Farah's place among other African writers and his literary gifts, J.P. Durix commented in The Times Literary Supplement, "Close Sesame confirms Farah's reputation as one of Africa's major writers, and as the creator of a new language, strong, poetic, and possessing great rhythmic qualities, which, like the author himself, is cosmopolitan yet rooted in the Somali tradition...."
Portrayed Besieged People of Somalia
Farah's Variations trilogy was followed by his Blood in the Sun trilogy, which is made up of the novels, Maps (1986), Gifts (1992), and Secrets (1998). Each of the three novels has been recognized individually as a masterpiece in its own right. Taken together, as the story of civil conflict that has dominated Somalia for over two decades, their beauty and power increase exponentially. They are extraordinary portrayals of a besieged people who manage to retain their humanity.
Maps takes place during Somalia's war with Ethiopia in the late 1970s. The book portrays the agony of people who live in a country whose borders have been haphazardly created by colonialists and, although the colonizers are gone, their successors have inherited their leadership roles and their maps. Here, Farah explores the conflict between nationalism and personal commitment through the story of the Somali orphan, Askar, who is brought up by an Ethiopian woman, Misra, with whom he is extremely close. As Askar nears adulthood, he must choose between joining the Somalian Liberation Front and looking after his ill adoptive mother, who is suspected of being a spy. About Maps Robert McDowell wrote in African Writers that it was "a marvelous account of an orphaned child's discovery of maternal love. United by circumstance amid the brutality of war along the Ethiopia-Somalia border, Misra and Askar represent the backbone of the community--the stay-at-homes and the workers, the young and abandoned, the feminine and abused--who suffer oppression yet ultimately survive their oppressors. These two characters also represent the child and woman in all of us."
While some reviewers criticized Farah for writing a belabored sociopolitical character study with too many stylistic and thematic layers, others admired him for his narrative skill and persuasiveness. Publishers Weekly observed that "he constructs a deft narrative that reflects an oral tradition." Christopher Hope wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "It is always the sincerity of the emotions and his ability to make them palpable that distinguish this tantalizing and original novel, and make it a journey into what Mr. Farah calls the 'territory of pain' and what we, rather loosely perhaps, call Africa."
In Gifts Farah weaves dreams, memories, and folklore into a contemporary tale of ordinary people attempting to live dignified lives in the midst of lack of food, colonialism, and age-old ethnic divisions. The book chronicles the life of Duniya, one of Somalia's embattled populace, a widowed nurse and simple village woman attempting to bring up three children alone in the city of Mogadishu. When she resolves to take in an abandoned baby, she must confront the patriarchs of her family and by extension, Somalia's male-dominated society. She also learns for the first time what it means to fall in love and the obligations, expectations, and dependence the "gift" of love can bring. The resilient Duniya represents, through her strength and bravery, the type of woman who helps Somalia to survive its worst times. "The different facets of her personality that emerge when she is dealing with the different men in her life," wrote Chitra Divakaruni in the Wall Street Journal, "are quite amazing and illustrate Mr. Farah's deep understanding of the female psyche."
Won Neustadt Prize for Literature
Farah's last book in this trilogy, Secrets, which won the prestigious 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has been described by some critics as a lyrical enigma. Wrote Kwame Dawes in Emerge, "Secrets takes the reader on a mammoth journey of profound mystery, bizarre happenings, magical reckonings and deeply philosophical musings in the hope of unearthing the secrets of a Somali family." Like Gifts, Secrets is also set in Mogadishu, just before the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia. The novel's central character, Kalaman, broods about his confusing childhood with its unexplained secrets, among them his ancestry. One day he receives a surprise house guest, his childhood lover, Sholoongo, who asks Kalaman to get her pregnant. Victimized by colonialism, Sholoongo uses the exploitive tactics that were used against her to seek her own gain and precipitates a family civil war that resembles Somali clan warfare. Helpless and tyrannized--"Sholoongo was so domineering I could never say my own name in her presence"--Kalaman is sucked into a voyage of self-discovery. When Kalaman eventually finds out about his origins, he discovers many possible parents, impossible to trace, a situation which resembles the colonial history of Somalia and of all Africa. Interestingly, unlike the women in Farah's other novels, Sholoongo is not struggling against the restraints of traditional Somali society, nor is she portrayed empathetically. She leaves readers with a riddle: Does she despise herself as a woman and use her sexuality as a weapon? Or is she a revolutionary who tries to castrate the very patriarchal society upon which Somalia's dictatorship was founded? "Brilliantly elliptical as ever, Farah shrouds 'Secrets' in ambiguity," wrote Lisa Meyer in San Francisco's Examiner, "keeping Sholoongo a mystery throughout."
Farah wrote his novels about Somalia while living in Gambia, the Sudan, Uganda, Berlin, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. He returned to his native land for a visit in 1996, five years after strongman Siyad Barre was driven from power. In 1992 he married again, to Amina Mama, and their union has produced two children, a daughter, Abyan, and a son, Kaahiye. Farah continues to live abroad. He and his family are currently residing in Cape Town, South Africa.
Awards
Received the Tucholsky Prize in Stockholm for his work as a literary exile, 1991; Gifts won Best Novel Award in Zimbabwe, 1993; selected as fifteenth Neustadt laureate, 1998; French edition of Gifts won the St. Malo Literary Festival award and was named Book of the Month for all French libraries; received Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma.
Works
Selected writings
- Novels
- Close Sesame, Allison & Busby, 1983; Graywolf Press, 1992.
- From a Crooked Rib, Heinemann, 1970.
- Gifts, Baobab Books, 1992; Serif Publishers, 1992.
- Maps, Picador, 1986; Pantheon, 1986.
- A Naked Needle, Heinemann, 1976.
- Sardines, Allison & Busby, 1981; Heinemann, 1982; Graywolf Press, 1992.
- Secrets, Arcade, 1998.
- Sweet and Sour Milk, Heinemann, 1980; Graywolf Press, 1992.
- Plays
- The Offering, Lotus (Afro-Asian Writings), 1976, pp. 77-93; produced at the University of Essex, 1975.
Further Reading
Books
- African Writers, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997, pp. 249-262.
- Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992, pp. 757-770.
- Contemporary Authors, Volume 106, Gale, 1982, p. 173.
- Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, 1989, pp. 131-141.
- Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press, 1986, pp. 312-313.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 125, Gale, 1993, pp. 35-40.
- Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, St. James Press, 1999, pp. 88-89.
- International Authors and Writers Who's Who, 1993-1994, International Biographical Centre, 1993, p. 186.
- Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, University Press of Mississippi, 1992, pp. 43-62.
- Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, edited by Martin Tucker, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 239-241.
- Who's Who in the World, 1996-1997, Marquis, 1995, p. 400.
- Writers Directory, 1992-1994, St. James Press, 1991, p. 303.
- Boston Globe, April 5, 2000, pp. C1,C4.
- Emerge, September 1998, pp. 65-66; July/August 1999, p. 78.
- Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1999.
- Library Journal, August 1999.
- Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1999; August 9, 1999.
- New Yorker, June 15, 1998.
- New York Review of Books, March 4, 1999.
- New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1998; September 12, 1999.
- Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1998.
- Publishers Weekly, June 28, 1999; August 23, 1999, pp.28-29.
- Wall Street Journal, September 10, 1999.
- Washington Post Book World, September 26, 1999.
- World Literature Today, Autumn 1998, pp. 701-786.
- Additional information was provided by Arcade Publishing, "News."
— Alison Carb Sussman
