Are There Secrets in Secrets?

“Industriousness,” so goes a venerable Somali aphorism, “never comes home empty-handed.” No author has ever more strikingly demonstrated the truth of this aphorism than Nuruddin Farah whose prodigious history has taken the world by storm. Secrets, his eighth novel, is the latest evidence of Farah’s energy and industrial output. The prodigious output has had its intimidating effects in African writing circles, to judge by the odes on the cover of this book. That he is now the laureate of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature should redound to the good of his already established reputation as “one of the world’s great writers.” The award represents a personal triumph for Farah, a vindication for his fiction, and, most important, a victory for a badly demoralized Somalia that one of the “sons of her soil” should be so rarely honored. As a fellow Somali myself, I should crave to be counted as one of his principal cheerleaders, applauding him on and on to higher and higher heights. But sentimental fellow feeling is one thing; integrity in assessing a work of fiction is another; and on the latter basis it must be said that Secrets arouses, at least in this reader, certain concerns of context and credibility. I shall examine these by and by.

Set against the background of civil-war Somalia, Secrets, a novel of luxuriant prose and strange similes—“grins as self-conscious as a sparrow dipping its head in the river’s mist”—attempts to recount a family saga, that of the Nonno clan, in multiple angles of vision and in a maddening maze of mechanical metaphors.The tale begins in Mogadishu, Somalia’s once charming but now ruined capital, where Kalaman, the protagonist, offers us a slice of his early insouciant coming-of-age and then takes a leap, without transition, to his growth into a thirty-three-year-old up-and-coming Somali yuppie, who runs a successful enterprise as a computer programmer. Grandpa Nonno, nicknamed Matukade, or “He-Who-Never-Prays,” possesses a dilapidated estate, composed of a bungalow and numerous acres of not unpleasant woodlands, on the banks of the Shebeele, or “River of Leopards.” He had, we are told, run south in the early decades of the century from the former British Somaliland Protectorate for reasons that are unsaid. Nonno’s son, and Kalaman’s father, Yaqut, earns his upkeep as an engraver of headstones for graves. Macabre enough. Yaqut’s wife Damac, Kalaman’s putative mother, is a “four-breasted” boneless wonder, who has made well off enough on the “beads trade” to own a vehicle for movement, and a firearm for self-defense against marauding militias.

Second in significance to the Nonnos are Madoobe, or the Black, and his pair of progeny—Sholoongo, a “shape-shifting” witch of a lass “with animal powers,” “raised by a lioness”; and Madoobe’s son Timir who, among other improbabilities, holds office as an “active member of the American gay movement.” Then there is Fidow, Nonno’s general hand man, wild honey collector, crocodile trapper, elephant poacher, and goer of “both ways in sexual matters.” This just about closes the circle of significant characters in Secrets.

As to the events in Secrets, it must be said that not much happens. There is no character development, there is no plot, there is no sign of humans doing things to other humans to stir the reader’s admiration, pity, or scorn. There is only a cloud of verbiage. In the end a work of fiction must stand—or fall—by the measure of its plausibility. Judged on this criterion, Secrets fails to measure up. To offer a running sample of the various grounds for complaint: first, there are the elementary errors: dibqaloo’, hanqaraloo’, or hangaraloo’ (all three Somali for “scorpion”) is misnamed as “hangaroole.” This should have been a petty objection if the dibqaloo’ didn’t play a central role in the folk myth employed to carry the story forward. Arraweello, the archetypal Queen of Somali mythology in pre-Islamic matriarchal Somalia is misrendered throughout as Carraweello. Now suppose a Yoruba novelist of...