Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel & the Idea of Home by F. Fiona Moolla (review)

In her critical text Reading Nuruddin Farah, author F. Fiona Moolla examines the complete collection of Nuruddin Farah’s novels published to date—eleven novels, including three trilogies, spanning four decades—through the lens of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. More specifically, her analysis discusses first how Farah relates to Taylor’s three concepts of individualism, modernism, and modernity, with a focus on “internalisation of moral sources” (16), whose form, according to Moolla, appears to depart from Farah’s Somali heritage. Her second rationale for surveying Farah’s novels pertains to their ability to “encapsulate a history of the novel in the career of a single author” (16). Farah’s novels are examined by Moolla according to the paradigms they illustrate, although she maintains a certain chronological progression to highlight his novelistic development.

In Moolla’s view, Farah’s first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), is a typical illustration of the bildungsroman. Its depiction of the emancipation of heroine Ebla breaking away from her nomadic life and a strict patriarchal tradition to become her own, autonomous, individual self in an urban environment is read by Moolla as pointing to Somalia on the eve of independence. The author gestures to Farah’s recurrent motif, the centrality of individualism, while pinning down paradoxes that systematically deconstruct first-sight reading.

An illustration in point is the paradigm of bildung, which, Moolla contends, is present in most of Farah’s novels, even if only to be challenged. Sardines and Gift both exemplify female bildung and variations on the typical conditions for its realization. On its surface, Sardines meets all of the criteria for the archetypal “gynocentric Bildungsroman” (80). Yet unlike Woolf’s heroine in A Room of One’s Own, against whose backdrop Sardines is set, Medina neither lacks space nor financial means and authority. Medina’s quest is rather for a space where she is at home out of sheer individual freedom while paradoxically shaping her social environment. Furthermore, observes the author, Sardines is a novel in which traditional gender roles have been reversed and Medina actually suffers under the dictatorship less than her male fellows. In Gift, Moolla claims that the journey toward self-realization embraced by protagonist Duniya consists of taking her own existence from being a gifted (donated) commodity to acquiring autonomy through to making herself a “pure” gift in the Derridean acceptation, i.e., precluding any obligation of return. Duniya’s development is understood by Moolla as an allegory of Somalia depending on aids and donations, yet an incomplete one since the country doesn’t reach Duniya’s degree of emancipation.

If, as highlighted by Moolla, all but the first of Farah’s novels are consensually considered modern—organized in a trilogy, framed by epigraphs from and references to modernists—some of them adhere to modernism more than others. A Naked Needle is probably Farah’s most experimental and modernist novel. With numerous references to Joyce’s Ulysses, ANN points to the Enlightenment model of the disengaged subject embodied by its radical individualist, self-begetting hero Koshin, who disengages himself from any clan obligations. In turn, Sweet and Sour Milk is a modernist variation on the detective novel whose subject is the refracted reflection of other textual representations. As Moolla remarks, Becket provides the novel’s intertextual fabric not only in its motifs, but also in its linguistic materiality. However, the most significant modernist trait in both novels pertains to the subject being “an unstable, fragmented literary or linguistic construct” (120).

Closing the first trilogy, Close Sesame sets itself apart, claims the author, as it explores not only an apparently heteronomous subject, but a pious character. On the surface, Deeriye draws his moral sources from Somali tradition and Islam, yet ironically rejects altogether the idea of clans, challenges Muslim priorities regarding family, and escapes the social practice of religion. Moolla remarks that, like in the other novels...