Wars of Representation: Metonymy and Nuruddin Farah's Links

This paper shows how Nuruddin Farah's Links counters the sensationalist media representation of the UN and US intervention in the civil war in Somalia in the 1990s. The novel contributes an alternative anti-sensationalist representation of the events, by which I mean a representation in which the direct spectacle of violence is often mediated and deferred rather than exposed. I want to argue that sensationalism at the heart of reportage, and specifically photography, is fuelled by a metonymic production and reproduction of images. In contrast, deploying metonymy as a strategy for representation and reading in Links reveals the anti-sensationalism of the novel and enables it to undermine the media's construction of the Somali war. The different political implications of sensationalism in the media and anti-sensationalism in Links, both entailed by the same trope, forms my basis for identifying metonymy as an important strategy in war representation and postcolonial literary criticism.