Nationalism and the Aporia of National Identity in Farah's Maps

Nuruddin Farah, the Somali writer and cultural critic, has become an influential presence on the African and world literary scenes. Farah's reputation may be due to the consistently high quality of his works as well as to his persistent questioning of some of the assumptions of Somali nationalists. Even in an early work such as From a Crooked Rib (1970), Farah uses the demeaning roles to which a largely patriarchal Somali society relegates women to criticize some of the codes of his culture and to pose questions about human agency. Also, in the Dictatorship trilogy, he exposes the problems inherent in nationalist paradigms for talking about identity in Somalia and, one may add, in Africa as a whole. African nationalists, notably Senghor, in their struggle against colonialism, emphasized the need to recreate Africa's primordial values, first, as a precondition for liberation and, second, as the foundation for a collective national or ethnic identity. In their desire to reinsert the African into what they perceived as an authentic cultural space voided by colonialism, the nationalists celebrated the black race in exclusive terms, thereby appropriating the totalizing discourse of the imperialists. In fact even at the "institutional" level, Partha Chatterjee argues, Third World nationalism did not change the "structures" created by imperialism, but rather "selectively" inveighed them in order to "neutralize" and at the same time co-opt them as "subsidiary allies within a reformed state structure" (49). The "contradictions" inherent in the nationalist agenda, which most early African writers failed to question rigorously and which continue to affect the "reorganization" of postindependent nations, are urgent concerns in Farah's works. Derek Wright is thus accurate in saying that the "relationship between national and ethnic identity" is of central importance in Maps (Novels of Nuruddin Farah 105). Farah nevertheless refuses to privilege either the nation or ethnicity, probably to avoid what Kwame Anthony Appiah would call the "alternate genealogizing" that Western "modern theories of the nation in the Herderian conception of the Sprachgeist" forced on the colonized (68, 53).

Farah's disavowal of the strong position on nation and ethnicity must, however, be located in what could be called a new postcolonial discourse, namely, the emphasis on cultural diversity, which has emerged as a repudiation of the nationalists' obsessive concern with indigenous values as a mark of identity. Specifically, political theorists such as Naomi Chazan no longer take for granted the notion that the African national space can be a receptacle for "pure" ethnic groups or a site for constituting unique identities. Chazan talks about the growing "fluctuation around the situational preeminence of the territorial framework" in Africa, whereby even "the architecture of power" shows "diverse locations of concern and interconnection" (139). Also, an emerging skeptical, postmodernist, ¹ African literary tradition, represented by Ben Okri, among others, and to which Farah obviously belongs, is using imploded narratives, metaphors of splintered bodies, linguistic heteroglossia, the "juxtaposition of parallel worlds," and other formal strategies to underscore Africa's diverse cultural experiences. In short, the need to break with the belief in a univocal Somali identity or with the ethnic paradigm provides an important context for understanding Maps.

Most of the strategies of the emerging skeptical tradition enumerated above are evident in Maps and are activated by Askar. The story, alternately narrated in three conflicting voices, is, seemingly, Askar's defense for his alleged implication in the tragic murder of his foster mother, Misra. And his account of events ultimately reveals that his ambition is to find and assert a unique Somali identity. Farah, however, undermines Askar's nationalist expectations by situating the story in a frontier culture, the Ogaden, a disputed territory between Somalia and Ethiopia. Like the Ogaden, which is cut off from the parent civilization, Somalia, Askar is born an orphan, his mother having died in childbirth and his father in the fight against Ethiopian colonization. Deprived...