Somali Soundscapes: Signal and Noise in Nuruddin Farah's Crossbones

Stations and paths together form a system. Points and lines, beings and relations. What is interesting might be. . . . the flow of messages passing through the lines. . . . But one must write as well of the interceptions, of the accidents in the flow along the way between stations―of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent.

Michel Serres, The Parasite (10–11)

Overture

The revitalization of world literature as a classificatory tool and critical apparatus has helped broaden knowledge of literary traditions partly by inciting further exploration into literatures of the Global South, including Africa. As the expansion of world literature studies continues apace, it seems pertinent to ask how such literatures simultaneously compel a rethinking of dominant images of the world that underlie and authorize this expansion. Perhaps the most potent image is that of a planet across which communications flow, connecting the disparate parts and transforming it into a unified whole. The increased circulation of contemporary writing from Africa around the world because of reconfigurations of literary markets and new possibilities offered by digital technologies seems to bolster this image while contributing to African fiction's recategorization as "world literature." Although various media and communication technologies do create flows that connect the African continent to networks that span the globe, African writers themselves warn that this is only part of the story. Among them is Somali author Nuruddin Farah. Farah's most recent trilogy, "Past Imperfect," illustrates that African literature is world literature not because it testifies to global connections between Africa and other parts of the world but because it demands "a new framing of . . . the global: centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection" (Ferguson 23). The third book in the trilogy, Crossbones (2011), issues this demand in an even more sustained manner than earlier works Links (2003) and Knots (2007).

Crossbones critiques images of transnational flow and unfettered connection by enacting interceptions and interferences of them in its plot, themes, and narrative form. Addressing piracy off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden, the novel shows that "flow is a peculiarly poor metaphor for the point-to-point connectivity and networking of enclaves that confront us when we examine Africa's experience of globalization. . . . the 'global' does not 'flow'[;] it hops instead, . . . connecting the enclaved points in the network while excluding . . . the spaces that lie between the points" (Ferguson 47). Farah's text elaborates how commodities, military equipment, and humanitarian aid that seemingly flow through the busiest shipping corridor in the world actually hop between points in networks that exclude the Somalis, whose waters they skirt. Piratical interceptions of supply chains relate that networks that span planetary commons, in this case international waters, do not connect the planet but divide and differentiate it unevenly.¹ The work's interceptions and interferences, however, extend beyond those it plots and whose causes it analyzes at length. They also take place across commons other than the waters―air and sky―but the narrative leaves their causes and meanings unexplained, thus inviting investigation. These interceptions are staged as impeded communications resulting from an apparent overwhelming of signal by noise, enacted through subjects' interactions with recording, broadcasting, and telecommunication technologies. Such enactments disclose that "[t]he global, as seen from Africa, is not a seamless, shiny, round, and all-encompassing totality. . . . Nor is it a higher level of planetary unity, interconnection, and communication. Rather, the 'global' . . . has sharp, jagged edges" (Ferguson 48). The edges point toward ecologies and infrastructures obscured in totalizing global imaginaries that overlook the conditions that potentiate and curtail transmission flows and communications.

Literature and culture in Africa and beyond it have registered the world's unevenness and the inconsistent motions that attend it since well before the current era of globalization, from the colonial period through decolonization to post- and neocoloniality. Recently, literary and cultural theorists have renewed their attention to the material forces behind such registrations, past and present. In literary studies, scholars use materialist approaches long operative in...