Postnational Paradoxes: Nuruddin Farah’s Recent Novels and Two Life Narratives in Counterpoint

Nuruddin Farah’s most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism on subject formation, personal and family relations, and opens up questions of sexuality in a postnational context. Connections between individual subject and nation formation have been considered across Farah’s career beginning with his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, that marked the double emergence of the autonomous individual and the nation-state, to, most notably, Maps, which completely deconstructs the “mythical” foundations of the Somali nation. Hiding in Plain Sight presents an idealized, postnational cosmopolitanism with no apparent collective affiliation that is presented as the automatic outcome of constitutive hybridity and global hyper-mobility. Paradoxically, the new postnational cosmopolitanism simultaneously reconstitutes versions of ethnic, racial, and religious identities as it liberates itself from these affiliations that are linked with the nation. Crossbones, Farah’s previous novel, reflects the hybridity, hyper-mobility, and transnationalism of global terror and criminal networks. However, the constitutive structural similarities of the utopian ideals of cosmopolitan postnationalism and dystopian realities of transnational crime and terror are not foregrounded in the novels. Two life narratives are used as a counterpoint to Farah’s novels. Inside the Global Jihad, an autobiography of a spy using the nom de plume Omar Nasiri, underscores the idea of the transnational constitution and reach of terrorism opened up in Crossbones. Farah’s novels are also contrasted with Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope, the biography of a Somali refugee in South Africa that presents a different conception of transnational cosmopolitanism formed out of the affiliations associated with the nation.