"A bare needle", by Nuruddin Farah

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Sentenced to exile for many years, the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah has raised through his masterful work of fifteen novels and essays a moving monument to the memory of his native country plunged into an interminable civil war. Somalia, the “country that is in my head” was already the protagonist of his first great novel “A naked needle”, published in 1976. Inspired by “Ulysses”, this novel tells a Joycian tale of wanderings in the streets of Mogadishu, against a backdrop of lost love and reflections on the fortunes and misfortunes of a drifting Somali society. A classic of post-independence African letters to discover or rediscover.

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A Joycian novel

A naked needle , translated into French under the title of A naked needle , is one of the first great novels written by the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah. Author today of fifteen works of fiction and essays, recipient of numerous literary prizes around the world, Farah is considered as one of the most important English-speaking writers of our time.

It was in 1970 that Farah published his first novel entitled  Née de la côte d'Adam (Hatier, 1987). One finds there a denunciation in rule of the Somali patriarchal society, through the fate of a young adolescent girl condemned to a forced marriage. In the process, the novelist published, in 1976, his second novel A Naked Needle . It is a very modern and experimental story that tells a day in the life of its protagonist, on the model of James Joyce's Ulysses. Hence this qualifier of "  Joycian novel  ".

A political novel

This novel hit the headlines when it was published in 1976. In fact, this book, which offers a romantic chronicle in the foreground, is also a political novel. The story Farah tells is framed by the end of democracy in Somalia with the installation of a military regime after the coup of October 21, 1969 perpetrated by General Siyaad Barré. While revealing the uncertain hopes aroused by this revolution of Marxist-Leninist inspiration that had shaken the country after independence, the novel draws attention to its ironic staging of alienation and the decadence of the Somali ruling class. The author also points to the prevailing corruption and nepotism.

All this was not, as one can imagine, to the taste of the censors of the regime who had been watching this young subversive writer for several years. The editor of Farah had postponed the publication of A bare needle to avoid trouble for the author. But the troubles will start the day after the publication of the book in 1976. It can be said that overnight the world of Nuruddin Farah had collapsed!

The writer was abroad at the time. The day he was due to fly to Rome to return home, he received a call from his older brother announcing that his book had been seized and blacklisted by the regime. He was now persona non grata in his own country. According to his entourage, the dictator Siyaad Barré would have sworn to reduce him to lint if he dared to set foot in Somalia. "  Forget Somalia and hold it for dead and buried : this country no longer exists for you  ", were the big brother's last advice. "  Nuruddin Farah will never forget the few seconds that made him an eternal wanderer, an icon of the writer in exile,  " said Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi in his preface to the French version of the offending novel. Paradoxically, it is perhaps this exile which will last 22 years, which made Farah this immense writer who he became.

An intellectual and impressionist novel

There is nothing in this novel that deserves this unjustifiable censorship. Besides, the writer himself refused for a long time that his book be republished, considering that it did not constitute an adequate response "  to the formidable challenge posed by a tyrannical regime  ".

For critics, it was a primarily literary book, "A naked needle is the first great novel of introspection coming from Africa " one could read in the newspapers. Its originality lies in its narration in "stream of consciousness", technique of the flow of consciousness borrowed from James Joyce, mixing the intimate thought of the main character and the reported events.

The novel tells of the protagonist Koschin's wanderings, through a space that is both mental and geographic. While waiting for the arrival of his English fiancée, Nancy, to whom he had once promised to marry her, the hero wanders the streets of the capital, Mogadishu before the Civil War. The story of Koschin's loves and dislikes is punctuated by ironic and caustic observations on the mores of the "Privendgenttzia", ​​the alienated and corrupt Somali ruling class. 

An intellectual and impressionist novel, Une aiguille nue already prefigures this narration halfway between nostalgia and subversion, which has become the hallmark of Nuruddin Farah's fiction.

A naked needle, by Nuruddin Farah, has been translated from English by L'or des fous.

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