"Territories", by Nuruddin Farah

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Released in English in 1986, Territoires is considered to be one of the most successful novels by Somali artist Nuruddin Farah. A political novel par excellence, it tells of war, peace and individual journeys strewn with obstacles, against the backdrop of rising nationalism among a Somali population undermined by clan rivalries. In this novel there are beginnings of turbulence which will lead to the Somali civil war. 

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A wandering novelist

A native of Somalia, Farah is one of the sacred monsters of contemporary English-language literature. He is the author of fifteen novels, essays, short stories, translated around the world and awarded with prestigious prizes such as the “Neustadt International Prize for Literature”, considered as the last step before the Nobel Prize . The 75-year-old man spent most of his life in exile, first in Europe and then in Africa. He divides his time today between South Africa, where he has lived since 1999, and the United States, where he is regularly invited to give courses in “creative writing”.

Farah published his first novels in the late 1960s, the day after independence, whose 60th anniversary was celebrated on July 1. Very critical of the successive regimes in Somalia, these novels had greatly displeased General Siyaad Barré in power in Mogadishu since 1969, forcing Farah to go into exile.

It was only in 1996, after a banishment that lasted twenty-two years that the writer was able to finally set foot on the soil of his native country. But meanwhile the Somali state had collapsed and the country was ravaged by a terrible civil war, in particular the capital Mogadishu, said to be 80% destroyed. Even today, Somalia has not recovered from this disaster, but it survives through the literary works of its novelists, most of whom live abroad and of which the most eminent is of course Nuruddin Farah.

"This country that is in my head"

Farah's literary ambition was to be the Balzac and the Dickens of Somalia. Exile was the great tragedy of his life because he brutally cut it off from his source of inspiration. By force of circumstances, he became a cosmopolitan, a wandering writer, but he never cut himself intellectually from Somalia, "this country that is in my head", he likes to repeat. Even recently, he said at the microphone of RFI that it was enough for him to activate his memory and his imagination to find the landscapes, the smells, the textures of the voices, the cries and the whispers. He hasn't forgotten anything.

Released in 1986 in London, Territories is the sixth novel by Nuruddin Farah. Farah's work is structured in trilogies. "  Variations on the themes of an African dictatorship  " is the title of his first trilogy. Territoires opens the second trilogy entitled "  Sang au soleil  ". The novels gathered under this title tell of individual quests, against the backdrop of a Somalia plagued by clan struggles and the unfulfilled irredentism which opposes it to its neighbors. Moreover, Territories has precisely as a framework the war which opposed in 1977 Ethiopia to Somalia for the control of the province of Ogaden, bitterly disputed by the two countries since the colonial period. According to observers, this war, lost by Somalia, sowed the seeds of the civil war that will lead to the breakup of Somalia in 1991.

The orphan and the servant

The novel follows young Askar, torn between his "  somalitude  " and his loyalty to his adoptive mother, the Ethiopian servant, Misra, who had taken him in when he was still an infant, after the death of his biological parents. We are in Kallafo, in the Ogaden. The action takes place before, during and after the Ogaden War. As the war rages, Askar, 8, is sent to Mogadishu. He arrives at his maternal uncle and his wife. These take charge of his education and make him aware of his belonging to the Somali nation. They make him discover the adult world of maps and borders, in which the adolescent tries in vain to find his national and cultural identity.

The story is told a posteriori by the character narrator who remembers his happy childhood in Ogaden. In a sensual and beautiful language, he evokes the quasi-fusional tenderness that long linked him to his adoptive mother, leading him to believe that Misra's menstrual blood was his. The departure for Mogadishu was a brutal break in the young man's life, but it was above all the war that made his foster mother his enemy. He must choose between his homeland and his mother, between the territory and his more intimate, more individual sense of self, between geography and the impulses of his heart that ignore borders, The dilemma is almost Cornelian, because in addition to Being an Ethiopian, Misra is also suspected of having betrayed the fighters of the Ogaden Liberation Front, of which her son is a member. The outcome can only be tragic.

A sophisticated imagination

This novel must be read for its writing, both intellectual and deeply sensual, made up of thoughts, dreams and obsessions. Territoires is also an ambitious novel, with complex networks of metaphors connecting blood, borders, History. Several dimensions overlap in this story. One of these dimensions is obviously allegorical, with the main character Askar, an orphan, torn between his double allegiance, representing Somalia shared between its different borders, mined from within.

It is undoubtedly this sophisticated imagination of the Somali writer, coupled with a deep empathy for his characters, which made Nadine Gordimer say that the Somali was "  one of the finest interpreters of the troubled experience of the continent African  ”.

Territories , by Nuruddin Farah. Translated from the English by Jacqueline Bardolph. Le Serpent à Plumes, 1994, 447 pages.

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