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Where lawyers are redundant, family is supreme
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Nuruddin Farah
2003 (South Africa)/March 2004 (UK)
Kwela Books, Cape Town and Riverhead Books, London
306 Pages
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
There is a theory of incest which states it is taboo not so much because of the genetic results of such a union, but more because of what effect such a union would have on our language. Family is the basis of our society and if we undermine the parameters of father-mother-daughter-son it will have causal results in broader society. It is thus in the interests of the state, and not just the individual, to outlaw incest.
This theory came to mind while being led through the statelessness of Mogadiscio by Nuruddin Farah, in his latest novel, Links. (It has only been published in South Africa and is due for release in the UK and US in 2004). While incest is not an obvious or direct theme of the novel, the necessity of taboos, their persistence and their erosion, is central to the novel, as is the idea of family as narrative.
Jeebleh is a Somalian who returns from the comfort of New Yok to his homeland of Somalia after an absence of more than 20 years. He has returned to his birthplace to mourn the death of his recently deceased mother. He has left his anxious family behind, and arrives in Mogadiscio as foreigner with a Somali passport. His distance, his separation, from his nuclear family, is a metaphor for the similar distance between the reality of Somalia and his/our notions of family. His journey into his unfamiliar homeland is about the discovery that family is not nuclear, it is clan, and this requires a re-learning of the language that circumscribes our definitions of self. As his childhood friend Bile puts it, while describing his re-emergence into society after years of imprisonment under the old regime:
In Somalia the civil war then was language," Bile said, "only I didn’t speak the new language. At one point, a couple of armed men flagged me down, and one of them asked ‘Yaad tahay?’ I hadn’t realised that the old way of answering the question ‘Who are you?’ was no longer a valid one. Now the answer universally given to ‘Who are you?’ referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity!"
Ostensibly the plot is based on the search for two ‘angels’, two girls (one of them with Down’s syndrome
) whose mere presence brings peace to whichever group they happen to be among. The two girls have been kidnapped, but that turns out to be almost circumstantial to Jeebleh’s search for his place in a country of which he is part, but does not recognise.
"He is struck by the arbitrary nature of death, of children shooting people just for target practice, of a society where weaponry is a measure of success"
The novel is divided into four parts, with each one marking a step in Jeebleh’s gradual transformation from US visitor shocked by all he sees, to active participant in the events of his environment, such that the book ends with a first person affirmation where it began with Jeebleh describing, with the wide-eyed greed of a tourist, all the Others of the world which was once his.
Shortly after arriving in Mogadiscio, and having been driven to his hotel by one of the local warlords, Jeebleh is contemplating the nature of the civil war. He is struck by the arbitrary nature of death, of children shooting people just for target practice, of his self-appointed guide who is known as Marabou because he collects dead bodies to bury them, and his entrance into a society where clan and weaponry are a measure of success. But Jeebleh, in his isolation as foreigner, comes to understand the situation not in terms of armed conflict between two opposing groups, but "he thought it characteristic of civil wars to produce a multiplicity of pronominal affiliations, of first person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third person plurals meant to separate one group from another".
In trying to circumscribe destruction by understanding it, Jeebleh takes us along the streets of a city that presents a façade of destruction, and it is only when he begins to adapt to the functioning of the stateless society as first-person plural, rather than first-person singular that he can begin to fulfil the reasons for his visit. He does not sacrifice the I, he merely incorporates himself into the We. As this invisible transformation takes place Jeebleh takes control of his condition, he is no longer led along strange paths, he abandons his status as witness and becomes protagonist. He finds solutions and can only do so thanks to his newfound links.
The back cover blurb of this book boasts that Farah takes readers "to the heart of the African crisis as country after country cuts loose from the international order". While understanding that the ultimate job of blurb writers is to encourage bookshop browsers to buy books, this particular phrase does Links a great disservice. Apart from the fact that there is no such thing as an ‘African crisis’, Somalia has not so much ‘cut loose from the international order’, it is more that it has re-invented itself as a stateless society and is now shaping a new order, however flawed that may be. There is also the use made by the ‘international order’ of Somalia to promote its own ends. Seamus, an Irishman who has ‘mislaid’ something of himself in Somalia, puts the US’s disastrous 'peace-keeping' mission to the country in a broader context:
I think they came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia, in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf. They came to showcase peace here, as a counterpoint to their war effort elsewhere. Iraq and Somalia had one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows, the one in celebration of advanced technology, and the other of peace.
This new order, this stateless society, which the US left in disarray, is one which is lawless yet not without rules. It is lawless because the written laws, statutes have been swept aside, that lawyers, such as Shanta (the mother of one of the kidnapped ‘angels’) have become redundant, but it remains a functioning society. Early on in the story, Jeebleh asks Bile what is so bad if society, and the economy, continue functioning. Bile quickly points out that those functions usually left to the state, such as health, education, social welfare, are all being ignored as the rival warlords use business to further their own ends rather than making a contribution to a broader society. Benefits are assigned according to proximity to the warlord. And the most basic of laws, that of taboo, remain in place, as is often alluded to in references to Bile’s breaking of one of the ultimate taboos.
Taboos remain in the background, unchallenged, as do the two central characters in this novel – the two ‘angels’, Raasta and her companion Makka. They only make an appearance towards the end of the narrative, yet are continually present as their absence is the possibility for hope. Jeebleh arrives in Mogadiscio filled with ideals, and it is only as his ideals come to be whittled away by the links he re-establishes with his homeland that he fulfils the tasks he set out to accomplish on his arrival.
But Farah has not given us a book about the destruction of ideals, it is not about the hopelessness of living in a warring, divided society. He has given us a masterpiece of resourcefulness, of hope that cannot be kidnapped or destroyed just because the individual is worth less than the clan. What makes Jeebleh’s journey through the living remnants of Mogadiscio especially immediate is Farah’s condensation of narrative, his coifed prose with not a word out of place. The reader is led as if through a maze where there is never a dead-end, yet never an exit and the limits are not so much the solid walls of Mogadiscio’s crumbling infrastructure, but the emotional and familial links which determine in which direction the guns, and limits, are pointed.
The warlords who control Somalia need to subvert language, must reshape taboos to establish a powerbase. They must take command of the narrative to remain in power. They control many pronouns, but narrative is beyond their grasp because it is within each one of we, and therein lies the reason that Somalia’s statelessness is not necessarily a reason to condemn it to hopelessness. And therein lies the beauty, and the seductiveness, of Farah’s latest work.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.
