Lazarus, N. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Sueur, J.D. 2001. ‘Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria: Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Violence during Colonial Incarceration’. In G. Harper (Ed.). 2001. Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration. London: Continuum.
Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miller, J. 2000. The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa – Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Said, E. 2001. ‘Michel Foucault, 1927–1984’. In E. Said. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta.
Said, E. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Spivak, G. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Stoler, A. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire – Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and The Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.
White, J. 1993. ‘Politics and the Individual in the Modernist Historical Novel: Gordimer and Rushdie’. In J. White (Ed.). Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Young, R. 2001. Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Endnotes
1 I use this spelling throughout, as does Farah in his novels. Whilst he uses ‘Mogadishu’ in ‘The City in My Mind,’ I retain ‘Mogadiscio’.
2 See also Cooper, F. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 48–49 and Cooper, F. and Stoler, A. (Eds). 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3 For further speculations on Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, see El-Din Aysha, E. 2006. ‘Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics Beyond Civilizational Clashes, External and Internal.’ International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 377–394.
2
Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
In every epoch, writers have grasped the possibility of forming out of words a labyrinth in which to hide. That a maze of language could also hold the reader ‘captive’, because ‘captivated’, was a possibility Foucault had learned from Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, and also Jorge Louis Borges ... The appeal of the labyrinth to the writer’s imagination was therefore doubtless manifold ... a place where a person might come to ‘think differently’, it facilitated, as a literary device, self-effacement and self-expression simultaneously.
(James Miller – The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000: 147)
A writer’s imagination is always intensely fascinated by relationships – between objects and events in time and space. Certain symbolic, or seemingly symbolic, parallels, convergences, divergences, circles are irresistible to the imagination.
(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – Detained, 1981: 121)
FOUCAULT’S EXAMINERS RAISED A NUMBER OF RESERVATIONS DURING THE defence of his original thesis, with the Sorbonne historian Henri Gouhier expressing his profound unease with this student who ‘thought in allegories’ (Miller 2000: 104). For the purposes of this analysis, I am grateful Foucault refused to alter his approach. The following chapters consider Farah’s first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, exploring it in relation to those carceral concerns and tropes that litter Foucault’s early work. Alongside them, what Michael Senellart refers to as Foucault’s ‘taste for the labyrinth’ in Security, Territory, Population also captures the imagination (Foucault 2007: 380). Whilst the labyrinth has various allegorical meanings, the above marriage between power as design and literature as obfuscation is particularly enabling. It corresponds with the murky world of Variations where, as D.R. Ewen suggests, ‘a weird cognitive fog envelops even simple facts’, leaving identities fragmented, disappearances routine and bodies either broken or obliterated (Ewen 1984: 201). Farah’s preoccupation with the insurgent, if ultimately misplaced energies of the Group of 10 (a group of young intellectuals opposed to the General’s rule in Variations) has provoked fierce debate. Whilst his created ‘priviligentsia’ resembles a quasi-clan, focusing on them allows Farah to shed revealing light on the ways in which, to borrow from Eyal Chowers’ provocative study, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination, ‘the individual is enmeshed within a web of power’ (Chowers 2004: 168). Debates concerning webs of affiliation, the entanglements of history and outlets for potential resistance all cluster around the Group. The result is a necessarily claustrophobic portrait of authoritarian society. As I come to illustrate, a key difference between the Variations and Blood in the Sun trilogies is that, whilst a certain uncertainty distinguishes both plot and protagonist in the former, the target of Farah’s critique remains the autocratic regime. With Maps’ exploration of the fallout from defeat in the Ogaden War, the national narrative has begun to unravel, causing Farah’s focus to shift accordingly.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains that:
there is no risk ... that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world’ ... The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. (Foucault 1991: 207)
The carceral environs of the Variations series demonstrate how and why Farah is equally preoccupied with circuitous, surveying systems of power. The individual novels, however, return the reader to this very ‘dark room’, suggesting that tyranny can flourish when panoptic and labyrinthine disciplinary schemes fuse. To initiate the oftentimes compelling dialogue between Foucault’s discourse and Farah’s fiction, I have found the work of Latin American scholars similarly concerned with manifestations of power particularly enabling.1 For both Claudio Lomnitz-Adler and Gerald Martin, for instance, the labyrinth has more than figurative significance. Focusing on myriad tensions within Mexico in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space, the former maintains:
the political importance of national culture and the difficulty in describing [it] in any terms other than the terms of nationalism has generated a circular dialectic, a vicious cycle that is built on the tensions that occur between the maze of social relations that exist within the national space and the ideologies regarding a common identity, a shared sense of the past, and a unified gaze towards the future. I call this complex of issues the labyrinth. (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 3)
This complex of issues can be seen to correspond with the specifically