The labyrinth is everywhere ... The twentieth century has rediscovered this metaphor with a vengeance, and for contemporary Derrideans and Foucauldians textuality, with its decentring and its difference and its gaze into the abyss, has been repeatedly likened to a web, a forest or, above all, a labyrinth ... it has its own entirely concrete basis in a continent at once unitary and diverse, where identity is never given, and where history and culture themselves have always seemed to be a question of opting between different, already existing choices and alternative forking paths. (Martin 1989: 360)
Whilst this final, Borgesian image has been used to describe Maps, I argue that Farah’s entire oeuvre is preoccupied with ‘decentering’ and ‘difference’, at levels both micrological and macrological as well as in terms of plot and polity. This resonates with the author’s claim that his primary objective, in these and other novels, is not to launch a conventional polemic against the abuse of power by despotic leaders. Farah is rather more concerned with exploring the complex underlying conditions of family, kin and blood that allow autocrats to maintain and misuse power in the first place, as discussed in I.M. Lewis’ Blood and Bone: The Call of Kinship in Somali Society (1994). When the critique is opened out in such a way, issues of hegemony and oppression are shown to be much more intertwined. The onus is placed on individuals to negotiate these structures and, where necessary, define themselves against rather than in terms of various groups.
The Variations trilogy has a necessarily nightmarish quality, as it presents us with an autocratic General imagined to have panoptical power. When Sweet and Sour Milk’s Soyaan refers to father Keynaan as ‘a miniature creature in a flat world dominated by a God-figure high and huge as any mountain anyone has seen’ (S&SM: 83), it is not clear whether he is referring to Allah, the General or both. The slippage is crucial. Once in this position, the General is able to survey all beneath him, watching his intellectual adversaries lose themselves in mazes of both his and, more peculiarly, their own making. As Felix Mnthali suggests in ‘Autocracy and the Limits of Identity: A Reading of the Novels of Nuruddin Farah’:
the remote and shadowy figure of the General is in everything and in everyone’s life and yet the immediate impression is that of clans fighting amongst themselves while the real culprit remains detached from it all. He resuscitates clan animosities by seeming to give power to the clans while closely monitoring their discussions and making sure that his secret police plants the right amount of fear in everyone’s mind. (Mnthali 2002: 178)
The result is that the reader is given a penetrating insight into repressive systems, dependent upon suitably Foucauldian relays for their very existence. Alongside this, an enduring fascination with the relationship between individual body politics and the collective body politic lies at the heart of Farah’s fictional labyrinth. I suggest this can be seen in relation to Diane Nelson’s study, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala:
[because] there is a body in the metaphor, but a body that is deeply contradictory – scarred and wounded by violence – I think the metaphor is useful for describing the body politic of the Guatemalan nation. Guatemala is emerging from a civil war that displaced one-eighth of the population and left some one hundred and twenty thousand people dead or disappeared: the wounded body politic is thus also terribly material. (Nelson 1999: 2)
Whilst analogies with the situation in contemporary Somalia are striking, it is Nelson’s attention to the fleshy materiality of ‘the wounded body politic’ that informs this analysis of Sweet and Sour Milk, as it does the book as a whole. Inevitably, Nelson makes Foucault groan and protest in a Guatamalan context (Nelson 1999: 5). Like her, I again find that Discipline and Punish usefully captures the body/power dialectic I flesh out in this section:
Power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a ‘head’, it is the apparatus as a whole that produces ‘power’ and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field ... Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the ‘physics’ of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence. It is a power that seems all the less ‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’. (Foucault 1991: 172)
For Farah, as for Foucault, processes and techniques of control never operate in monolithic, unilateral ways. As such, if not dismantled at a structural level, they remain in place long after the removal of power’s ‘head’. Events in post-Barre Somalia have provided sombre support to this effect. As the above passage suggests, it is precisely at this rhetorical level that Foucault captures the imagination. Throughout his work, as evidenced in The History of Sexuality, An Introduction, references abound to ‘perpetual spirals’, ‘circular incitements’ and ‘relays’ of power (Foucault 1990: 46–47). As Ali Jimale Ahmed points out in Daybreak is Near, this concept of power has a peculiar resonance when viewed within a Somali context: ‘herein lies the importance of hegemony in understanding the seemingly confusing dialectics of power in Somali society: power is not amorphous’ (Ahmed 1996: 40). Whilst staging a contrapuntal dialogue between Farah and Foucault, I am equally concerned with sites of critical divergence. Whereas Foucault’s Francocentrism leads him to conceive of power in terms of a politics of entrapment, Farah suggests that an escape from the disciplinary design may be achieved through renegotiating the terms of the social contract between the body politic and more intimate body politics. Once again, therefore, I turn to Said as a critical intermediary. Comparing Foucault and Fanon, Said suggests that the former ‘moved from what appeared to be insurrectionary scholarship to the kind of scholarship that confronted the problem of power from the position of someone who believed that ultimately very little resistance was possible to the controls of a disciplinary or carceral society’ (Said 2002a: 53). Whilst there are pronounced similarities between Farah and Foucault’s insistence on the individual microphysics of struggle and the ‘agonism’ that defines relationships between power and resistance, the former’s Orwellian cycle explores the kind of oppositionality that, for Said, is precluded by the latter. In attempting to capture the simultaneously exhilarating and exasperating qualities of these Variations novels, both Derek Wright and Ali Jimale Ahmed invoke the term ‘labyrinthine’.2 In what follows, I consider how and why the image assumes different burdens of significance.
Negotiating the Labyrinth: Texts and Contexts
But why would something so blindly experienced be revealed today with no detours, no sidestepping, no desire for a labyrinth?
(Assia Djebar – So Vast the Prison, 2001: 54)