The Disorder of Things. John Masterson

relationship between form and content operates in Farah’s work. If, as Ahmed has argued, faith in the ideals of the Somali Revolution of 1969 has withered by this stage in his socio-political evolution, the shadow of earlier text A Naked Needle, originally conceived as the first instalment of Variations, still hangs heavy over Sweet and Sour Milk (Ahmed 1996: 75–99). Yet, in the spirit of exploring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s circular patterns, there is an alternative route into the series. At the outset of the novel, the reader is confronted with Soyaan who, described as having ‘disturbed features’, does not have long to live. Before the prologue is over, the reader sees him ‘hiccup his last’. The pervasive sense of disintegration is amplified following the discovery that Soyaan was a key architect of the Group of 10, charged with usurping the General and reclaiming the betrayed ideals of the Revolution. After this perishing prologue, we follow the search of twin brother Loyaan to identify the guilty parties and gain justice in the name of his sibling. Along the way, Loyaan stumbles into the inner sanctum of power struggles familial, group and governmental. Ministerial doors creak open, allowing him to engage in subversive bouts of shadow play with representatives of the regime, only to be slammed in his face when his questioning becomes too threatening. As he battles to prevent the co-option of his brother’s militant legacy by the regime, he clashes with his authoritarian father Keynaan, a ruthless if largely incompetent ex-stooge of the General.

      As such, the majority of the text concerns this ‘fight over the dead soul of Soyaan’ (S&SM: 75). For Ewen:

      the only order [in Sweet and Sour Milk] is a bizarre form of institutionalized disorder. The novelist, writing with lizard-like agility in a collage of dissolving styles, presents a hideously convincing, and an uncomfortably hypnotic, study of a situation that bears the same relation to any reasonably sane society as Milton’s Hell does to Heaven: a post-colonial Pandemonium. (Ewen 1984: 200)

      In essence, Sweet and Sour Milk is a brooding experiment in quasi-detective fiction. The reader accompanies bewildered sleuth Loyaan deeper into the heart of the state apparatus, where walls have eyes and, most crucially within the largely oral-cultural context of Somalia, ears. The disciplinary labyrinth metamorphoses into a distorted echo chamber, designed to monitor and neutralise dissent. By the novel’s close, the reader is left, like Loyaan, with a series of unanswered questions concerning complicity and culpability. If both protagonist and reader struggle to piece together the puzzle of meaning, it is the very process of this struggle that suggests Farah’s incremental critique of the use and misuse of power. Fittingly, therefore, one of the richest terms in Sweet and Sour Milk is ‘complications’. When the shadowy Dr. Ahmed-Wellie attempts to uncover the reason for Soyaan’s death, he is told it resulted from ‘blood complications’ (S&SM: 42). Playing with this idea, Alden and Tremaine suggest, ‘if it is true, as we are led to believe, that Soyaan was murdered in some way, what caused him to be killed was the complications of his own multiple involvements and commitments and the complicating of truth by its appropriation for political purposes’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 52). Whilst these are precursors to the later identity interrogations of Askar in Maps and Kalaman in Secrets, they are here invoked to intensify the determined indeterminacy that haunts both novel and its protagonists. Mother Qumman may well cling to the Koran as a harbinger of certainty (‘[it] is all we know that cures without complications’, S&SM: 5). Yet, in a socio-political situation where the General has ordained an unlikely marriage between Marx and Mohammed, even the rules of this metaphysical game are confused: ‘in one hand, the Blue Book of the General and Lenin’s writings in improvised translations; in the other, the Holy Koran’ (S&SM: 133). For Soyaan, the General is adept at providing ‘cocktails of contradictions’ (S&SM: 14).

      As demonstrated most vividly in Close Sesame, Farah’s exploration of links between colonial and neo-colonial regimes is a significant feature of his work. The comparative reader will note the rhetoric he employs in different contexts when conceiving of power as a system under the Italians. The following, for instance, is taken from Yesterday, Tomorrow: ‘Italy’s colonialism is full of disasters ... a tragic history ending in colonial cul-de-sacs ... it shared in the carving up of Africa into spheres of future disorders’ (YT: 62). Similarly, in Sweet and Sour Milk, the foundations upon which such social structures are built are recast at the level of narrative. Mazes become figurative and functioning and, by the close, Loyaan’s admission that ‘there are a hundred questions I haven’t had answers for’ (S&SM: 203), speaks to the novel as a whole. Similarly, the internal monologue Farah employs to trace Loyaan’s exasperated search mirrors that of his reader: ‘Am I too tired to catch the significance of all this?’ (S&SM: 213). Approach this opacity from another angle, however, and it has a direct correspondence with the nature of its target. Considered in this way, the Foucauldian overtones are pronounced. As Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow suggest in Michel Foucault, Beyond Strucuralism and Hermeneutics, ‘[there] are areas of unclearness and sketchiness which can be read either as confusion or, more sympathetically, as problems [Foucault] has opened up for further exploration, either by his subsequent work or by others’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983: 126). As Ian Adam similarly argues in ‘The Murder of Soyaan Keynaan’, if Farah seems to delight in confounding his reader, his opaque narratives are not simply the result of authorial indulgence:

      In the classical detective story ... the labyrinth is mapped, signs direct you away from the wrong turn and blocked exit ... from multiple possibilities, polygraphy of meaning, emerges meaning single and definitive ... it seems clear that Sweet and Sour Milk departs radically from the classic genre in this pattern of closure ... one senses the relative lack of closure to derive less from epistemological scepticism than from an ethical principle which looks with mistrust at the egocentric tyrannies of the General’s or Keynaan’s ‘I am’. The notion of a single superb deductive intelligence implied in the figure of the traditional detective ... comes rather too close to the belief in one leader, one rescuer, that the novel opposes. (Adam 2002: 342–343)

      Expectations are critically complicated, with few easy answers given to despots or readers alike. What may appear stylistic solipsism to the latter is ideological anathema to the former. Whilst Ngũgĩ writes in an alternative context, his thoughts enable us to see how Farah’s choice of genre corresponds to some more longstanding convictions. In Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, he maintains that:

      Art has more questions than it has answers. Art starts with a position of not knowing and it seeks to know ... There may be answers implied in the questions. But they are often hints, open-ended possibilities, and not certitudes ... The state, on the other hand, has plenty of answers and hardly any questions. The more absolutist the state, the less it is likely to ask questions of itself or entertain questioning by others. (Ngũgĩ 1998: 15)

      As Jacqueline Bardolph maintains, the complexities and frustrations of Loyaan’s quest compel the reader to become an active producer of textual meaning: ‘[Farah] does not underestimate our capacity to react and think as free moral agents. The tale is a riddle ... [he] risks losing us at times ... but we come back for more, because the enigmas he entertains us with are of the kind that aim at transforming our vision’ (Bardolph 2000: 121). The transformative, arguably ethical imperatives bubbling beneath the surface of Sweet and Sour Milk are integral to its success. Accordingly, it is crucial that Farah portrays an unwilling and, at times, unwitting protagonist. The circular dialectic and architecture of power that both Foucault and Ahmed allude to in their respective fields is realised in Loyaan’s maddening search: ‘[he] took several possible roads but came upon a cul-de-sac as before. Questions and questions. Whys and no wherefores’ (S&SM: 58).

      Whilst Farah presents Loyaan’s quest as a reflection of the General’s obfuscatory order, the maze is a puzzle predicated on the existence, however cryptic, of an exit. In ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky’, Said suggests