The State as Stage: Torture and Performance in Sweet and Sour Milk
Everything is happening on centre stage and in broad daylight. But let us not forget about the events taking place offstage, in dark labyrinths and deep tunnels where you see nothing, hear nothing, where terror’s powerful pincers grab you by the throat, and where that desperate, superhuman cry that might save your soul while you offer up your body is pulled back into your gut.
(Mouloud Feraoun – Journal, 1995–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, 2000: 240)
Feraoun’s chilling journal entry corresponds with a recurrent analogy throughout Farah’s work. Whilst metaphors tend towards the overdetermined in some of his writing, the image of the theatre as a disciplinary, if shadowy, arena is both enduring and effective. Towards the inconclusive close of Sweet and Sour Milk, Loyaan conceives of his search, and Somalia itself, in darkly dramatic terms: ‘this read like a badly-written play, with stage-directions almost non-existent, the stage dark and hardly lit, the actors and actresses unbriefed, and the dialogue unrehearsed’ (S&SM: 203). Whilst the reader also cries out for direction, this is an almost literal transcription of Farah’s own comments on the Barre regime. In ‘Why I Write’, he states, ‘Somalia was a badly written play ... and Siyad Barre was its author ... he was also the play’s main actor ... he was its stage-designer and light-technician, as well as the audience. You can imagine how Siyad-Barre-as-subject oppressed and obsessed me’ (Farah 2002: 10). Similarly, in Close Sesame, Deeriye describes Somalia as ‘a stage where the Grandest Actor performs in front of an applauding audience that should be booing him’ (CS: 214). To build from this, a theoretical and figurative marriage between Ngũgĩ on postcolonial Africa and Foucault on disciplinary designs proves instructive. The former’s depiction of neo-colonial authoritarianism as extending the architecture(s) of oppressive power has been referred to. Discipline and Punish emerges as a particularly enabling intertext, however, due to its series of imagistic juxtapositions: light and shade, performance and punitive techniques and consequently the stage and prison panopticon.
In Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, Ngũgĩ suggests, ‘the prison yard is like a stage where everything, including movement, is directed and choreographed by the state. The mise-en-scène, the play of light and shadows, the timing and regulation of actions ... are directed by armed stage-hands they call prison warders’ (Ngũgĩ 1998: 56). It is significant that Farah’s imagined General is described, primarily in Soyaan’s pronouncements, as the ‘Grand Warder’ of a Gulag-style society in which he manipulates the bonds of kith and kin to secure his dominance (S&SM: 10). The description is strikingly similar to accounts by detainees of Barre’s regime. In The Cost of Dictatorship – The Somali Experience, Jama Mohamed Ghalib includes ‘Inside Labaatan Jirow Secret Maximum Security Prison’, an abridged report by Mohamed Barood Ali, a political prisoner. Alongside accounts of torture, Ali includes a diagram of the prison compound, describing how its design served as a concrete reflection of the divide-and-rule policies of Barre’s regime (Ghalib 1995: 231–256). Considered in this light, the ‘imaginary intensity’ identified by Foucault also crackles throughout Farah’s work: ‘the panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power ... a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years’ (Foucault 1991: 205). This, in turn, has a chilling correspondence with Wole Soyinka’s carceral account, The Man Died. It is a text that, like Discipline and Punish, casts a lengthy shadow over the entire Variations cycle: ‘interlocking cages, they appear to the uninitiated as mazes designed by mad scientists for testing the intelligence of mice ... From mice to men is one easy intelligent step, cages and mazes to disorientate the mind’ (Soyinka 1972: 124). In Farah’s early work, the labyrinth emerges as the variation on this Foucauldian mechanism of power.
One playful technique established in Sweet and Sour Milk that comes to dominate Farah’s fictional landscape is that of doubling or mirroring, both in terms of events and characters. Here, the comparisons and contrasts are intensified by situating them within the familial sphere. The twin brother juxtaposition comes early, concludes with a typical allusion to openness and is shot through with a dash of self-reflexive irony:
Soyaan: a man of intrigue, rhetoric, polemic and politics. Loyaan: a man of melodramatic scenes, mundanities and lost tempers. Loyaan would insist, for instance, in removing all inverted commas from phrases like ‘revolution in Africa’, ‘socialism in Africa’, ‘radical governments’, whereas Soyaan was fond of dressing them with these and other punctuational accessories; he was fond of opening a parenthesis he had no intention of closing. (S&SM: 14)
Farah uses inverted commas to interrogate constructs such as ‘nation’ and ‘postcolonial identity’, as he does throughout his work. Similarly, it is entirely appropriate that, in a text primarily concerned with deciphering cryptic codes, the narrative should conclude with an incomplete parenthesis: ‘doors untried had begun to open: the hinges of these doors creaked as they opened’ (S&SM: 241). Whilst these motifs represent the tentative interpretative strategies of protagonist and reader alike, Farah pushes against moral doors that, in normal circumstances, have to remain sealed. As such, he engages in an ‘unsettling, antiutopian’ and thus suitably Foucauldian critique in which the seemingly rigid dichotomy between ruler and ruled is problematised. As Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, ‘[there] is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix’ (Foucault 1990: 94). This relational conception of power is critical for the purposes of this study as a whole. In Sweet and Sour Milk, it is only by exploring the contested matrix between ruler and ruled that the reader comes to appreciate the necessity of employing protagonists who belong to a ‘priviligentsia’.
Fittingly, therefore, one of the novel’s principle mazes is that of morality, designed to present protagonists and readers alike with a series of navigational challenges. The contours of this moral maze are illuminated when Loyaan meets one of the General’s ministers in an attempt to piece together some clues regarding his brother’s death. Effectively, it marks his transition from bumbling sleuth to strategic interrogator. He comes tantalisingly close to penetrating the General’s disciplinary labyrinth by scrutinising one of its stooges. It is crucial that Loyaan, like Khaliif in Close Sesame, focuses on the regime’s reliance on torture to deal with opponents committed to