Perversely, Loyaan was enjoying himself now ... He believed he would see ... the Minister just fade away ... He saw himself as the torturer, as the powerful pervert who puts the needle between the flesh of the thumb and the nail, screws it in harder, deeper, further and further, until it draws blood ... Drill it in, harder, deeper ... turn the ailing soul’s cry into the scream of the tortured. (S&SM: 182)
The penetrating imagery is necessarily visceral. It allows the comparative reader to consider it in the same bloody company as depictions of rape and infibulation in Sardines, mutilation and menstruation in Maps or, with its chilling reference to ‘enjoyment’, Ali’s testimony about his treatment at the hands of National Security Service officers.
As was the case in Discipline and Punish, I find it revealing that Farah relies on motifs of light and shade, revelation and concealment. It deepens the sense that the narrative action is shrouded in a veil of indeterminacy. The reader thus enters a moral labyrinth, in which the distinction between those carrying the oppositional light of truth against the General’s obfuscations becomes less than clear. To build on this, I find Foucault’s notion of ‘agonism’, as discussed by Chowers, particularly enabling: ‘[agonism] demands the acceptance of this fragmentary nature of power, as well as the lack of easy, nameable targets’ (Chowers 2004: 169). Whilst Farah names his target (the General), the terms in which he does so are deliberately vague, just as the sadistic allure of power in the above passage creates an agonistic ambivalence between those associated with state repression and those seeking to resist it. This is a transposition of the ‘complications’ that characterise Soyaan’s death and, I suggest, serve as a password for the entire text (S&SM: 31). It can also be seen in relation to Chowers’ riposte to those who would charge Foucault’s work with overwhelming quietism and pessimism: ‘perhaps by insisting upon the anonymity of power Foucault seeks to convey another idea: that power is in me as well as in you, that it is internal as well as external, that I am responsible for its operation as well as you are’ (Chowers 2004: 170). This informs what I take to be Farah’s more compelling critique of power, as well as his interest in considering how it might be more effectively resisted. In the above tableau, for instance, Loyaan is represented as having access to the authoritarian regime of power as well as the capacity to oppose or mimic this regime. Typically, the onus is placed on the individual, as moral agent, to take responsibility for such negotiations with power. For Alden and Tremaine, it is the inherent tensions of Farah’s protagonists, invariably situated between rulers and ruled, that make them both convincing and unsettling (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 45). For me, his focus on this vanguard class concentrates rather than dilutes his critique of power. It allows him to explore various ambivalent spaces in something like the disruptive fashion described by Said in Representations of the Intellectual: ‘real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is ... highly problematic ... [and not] all either good or evil’ (Said 1996: 119). In Sweet and Sour Milk, complications abound because caricatures of good and evil are unpacked. The result is that existential burdens are placed on individuals situated within complex processes.
In light of the above, Farah’s preoccupation with power throughout the Variations sequence can be seen in the titular terms of two much later novels, Links (2004) and Knots (2007). By this, I mean that his critique is intensified by gesturing towards those invariably entangled complicities, complications and connections between characters and, by extension, a wider audience. By their very nature, these are often as profound as they are unpalatable. Yet, exploding reductive standards and narrowing the distances between oppressive and oppositional forces does not lead to a conflation of the two. Farah uses his fiction to explore how and why the contestatory degrees of difference between the spheres of despotic regime and its opponents might hold out the promise of genuine change. The most telling signposts, therefore, are in the trilogy’s title. Whilst the overarching concern is dictatorship, it is the variations on this theme that give the critique of power real substance. In the typically elaborate terms of many of Farah’s interior narratives, Loyaan imagines himself ‘challenged like a torturer who couldn’t make the tortured confess after the umpteenth piercing of the needle’ (S&SM: 182). The simile is pivotal here. Likewise, when Deeriye playfully describes daughter Zeinab as a dictator, it obliges reader and protagonist to step back and re-evaluate the construction of comfortable moral distances at a more immediate level: ‘“[y]ou would be a dictator, you act like one, you are a prisoner of your own obstinacy, insisting on being right all the time. Which is what dictators do,” he said teasingly’ (CS: 93). As in Sardines, it is the inherent agonism of, rather than the chasm between, such differences that is vital. This once more corresponds with Foucault’s more relational and therefore more refined conceptualisation of power. He sets this out in ‘The Confession of the Flesh’: ‘in so far as power relations are an unequal and relatively stable relation of forces, it’s clear that this implies an above and a below, a difference of potentials’ (Foucault 1980a: 200–201).
For Alden and Tremaine, ‘it is ... precisely [the elite’s] education and wide experience that make them so attentive to the issue of individual autonomy, that loosen the hold of imposed identities on their consciousnesses, and that place them thereby in a position to recognize and to disclose the lies by which dictators gain and hold power’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 84). By foregrounding the activities of his privileged group, Farah knocks power from its pedestal, making it susceptible to challenge rather than capitulating before it. For Barbara Turfan, however, his presentation of the ‘Group of 10’ is inherently troubling:
The reader gets the impression that most of these elite neither know nor care about their fellow countrymen ... it is not clear in these novels whether [Farah] is not interested or whether it is his characters that are so. This is an imbalance ... [and] this weakness ... remains, I think, a very real one ... He cannot be putting over his message sufficiently clearly if the reader remains uncertain as to what that message actually is. (Turfan 2002: 278–280)
I would counter this by once again reiterating that Loyaan’s bumbling quest in Sweet and Sour Milk is presented as an exploration of, rather than an arrival at, certain solutions. The very uncertainty of the process, therefore, becomes its critical feature. As Mnthali suggests in relation to Maps, perhaps some of the unease caused by Farah’s ambivalent portraits comes from a dubious desire to have ‘Africans’ conform