In Farah’s writing, unlike that of [his] contemporaries, we find no peasants forced from their land, no workers brutalized through rapid industrialization ... Those who resist are drawn from a privileged class ... often educated abroad, widely travelled, multilingual, and materially comfortable. For some readers this choice of protagonists undermines Farah’s political analysis ... Part of the distinctive importance of Farah’s work is that he draws the attention of many non-African readers, by his choice of characters, to a complexity of social experience in Africa that such stereotypes have trained them to think does not exist or is not ‘really African’. (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 83)
Some of the most enthralling and disquieting features of these novels concern the turbulent development and subsequent dissolution of an intellectual cadre. When the prospect of overhaul starts to crumble, the priviligentsia’s program of resistance is reconfigured, brought back home to start again from concrete, local, often domestic sites and struggles. Consciousness on a suitably liberating scale is awakened as they come to see how and why their fellow countrymen are also engaged in pyramidal power relations. Whilst having a head, these cannot be effectively resisted until work has begun on dismantling the structure and system itself. If we are to accept Ngũgĩ’s postcolonial state/penitentiary comparison, as discussed above, I suggest something akin to Foucault’s response to an interviewer’s question in ‘The Eye of Power’ chimes with Farah’s broader aims in Variations and beyond: Perrot – ‘And there’s no point for the prisoners in taking over the central tower?’ Foucault – ‘Oh yes, provided that isn’t the final purpose of the operation. Do you think it would be much better to have the prisoners operating the Panoptic apparatus and sitting in the central tower, instead of the guards?’ (Foucault 1980b: 164–165). Transposed in an anti-colonial context, this is strikingly similar to Said’s description of Fanon’s resistant ideology in The End of the Peace Process: ‘Fanon was right when he said to Algerians in 1960 that to substitute an Algerian policeman for a French one is not the goal of liberation: a change in consciousness is’ (Said 2002c: xxvii).
It is therefore critical that Farah represents the Group’s failure to mount a coherent challenge in terms of factional bad faith. As with the motif of disintegration introduced by spluttering Soyaan at the outset, the reader learns (through Ahmed-Wellie) how the intellectuals separated into two camps:
‘Three meetings at most, and we split. One group was headed by Medina and the other by Soyaan. Medina held on to the belief that the General was the Master of Grand Irrelevances and Irreverences ... and that no intellectual in his senses should take him seriously ... Soyaan and I were of a different opinion. We held the view that there is a pattern studyable, that there is a logic behind almost all the General has done.’ (S&SM: 140)
The key term here is ‘pattern’ precisely because, as Nonno tells Kalaman in Secrets, ‘things look more complex than they seem when you study patterns’ (Sec: 111). In order to speak out against power effectively, its labyrinthine mechanisms must be identified before they can be challenged and, ultimately, changed. Ahmed-Wellie alludes to the Group’s ideological schism in terms of their divided thoughts about the ordered disorder manipulated by the General to retain his grip on power. In unwittingly accepting it as anarchic, and therefore unworthy of their resistant energies, key members appear to evade their resistant responsibilities.
The torture motif also links certain characters, enabling Farah to extend his meditations on the intellectuals’ functions in order to foreground the relativity of their world views. Into Loyaan’s already shaken world walks the mysterious Margaritta clutching her son Marco. Complications intensify following the revelation that Marco is Soyaan’s son. Margaritta holds one key to unlocking Sweet and Sour Milk’s cryptic labyrinth as she has a copy of the memorandum composed by her lover against the regime. In order to reclaim his brother’s legacy, Loyaan must reaffirm his oppositional stance. As such, the document assumes particular importance. Farah tells how Margaritta ‘had a decent and very well-paid job. In addition to that, she had recently inherited her (Italian) father’s wealth ... She was registered as an external student at the University of Rome, registered for a degree in law, and had recently begun to research for her thesis’ (S&SM: 68). Coming from this privileged background, Margaritta considers herself qualified to hold forth on the colonial and neo-colonial woes of Africa’s body politic. She does so in typically visceral terms:
‘Africa, for nearly a century, was governed with the iron hand of European colonial economic interests: these ran Africa as though it were a torturechamber. Africa has known the iron-rod, the whiplash, thumb-screwing and removing of testicles: Africa has been humiliated one way or another ... Came the seventies. Army coups. Barefaced dictatorships. We see Africa ‘taken back’ to an era she had lived through before, the era of European dictatorship, concentration-camps. Africa is again a torture-chamber.’ (S&SM: 124)
This final image corresponds with much of the most exhilarating work that has been done on the carceral realities of many colonial and postcolonial situations, as evidenced in the impressive A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, amongst others.
Whilst the essence of her argument may be correct, Margaritta indulges in what Foucault, in ‘Power and Strategies’, calls ‘scare-quote’ logic, suggesting how and why it compromises the Group’s effectiveness, both individually and collectively (Foucault 1980c: 135–136). Typically, she is less willing to acknowledge the culpability and complicity of the elite she belongs to. Alongside this, the discursive space between the internal evocation of torture to depict Loyaan’s struggle with the vagaries of power and this image of Africa as sprawling torture-chamber captures those micrological/macrological negotiations that define Farah’s work. The reader learns that Soyaan once described his brother as ‘a man less mature politically, less conscious of social and political pressures’ (S&SM: 115). It is again critical to emphasise, however, that this very political unpreparedness makes him an ideal guide. The text is refracted through Loyaan’s quest to crack codes, resist official claims to his brother’s name and navigate a path through the labyrinth of power. Accompanying him, the reader comes closest to deciphering ‘the personal in the political’ dialectic identified by Medina in Sardines. Margaritta’s academic training at once endows and burdens her with a capacity for theoretical extrapolation. Whilst allowing her to forge productive links between despotic states, it means she also runs the risk of eliding the micrological in favour of the macrological. Genuine critique, the text seems to suggest, can only come from analysing their reciprocal relations. For Farah, it is the interrogation of these interconnections, alongside privileging the fleshy materiality of the body itself, that remains crucial.
Shall I Be Released?
In Daybreak is Near, Ahmed focuses on the ‘complexity of metaphorical language’. He cites Adonis who suggests, ‘metaphor does not allow a final and definitive answer, because it is in itself a battleground of semantic contradictions. It remains a begetter of questions, an agent of disruption, in contrast to the type of knowledge which aspires to certainty’ (Ahmed 1996: 5). If this notion of disruption is akin to Kwame Appiah’s statement on the academic function in In My Father’s House, it also corresponds with the figurative fecundity of shifting body politics throughout Sweet and Sour Milk (Appiah 1992: 290). With Soyaan dead, the remaining family members argue over the post-mortem. This not only allows the reader to explore the supposed schisms between traditional and modern medical practices (Qumman refuses to have her son’s body carved up in accordance with her belief in the Koran’s ‘uncomplicated’ edicts), but also establishes the prevailing aura of confinement. In a revealing