For commentators such as I.M. Lewis and Alice Hashim, corporeal motifs are irresistible when it comes to describing the Somali (dis)order of things. In A Modern History of the Somali, for instance, Lewis states that ‘Somalis sometimes speak about their diminished nationalism ... in a way that recalls patients whose limbs have been amputated but still “feel” intact. Theirs is a phantom-limb view of their dismembered body politic’ (Lewis 2002: ix). Similarly, for Hashim in The Fallen State – Dissonance, Dictatorship and Death in Somalia, ‘[predatory] rule in Somalia was the last resort of a failed state ... [it] represented a terminally ill condition for the State was in the throes of a struggle for survival’ (Hashim 1997: 4). In Sweet and Sour Milk, Soyaan also frames his critique of the General’s gulag-esque state in fleshy terms: ‘if we cannot totally remove the hernia of inefficiency ... we might as well try to make the pimples of the body-politic bleed’ (S&SM: 81). This reliance on body imagery sees Farah tread a tightrope between his own and/or his protagonists’ imagistic indulgence (Amin and Gaddafi are represented with entrails garlanding their necks, S&SM: 90), whilst allowing him to suggest how it offers the regenerative promise of escape from the labyrinth. Wright’s attention to the counter-hegemonic significance of these fleshy metaphors is critical:
Recurring images of wombs, fertilizing sperm, foetuses and eggs are not merely symbolic of the aborted hopes of the 1969 Revolution or of the faith in the future which is pinned to the creative energies of Somalia’s women. They also appear to represent the private bodily and sexual realities over which the state has no claim of ownership, that tender pragmatism of the flesh which becomes the only touchstone, the only tangible thing individuals have to hold onto in the enveloping malaise. (Wright 1994: 65)
As with all of Farah’s touchstones, however, the desiring and disciplined body is locked in a fraught relationship with power. Soyaan’s fatal poisoning may be the catalyst in a corporeal continuum that unfurls across this first trilogy and throughout Farah’s oeuvre. Yet, as with Loyaan’s investigative search, it is the very nature of this unravelling process that is significant. If Marco and baby Soyaan (son of Keynaan’s young second wife Beydan) embody the regenerative hope of delivering Somalia anew, as do Ubax in Sardines, Samawade in Close Sesame and, perhaps more problematically, Askar in Maps, Farah is eager to juxtapose them with figures, often grandparents, who represent the sacrifices of and for history. As Adam maintains, ‘new generations will bury the old, the Soyaans the Keynaans ... The establishment of a new order will not give any one person the responsibility for final solutions, and indeed will preclude such absoluteness in favour of the endless provisionality of group agreement’ (Adam 2002: 343). A key figure in this respect is Qumman. A focus on her besieged body allows Farah to present his centrifugal critique of power, something that intensifies across successive novels. It is also signalled, in two very different but mutually enabling contexts, by Chowers and Hashim. For Chowers, ‘if discourse is the centripetal mode of our language, literature is the centrifugal one’ (Chowers 2004: 159). For Hashim, ‘the centrifugal aspect of Somaliness prevailed over the centripetal’ (Hashim 1997: 4). I build on these interventions to show how relationships between bodies, designs and the shaping of world views in Farah’s fiction are influenced by these centrifugal forces.
Mother to the twins and their younger sister Ladan, Qumann allows Farah to reflect on the embodied and enduring suffering of women. In so doing, he introduces the reader to evermore chilling features of the Grand Patriarch’s hegemony: ‘it was as if different parts of her had been dismantled at puberty and reassembled, in a rush, at old age. Also, today, she had bruises. Her forehead had bled and dried. There was a scar a night old on her head as well’ (S&SM: 23). The source of this beating, meted out the night of Soyaan’s death, is Keynaan. As becomes clear, it is one episode in a disturbingly long line:
Whenever some superior officer humiliated him, he came and was aggressive to the twins and his wife. He would flog them, he would beat them – big, and powerful that he was, the Grand Patriarch whose authority drenched his powerless victims with the blood of his lashes. She would wait until the twins grew up, she confided to a neighbour. She would wait ... Society, on top of it, required women to be tolerant, to be receptive, to be receiving – and forgiving ... Keynaan and his generation have never known women ... Soyaan would argue. (S&SM: 84)
With a loaded reference to being ‘on top of it’, Farah renders the patriarchal society Keynaan represents to be as sexually aggressive as it is overbearing. As Ahmed maintains, Farah’s preoccupations with the sovereignty of the female body and the punitive relationship between authoritarian power and patriarchy have endured since From a Crooked Rib (Ahmed 1996: 78).
Whilst the embodied focus is unequivocal here, commentators have been less eager to explore the attendant ambivalences that distinguish portraits of figures such as Qumman. In turn, the nuances of Farah’s critique of individual and collective responsibility, and its correspondence to his overarching concern with power, have not been afforded the attention they deserve. It is ironic that Qumman should alert Loyaan to the shadowy figure of Ahmed-Wellie and his tribal affiliations with the General (‘Cousins only twice removed, that man’s father and the General’, S&SM: 79), as it is Ahmed-Wellie in turn who dismisses her world view:
‘Qumman is simply a woman who feels threatened by Beydan and Margaritta; Beydan ... being the wife Keynaan prefers and also because Soyaan supposedly ate poisoned food at her place; Margaritta because she represents the type of woman Qumman’s generation detests’ ... Qumman detested young, educated, ‘liberated women, the Margarittas, the Medinas.’ Well, that simplified things, thought he. (S&SM: 164)
Loyaan’s final comment is deliberately deceptive. What at first appears an oasis of order in the midst of textual chaos is in fact the primary target of Farah’s critique. Once again, complications abound at the narrative and national levels because little is simple. The order of things can only be challenged once this reductive view has been dismissed. Elsewhere, it is revealed how Qumman despises Beydan for being a woman of ‘inferior tribal breeding’ (S&SM: 56) when she comes to pay her respects following Soyaan’s death.
Complications define relationships in generational and clan terms alike. The essential point is that ways of being and seeing govern the world at both individual and societal levels. Turfan’s critique of the Group as unconcerned with the plight of their fellow countrymen becomes more problematic when taking into account their impassioned discussions of competing ideologies within various domestic settings. From Farah’s perspective, the Machiavellian General derives power simply by replicating the disciplinary designs found within the homes of figures such as Qumman. Once again, therefore, Foucault’s comments in ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ have a certain resonance:
I heard someone talking about power the other day ... He observed that the famous ‘absolute’ monarchy in reality had nothing absolute about it. In fact it consisted of a number of islands of dispersed power, some of them functioning as geographical spaces, others as pyramids, others as bodies, or through the influence of familial systems, kinship networks and so forth. (Foucault 1980a: 207)
Transposing this in relation to Farah’s work, we might substitute ‘absolute monarchy’ for ‘absolute dictatorship’. Divide-and-rule tactics at the macrological level are seen as distorting the logic behind social organisation