Described as if he were a Foucauldian delinquent, Keynaan is perhaps the most morally reprehensible figure in Variations: ‘a former police inspector, a man forced to retire because of scandalous inconveniences he had created for the regime ... An informer, a daily gatherer of spoken indiscretions, an ‘earservant’ of the National Security Service since he was semi-literate’ (S&SM: 9). Commentators have written extensively on the oppressive dialectics of family and state in Farah’s work. It is, however, a critique that benefits from the kind of Foucauldian supplement offered by Dubravka Juraga: ‘[Farah’s] view of the function of the family as a tool of official oppression closely parallels Foucault’s description of the bourgeois family of Victorian England as a focal point for power relations in a society’ (Juraga 2002: 294). Before Soyaan dabbled in subversive memorandums, it was the abuse suffered by his mother that ignited his Oedipal/political conviction to usurp his father and all he could be seen to represent. Whilst body politics provide the unequivocal, if besieged, base of Farah’s novels, they are also a gateway into considering the broader interplay of ideas that preoccupy him. As Alden and Tremaine suggest, ‘to enter into [the Group of 10’s] world as a reader ... is to enter into a discourse of ideas imagined as flesh and blood, a lived debate, one that goes on both among and within characters’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 45). This conceptual contest is exemplified in an exchange between Keynaan and Loyaan.
Like Idil in Sardines, Keynaan offers a scathing critique of the intelligentsia’s incompetence: ‘no young man of your age that I know has ever appeared as ‘dangerous priority’ on the list drawn up by the Security ... You have no common ideology for which you fight. You have no organised protest ... you are no threat ... The General fears tribal chieftains or men of his age. Not you, nor Soyaan, nor anyone of your Generation’ (S&SM: 91). It is revealing that this episode emerges immediately before the end of Part One, with Part Two being introduced by the pivotal Wilhelm Reich epigraph: ‘in the figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument of power’ (S&SM: 95). Keynaan’s indictment strikes a dispiriting blow to the Group’s insurgent aspirations. Whilst lacking the wisdom of Deeriye in Close Sesame or the compassion of Nonno in Secrets, Keynaan does display an awareness of ‘power as a system’, in turn showing how he and the General play their patriarchal parts in it. As such, his accusation that the Group effectively represents an ideological void against the General’s manipulation of existing social structures and affiliations is pertinent. The spectre of total despair, however, is in turn challenged by this portrait of counter-hegemonic fallibility, with Farah keeping his focus firmly on the incremental processes of resistance.
Farah places this confrontation at the close of Part One. If this suggests his critical convictions, it also indicates the centrality of designs within the trilogy as a whole. Having argued about Keynaan’s role in Soyaan’s death and the subsequent reappropriation of his legacy, Loyaan identifies a familiarly savage glint in his father’s eye. It reminds Loyaan of an incident in the twins’ childhood, when Keynaan slashed the ball the boys were playing with. This memory, which is presented early and recurs throughout the text, recalls Soyaan’s promise that ‘I will kill him. When I am old enough to use a knife. I will’ (S&SM: 94), before returning to the narrative present in which Keynaan announces to brotherless Loyaan, ‘I am the father. It is my prerogative to give life and death as I find fit. I’ve chosen to breathe life into Soyaan. And remember one thing, Loyaan: if I decide to cut you in two, I can. The law of this land invests in men of my age the power. I am the Grand Patriarch’ (S&SM: 94). With this flourish, Keynaan departs, leaving the reader in little doubt as to the despotic comparisons between domestic and national patriarchs. As Adam maintains, ‘[Keynaan’s] attitude to women (always a touchstone for enlightenment in Farah) parallels that of the General to his subjects: it is tyrannous, dismissive of their capacities and proprietorial of their role’ (Adam 2002: 340). Elsewhere, Fanon has drawn attention to this patriarchy/power dynamic. In The Invention of Somalia, Ahmed, amongst others, considers how Fanonian thought might be transposed within a Somali context (Ahmed 1995: 149). In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon declares that ‘there are close connections between the structure of the family and the structure of the nation. Militarization and the centralization of authority in a country automatically entail a resurgence of the authority of the father’ (Fanon 1967: 141–142). To maintain a Foucauldian perspective, it is necessary to note a key divergence, as discussed in The History of Sexuality: ‘the father in the family is not the “representative” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family’ (Foucault 1990: 100). If Farah’s position exists somewhere between these two statements, his most compelling critique comes from what appear to be the textual margins.
When Keynaan bursts his sons’ ball, it heralds ‘the age of challenge. The age of growth’ (S&SM: 94). It is a statement applicable to both protagonists within this text and the Group’s general socio-political development. The dialectical progress of history rests on struggle and it is this process that fascinates author and reader throughout Variations. Accordingly, Patricia Alden’s Sardines note can be applied to the trilogy as a whole: ‘with Medina the positive and negative perspectives are located within history: the unresolved questions involve evaluating the efficacy of her actions in history, and this efficacy cannot be established’ (Alden 2002: 379). The destructive intent with which Keynaan wields the knife recalls the painful infibulation undergone by Somali women. The connections between patriarchal power at both micro and macro levels of governance are pronounced. Indeed, the novel implies that it is Keynaan’s dismissal of body politics as a touchstone for the Group that might eventually constitute his undoing and that of the system itself. When he accuses Loyaan’s young generation of having no coherent ideology, he omits mention of the embodied political concepts upon which their loftier insurgent aspirations are based: the right of corporeal sovereignty and respect for individual liberties. As Juraga suggests, this familial conflict allows Loyaan to gain a clearer insight into power as system. Foucauldian parallels remain striking:
Farah suggests that the authoritarian structure of the Somali family makes Somali society inherently susceptible to political oppression. In that he parallels Foucault, who points out that in bourgeois Europe the family organization is used to support other ‘maneuvers’ of the larger alliances of power in the society. In a sense, the family acts as a ‘back-up’ to other strategies of power by enacting the power hierarchy already existing in the society. (Juraga 2002: 289)
Keynaan destroys the ball the twins used to imagine their universe in an apocalyptic precursor to Askar’s vision of a globe without boundaries in Maps. Whilst this symbol is self-explanatory, it captures the central relationship between micrological and macrological designs of and on power. Ideologies are oftentimes conceived in geometric terms in Variations, and it is Loyaan’s recollection of the words his brother used to articulate the divergent world views of father and twins that will come to haunt the trilogy. They also express the fundamental imperatives of Farah’s critique of power: ‘not so much generational as they are qualitative – the differences between us twins and our father. My father grew up with the idea that the universe is flat; we, that it is round ... We believe that his are exclusive, that they are flat (and therefore uninteresting) as the universe his insularities tie him to’ (S&SM: 83). Such degrees of difference or ‘potential’, to borrow from Foucault once more, remain critical. Effectively, Keynaan’s conceptual failure lies in his refusal to acknowledge the presence of alternative geometries. He thus replicates the General’s propagandistic power. Loyaan internalises his brother’s sentiments. His description