‘My father sees himself as a miniature creature in a flat world dominated by a God-figure high and huge as any mountain anyone has ever seen ... When you confront him with a question of universal character, his answer is tailor-made, he will say: ‘Only Allah knows, only Allah.’ A miniature creature dependent upon his creator to answer his questions. Suddenly, however, he behaves as if he were the most powerful of men, the biggest. Suddenly, he is, as Soyaan called him, the Grand Patriarch.’(S&SM: 83)
The image of detached, surveying power conjures up spectres of Foucault. As such, it informs the remainder of this analysis.
Architectures of Power and Resistance
Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relations in which individuals are caught up.
(Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1991: 202)
Summarising Variations, Alden and Tremaine compare the more overt subversion of Sardines and the outright violence of Close Sesame with Sweet and Sour Milk’s preoccupation with ‘research, documentation and disclosure’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 58). Whilst this resonates with a Foucauldian obsession with discourse and its normalising impulses, a supplementary interpretation might consider Soyaan’s original memorandum as a meditation on the technology of power itself. Soyaan’s collaborator, Ibrahim Musse, explains the relevance of its title, ‘Dionysius’s Ear’, to an inquisitive Loyaan:
‘The Syracusan tyrant had a cave built in the shape of a human ear which echoed to him in polysyllables whatever the prisoners whispered secretly to one another. Soyaan and I saw a similarity between this and the method the General has used so far. The Security Services in this country recruit their main corps from illiterates, men and women who belong to an oral tradition, and who neither read nor write but report daily, report what they hear as they hear it ... Everything is done verbally ... We say in our Memo that the General (with the assistance of the Soviets) has had an ear-service of tyranny constructed.’ (S&SM: 136–137)
With the emphasis placed on relays, networks and constructed surveillance systems, the above description places individuals akin to Foucault’s delinquents within a specifically Somali context. As Perrot maintains in relation to the Panopticon’s archetypal design in ‘The Eye of Power’, ‘at the same time one is very struck by the techniques of power used within the Panopticon. Essentially it’s the gaze; but also speech, because he has those famous ‘tin tubes’, that extraordinary invention, connecting the chief inspector with each of the cells, in which Bentham tells us that not just a single prisoner, but small groups of prisoners are confined’ (Foucault 1980b: 154). Once again, this works in an intriguingly contrapuntal manner with Ali’s testimony in The Cost of Dictatorship. In it, he details how inmates devised their own, ingenious method of communication:
our knocking on the cell walls developed secretly into a fine art. We devised an alphabet from the two distinct sounds available to us – a loud note made with the knuckles of the middle fingers and a low drumming note ... I cannot overestimate the value of our alphabet because it was the only method of human contact left to us. The guards could not see us and never made the mental leap of deducing that we were able to understand each other by ‘touching the walls’. (Ghalib 1995: 245)
If this provides a discursive framework in which to read some of Sweet and Sour Milk’s carceral concerns, Ibrahim’s depiction of dystopian design once again confounds Medina’s dismissal of the General as unworthy adversary. The ‘politically immature’ Loyaan illustrates the extent of his development by couching his critique in relation to his fallen brother, even acknowledging the power wielded over posthumous reputations: ‘the Master of Grand Irrelevances? No, Medina is wrong. The man kills. The man has designs on our lives. The man can eliminate a person and then take possession of his soul and have him discredited in the eyes of his friends’ (S&SM: 142).
As with Ahmed-Wellie’s attention to patterns, it is this focus on design and the architecture(s) of power that elevates this opening instalment. It also obliges the reader to consider links between it and the body-politics motif that runs throughout Farah’s oeuvre. The labyrinthine, quasi-detective quest Loyaan is engaged in is ominously reflected in the authoritarian society’s disciplinary designs. He both operates within and is ultimately charged with deciphering and opposing them. Read in this way, Foucault’s notion of getting ‘caught up’ assumes greater significance. Here, the labyrinth is characterised by reverberation, rumour and reiteration, with whispers and echoes amplified to such an extent that they come to sound like ‘truths’. Farah offers something akin to an Orwellian dystopia, in which the entanglements of power relations are such that family members occupying the same space clash with one another. The buffer zone between despotic regime and counter-hegemonic intelligentsia is most obviously represented by Keynaan. As such, Farah can be seen as playing with Foucault’s notion of the relationship between secrecy and the mechanisms of power. In The History of Sexuality, he states that ‘[p] ower is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself ... secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation’ (Foucault 1990: 86). In the General’s Somalia, webs of political affiliation are an open secret; the fundamentally cellular nature of power is veiled by the façade of socialist advancement. What makes the situation even more ominous is that, accepting Ngũgĩ’s concept of the tyrannical neo-colonial African state as penitentiary, the agents of resistance are hampered by the axial invisibility and limited communication depicted by Foucault. Chowers explains it in the following terms: ‘atomized individuals find it difficult to assemble the knowledge and develop the cognitive understanding needed to truly and comprehensively fathom their predicament; moreover, even if such an understanding could be attained, detached individuals lack the mutual trust and social practices necessary for ameliorative collective action’ (Chowers 2004: 190–191). In Farah’s fiction, the oppositional hope manifest in the ‘touching of walls’ described in Ali’s testimony is constantly under threat.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to ‘a microphysics of what might be called a “cellular” power’ (Foucault 1991: 149). He maintains that ‘discipline organizes an analytical space ... Even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular’ (Foucault 1991: 143). With awareness of the alternative contexts in which these concepts are employed, I find something like these notions of cellular power and disciplinary/analytical space at play throughout the Variations cycle. In place of the authoritarian gaze that will come to dominate proceedings in Sardines, Sweet and Sour Milk is concerned with oral resonance within a society where ‘rumour rules’ (S&SM: 116). In the regime’s disciplinary design, it is the peculiar conjunction of surveillance eyes and ears that guarantees the order of things. Soyaan’s ‘Dionysius’s Ear’ document circumvents the channels of oral communication and attacks power on paper. Whilst this largely constitutes the radical threat that must be neutralised, in the guise of its author, it is also its major flaw. In a society more reliant on speech than writing, the transcription of subversive material to print can only ever have a limited reach. Simply put, the ‘captive’ and/or ‘entrapped’ Group fails to spread its oppositional message. The strength of Farah’s critique of power lies in demonstrating how the Syracusan tyrant utilises the essentially cellular base of power in Somalia, manipulating its oral networks and distorting clan logic in order to retain control. As the Barre and post-Barre national narratives attest, the trajectories of fiction and fact run conspicuously parallel.
Beyond