Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. (Foucault 1991: 200)
The sinister designs Loyaan identifies as the General’s are replicated in the social structure and architecture of power on the ground. The specificities of this cellular authority are first considered in an earlier work.
Whilst A Naked Needle functions as a conceptual laboratory for Farah, an intriguing and lengthy episode shows protagonist Koschin acting as a guide for his foreign girlfriend, Nancy. Escorting her round Mogadiscio, he identifies the General’s growing personality cult in those incessant reminders of his dominance. For Ahmed, ‘Koschin treats the city both as a backdrop and as a political space both to attack Barre’s regime and to rewrite Somali historiography’ (Ahmed 1996: 92). By the more ominous time of Sweet and Sour Milk, the propagandistic banners and murals remain. His omniscient power is, however, really represented by Orientation centres attended by citizens so that they can be ‘educated’ in the goals of the faux-revolutionary regime. In an Orwellian pastiche, these centres are effectively surveillance cells operating to monitor and, where necessary, neutralise dissent. Loyaan’s evocation of the confined, cellular cityscape and Soyaan’s description of the Grand Warder with the master keys again has eerie associations with Foucault:
‘[Mogadiscio] is broken into thirteen cells, of which all but one is of manageable size.3 The security deems it necessary to break this sandy city into these, have each house numbered, the residents counted ... The General has the master key to all cells, whether numbered or unnumbered. He is the Grand Warder ... Thrice weekly, civil servants should report themselves to the Centres at which they are registered ... If any person is found missing on two counts of six, he or she loses his or her job.’ (S&SM: 87)
The notion of punitive and political cells is again reconfigured as Farah seems preoccupied with the dialectic of disciplinary apparatus and space. When grafted onto the already complex divisions of Somali society, Foucault’s meditations on the authoritarian gaze and the surveillance relationship between (Orientation) centre and periphery can be translated effectively: ‘the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly ... a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned’ (Foucault 1991: 173). Like the Syracusan tyrant, the General employs parts of the perfect ear that hears all.
The concern with confinement, enclosure and entrapment in Variations is established in both private and public spheres. Mnthali has made a persuasive comparison between such elements in Farah’s work and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala. In both, the transgressive threat represented by beggars must be purged for the benefit of visiting leaders: ‘before any head of state visited a town, the Local Government and the Security swept away these ugly sights and kept them at bay for the whole period the foreign dignitaries were in the country’ (S&SM: 145). If the presence of these itinerant figures shatters the illusion of socialist harmony, it also embodies a challenge to the cellular power and containment procedures relied upon by the regime. Like Khaliif in Close Sesame, the beggars are audience members witnessing the General’s badly written play. Their negligible position means they are under no pressure to keep up appearances. The result is that they emerge as disruptive, and therefore potentially dangerous, hecklers:
They were among the ugly sights of poverty, the bad conscience of the Revolution, beggars who reminded one of the grave situation of the national economy despite the statistics published in government bulletins. One of them started to sing the General’s praises and choked on them. Another tried to lift the refrain from where the other had left it but couldn’t continue ... It was like a theatre audience not agreed on whether to clap: the solitary applause died at the immature stage of ridiculousness. (S&SM: 235)
As in Xala, beggars blur the boundaries of state authority, oftentimes evading the surveillance gaze. As such, they pose a series of ‘complications’. They have a comparably disquieting function to the lepers in Foucault’s discursive imagining. In effect, they are disorder made flesh. It is only through their definitive removal that the disciplinary apparatus can re-establish the normative and cellular division of the wider body politic. Reappropriating Adonis’ notion of the inherent instability of metaphorical language, however, Farah does entertain the possibility of regenerative and resistant hope. An analysis of power and resistance that privileges the microphysics of struggle provides one such outlet. A supplementary, suitably Foucauldian outlet in Farah’s imagining sees a return to the unstable sphere of personal and biological cells.
Ahmed’s project concerns ‘how literature captures in an inchoate form the incremental process: the accretions that caused the original cell (containing the replicating Somali mitochondria) to become dangerously turgid; the fraying at the seams that led to the cataclysmic disintegration of the abode that had hitherto housed the “Somali character”’ (Ahmed 1996: 34). Similarly, Farah’s texts are preoccupied with incremental processes at micrological and macrological levels. Central to both his fictional labyrinth, as well as the disciplinary designs of the regime, is the body. As such, Farah’s work traces the oscillations between body and polity, and how the realisation of these ongoing interconnections offers the most enduring prospect of escape. Whilst writing in a South African context, this is something touched on by Paul Gready in Writing as Resistance: ‘[i]nternal space (the body) and external space (the cell, the prison, and beyond) can be mobilized to transgress the repressive spatial design and its central components: isolation, immobilization, and surveillance’ (Gready 2003: 86). In Sweet and Sour Milk, this point is illustrated through the twins’ sister, Ladan, to whom they offer the gift of reading the world differently:
(It was here that Loyaan’s memory swam away back to days when Ladan was barely two ... How the twins had protected her from those murderous looks of Keynaan and the – at times – indifferent attitudes of Qumman to a girl. They would invest in Ladan their hopes, they would trust their future with her. They used to take turns telling her fables from faraway lands, the sagas of Iceland and Norway, the Nights of Arabia, the stories of Tagore, the tales of Ukraine and those of China. They fed her small brain on figures round, complete and open-ended. They trained her young mind with the aid of circles, squares and trigonometry. She was like them – except she was a girl. The world is an egg and it awaits your breaking it. Clear the mistiness of the white off your eyes and the yolk is yours – yellow and sick, yes, but yours for the asking). (S&SM: 108)
Revealingly