The Disorder of Things. John Masterson

set aside from the determined indeterminacy of the present. It is essential that, whilst the text ends with an open parenthesis, this memory is complete. Whilst the playful presentation lends it an almost throw-away quality, it strikes me as an attempt to catch the reader off-guard, capturing as it does so many of Farah’s major preoccupations. The regenerative hope invested in Marco and baby Soyaan is given a longer historical perspective within the (potentially oppositional) domestic sphere. The cosmopolitan influences of this first post-Independence group are typically on display. It is the emphasis on design and trigonometry, however, that appears most crucial in relation to concerns with narrative, the construction of various labyrinths and the possibility of release. The gifts bestowed by the twins are both the imagined howl of Saul Bellow’s dog (‘For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!’) and the confidence to construct alternative ways of engaging that world (Rushdie 1992: 21). That these seeds of autonomy should be planted in a cultural context where a young girl is treated with indifference by her own mother lends the act additional hope. The reader may dismiss Farah’s final italicised sentences as indulgent. Yet, considered within Sweet and Sour Milk’s murky context, they do resonate with the concept of deciphering a code in order to find a way through the labyrinth.

      Viewed in this light, the mistiness of the white symbolises the novel’s evasiveness, with its yellow yolk constituting the body existing at the core of both disciplinary and emancipatory designs. References to circles and patterns recall the Detained epigraph above. The notable allusion to ‘figures round, complete and open-ended’, however, resonates both with the narrative’s unresolved nature and Farah’s broader aims. His novels and protagonists have been criticised for their inconclusiveness. Narratives taper off, characters disappear and no coherent plan of revolutionary action is implemented. Yet, in a society where confinement, containment and surveillance are the norm, a little indeterminacy is to be prized, rather than derided under the lazy exegeses of what Idelber Avelar, borrowing an epigraph from Foucault, calls ‘self-satisfied postmodernism’ (Avelar 1999: 233). Labyrinths can be fathomed when alternative exits are sought. The reclamation of Wright’s ‘tender pragmatism of the flesh’ represents one such outlet. What he cites as the inadequacy of Ladan’s portrait might, I suggest, constitute her exceptionalism: ‘it is Ladan who, significantly, is left at the end of the book holding the child born out of Beydan’s death and who names him Soyaan ... Ladan seems therefore to hold the key to Soyaan’s posthumous future. Yet she is, puzzlingly, one of the few characters who fails to reappear or receive any substantial mention in the next two volumes of the trilogy’ (Wright 1994: 64).

      Ladan is represented as exiting the maze of Farah’s dystopian imagining. Individual agents emerge to take charge of their political being and, in the process, begin to dismantle the very foundations upon which despotic power is based. Fittingly, therefore, one of the text’s most poignant portraits captures the union between the two young women, Ladan and Beydan. In contrast to her indifferent mother, Ladan breaks a myopic cycle by attending to her less privileged ‘sister’ during her difficult pregnancy: ‘the patternless loom of shades, after a while, answered a known design; all those present, save Ladan and Qumman, turned their eyes away. And from that rubble rose Ladan. She came over and took Beydan’s other arm. Of such gestures are understanding sisters made, thought he’ (S&SM: 57). It is one of Farah’s more hopeful experiments in doubling, accompanied as it is by the statement that ‘the universe is round and not flat. It is oval-shaped like an egg awaiting a hand to break it in half like a rubber ball’ (S&SM: 101). The imagery evokes memories of Keynaan’s despotic worldly designs as well as the faded symbols of the Somali Revolution. The act of breaking, however, signals transformative change, bestowing Ladan with the possibility of resistant agency and the chance to form other bonds, more emancipatory than carceral. Loaded with imagistic as well as ideological significance, Farah gestures towards alternative networks of communication: ‘doors untried had begun to open: the hinges of these doors creaked as they opened ... Let creaking doors creak. And use them while you may’ (S&SM: 241). Mysteries are half-revealed until the very end of Sweet and Sour Milk. Crucially, however, some key interpretative doors have been tried and alternative exits from the labyrinth sought. They open onto the associated concerns of Sardines, a novel in which questions surrounding the political sovereignty of the female body are dragged centre stage.

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