The eighties saw Farah living and working in locations as diverse as Los Angeles and Khartoum, Bayreuth and Kampala. It was also a time of great literary productivity. Following an appointment as Visiting Reader at the University of Jos, Nigeria, Farah continued his itinerant journey across Africa, moving to Gambia in 1984 and then to Sudan following the publication of Maps. In the early nineties, during a spell teaching at Makerere University in Uganda, Farah once again fell foul of the political powers-that-be. After the Swedish-language publication of Gavor (Gifts) in 1990, Farah resigned his position following criticism by President Museveni. If this got the decade off to a rather inauspicious start, 1991 was a year of watershed moments. Whilst Farah collected the Tucholsky Literary Award in Stockholm, it was Siyad Barre’s fall from power that had the most significant impact on his life and work. In the post-Barre power vacuum, uncertainty about Somalia’s political future mounted, culminating in the failed U.S.-led intervention Operation Restore Hope. America’s military misadventures in the Horn of Africa would provide the backdrop for Farah’s first, post-9/11 novel, Links (2004). As helicopters burned and bodies were beaten in Mogadiscio, Farah found comparative stability in Nigeria following the birth of a daughter and a son. After spells in other parts of the continent and beyond, one of his next journeys would prove particularly decisive. Following Barre’s death in Abuja in 1995, Farah returned to Somalia after 22 years in exile. An emotional homecoming, the 1996 trip allowed him to witness firsthand how much his country had changed and its people had suffered since his own departure in the seventies. These experiences fed into the writing and publication of Secrets, the final instalment of the Blood in the Sun trilogy that began with Maps. After years of uprooting, Farah and his family settled in Cape Town in 1999.
Whilst my own journeys have been freely willed and much more modest in comparison with Farah’s, I use the concluding section of this study to reflect on how a meeting with him in Cape Town in 2011 galvanised this project anew. Following my relocation to South Africa in 2010, questions of home, roots and routes have assumed particular burdens of significance, both personally and professionally. In its own, necessarily ‘unhomely’ way, Farah’s work continues to have a resonant power. What I will argue throughout this book, however, is that it is the manner in which he marries the intimately personal with the intensely political that distinguishes his finest writing. If this can be seen to both pass comment on and reflect the various ruptures that have defined his own narrative as well as that of Somalia, I explore how and why it is underpinned by an enduring set of ethical and political convictions. Having offered a contextual overview of Farah’s own narrative, marked as it has been by locations, dislocations and relocations, the remainder of this introduction explores why a discursive marriage between his work and that of Michel Foucault is so enabling.
Why Farah? Why Foucault? Why Now?
Throughout this contrapuntal study, I explore how Foucault’s reflections on power, body, resistance, disciplinary institutions and biopower might be seen in productive conjunction with some of the most urgent concerns of Farah’s oeuvre. These preoccupations have endured since From a Crooked Rib to Crossbones, a text that appeared in South Africa in 2012. Whilst my analytical approach builds on the idea that there are a series of ‘uncanny links’ between their respective projects, it is important to foreground the book’s commitment to investigating sites of potential convergence and divergence. In what follows, therefore, I focus on some of the key theoretical coordinates of the study as a whole. I consider how pioneers working in predominantly postcolonial and feminist fields have readily accepted the challenge to salvage rather than savage Foucault for their own ends. The lessons taken from their work are salutary, inspiring me too to make Foucault groan and protest in what, at first sight, may seem unfamiliar settings. As I claim throughout this book, many of the ‘open-ended’ qualities that characterise Foucault’s speculations are analogous with Farah’s work. Whilst the latter has been the subject of fine single-author studies and critical compendiums, The Disorder of Things strives for something different. For a writer who is often spoken about in the same breath as Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, Farah warrants the same theoretically substantive engagement afforded to them. My contention, therefore, is that the at-once ethical and political imperatives underpinning Farah’s writing, fictional and non-fictional, invite his readers to situate it within more interdisciplinary, Foucauldian-inflected frameworks.
As such, my approach, here and throughout The Disorder of Things, takes its lead from Sam Binkley’s sense of multiple Foucaults: ‘[h]ave changing times required that we discard our old Foucaults and invent new ones, or are there parts we can save, parts we should revise, or previously neglected parts we should draw to the fore and emphasize?’ (Binkley 2010: xi). Building on this, I argue that both Farah’s fictive and Foucault’s discursive concerns morph and evolve as they shift from one key text to another. As such, Foucault’s more identifiably ‘literary’ concerns, such as the ‘death of the author’, are less significant for the purposes of this study than his privileging of particular sites, spaces and discourses concerning discipline and power. Whilst, particularly when it comes to engaging with Farah’s Blood in the Sun trilogy (comprising Maps, Gifts and Secrets), I consider contentious issues of authorship, its premature or otherwise demise and readerly responsibility, the analyses that follow are inspired by Foucault in a broader sense. This is the figure whose interventions and legacy have proved critical catalysts for writers and thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Ann Laura Stoler, V.Y. Mudimbe and Alexander Butchart, to name only a few of those who inform this discussion. My primary interest, therefore, lies in exploring the extent to which the comparative reader can map certain key developments within Farah’s oeuvre in relation to similarly key negotiations in Foucault’s thinking and writing. When it comes to examining Farah’s first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979–1983), for instance, I suggest how its claustrophobic, quasi-Orwellian portrait of life under autocratic rule can usefully be read in light of early Foucauldian interventions. In drawing on Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization in particular, I argue that an awareness of Farah and Foucault’s respective concerns with the use and abuse of power within what can be seen as carceral societies need not result in an airbrushing of contextual or other crucial differences. As my engagement with a range of secondary sources suggests, the manifest blind spots that, for many, blight Foucault’s vision have not prevented succeeding generations of scholars, in fields as diverse as anthropology and the medical humanities, from engaging with and taking his work in provocative new directions. At the outset, therefore, I suggest the success, or otherwise, of this book can be judged by how effectively it operates in such a discursive spirit.
If carceral concerns haunt Farah’s first trilogy, I consider the ways in which a reading of his second might be enlivened by reflecting on the shift away from predominantly spatial and disciplinary preoccupations in Foucault’s early work to those of biopolitics and normalisation. I maintain that similar negotiations, away from the carceral and towards the bio-political, take place as readers cross from Farah’s Variations to his Blood in the Sun cycles. The indepth discussion of opening instalment Maps provides a case in point. Whilst the novel’s dramatic action centres on what will become Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War with Ethiopia over disputed geo-political boundaries, it is just as preoccupied with the ways in which the conflict is both conceived and fought in terms of an equally contentious series of bio-political lines. Accordingly, I draw on Foucault’s The History of Sexuality as well as his provocative lecture series ‘Society Must Be Defended’. I use them to argue that this shift away from a concern with the use and abuse of sovereign power as well as its protection to a position where the governing dictum for Foucault ‘consists in making live and letting die’ provides a compelling way to approach