Farah and Foucault: Reflections on Beginnings
For Said in Orientalism, ‘the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning’ (2003: 16). Whilst The Disorder of Things aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of Farah’s work to date, it necessarily involves its own acts of delimitation. Significant as both From a Crooked Rib and A Naked Needle are to an appreciation of Farah’s oeuvre, I refer to them only in passing throughout what follows. My principal concern lies with the three trilogies (Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, Blood in the Sun and Past Imperfect) as well as the documentary study Yesterday, Tomorrow, all of which I consider in chronological sequence. As this book was going to press, Farah released Crossbones, the final instalment of his Past Imperfect cycle, in the United Kingdom and the United States. As such, I touch on it only briefly in a conclusion that is unapologetically open-ended. This is in keeping with what I take to be the interrogative spirit of both Foucault and Farah’s respective projects.
To return to the beginning, however, I suggest that, beyond the ‘uncanny links’ that join their varied preoccupations with biopolitics, power and resistance as well as their experiences of transnational uprooting, more fundamental connections exist between Michel Foucault and Nuruddin Farah. In their respective contexts and throughout their alternative discourses, their peculiarly intense focus on body politics might be seen to stem, in part at least, from formative moments in admittedly very different childhoods. For Foucault, the experience of having his place at the top of the Saint-Stanislas class jeopardised by an influx of Parisian refugees in the 1940s had a profound impact:
Foucault recalled how, during this period [in occupied France], his ‘private life was really threatened’ ... school had been ‘an environment protected from exterior menaces’ – but with the coming of war, there was no safe haven. ‘Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part,’ he later speculated: ‘I think this is the nucleus of my theoretical desire.’ (Miller 2000: 369)
Some twenty years after the end of the war and on a different continent, Farah found himself confronted with a more immediate menace. In ‘Why I Write’, he recalls how his soon-to-be-published ‘longish short story’ ‘Why Dead So Soon?’ was conceived ‘when in hospital, in pain and certain I would not survive the operation I was to undergo ... I might have written the first story because I was afraid of dying’ (Farah 2002b: 5). At the core of these anecdotes is a fundamental concern with moving from the micro to the macro, the personal to the political. Just as such negotiations can be seen to characterise both projects, they have, in turn, influenced my own approach in the opening and closing sections of this book. As The Disorder of Things begins with a personal aside, so it ends with a reflection on how and why my relocation to South Africa from the United Kingdom gave fresh impetus to this comparative study.
At the sentient level of fear and threat, both incidents appear to have had a simultaneously haunting and compelling influence on Foucault and Farah’s work. Reading these formative narratives alongside one another gives a sense of the contrapuntal approach I adopt throughout what follows. Similarly, when Farah conceives of the slippery concept of and incessant need to critique holistic truths, his argument is purposively fleshy:
The body politic whose sinewed muscles, strong as pillars, embodied the collective strength to which every member of the community contributed: in Africa that was sadly lacking ... The ‘truth’ that matters, indeed! What if I argue that truth must be ‘spoken’ whether in the privacy of one’s chambers or in the presence of others? What if I argue that it must be given a body, a physical existence, that truth must be clothed in the bodied concepts of words, of motions – so that others may share it, challenge it or accept it? (Farah 2002b: 10–12)
The anxious period in an Ogaden hospital bed proved the initial catalyst for Farah as a writer. As I argue throughout this book, preoccupations with body politics shift from the intimately personal to the intensely political throughout his work, continuing to characterise it to this day. A similarly fleshy vision seems to have driven Foucault’s own discursive investigations. With due acknowledgement of the elliptical quality of memory, Miller recounts Foucault’s own childhood tale of how his doctor father forced him to witness an amputation. The uncanny scene operates in conjunction with some of the discursive touchstones that resurface throughout Foucault’s work:
The image ... has all the ingredients of a recurrent nightmare: the sadistic father, the impotent child, the knife slicing into flesh, the body cut to the bone, the demand to acknowledge the sovereign power of the patriarch ... Like debris from a shipwreck, fragments of the scene keep bobbing up and down throughout Foucault’s life and work ... One is reminded ... of the strange link the philosopher makes in The Birth of the Clinic between sadism and the scientific foundations of modern medicine. And then there is the truly terrible diorama that opens Discipline and Punish. In this passage, the philosopher forces us to watch as the regicide Damiens has his legs and arms carved up and pulled off by a team of six horses. (Miller 2000: 366–367)
The groans and protests become audible once more as the spectres of ‘strange links’ hang heavy. With these in mind, my opening chapter builds upon the theoretical foundations I have laid throughout this introduction. In it, I offer an analysis of Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) in light of Foucauldian concerns with carceral power.
References
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