Nuruddin Farah: A Shining Star in a Dim Nation

By Faisal A. Roble

Somalis are collective in nature and live in a clan corporate culture where individual merit is often subordinated to the collective one. When their nation state failed in 1991, it seemed as if the collective will to reignite the flicker of hope also died. But it did not die in Nuruddin Farah.

Nuruddin’s literary work always focused on the tension between the collective society and the individual. Do the society’s morality and norms determine the outcome of the individual, or the individual often defies and must reject the collective? In practice, though, Nuruddin seems to have defied the odds of his society. In places where the collective failed, his individualism triumphed, and in turn redefined and challenged, or so it seems, the corporate nature of his society.

For the last quarter of a century, Somalia was entirely forgotten and unrepresented in global conversations. Yet one of her sons single handedly insisted that his narrative about his country be heard by the communities of the glob; and so he succeeded in his endeavor.

Nuruddin Farah

Yes, Somalis have been maimed and displaced, their urban centers depopulated, their architectural heritage razed from the earth for good. Their collective good will failed. Yet, Nuruddin Farah kept carefully and artfully knitting a powerful narrative of the undying spirit of the individual in the midst of a society that doubted itself.

Without Nuruddin’s work, the Somali narrative could have been reduced to a bunch of warlords looting their nation, a nation of beggars and an unyielding culture of piracy: through Nuruddin’s work, however, we have a bard’s eloquence and vocal voice that ceaselessly reminds us of the tenacious Somali individual defying odds.

This short tribute is neither a literary review of Nuruddin’s ever-expanding body of work, nor an exhaustive biographical essay of the man, the author, essayist, and the playwright. It is simply a spur of the moment in owe on my part to celebrate yet another prestigious Award.

On November 7, 2014, following the release of his latest book, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” he received the Life Time South African Literary Award (SALA). Although absent (he is a vising lecturer at Bard’s College in New York), the event of the award for Nuruddin was “graced by a number of people, the most interesting – and who was interested” in hearing him speak “was Elisabeth Barbier, Ambassadrice de France en Afrique du Sud.”

Nuruddin has in the past won many accolades and is considered to be one of the most acclaimed Africa’s contemporary writers. He is often banded together with the late Chinua Achebe and his friend, Wole Soyinka.

He has published more than twelve books, most of them in trilogies, numerous essays and plays. Some of the more known awards include the Kurt Tucholsy Prixe in Sweden, the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, the St. Malo Literature Festival’s Prize as well as the most prestigious award next to the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998.

As someone put it, “Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is one of the only major literary prizes, for which he is eligible, that he has yet to win.” He has been shortlisted for the Nobel and was considered as one of the top five finalists, a sure path to the Nobel itself.

As a reader of Nuruddin’s work, cutting my teeth with “the Crocked Rib,” a book I read in my teens, “Naked Needle” which I read in a makeshift jail in Lukhaya, near the scorched border town of Zaylac, Somalia, at a training camp for the Western Somali Liberation Front, and my all-time favorite, “Maps, ” “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,” and his other trilogies, it gives me particular satisfaction to note that he has been awarded the SALA Award on November 7, 2014.

As a Somali, his latest award gives me a unique satisfaction and a sense of a narrow triumphalist feeling. Bestowing the SALA Award on Nuruddin is a double-edge sword, to wit, an irony about inter- community and inter-individual relationships. Whereas South African’s down-trodden class wrongly maligns Somali refugees who dared to run small business in the underserved townships, the cultured high society at the Downtown Business Districts and college campus in the new South Africa find Nuruddin’s rich Somali narrative a “gift” as expressed by his books such as “Gifts” and others. We hope that Nuruddin would one day share with us the comeback kid’s story of a collective Somalia that defied odds as he individually did.

By Faisal A. Roble
Email: faisalroble19@gmail.com

Source: wardheer news