Links
by Nuruddin Farah
(Kwela)
For this newspaper, in September 1999, as a welcome to South Africa, I had the acute pleasure of interviewing Nuruddin Farah. The occasion was the publication, in this country, of an edition of his novel Secrets, soon to be followed with a local version of Gifts.
At the time he was non-committal as to whether or not those two striking reports on the condition of his homeland, Somalia, were to be wrapped up in a third work. But, four years on, we now have what turns out to be a trilogy concluded with Farah’s Links, now originated by a South African publisher.
Links may be taken quite comfortably on its own, nonetheless, without any priming from Farah’s earlier career. Yet, since it is unfashionably Victorian in length and complexity of plots, evidently Farah felt he had much unfinished business to write off here. Many familiar Farah tropes recur: there is a central character unwillingly returning to the war-torn country he had turned his back on; there are those “special” children born to bring about peace, and a lot more cross-references for Farah devotees to find.
But such familiar story material is manoeuvred freshly and adeptly here, indeed as if he had never attempted to squeeze the juice from it before. We are all part of one another’s recurring stories, Farah keeps insisting. Here the linking of one into the next, into the next, is especially knowing, and devilishly fascinating as a result.
As one of his sources Farah uses Black Hawk Down, the movie about that October 1993 goodwill invasion of Somali territory by American troops. The disastrous consequences are the main character’s concern: his mother dead and improperly commemorated, his sister’s infant kidnapped, kids in gangs toting knives at him. Mainly, warlords in battle wagons, with machine guns mounted on the roofs.
So dysfunctional has the potholed Mogadiscian cityscape become that Farah’s protagonist can pull off no easy heroics. The failure of his nation is beyond shocking, once he gets to see it, for he finds that it is down to exporting one last commodity: human body parts (in exchange for cars stolen in Europe). All he may admit to is his complicity and, hence root for a return to decent burials and disarming in every sense of the word.
Yet Farah’s teeming journey is no atrocity tourism of yet another African disaster area, although this reader has never yet come across such a pile-up of sorrows as in Farah’s ghastly city of ruin. Rather it seems as if Farah needed to take his time here, chewing each and every horror through. Above all, he had to avoid doctoring his version of his nasty home truths. So Links comes out as simply beyond reporting, beyond propaganda, even beyond human despair.
“Memory’s a bugger,” his hero recalls an English teacher quipping once, in the happier days of his youth. And so is one’s own history, it appears. Bravely facing it is Farah’s secret gift, unflinchingly and with the supreme clarity of the virtuoso writer who has the guts to take us way behind the prime-time gloss. And the Links between words and their meanings then may form the chain that is this devastating — and humbling — literary masterpiece.