Nuruddin Farah: Nostalgia and the daily search for a lost home

“I had a piano teacher who used to talk about the most familiar musical cadence — in which a piece returns, after wandering and variation, to its original key, the tonic — as “going home” …

These satisfying resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the expected resolution, a dissonance sharpens its blade and seems about to wreck things — and is then persuaded home …” That’s how the English critic, James Wood, describes the concept of home. A sweet place. A perfect cadence. Like the beautiful rainbow after drenching rain.

However, for Nuruddin Farah, one of the featured writers in the December 1-6 Kwani Litfest 2015, his home country of Somalia is a broken place. Somalia is a place of great conflict and rivalry, where human life sometimes means little; people seemingly live by the wisdom that “a dead man’s shoes are more useful than he is”.

In his writings, Farah takes his place among the painters of the homesick, the haunted, the melancholy and the diminished.

INTACT MEMORIES

Salman Rushdie, in his memoirs, Joseph Anton, writes a moving account of how he went to Farah for advice on how to depict his home country of India, a country lost to him as he has spent years in exile. “I keep it here,” Farah said, pointing to his heart. He carries Somalia the way an inconsolable woman may carry a dead child, refusing to accept the fact.

Farah may be away from Somalia but the country looms large in his writing. It haunts him; the way the laughter of passersby intrudes and follows one even when he locks himself up in the privacy of a room, trying to catch some sleep. Farah is always remembering what has been lost. He reminds us of the words of Theodor Adorno in Mimima Moralia: “For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live”.

And for Farah, writing is a “moveable home”. Home, as a physical place, is vulnerable to decay. It is like a dying man’s fading light; houses collapse, parents die, siblings grow up and leave, voices trail off over the years and hugs grow cold. However, memories are like a longing gaze into the past; tenderness that is difficult to describe.

And memories are intact even of the people we’ll never see again. Our parents are frozen in time — alive, energetic, ageless and immortal — and we are young again — carefree, playing and chasing butterflies in the rain.

If home as a physical place is disappointing, we can make another home as a construct of reality. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their 1996 book, The Social Construction of Reality, showed how this can be done. By this logic, home can be a construct we can create the way we remember not necessarily the way things actually were.

This construction of reality (of childhood) is probably what Patrick McGuinness has in mind when he writes in his book, Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory: “And as with much of that childhood, I seem to remember not the things themselves but the memories of the things, as if the present I experienced them in was already showing up and treacling over, fixing itself in a sepia wash”.

Like the way a vagabond does – a wanderer living in other people’s countries, sleeping on park benches or on other people’s floors – Farah is seemingly always on the move from country to country.

Of course, as a writer of repute, he lives comfortably but Somalia, the bedrock of his memories, won’t leave him alone. “Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality,” James Wood once wrote.

PROLIFIC WRITER

Now aged 70, Nuruddin Farah was born in Baidoa, Somalia. He is arguably Somalia’s most prominent novelist. He is a nomad, having lived in 10 African countries. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), is about a girl fleeing from an arranged marriage to a much older man.

After publishing A Naked Needle (1976), he went to self-exile, teaching in the United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India and Nigeria.

It was then that he wrote three novels in the series, “Variations” on the theme of African dictatorship. These novels are Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981) and Close Sesame (1983). Then came his famous novel, Maps (1986), tackling nationalism and religious dogma, Gifts (1992) addressing foreign aid and Secrets (1998) on clan conflicts, then Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000) on the theme of international refugees created by political violence. The other novels are Links (2003), Knots (2007), Crossbones (2011) and the latest is Hiding in Plain Sight (2014), addressing the Al Shabaab menace.

Farah deals with issues affecting Somalia in all his works. He writes to make his country alive. Fortunately, literature will outlive us all and generations unborn will conjure up pictures of Farah’s Somalia.