Fiction, Exile, and Alternative Histories: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah

Hello and welcome to the latest

installment of Being Human from the

University of Pittsburgh.

This series is devoted to exploring

the humanities, their connections to

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, associate director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is novelist Nuruddin

Farah. Born in the city of Baidoa,

Farah attended school there and in

the Ogaden, an ethnic Somali region

of eastern Ethiopia, until his

family was forced to leave due to

violent conflict.

He attended Punjab University in

India, pursued a master's degree

at Essex University in the UK,

and has also spent considerable

amounts of time living in the U.S.,

Germany, and South Africa,

partly because his writing forced

him into exile from his native land

for more than 20 years.

Farah has been publishing fiction,

plays, and criticism since 1970

and just published his 14th novel

titled North of Dawn last month.

In his writing, he registers the

instability and violence of Western

imperialism as accurately and

sensitively as any writer of the

last 50 years.

His 1983 novel, Close Sesame,

for example, has been called the

best novel ever written about the

terrors, hopes, and ironies of

post-colonial tyranny.

Farah has won a number of the most

prestigious literary awards in the

world, including the Neustadt

International Prize for Literature

in 1998.

He has also consistently earned

praise for his ability to write as

wonderfully and as clearly about

women as he does about men.

But Farah's fiction does more than

just record injustice, as essential

as that work is.

Ultimately, it proposes a different

way of responding to injustice

and to the complexities that come

with the various ethnicities,

languages, and histories that exist

across the globe.

Rather than reacting out of fear or

building walls, his fiction reminds

us that humans have resources for

creating structures of co-existence,

even if those structures need to be

constantly renewed and re-energized

to keep from becoming rigid and

exclusive.

One of Farah's favorite ideas that

he associates with this coexistence

is cosmopolitanism.

And I began by asking him to talk

about that quality and how it exists

in his adopted hometown of Cape

Town, South Africa.

It's a cosmopolitan city,

and it's a city in which,

despite the sad history

of the city

during apartheid and even now,

one feels

that one can actually take

time off from all these historical

complications and just live

in it for its

beauty.

For the fact that in the Cape

Town, in the Cape Peninsula,

which comprises Cape

Town and the towns and cities

around it, allows

you to enjoy the beauty of nature

and the

frequent

privacies that you can enjoy

in a city like Cape Town more than

most other cities in Africa.

And since I decided many,

many years ago that I was going to

live in Africa for

much of my life,

even though this is not always

the case,

my being based in Cape

Town gives me the comfort that when

other parts of the world are

burning, I can go back to

Cape Town and do my writing because

that's where I do all the writing.

You mentioned the cosmopolitanism

of Cape Town.

I

want to turn to your fiction for a

second, but maybe keep

that cosmopolitan idea alive.

So

anybody who knows anything about your writing knows that Somalia is a central presence in your work. It seems to me that you are also interested in preserving-- you've said that you write to keep Somalia alive. It seems to me that you write not only to keep Somalia alive but to keep a certain kind of cosmopolitan possibility

-that you know in Somalia

- alive. You know this from Mogadishu. You know this from other places in the country as well. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. That is the idea of cosmopolitan Somalia.

Well, there are two

phenomena that go together for me

in my mind.

And one of them is cosmopolitanism.

And cosmopolitanism,

for me, suggests

an openness of mind,

a tolerance for differences,

the celebration of

these differences because everyone

comes to the party, so to speak,

with their own personal qualities,

with their own history.

And therefore, each person,

when they come to a party, when they

come to the circle,

brings a wealth

that no one else

in the circle, no one else at the

party has.

Cape Town, therefore, allows

a Somali such as myself,

a European living

residing in Cape Town for a

few months, a university

professor, an artist, a filmmaker,

all of these people,

to meet, converge

on the city, and therefore

contribute to each other's

well-being and contribute

to each other's

richness of experience.

Now, with cosmopolitanism,

in my view, comes

secularism as well.

And because I have been-- I

come from Somalia, where

this terrorist group, al-Shabab,

claiming to be Muslims, have been

massacring people, killing people,

throwing bombs, doing all kinds of

terrible things.

And it protects you.

The ideas of cosmopolitanism

and the idea--

my faith

and the idea of secularism

protects me

from

that onslaught

on my person, on

my ideology and my philosophy,

and so on and so forth.

So in the one hand,

if there was a flag, I would have

cosmopolitanism, and in the other,

secularism.

And that, therefore, allows

people of different backgrounds,

different ancestries

to live together side by side

and to, as I said before,

appreciate the differences

that join them.

Yeah. And this is a this

is a kind of a very big-picture

question for you.

I mean, your first novel was

published in 1970.

So it's been-- you've been writing

novels for many years.

Is there a way in which

you think that you

are kind of, say,

enacting those

beliefs in cosmopolitanism and

secularism in your fiction?

Yes, because the majority of my

fiction, with the exception of

the first novel, takes place

entirely in

a cosmopolitan setting.

And therefore, there

is a debate

as to the present day and what's

happening. There is a debate as to

the past and what happened

and how to reconcile oneself

to the changes of the seasons,

the changes of the moods, the

changes of the centuries.

But there is a big difference, for

example, between Cape Town

and many of the other cities in

Africa in which I have lived.

And I

continue to go to

some of these other cities

while I have my base

in Cape Town.

And it's very possible, because

of who I am,

that no city would

accept me wholly

because I'm

in Cape Town, and the Capetonians

have suspicion that I

am there less often

than the majority of them are, and

they have no idea what I do when I'm

not there.

And then the books

also give you the possibility

of a debate.

That cosmopolitan debate, that

secular debate, the

one that is

essential. A debate that's

very, very essential between

communities.

And you must

realize that debates

such as these can only take place

in a city setting.

Yeah. I

want to ask you more about that

idea of debate, that idea of

kind of the cosmopolitan possibility

in your fiction. I wonder

if you think

that the novel as a

form is the thing

that-- does it always present this

possibility for debate?

Well, yes, it does.

It does. And the reason is if you

bring two people together

in a room,

and they talk,

very often they agree or disagree.

And regardless of

the direction in which their

conversation

may take,

the debate continues until

a third party joins and a fourth

party and then the world

will be represented in that room.

Mini-world would you represent

in that room. And a novel

more than a

play, the

novel more than poetry,

has the possibility of opening

that dialogue that continues

and reverberates in the

room in which you are.

Now,

the good thing about the novels

is that they don't necessarily have

to end, number

one. And number two, the good thing

about novels is you don't have to

write only one novel about that

subject because you could come and

look at it from different

angles and then treat

the same thing differently.

And then you can obviously

decide that tomorrow

the same characters would meet,

and then they would change their

mind about the things that they said

yesterday.

Now, that possibility

is available in the novel

but not necessarily in poetry

or in theater.

Yeah. I mean, I love the way you're

talking about the-- you

talked about a party earlier.

You talk about other

people entering and changing the

scene. Hiding

in Plain Sight is your most recent

novel, that you published from 2014,

and the scene that

it ends with-- the dinner party

scene there.

And there are dinner parties in

your fiction frequently.

But this is something that

you very explicitly

describe this is what happens

in this scene and in these party

scenes. As another person comes in,

you say, and then the mood was

shifted in a certain way, and then

another person comes in, and then

the mood was shifted. And a certain

person leaves, and then the mood is

shifted. And so it's very-- you're

kind of dramatizing that in a way

in these moments.

Yes. Because everybody brings their

own history. Everybody brings

their likes and dislikes.

And any two people who have known

each other for a long time

are likely

not only to know each other but to

like or dislike each

other. And then there is friction.

There is gossip.

There is

envy.

Somebody walks into a room

where you are.

As a writer,

you haven't published a book for

five, six years.

Somebody walks in, you say, "Hello,

how are you?" And then they say,

"I've just finished a book." When

you know that they've finished

another book

a year ago, two years ago.

And therefore, there is that

immense possibility

of

wounds

being opened.

Bad memories being revisited.

I could just stay with this

one scene, this idea of the party

and kind of coming and leaving for

one moment.

When I read that

scene, I reread it to prepare

to speak with you a few weeks ago.

I was

very much reminded of a scene from

To the Lighthouse from Virginia

Woolf's novel, where Mrs. Ramsay has

her dinner party at the end of the

first part of that novel.

And I know Virginia Woolf is someone

who has meant a lot to you.

And I guess I wanted to ask

you about that

connection, not necessarily about

To the Lighthouse or Woolf.

But

what that connection called to mind,

for me, was the idea that the kind

of the

cosmopolitan possibility

also existed in,

not only in kind of Somalia and in

kind of political and real world

settings but also in this modernist

moment.

Because these writers are people who

mean a lot to you. Joyce and T.S.

Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

And I wonder if-- I wanted

to ask you if that is

one of the things that you see in

them. And one of those-- these

writers and one of the things that

you value in them. That is that kind

of like the cosmopolitan

possibility. Do you see that in them

also?

Well, maybe subconsciously.

Maybe. And I

didn't think that I had

To the Lighthouse in mind when I

wrote Hiding in Plain Sight.

I did teach

To the Lighthouse a few years ago,

but I don't think I remembered that.

There are certain things that come

as

a natural

way of responding to

the narrative demands

because the story demands sometimes

that people be separated,

that there are only two people who

are meeting.

Because generally speaking,

only two people make love.

Generally speaking, the debate is

usually between two persons,

and then the rest of us will

come in and join.

I don't think that I had that

in mind, but I also remember,

in fact, come to think of it,

that in my novel, my second novel

called Naked

Needle, there is

a big party which more or

less ends the novel

to which everybody goes, including

the principal character who arrives

on that day.

But there

is almost always,

I find, that

the story suggests whether there

is a party or not a party.

And

because I write and rewrite

many, many times, every

novel that I

commit myself to writing,

it's very possible that in the

earlier versions,

there was no party.

And it's possible that

in the final version of the text,

the party grows

to such a degree

that it dominates the entire novel.

Yeah.

Well, I wonder, just to kind of stay

with this, and this is not

necessarily to

kind of stay with the

connection to modernist writers or

not, although if you feel like

talking more about that, that would

be fine.

But one of the things to me that

seems like it also

has these

moments of these parties,

gatherings, dinner parties, whatever

they are, in your fiction.

And another way in which they kind

of dramatize this cosmopolitan

possibility that we've been talking

about has to do with the fragility

of the togetherness that's there.

Right? I mean, there's a moment

there, for example, just in Hiding

in Plain Sight, again, like Bella,

bringing these people together at

the end of the novel and kind of

successfully having everybody

interact in this way.

It's a very fragile moment, and it's

always in danger of falling apart.

Exactly.

And I wonder if this-- yes.

So I wonder if this, too, is

a way in which it is an accurate

representation of

that cosmopolitan.

Like the real world cosmopolitan.

Yes. Yes. But I'm

reminded-- I mean, I'm not changing

the subject, but I'm reminded

of one of my favorite sayings

from Raymond Chandler,

who says, "When the story

can't move,

bring into the room a man with

a gun."

That'll make something happen.

It'll make something happen because

it'll make somebody frightened,

like somebody very happy that

a man with a gun has just

walked in.

But everyone who comes

into the room is like a man

with a gun because everybody

has a history.

And especially if they know each

other. If people know each other,

and if they don't know each other,

they bring in a

sense of foreboding.

They bring in a sense of

caution.

I mean, who is this person?

What does he want?

And in a world

as fragile as it is,

even in

Pittsburgh today,

new people who come into a room,

you begin to suspect them.

You say, "Are they right-wing?

Are they left-wing?

Are they

of the Republican Party, the

Democrats, and so on and so forth?"

And there is this continuous-- and

the debate, obviously.

These are things that have been said

before, 20

years ago, 30 years ago.

The same stories

are being retold.

The characters have changed,

but the same stories are being

retold.

And it's the retelling of this story

and the metaphors

that are being used, the handles

that are being distributed,

the baton, that these

are some of the things that

determine the success

or lack of success of a novel.

Yeah.

I mean, there's also one of the

other things that is--

and there's kind of-- we've been

talking, I think rightly, about

divisions along lines of

political belief.

One of the other kinds of

divisions that exists

and can make kind of togetherness

difficult at times is generational

divisions.

Yes, I have quite often

been interested in generational

differences.

And

the reason is, you see,

my father's generation

and my generation

are absolutely and

totally different.

You could not

imagine

that I am the son of my father.

And the reason is

he was semi-literate.

He spoke English and Swahili

and Somali, but he

was semi-literate,

and he could not

sit down and write a

letter to

his wife.

My mother was an

oral poet,

and I am as far away from

being an oral poet

as the moon is

from Saturn.

So I am,

therefore, a completely different

person from what my parents

were.

My children,

which is a generation later,

obviously very, very different.

They do not know Africa.

They do not speak an

African language.

They are not keen on the idea.

They are not interested

in Africa.

They live in California.

And therefore, the world

in which I reside

is made up of all these

contradictions.

And you ask yourself

the question: is it actually

possible for people who are

as different as my

parents and I were

and my children and

myself? Is

love possible?

And it is.

And that is the

beauty of it.

And that can only happen

in a world of cosmopolitanism.

And it can also

happen in a world

of secularism.

And the reason is because if

religion walks in, my

children having never set foot

in a mosque or church.

My parents spent

a great deal of time

praying,

worshiping the Lord.

I have not set

foot in a mosque for God knows how

long.

All these are possible

because of that tolerance

of differences and appreciation

of differences.

Obviously, my parents and I,

I was a great friend of

my mother's, but not my father

because he had no sense of

tolerance.

You've written about

conversations you had with your

father towards the end of his

life, where

there was some tension on exactly

this issue, and exactly what you

were describing, the kind of

knowledge, his resistance

to the very idea of knowledge has

been so important to you.

Well, exactly.

And I wanted to

be as different from my

father as any son could

be from his father.

But I was also-- I nursed the

idea and the dream of

one day becoming like my

mother, tolerant,

generous to others,

listening all the time,

waiting for advice,

and open to a much

larger world

than the one in which I was born.

I wonder about, picking

up on the cue of your mother,

the kind of distance you wanted to

see from your father,

and the kind of the

closeness that you felt to your

mother. One of the things, and

others, I mentioned Somalia earlier,

that's unmistakable in your fiction.

Also, strong

women characters are very important

in your fiction.

Is this one of the places that comes

from - your relationship with your mother?

It comes from the Somali tradition.

I've written about it.

And even if one didn't want

to write about it, one would be

forced to write about them.

And the reason is I usually say

that Somalia as a country exists

today thanks

to the women,

the Somali women, who held

homes together, put

food on the table, despite

all the difficulties, and

who fought for peace, continue

to fight for peace.

And the men who are

power crazy,

mad in their ambitions

because they think they can change

the world or gain

power illicitly, and

so on and so forth.

And the reason why the war continues

is because of these men.

Men, whether they are even

not very religious

minded. Men

who crave power,

hungry for it.

The women are the ones

who run the families.

And when one person

is wounded, or the entire

community is injured, or

something terrible happens,

they're the ones who work on the

healing process.

The respect

that you clearly have for women, the

role they've played in Somalia, the

important

women characters that are in your

fiction.

I have

seen-- you've talked about kind of

patriarchy being a form of

dictatorship in

your fiction. And you're reacting

against that.

What I see, though,

is not only

a kind of view

promoting the idea

of the strength of women and the

importance of women but also

imagining the

possibility that gender itself

would be more fluid.

And this comes in for-- you can

imagine characters like Askar, for

example, in Maps.

The

imagination that he has, that

he's part of Misra, that he

menstruates, for example.

And these kinds of ways

of having kind of like male

and female go back and forth between

each other rather than the--

The empathy that actually created

him. And the reason is because he

sees that the men

with whom he is

surrounded are untrustworthy,

selfish. Their

self-aggrandizement,

unacceptable.

Their acceptance of

differences, also

unvailable.

Women, therefore, suggest

a world that is

open with possibilities.

Men suffer

from closed minds in

Somalia.

And I'm quite sure it's the same in

many parts of the world.

Until they realize

the women in them,

as well as the men

being who they are.

And these are some of the things--

the problem. I

usually say any

man who cannot accept

the woman in him,

any man who doesn't have that

continuous

empathy

towards women, they

need to be hospitalized.

There's something wrong with them.

There's something lacking in them.

Their humanity is

sort of damaged.

Yeah.

I'm reminded we talked about kind of

generations and moved to talking

about women.

I'm reminded of these kinds of--

When the generations

come back-- may I?

If I come back to it.

In a couple of the novels,

in Close Sesame

as well as in

Secrets,

there are generational differences,

and I've always been fascinated

by the idea of the grandfather

and the grandchild.

With the absence of tension,

direct paternal tension,

because between you and your father,

between me and my father,

there is always tension

because the father wants to mold

you into

someone whom he wants

you to become.

With the grandfather, there is

seldom tension.

And therefore, wisdom,

usually in my fiction,

is passed from the grandchild

to the grandson.

Yeah. The grandfather to the-- yeah, yeah.

To the granddaughter.

Because of the absence of that one.

And because, again, the idea

of tolerance, the idea of

listening.

You see, the big tension between men

and women, usually whenever

bad things happen and husband and

wife are arguing back

and forth, the word

that many women continuously

use is listen

or you do not listen to me.

You have not heard what I said.

Whereas, in

the absence of such

tension, the grandfather

and the grandchild listen

to each other, and therefore, wisdom

is parted.

And the child, who

is receiving the wisdom from the

grandfather, is well

aware of how much

the child is listening

to the wisdom.

And unless you listen,

there is no wisdom.

And unless you listen,

there is no peace in the household.

I was thinking of Close Sesame

earlier, the novel you brought up,

when I was asking this question

about generations because the main

character there

is a devout Muslim.

His children are very different from

him, much like we're talking about

here. He doesn't necessarily seem

to think

that's altogether

a terrible thing, though.

No. Because he's able to tolerate

his-- Remember, he'd spent

a number of years in detention.

First in the Italian prisons

and then in the British.

And then in

Siad Barre's Somalia. And therefore,

he knows that there

is no benefit of locking people

up or there is no

benefit in thinking

that you can silence somebody

by giving them instruction to order

and saying, "You can't talk like

that." So he allows people

to speak their minds.

And when you are allowed to speak

your mind, you become a person,

fully fledged and therefore

complete.

I mean, he's a remarkable character

for that quality, I think.

It makes me very sad

that not many

readers even know

that the novel