Imagining against the nation state: radical singularity and transnationalism in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps

Abstract

Nuruddin Farah’s Maps deploys cross-ethnic relationships in its imagination of a radical transnational singularity. This article argues that the thoughts and memories of Askar and Misra, the protagonists who form an unconventional family in the narrative, about their selves, corporeality and belonging contribute to the creation of a singular imagination that challenges the divisive nationalisms of the Somalis and Ethiopians.

Keywords:

• Nuruddin Farah
• singularity
• nationalism
• transnational
• hybridity
• corporeal

Notes

1. Farah’s novel is set against the backdrop of the war that took place between July 1977 and March 1978 between Ethiopia and Somalia over the political status of the Ogaden, the Somali-inhabited region in the Horn of Africa, which was officially a part of Ethiopia. Somali forces attempted to annex the Ogaden but were unsuccessful; see also Lewis (1989) and Tareke (2000).

2. In his review of Manuka Wijesinghe’s (2006) Monsoons and Potholes, Nihal Fernando (2006) makes reference to a novelistic tradition within South Asian anglophone literature that maps the connections, mirrorings and ruptures that occur between individual selves and their nations. In thinking about the personal/political in Farah’s Maps, one is also reminded of Fredric Jameson’s (1986) much-debated essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” where he makes the point that “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory” (69).

3. See Abdi Sheik-Abdi’s (1977) academic account of Somali nationalism, where one observes a romantic longing for the creation of the Somali nation state, which would include the entire Somali lands fragmented by colonial rulers.

4. Donald Donham (1999) has also written about the politics of language and religion in Ethiopia.

5. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) uses the term “heteroglossia” to denote the various “social speech types” and “compositional-stylistic unities” that form the language of the novel (262).

6. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998) argue that masculine violence on women belonging to the Other community during the partition of colonial India “treat[s] women’s bodies as territory to be conquered, claimed or marked by the assailant” (43). Robert Hayden (2000) notes in his analysis of rape during ethno-nationalist conflicts in South Asia and Bosnia that “mass rape is actually a corollary of the liminality of the state when a heterogeneous territory is being sundered into homogeneous parts” (36).

7. For a stimulating critical psychoanalytic reading of the politics of motherhood and motherland in Maps and the figuration of Askar in this politics, see Brown (2010).