Somali soldiers stand in front of the damaged Jazeera Palace hotel
following a suicide attack in Mogadishu on July 26, 2015. We, students
of literatures, have been the poorer by having a rather scant knowledge
of oral literatures of the Somali people from Somalia. PHOTO | ABDIFITAH
HASHI NOR | AFP
Whether it is due to the colonial legacies of geographical
boundaries that imposed nationalist identities on us, or a mere crack in
the literature curricula that we follow in Kenya, we, students of
literatures, have been the poorer by having a rather scant knowledge of
oral literatures of the Somali people from Somalia.
Even
though there is a lot more in common between our oral literatures in
Kenya and those from Somalia than we may be aware of, I think that our
approach to the study and teaching of oral literatures has tended to
unnecessarily compartmentalise this rich
genre
of literature to the extent that we remain oblivious to what joys and
lessons we can draw from our familiarity with, say, Hussein Kaddare’s
rendition of Waasuge iyo Warsame, a narrative that captures the counterpoints of power and powerlessness,
light
and darkness, in their metaphoric significance, as compared to the
sungura mjanja narratives that have been gifted to us by many
communities of Kenya.
One would
expect that, years after Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa, we
would by now have been driven towards a more comparative study of this
genre that is weighed down by paradoxes that are all the more
incomprehensible.
The paradoxes that I
speak of relate to the genre broadly, and not necessarily Somali or
Kenyan oral literatures; for example the fact that though it is the
oldest genre of literature on the continent, it is also the newest in
terms of its entry into university
literature curricula.
It
is also the most influential, if we consider Eileen Julien’s arguments
in African Novels and the Question of Orality, yet it remains one of the
most peripheral genres of literature being studied.
SOMALIA COMPLEXITIES
I
recently became aware of this gap when I reread Ali Jimale Ahmed’s
book, Daybreak is Near…: Literature, Clans and the Nation-State in
Somalia. In important ways, this book draws our attention to the
complexity of literatures and politics in Somalia, known to most of us
in the politics of a failed state, and as the grudging home of Nuruddin
Farah, the leading novelist Somali writing in the English language.
Borrowing
heavily from Frederic Jameson’s controversial notion of the Third World
Literatures as national allegories, Ahmed draws on multiple examples to
show the relationship between literature and what he calls the
‘historical teleology of the nation’, in which metaphorical texts and
oral poetry are shown to beam light on the dynamics that influence the
politics of nation formation in post-colonial Somalia.
An
important aspect of the book is the subtle way in which Ahmed captures
the subversive elements of oral literatures that, by employing the
ambiguities of allegory, operate beyond the reach of the state censor,
thereby creating opportunities and spaces of freedom in an otherwise
autocratic regime that sustains itself through surveillance and fear
mongering.
Further, by revisiting the
works of Nuruddin Farah to show their reliance on the oral literatures
of Somalia, Ahmed in a way gives an ‘insider’s view’ of Farah’s novels.
Indeed, the strategic placement of Farah’s texts after the introductory
chapter and the earnest discussion of
oral literatures is a way of capturing the points of convergence and divergence between the broad genres of Somali literatures.
The
fact, further, that nothing captures our cultural geographies better
than oral literatures appears not just in the dominance of oral
literatures in Ahmed’s discussion of Somali literatures and politics,
but also in the way he situates different forms of oral literature in
specific pockets of Somalia.
Equally
interesting is the way that Ahmed employs aspects of post-colonial
theory to interpret the oral literatures that he discusses. Echoes of
post-colonial and Marxist theorists like Jameson, used to read Farah’s From a Crooked Rib and A Naked Needle
only
emphasise his point that the tendency to homogenise Somalia experiences
has been given a push by the idea of a singular language (with
different clans), without paying regard to other class-based cleavages
in the national narrative of Somalia.
Ahmed
spends most of his time paying homage to oral artists in Somalia who
have used their artistry and consciousness to capture how an oppressed
people deploy orality to reclaim part of their lost freedoms.
While
one may doubt, for instance, the comparison that Ahmed draws between
Abdi Muhumed, the renowned Somali poet and critic of the state, with
Bertolt Brecht, it is much easier to accept the similarity of the
material conditions that informed both artists’ creativity.
In
a significant sense, therefore, one may read in this generous
comparison an illustration of Barack Obama’s phrase, ‘the audacity of
hope,’ a hope that the Somalia that creeks under the weight of
clan-based conflicts on the one hand and poor leadership on
the
other will not just survive the current predicament, but also flourish
and prosper in the same way that the Germany of Brecht did; that it will
transform from the source of refugees and emigrants fleeing to pursue
freedoms and save their lives, to the
recipient of other people suffering from the same plight, not unlike what Germany is now doing.
POLITICAL TRAGEDY
In
his analysis of Somalia’s political tragedy, Ahmed examines the role
that the intellectual played. In Daybreak is Near…, he shows how the
Gramscian intellectual was co-opted by the Siad Barre regime to restrain
the traditional poet intellectual, whose critical view of Barre’s
leadership had begun making Barre uncomfortable, and pushed him towards
greater intolerance.
By focusing on
the works of oral poets like Abdi Muhumed, Abdi Qays, Yam Yam and
others, Ahmed nonetheless captures the resilience and eventual triumph
of the oral artist over persecution.
This
is an important book that gives a nuanced analysis of the state of
Somali oral literatures, how they intersect with Somalia’s written
variants and the state. Nevertheless, reading the text in its current
form may drain your patience, because of the longwinded style in which
it is written.
Indeed, use of end
notes, some of which would have been easily integrated in the main text,
gives the impression that the text was initially a dissertation on
which inadequate work was done in the process of converting it into a
book. I wish that later editions of the book would be more thoroughly
edited for flow of reading, and for avoidance of unnecessary
digressions.
But these observations
do not take away anything from the worth of a book that should be basic
reading for any student and teacher of Somali literatures.
The writer teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi and is co-editor, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies.
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