Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah

Abstract

56 World Literature Today reviews unfolding of a promise in the Promised Land over a span of thirty-eight years. “Free Fruit for Widows” is an Israeli coming-of-age tale filled with bittersweet moments and oddly effective morality lessons that are counter to any code of ethics taught in Sunday schools. Young male fantasy life provides the fuel for “Peep Show,” which parodies Jewish guilt as though Franz Kafka and Woody Allen had invaded Englander’s dream life. Only two of the eight stories fall a bit short of Englander’s high standards: “The Reader” because it is a slightly self-indulgent insider’s tale about authors and their audiences that is never truly satisfying, and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” because it is an intriguing experiment that doesn’t quite pay off. But even when the stories are less than sublime, which isn’t often, Englander always shakes the reader up by defying expectation. The peep-show goer must engage in an even greater taboo, which turns him into an object of lust so that he can experience objectification from the other side. The desire to punish someone for as righteous a reason as anti-Semitism in “How We Avenged the Blums” turns into an ethical quandary about acquired and exercised power. And, of course, the Anne Frank game in the title story is no game. With his meticulously crafted language, Nathan Englander is always unsettling and provocative. He rarely takes, or gives the reader, the easy way out—and that may be precisely why he’s such a pleasure to read. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Nuruddin Farah. Crossbones. Riverhead . New York. 2011. isbn 9781594488160 Crossbones completes Nuruddin Farah’s “Past Imperfect” trilogy, in which the nuanced style, rich characterizations , and allegorical power of Maps, for instance (the first in his earlier trilogy, “Blood in the Sun,” also written in English), yields to workmanlike prose, a plot-driven structure, and a cast of relatively under-drawn protagonists, including Bile, Cambara, and Jeebleh, whose fates once more entwine. No aesthetic masterpiece, this latest work fits more the category “thriller” than “literary novel.” But like its trilogy in toto, it fulfills an important function, transporting us to a distant, troubled nation seen largely through Western news media and film. One stumbles at first through the clumsy narration, choppy action scenes, and a “cast of thousands,” including reluctant pirates, middle men, Islamists, political and economic opportunists, teenage suicide bombers, and would-be martyrs. But as Farah chronicles the chaos both before and during Ethiopia’s most recent invasion of a weak Somalia loosely governed by the “Union of Islamic Courts,” the narrative at last evolves into a web of internal and external threats and stratagems that builds to a “breathless” dénouement. Crossbones’s principal setting, Mogadiscio—a warren of dusty, narrow streets lined with ruins, chaotic markets, and people of all classes and dress darting everywhere—effectively mirrors the plot machinations radiating from its core and back. Expatriate Jeebleh, his son-in-law Malik, and Malik’s brother, Ahl, fly to Somalia to find and retrieve Ahl’s teenage stepson, Taxliil, who, radicalized in his Minnesota mosque, has chosen to martyr himself. To this end, his relatives must pursue fragile, interwoven threads that lead to the courts, al-Shabaab militants, pirates, bordering states, and more powerful nations. But this proves merely the scaffolding on which hang the layered political intrigues that Crossbones reveals. For even as events unfold with the intensity of an edge-of-the-seat “thriller,” one apprehends that unlike the latter, drawn from headlines to entertain, Crossbones plumbs the murky depths, probing what the Somali-Malay-Chinese journalist Malik calls “a spiraling degeneracy that a near stranger like me cannot make full sense of.” Through its characters ’ odyssey, for example, the novel critiques the standard Western depiction of the pirate situation as simplistic and self-serving. Linking it rather to Western financial operatives, it faults stronger Western and Eastern nations for destroying Somalia’s fishing industry. Moreover, it takes aim at America’s interventions in Somalia while simultaneously problematizing their manipulation by equally selfserving Islamists. Ultimately, it portrays the...