?Doing History?: Nuruddin Farah'sSweet and Sour Milk, Subaltern Studies, and the Postcolonial Trajectory of Silence

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This essay argues that Sweet and Sour Milk, which should be understood as both a political and literary text, does history, which is not to say that it merely tells the history of postcolonial Somalia, but that it participates in a kind of historiography that is, to borrow a phrase Edward Said, both frankly revisionist and fiercely theoretical and intellectually insurrectionary. In this paper, using the theoretical work of a group of Indian historians, collected in the journal of SubalternStudies over the past two decades, I show how Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk uses the trope of silence to dramatize the potentially fruitful (and problematic) process of writing histories from below.