Nationalism and the Aporia of National Identity in Farah'sMaps

Abstract

Nuruddin Farah, Somali writer and cultural critic, has become an influential presence on African and world literary scenes. Farah's reputation may be due to consistendy high quality of his works as well as to his persistent questioning of some of assumptions of Somali nationalists. Even in an early work such as From a Crooked Rib (1970), Farah uses demeaning roles to which a largely patriarchal Somali soci? ety relegates women to criticize some ofthe codes of his culture and to pose questions about human agency. Also, in Dictatorship trilogy, he exposes problems inherent in nationalist paradigms for talking about identi? ty in Somalia and, one may add, in Africa as a whole. African nationalists, notably Senghor, in their struggle against colonialism, emphasized need to recreate Africa's primordial values, first, as a precondition for lib? eration and, second, as foundation for a collective national or ethnic identity. In their desire to reinsert African into what they perceived as an authentic cultural space voided by colonialism, nationalists cele? brated black race in exclusive terms, thereby appropriating totalizing discourse of imperialists. In fact even at institutional level, Partha Chatterjee argues, Third World nationalism did not change structures created by imperialism, but rather selectively inveighed them in order to neutralize and at same time co-opt them as subsidiary allies within a reformed state structure (49). The contradictions inher? ent in nationalist agenda, which most early African writers failed to question rigorously and which continue to affect reorganization of postindependent nations, are urgent concerns in Farah's works. Derek Wright is thus accurate in saying that relationship between national and ethnic identity is of central importance in Maps (Novels of Nuruddin Farah 105). Farah nevertheless refuses to privilege either nation or eth? nicity, probably to avoid what Kwame Anthony Appiah would call alter? nate genealogizing that Western modern theories of nation in Herderian conception ofthe Sprachgeist forced on colonized (68, 53). Farah's disavowal of strong position on nation and ethnicity must, however, be located in what could be called a new postcolonial discourse, namely, emphasis on cultural diversity, which has emerged as a repudiation of nationalists' obsessive concern with indigenous values as a mark of identity. Specifically, political theorists such as Naomi Chazan no longer take for granted notion that African national space can be a receptacle for pure ethnic groups or a site for constituting unique iden? tities. Chazan talks about growing fluctuation around situational preeminence of territorial framework in Africa, whereby even the architecture of power shows diverse locations of concern and interconnection (139). Also, an emerging skeptical, postmodernist,1 African liter? ary tradition, represented by Ben Okri, among others, and to which Farah