Postcolonial "Greenery": Surreal Garden Imagery in Nuruddin Farah's Maps

Abstract

To date a variety of cultural and literary scholars have questioned the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies with varying results. Anthony Vital recently advanced “a specifically South African ecocriticism” in his published scholarship on the novels of J. M. Coetzee (“Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction” 299); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin edited a special issue of Interventions devoted to the topic; and William Slaymaker opines his concerns for the implications of this combination, especially in the African continent. Yet despite the attention, this fruitful topic remains largely unattended. A discourse between ecocriticism and postcolonial criticism can aid scholars on either side immensely with contemporary critical subjects. One fertile case study resides with Nuruddin Farah's novel Maps, which experimentally narrates a young boy's journeys during the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia. Farah intentionally employs several accounts of intense garden imagery, both in dreams and in reality, and associates these accounts with the conflicts his protagonist encounters. Through an intense analysis of this garden imagery fueled by the union of ecocritical and postcolonial discourses, Farah's allegorical modeling of the Somali nation on these garden images may emerge, allowing the reader to recognize his writing and his message. Not only will a greater appreciation of Maps better instruct Farah's readers, but the methods to achieve it will also add further credentials to the rich discourse possible when these separate critical idioms are combined.