“The Body of Human Truths” and the Limits of Humanitarian Reading in Nuruddin Farah’s Links

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though the title of Nuruddin Farah’s Links suggests the language of network often invoked in theories of globalization, the 2003 novel instead questions this discourse through its focus on the affective responses of characters to a series of dead bodies. The links Farah explores in the novel are the affiliations and lived experiences, often unacknowledged, that stress the limits of an individual, revealing what binds them to groups and shapes how they imagine others. Set in Mogadiscio in the years after the United Nation’s failed intervention, Links reflects on the gap between the ideals of a post-Cold War humanitarianism that could transcend differences of race and religion and the reality of the prolonged state of emergency in Somalia. While moral philosophers have stressed the novel’s ability to generate humanitarian sentiment, this article argues that Links presents a generative limit to humanitarian reading models. Building on recent theorizations of the global novel’s relation to otherness, the article proposes that Links is deeply invested in not only locating the limits of the novel form to convey knowledge and build understanding, but also in presenting the powerful recognition of partial and contingent knowledge, what a character in Links calls “human truths.”