Writing Social Activism in the Refugee Camp in Safi Abdi’s Offspring of Paradise

Abstract

This article is a critical examination of Safi Abdi’s Offspring of Paradise (2003). It focuses on how Abdi employs a literary perspective to interrogate various socio-cultural and political dynamics in Somalia and their associated outcomes for Somalis. Abetted by close reading and contextual methods, the article explores how the narrative navigates between history and fiction by underscoring family as a domestic space entrusted with power in the making of the geopolitical nation and as a microcosm of the nation that expedites social activism in redressing nations ruined by wars. Using a postcolonial approach, I read how the novel uses the institution of the family as a metonymic space where characters negotiate existence and challenge the nation in an attempt to reconstruct the ‘failed’ nation of Somalia. The central argument of this article is that the novel imagines the family institution as a central pillar that not only complicates the identities of characters in a polarised cosmopolitan society but also plays a proactive role in reforming nations wracked by wars.