By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Saturday, April 07, 2007
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KNOTSBy Nuruddin Farah. |
We have taken a step forward in time from “Links,” the prequel to “Knots,” which also concerns an exile’s return. In the earlier book, Jeebleh, a middle-aged Somali man, arrives home from the United States on a mission to settle personal scores and finds the country divided between two chiefs, characters who correspond to Mohammed Farah Aidid and Mohammed Ali Mahdi, whose ruinous war lasted until the former was killed in 1996. In “Knots,” the country is now run by several warlords, and the fundamentalists of the Union of Islamic Courts — the movement that seized much of southern Somalia and was dispersed just a few months ago — are a lurking menace.
It is soon clear that Farah’s heroine is equal to the formidable tasks she has set herself. “Cambara,” he tells us, “is famously admired or feared for confronting problems head-on.” A martial arts expert, she karate-kicks herself out of a mugging. When she needs assistance, she befriends a group of pacifist women who help her achieve many goals: to evict the hooligan in her house and the gun-toting delinquents in the neighborhood; to stage a play in a city that has forgotten the meaning of artistic culture; to care for two young boys she chances upon and adopts.
Anyone who has read “From a Crooked Rib,” Farah’s acclaimed account of a Somali woman kicking against repressive traditions, is on familiar territory here. Much of “Knots” is about strong women and the feats they can achieve when they are united. The novel is also about contemptible men. With a malice bordering on misandry, Farah dwells on the physical repulsiveness of Zaak, Cambara’s first husband. “Men are a dead loss to us,” observes one of the women. “They father wars, our miseries.” Farah’s aggressively feminist tone only softens when Cambara discovers a handful of decent men, characters from “Links.” One of them, Bile, she falls in love with.
There is a second progression to observe: the exile’s return. Farah has lived in India, Europe and South Africa, and only started revisiting Mogadishu in 1996, after two decades away. It may be assumed that much of Cambara’s nostalgia, shock and alienation are his own. Cambara and her creator share the tendency of many secular-minded Muslims to blame the malign influence of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries for the rise of Islamism in their own lands. From Pakistan to Turkey, you hear this same argument, which ignores the stubbornly local conditions that allow religious absolutism, whatever its origin, to prosper.
It’s unfortunate that Farah’s writing in “Knots” rarely equals the range and intellectual vigor of his inquiry. The book’s finest scene, when Cambara is confirmed in her love as she cares for the seriously ill Bile, is one of disquieting tenderness. But Farah’s characterization sometimes appears facile and repetitive; the core of his best work, flickering with magic and menace, seems to have been replaced with a wordy literalness.
As a result, Cambara, the book’s dominant character, is diminished. Farah’s depiction of her as a grieving mother is cursory and unconvincing. Arriving in lethal Mogadishu, “she reminds herself that in a civil war setting, she must attach herself, perforce, to a broader constituency from which she may seek succor in the event of life-threatening complications.” Doris Lessing once described Farah as “one of the few African men who write wonderfully about women.” In “Knots,” we see this only fitfully.