Be forewarned: You are entering the dense, bewildering forests of Somalian novelist Nuruddin Farah’s imagination. You will be startled by shape shifters who straddle the human and animal kingdoms. You will be oppressed by elaborate self-reflection. (Here is how “Maps” begins: “You sit, in contemplative posture, your features agonized and your expressions pained … Yes. You are a question to yourself.”) You will feel the blade of circumcision (both male and female), taste menstrual blood (again, strangely, both male and female). You will find every sexual taboo — rape, incest, homosexuality, sex with animals and young boys — overturned.
This is a singular place where Kierkegaard collides with spirit-world djinns, where Jungian dreams and local folklore converge with the rattle of modern fax machines and the gunfire of clan violence. You will find here the shifting realities of the Horn of Africa, but not brought to you by National Geographic or CNN: Farah sets off on a warping exploration of Somalian life and consciousness that, as one critic has put it, “manages to be both pre-Islamic and post-modern.”
In his bold approach to questions of modern African identity and sexuality, Farah — who was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which ranks just below the Nobel in literary prestige — is arguably the most important African novelist of the late 20th century. As Arcade reissues the first two volumes of his “Blood in Sun” trilogy this month (“Secrets,” the final volume, came out last year), it is worth adding that with the feverish and bodacious language of which he is a master, he is also the most astonishing, inventive, exuberant and mind-blowing.
After being exiled as a result of his first trilogy (aggressively titled “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,” it was reissued by Graywolf Press in 1992), Farah said that his goal was “to keep my country alive by writing about it.” And though recent Somalian history is indeed etched into this second trilogy — “Maps” takes place during the 1977 Ogadan border war with Ethiopia, and “Secrets” unwinds on the eve of civil war in the early ’90s — it’s the personal crises of his characters that engulf the reader. A good deal of social and political baggage travels along with the personal dramas, of course. “Maps” dwells on the effects of Somalia’s historically carved-up borders; “Gifts” cleverly exposes the motives behind the “gift” of aid to the Third World.
But Farah’s obsessive search for identity — personal, familial, social, national — echoes through the series. “Maps,” the most innovative and challenging of the three books, follows Askar, an orphaned wonder-child who has visions of his own birth (and his mother’s death) and whose mouth bleeds as if menstruating. Askar grows up in the nurturing — and titillating — embrace of his Ethiopian guardian, Misra, until he sets off to study in Mogadishu, the capital, and is shaken by the war that took his father’s life. The boy’s growing self-awareness is informed in part by the maps he uses to trace the shape of his people’s land and his own allegiances.
“Gifts,” the most linear of the books, concerns a single mother’s battle for independence and self-fulfillment. The story revolves around the discovery of an abandoned baby and the riddle of its parents. “Secrets,” the trilogy’s final volume, extends the themes of mysterious paternity and consuming social ties. In this novel, Kalaman, a 33-year-old Mogadishu computer programmer, struggles against the pull of ethnic loyalty. (“I was no member of a clan, I was a professional,” he insists.) Kalaman’s search into his family’s hidden history is complicated by the return of his childhood playmate, Sholoongo, who long ago cast a spell on him by serving him her menstrual blood in a thimble. (As I said, it gets weird.) Yet the more Kalaman digs into the secrets of his origins, the more the looming national crisis consumes his own: “I saw death being forecast, death being anticipated, I saw death stalking the entire country, pursuing it with the determination of an elephant gone amok.”
As a rule, the most fascinating and complex of Farah’s characters are women. There is Misra in “Maps,” the Ethiopian outsider (and possible betrayer of the Somalian cause) who raises Askar. There is Duniya in “Gifts,” the single working mother, widowed and divorced, experiencing love for the first time. And of course there is Sholoongo in “Secrets,” the sexual sorceress just returned from America (where she presided over the All-America Shape-shifters’ Union).
While subverting traditional gender roles, Farah also exposes the strong undercurrents of sexuality in Islamic society. Askar’s cosmopolitan Mogadishu uncle, Hilaal, ends a soaring riff on life, the cosmos, and Freud with the blunt nugget of insight “Truth is body”; more to the point, he adds, “Sooner or later, sex.” And the sex Farah reveals is unashamedly polymorphic. In the closing scene of “Secrets,” Sholoongo “takes” — in multiple creative ways — Kalaman’s grandfather, Nonno, and quite literally screws him to death. The scene is disorienting, tragic, maddening: vintage Farah.
While African writing as a whole has been suffering an extended drought (with the exception of Nigeria’s Ben Okri and a fistful of South African authors), Farah has been breaking remarkable new ground. What he calls the “pastures of the imagination” comprise, for him, a redrawn map of Africa, of the Somalian psyche, of individual abandonment and belonging. And yet they also include modern Somalia, “a nation with a split personality,” at war with itself, exploding with ancient hatreds and modern feuds. Nuruddin Farah is something of a literary shape shifter himself. Following the trail of these three books into the pastures and the forests of his strange imagination will surely put you under his spell.
Readers of the New York Times this morning, whether in print or online, were perhaps shocked by the searing image of an emaciated Somali child, whose skin was wrapped so tightly around his body that the contours of a skeleton were clearly visible.
The accompanying story, written by Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, detailed a group of Somali insurgents accused both of blocking Western aid to the country, resulting in a severe famine, and of imprisoning refugees trying to flee to safety. Half a million Somali children are “on the verge of starvation,” Gettleman reports. The photo itself — by Times photographer Tyler Hicks and spread large across four columns on Page One — was taken in Banadir Hospital, which Gettleman described as such:
Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.
The image has generated its fair share of buzz today. And it raises some interesting questions about the enduring role (and value) of still photographs in the modern-media landscape:
Why did the Times run that photo?
The graphic quality of Hicks’ photo certainly matches the stark portrait painted by Gettleman’s reporting. And executive editor Bill Keller told Salon that the choice to feature the image so prominently was uncontroversial in the Times newsroom: “We’d already decided to front Jeffrey’s powerful story, and it would have felt like journalistic malfeasance not to include Tyler’s powerful photography,” he said. “I know many readers found the picture disturbing. That’s good. The deaths of thousands of Somali children ought to disturb us, at least.”
Keller argued that the use of graphic photography does not equate to sensationalism: “We prize photographs that deserve and demand attention. Sometimes they do it with unusual composition, sometimes with wit or incongruity, and sometimes they do it by looking at death, hunger, disease or other misery close up.”
The United Nations declared a famine in Somalia two weeks ago, but the story has largely been overshadowed here by the debt-ceiling debacle, the Norway massacre and allegations of phone hacking at a Rupert Murdoch tabloid. (The Atlantic Wire notes the disparities in coverage of all these stories in convenient graph form.) According to another Times story, which ran Monday, humanitarian groups have struggled to raise money for aid, in part because of the famine’s limited media profile.
“I’m asking myself where is everybody and how loud do I have to yell and from what mountaintop,” said Caryl Stern, chief executive of the United States Fund for Unicef, a fund raising arm for the organization. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis.”
But is the photograph enough to change anything?
Some of modern history’s most significant moments are writ large through iconic photographs. Try, for example, to imagine the Vietnam War without the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, or without the horrific reality shown through “Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief.” And photography has often brought new awareness to under-covered tragedies, as it does now for Somalia.
But one question that lingers over the Hicks photograph — along with many others in a post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib world — is how much punch a singular image still packs. It’s remarkably simple to avoid unpleasant images in the modern media landscape. You can imagine the number of people who simply gloss over stories showing servicemen and -women in fatigues, because of wariness toward depressing combat stories. And the media often operates in lockstep. As Al Jazeera veteran Paige Austin noted this week [via HuffPost]:
It is well documented that when it comes to war and tragedy abroad, the American media’s tendency is to sanitize violence, showing none of the outrage and carnage evident in media accounts outside the United States.
Perhaps the attention generated by the Hicks photograph — an arresting image that’s hard to avoid if you’ve been anywhere near the Times today — will help generate more attention for the atrocities in Somalia. It’s certainly boosted awareness of the famine. But maybe we’re attaching too much significance to a photograph on its own. More important is that people understand the story behind the picture, argues Susie Linfield, NYU professor and author of “The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.”
“One of the problems with an image is that it can’t explain [context]. You can see a child starving, but you need the words to explain who is the culprit,” which, in this case, was Somali militants. “[The Times piece] was a very effective combination of image and text.”
The fate of the child from the photo is unclear. “[Gettleman and Hicks] said they were operating under tight constraints and weren’t able to follow up on the extreme cases like the child in the photo,” according to Keller. “They think the prognosis was not good.”
Writing in the Nation this week, Jeremy Scahill revealed that the CIA is running “a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives” at Mogadishu’s airport and also using a secret prison in the beleaguered Horn of Africa nation.
The revelations come just two weeks after media reports — sourced to unnamed American officials — of a U.S. drone attack in Somalia on members of the Islamic militant group Shabaab, which was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2008.
The Washington Post noted that Somalia is now the sixth country — joining Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen — where the Obama administration has launched drone attacks.
For context on the secret war in Somalia, I spoke to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. A regular lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, he studies Shabaab and recently wrote about the strategic implications of the historic drought that is devastating communities across the Horn of Africa.
What is the current government of Somalia and where did it come from?
The government of Somalia is called the TFG, the Transitional Federal Government. They’re a group that, when you go back to 2006 when the opposition Islamic Courts Union was the dominant force within the country, was hunkered down in Baidoa, a city in south-central Somalia. They were surrounded by Islamic Courts Union forces who were threatening to wipe them out, and were protected by a fairly small contingent of Ethiopian forces.
After the country was invaded by Ethiopia with the purpose of pushing back the Islamic Courts Union, the TFG was able to control territory — albeit briefly — in Mogadishu and throughout Somalia with Ethiopian support. But today, they only control a small amount of territory in Mogadishu itself. The TFG is now led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a former leader in the Islamic Courts. Certain outside powers who are supporting the Somali government pressured them to broaden the representatives in the TFG to include a number of Islamists (of which Sharif is one) with the goal of fostering reconciliation in the country.
Who is it that the CIA is training in Somalia?
There are two different factions that we’re training. One of them is AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. Uganda and Burundi are the two countries that provide forces to AMISOM, which helps to explain why Shabaab carried out terrorist strikes in Uganda last year during the World Cup, and why it’s threatening to do so in Burundi. They are basically peacekeeping forces, though there is no peace to keep. In the past few months, AMISOM forces have actually made a great deal of territorial gains, though I question whether those gains are sustainable. You see that in Jeremy Scahill’s recent report on Somalia, where he claims the Somali government is believed to hold about 30 square miles of territory in the Mogadishu area.
Thirty square miles doesn’t sound like very much. How much power does the government really have?
Not very much. But, in fact, 30 square miles is significantly more than they controlled six to eight months ago. At that time most people would say they only controlled a few city blocks. Somalia has the weakest government in the world; it is the most failed state. Hands down. Period.
Who controls the rest of the country?
That differs from area to area. In the north of the country there are two autonomous regions that are governed far better than southern Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland. When you move to southern Somalia, there are several factions that control territory. But the faction that’s of biggest concern, and I would say the dominant faction, is al-Shabaab. To understand them, let’s take a brief look at Somali history.
Somalia is about 100 percent Muslim, but it was previously welcoming to other forms of practice and the predominant practice of Islam was a peaceful form of Sufism. You first started to get Islamist movements in Somalia — those that wanted the state to impose religious ideals on people — in the 1960s and ’70s. That’s when Somalis started to travel and study abroad and were exposed to Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, and to a lesser extent to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Around 1983 a group called Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya was founded in Somalia, a precursor to both the Islamic Courts Union and Shabaab. It opposed the then-ruling regime, and when that government collapsed in the early 1990s, Al-Ittihad tried to take control of parts of the country. Mostly those attempts didn’t hold very long, but they did in the town of Luuq on the border of Ethiopia. One of the things this group — and others — believes is that Somalia has a right to territory beyond the colonial borders, including to areas in Ethiopia that have a Somali-speaking majority. Now, Al-Ittihad started to carry out strikes into Ethiopia and in response the Ethiopians went into Luuq and smashed Al-Ittihad. This helps explain why the Ethiopians saw the Islamic Courts, which were the next major Islamist group to arise after Al-Ittihad, as a threat.
And what is the Islamic Courts?
They were originally a confederation literally of courts. They provided an adjudication mechanism and some stability in anarchic areas of the country. They believed in implementation of a strict version of Sharia law. They shot and killed people for watching the World Cup, people were arrested for watching movies, music was banned at weddings, and so on. Of concern to U.S. policymakers is that there were connections at a leadership level between the Islamic Courts and al-Qaida. Shabaab was originally regarded as being the youth wing of the Islamic Courts; al-Shabaab literally means “the youth” in Arabic.
Ethiopia had its own reasons for seeing the Islamic Courts’ rise as a threat: They thought that, like Al-Ittihad before it, the Islamic Courts’ control would lead to attacks on Ethiopia. So Ethiopia first protected the Somali transitional government; then in December of 2006, when it looked like the Islamic Courts were about to overrun Baidoa, where the transitional government was holed up, Ethiopia intervened. They invaded the country.
What was the U.S. role in that invasion?
There are two different views. One is that the U.S. actually encouraged Ethiopia to invade, planned the invasion with them, and assisted from the very outset. The second view is that the U.S. was surprised, but that once it saw that Ethiopia was invading, it decided to jump in and help out. What is clear is that by January 2007 you had U.S. special forces on the ground, and the U.S. was providing air support. Since then there has been much more U.S. presence on the ground in Somalia than has been reported and much more than most people realize.
Why have both the Bush and Obama administrations seen getting involved in Somalia militarily as in the U.S. interest?
If you look back to 2006, there clearly was some connection between the Islamic Courts and al-Qaida at leadership levels. There’s a legitimate debate about how strong those connections were. But moving forward to where we are now with Shabaab, the group is clearly connected at its top levels to al-Qaida. There have been multiple statements coming out of Shabaab’s leadership that they align themselves with al-Qaida. One Shabaab leader, Omar Hammami, issued a manifesto a few years ago explaining the split between Shabaab and the other insurgent factions. He said that part of the reason was that the other factions were committed to the colonial borders, but in contrast Shabaab was dedicated to reestablishing the caliphate, which is one of al-Qaida’s goals. Other leaders have come out and pledged their allegiance to bin Laden or al-Qaida more generally. So this is why the U.S. sees what’s going on Somalia as of concern to the U.S. national interest. Couple that, of course, with the experience of Afghanistan pre-9/11 where a safe haven in another part of the world ended up allowing terrorist strikes to occur here.
So even though Shabaab has never actually attacked the U.S. — correct me if I’m wrong on that — it’s seen as a possibility?
Absolutely. The only attacks they’ve carried out outside of their own territory were the World Cup bombings in Uganda last year. But we’ve seen other examples of groups that haven’t struck the U.S. and then suddenly they do.
The Ritz Hotel in London and the elite private school Eton were among a handful of possible British terror targets that a senior al-Qaida leader was considering before he was killed in Somalia last week, a British security official said Thursday.
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, was killed when he failed to stop at a routine checkpoint outside of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called the 38-year-old’s death a “significant blow to al-Qaida, its extremist allies, and its operations in East Africa.”
British officials have said they see al-Qaida affiliates in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as being a significant threat to British interests.
“He was a fairly big player, but there is nothing to suggest that any reconnaissance had been done or that any of the attacks were imminent,” a British security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence matters.
It was not exactly clear how officials found the information on the British targets. There was no immediate evidence to suggest that Mohammed was working with British contacts or that he even understood where some of the intended targets were.
Eton College, Britain’s most elite private school where Prime Minister David Cameron and other politicians have been educated, is an hour outside of London.
Officials would not disclose details of the plots or other British targets, but said “now that he has been taken out, there’s even less risk.”
British intelligence officials have said dozens of youths have traveled to Somalia in recent years to attend terror training camps. Few have returned.
In 2009, a 17-year-old suicide bomber from the London suburb of Ealing blew himself up in a car bomb attack at a hotel in central Somalia, killing more than 20 people. Two Somali asylum-seekers were also among four men convicted of the failed attempts to bomb the London transport system on July 21, 2005 — just two weeks after four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters during morning rush-hour attacks in London on July 7.
Mohammed, a native of the Comoros Islands, is also believed to have played a key role in the 2002 attack on the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa that killed 13 people, and the failed missile strike on an Israeli charter flight on the same day.
He had been on the run for more than a decade.
The al-Qaida operative behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania has been killed, a Somali official said Saturday.
Somali officials have determined that a man killed by security forces on Tuesday was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, said a spokesman for Somalia’s minister of information, Abdifatah Abdinur.
“We’ve compared the pictures of the body to his old pictures,” he said. “They are the same. It is confirmed. He is the man and he is dead. The man who died is Fazul Abdullah.”
Abdinur said the government is planning to issue a statement confirming Mohamed’s death.
Mohamed had a $5 million bounty on his head for allegedly planning the Aug. 7, 1998 embassy bombings. The blasts killed 224 people in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania combined. Most of the dead were Kenyans. Twelve Americans also died.
Members of Somalia’s most dangerous militant group, al-Shabab, have pledged allegiance to al-Qaida. Al-Shabab’s members include veterans of the Iraq and Pakistan conflicts.
Hundreds of foreign fighters are swelling the ranks of al-Shabab militants who are trying in vain to topple the country’s weak U.N.-backed government.
Somalia has been mired in violence since 1991, when the last central government collapsed.
Five dozen pirates living on a hijacked ship serving as a roving pirate base jumped into the Arabian Sea on Monday after the Indian navy fired on the vessel in self-defense, the navy said Monday.
The navy captured 61 pirates fleeing the battle and the fire that broke out aboard the hijacked vessel. The battle is the latest example of the piracy trade’s turn toward increased violence.
A pirate in Somalia threatened Indian sailors and the government with targeted attacks in retaliation for the arrests.
The Indian navy said a patrol aircraft spotted the mothership Friday while responding to another vessel reporting a pirate attack. The pirates aborted the hijacking attempt and tried to escape on the mothership.
When the Indian ships closed in Sunday night, the pirates fired on them. The hijacked vessel caught fire when the Indian navy returned fire, the navy said.
The pirates had hijacked the Mozambique-flagged Vega 5 in December and had used it as a mothership. Indian sailors rescued 13 crew members from the Vega 5 Sunday night about 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) off Kochi in southern India, the statement said.
The pirates were carrying about 80 to 90 small arms or rifles and a few heavier weapons, likely rocket-propelled grenades, it said. The statement did not describe any casualties among the navy, the fishermen or the pirates in Sunday’s clash.
The pirates were being taken to Mumbai, India’s financial capital, to be prosecuted for attacking the Indian ships.
Piracy has plagued the shipping industry off East Africa for years, but violence and ransom demands have escalated in recent months. Pirates held some 30 ships and more than 660 hostages as of February.
A self-described pirate in Somalia who gave his name as Bile Hussein said the arrests will lead to “trouble” for Indian sailors and ships.
“They better release them, considering their people traveling in the waters, or we shall jail their people like that,” he said. “We are first sending a message to the Indian government of releasing our friends in their hands or else they have to be ready for their citizens to be mistreated in the near future.”
The Indian navy’s third anti-piracy operation this year followed the capture of 28 Somali pirates last month and another 15 in January. Both groups are to be prosecuted in Mumbai.
Indian warships have been escorting merchant ships as part of international anti-piracy surveillance in the area since 2008.
Several nations, including the United States, are prosecuting pirate suspects captured by their militaries. But other suspects have been released as countries weigh legal issues and other factors.
The prosecutions, the growth of criminal gangs participating in piracy and the ever-increasing ransoms have heightened confrontations.
Five Puntland security forces and two pirates were killed earlier this month during a failed attempt to rescue Danish captives taken from their hijacked yacht to a pirate stronghold in the semiautonomous northern region of Somalia.
Weeks earlier, four Americans on a hijacked yacht were killed by pirates under circumstances that are still unclear. Four U.S. Navy vessels were shadowing the captured boat at the time, and 15 pirate suspects were taken into custody after the gunfire.
The owner of a Bangladeshi-flagged ship that was held for more than three months said that the vessel and 26 crew members were released Monday.
Mehrul Kabir declined to say whether any ransom was paid for the release of the M.V. Jahan Moni, which was seized off the Indian coast while transporting nickel ore from Indonesia to Greece, but the media in Bangladesh reported the pirates were paid $4.2 million.
“All the crew members on board are safe,” Kabir told reporters in Dhaka.
Ashok Sharma reported from New Delhi, India.
A car burns outside Hotel Madina during a protest in support of Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, in the streets of Somalia's capital Mogadishu, June 10, 2011. Two boys were shot dead in Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Friday during a second day of protests against a deal to extend the mandates of the country's president and parliament, residents said. REUTERS/Feisal Omar (SOMALIA - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS)(Credit: © Feisal Omar / Reuters) 
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT - This photo taken Wednesday, June 8, 2011 shows Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, left, and another unidentified man lying dead in Mogadishu, Somalia. A Somali official says the al-Qaida operative behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania has been killed. The spokesman for Somalia's minister of information, Abdifatah Abdinur, said Saturday June 11, 2011 that officials have concluded that a man security forces killed late Tuesday was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. Fazul had a $5 million bounty on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 embassy bombings. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)(Credit: AP) 
AU peacekeepers take cover behind sandbags, right, as AU tank standby during clashes with Islamist insurgents in southern Mogadishu's Bakara market neighborhood on Friday, May 27, 2011. The U.N. Security Council is warning Somali leaders that they risk losing financial support if they can't agree on how to carry out upcoming elections. Somalia's government depends on international support for almost everything, including the salaries of soldiers and lawmakers. Around 9,000 African Union troops are stationed in Mogadishu to prevent the government from being overrun by militants. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)(Credit: AP) 
In this photo released by the Government of India Press Information Bureau, Indian naval officers distribute food to the captured pirates aboard an Indian naval ship in the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Kochi, India, Sunday, March 13, 2011. The navy captured 61 pirates from a hijacked boat after a brief gunfight in the Arabian Sea, the military said Monday, March 14, 2011. (AP Photo/ Press Information Bureau) EDITORIAL USE ONLY(Credit: AP) 
