Nuruddin Farah: Long road to freedom

As he opens the gate to let me in, Nuruddin Farah asks me to keep a secret. "Do you mind not disclosing the exact address of this studio?" Images of the long arm of dictators who trail adversaries into foreign lands through an intricate web of spies, informers and assassins fill my mind. I immediately swear not to reveal it. Then, as he leads me up the stairs, he explains that he only wants to keep a private space for writing, to shield it from the intrusions of friends and others who - in keeping with age-old African custom - may choose to drop in unannounced. Secrets do not always have to be ominous, even for a writer who has spent more than two decades in exile.

As he opens the gate to let me in, Nuruddin Farah asks me to keep a secret. "Do you mind not disclosing the exact address of this studio?" Images of the long arm of dictators who trail adversaries into foreign lands through an intricate web of spies, informers and assassins fill my mind. I immediately swear not to reveal it. Then, as he leads me up the stairs, he explains that he only wants to keep a private space for writing, to shield it from the intrusions of friends and others who - in keeping with age-old African custom - may choose to drop in unannounced. Secrets do not always have to be ominous, even for a writer who has spent more than two decades in exile.

We are now inside Farah's "studio", the second-floor apartment in the Rondebosch suburb of Cape Town that serves as his hideaway. "The neighbours don't even know who I am or what I do here," he continues with a wink, underlining the mystery of this cultivated privacy in the midst of a bustling suburb. Looking west on this sunny day, there is a full view of the mountains and the terraced campuses of the University of Cape Town on the foothills. At the opposite end, you look down on the green expanse of the Rondebosch Commons. A few blocks away lives Andre Brink, the novelist and critic; JM Coetzee used to live a few blocks further on, in the suburb of Rosebank.

What Farah does here is to pursue his career as one of Africa's, and arguably the world's, most important and innovative novelists. In jeans and short-sleeved shirt, he retains the air of that rebellious youth who, 35 years ago, debuted with a first novel that turned attention away from the tales of heroic males and epic struggles that defined the novels of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa.

Published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1970, From a Crooked Rib focused on the life of a young woman, Ebla, and her struggle for autonomy and selfhood in a society dominated by men. The significance of this novel was underlined in its title, adapted from a traditional Somali proverb. Farah translates it in the epigraph as: "God created woman from a crooked rib; and any one who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it." The traditional proverb is regarded as a carrier of values the society cherishes. For a novel to question its validity was, at that time, highly subversive in the context of the African nationalist agenda.

Since that initial outing, Farah has remained consistent in his questioning of received wisdoms that have a deleterious effect on society. "A writer has to be the dreamer for his people," he says, emphasising that dreams are about exploring "possibilities", allowing other voices to speak. "I see writing as a gateway to dialogue, to tolerance, to democracy, to justice; a gateway to understanding what the other person thinks."

In 1998, Farah won the Neustadt Prize, described by The New York Times as "the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel". In his prize lecture, he told his audience that he was born at a time in Africa's history when "the power of speech lay elsewhere, in other people's tongues". Bringing the power of speech to the voiceless became a major objective of his writing. "I would have written in any language because what mattered to me was to bear witness," he answers, in response to a question on the contentious issue of Africans writing in English: the language of the coloniser.

But dictators detest dialogue. Farah, born in Somalia in 1945, soon fell foul of the regime of General Siad Barre, the dictator who ruled his country from the military coup in 1969 until the insurrection that drove him from power in 1991. It seemed that whatever language Farah wrote in, he got into trouble. "When Somali became a written language in October 1972, I started publishing a novel in serialised form," he recalls. "Three months down the line, the censors said: 'You cannot continue to publish your novel.' I stopped writing the novel in Somali. Then I wrote a play in English. And was denied the right to produce it."

Throughout his 22-year exile from Somalia, Farah made his country not only the setting and the theme in novel after novel, but the underlying story behind all his stories. He made it his duty to "keep [his] country alive by writing about it".

It is possible to plot the history of contemporary Somalia through Farah's novels. From the war in the Ogaden depicted in Maps to the defeat of the Somalia army, the collapse of the economy and the country's dependence on foreign aid in Gifts, we are taken on a trip through history as captured in fiction. Secrets highlights the increasing importance of clan loyalties as opposed to the national ideal, and puts into question the notion of clan lineage as a natural unit of society. This unwavering focus, and the integrity of Farah's commitment, make the novelist's practice an avenue of social inquiry.

He says that, "Every author must occupy a territory that becomes his or hers." While some African writers have kept to "the big picture", he long ago decided that, rather than focus on the two big posters that said "Europe" and "Africa", he would "concentrate on the small one". His small unit is Somalia, and the micro-politics of the family examined through its marginal figures: women, children, and those whose lives and ideas linger on the fringes outside dominant conventions.

A series of honours followed. Farah's novels have been translated into 17 languages and he has been awarded prizes in Italy, Sweden, France and Zimbabwe, in addition to the Neustadt. In 2000, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

With the British publication of his ninth novel, Links (Duckworth, £14.99), Farah once again turns to his chosen imaginative territory. In this novel, he places the story of a returning exile at the centre. The main character, Jeebleh, was jailed and tortured under Siad Barre but released in mysterious circumstances and put on a plane to Nairobi, the first stop on his way to a long exile in America. Now, 20 years later, settled in his American life with a wife and two daughters, Jeebleh decides to return to Somalia.

Jeebleh's memories of his homeland are activated after he is nearly run over in New York by a Somali refugee, illegally driving a taxi. His reasons for returning are to honour the mother who died while he was in exile. He also wants to re-establish links with his childhood friend, Bile, and help him search for his niece, Raasta, abducted by a warlord. Lastly, he expects to settle scores or sever links with Bile's half-brother, the evil Caloosha.

Farah's own mother died in Mogadishu in 1990, while he was still in exile. Is there a thread of his personal life in Jeebleh's return? "Burying a mother is not actually burying one's biological or physical mother, but burying the idea that one had of Somalia," he says.

With Links - the first part of a trilogy - Farah begins a new cycle of novels. It is focused, as always, on micro-politics and the choices that individuals make within a moral and social landscape of conflicting loyalties. The Mogadishu he depicts in Links is the post-Siad Barre city of random death and destruction, divided between rival warlords and clan-based militias that terrorise the populace. As in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the landscape and events are no less nightmarish for being so realistically portrayed. Indeed, the gripping power of the novel derives from its being as realistic as it is allegorical. It is no surprise, then, that the main character has written a dissertation on Dante's Inferno.

In this city where young boys gun down strangers "just for fun" and death stalks every step, the girl-child Raasta becomes a figure of hope kidnapped. The search for her assumes symbolic dimensions. "You can't hope enough," Farah says. "When society is going through difficult times, that society must look for a way out and the way out is the future. Now, what better way of expressing the future other than the child? The child brings in the future."

Harry Garuba is associate professor of English at the University of Cape Town

Biography: Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in Italian-administered Somalia. He grew up knowing four languages (Somali, Arabic, Amharic and English). He studied in Chandigarh, India and at London and Essex universities, and has taught in Germany, Nigeria and Uganda. From a Crooked Rib (1970) was acclaimed as the first modern African novel by a male author to focus on the oppression of women. This was followed by A Naked Needle (1976), then by a series of fictional trilogies. Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship consists of Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981) and Close Sesame (1983). The second contains Maps (1986), Gifts (1992) and Secrets (1998). A new trilogy begins with Links (Duckworth). Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora is his non-fictional account of Somalia. Farah's many awards include the Neustadt International Prize. He lives in Cape Town with his wife and children.