Friday, June 17, 2011
Somalis, like the French or Portuguese, prefer writing in their dialect thus making their literature inaccessible to non-Somali speakers. However, Nurrudin, one of Africa’s greatest writers, chose English as his medium of communication.
“I began writing,” wrote Nurrudin, “in the hope of enabling the Somali child at least to characterise his or her otherness and to point at himself or herself as the unnamed, the divided other, a schizophrenic child living in the age of colonial contradictions.”
Somalia was in pre-colonial Africa a nation of a people of single language, religion, culture. The cataclysmic colonial experience dispersed Somalis in different countries in Eastern Africa; Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Republic of Somalia.
In an essay Childhood of my Schizophrenia, Nurrudin writes poignantly about boyhood. He skillfully uses ancient River Shabelle to symbolise alienation of the African from his environment and culture through European education, “we came to school short of preconceptions,” he writes.
However, having crossed River Shabelle, “we learnt of Nile, Thames, Gange, Euphrates, Red Sea.” River Shabelle which young Nurrudin crossed everyday on a canoe to school and which had an immediate bearing on his people’s socio-economic life was missing from that list.
But the boy had learned how to swim in Shabelle. There the boy had seen a crocodile swallow a woman and hated himself for not saving the woman. Was River Shabelle not important to be taught in school? The Africans have a saying that until the lion tells his story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter!
In another essay Of Tamarind and Cosmopolitanism, Nurrudin equates the destruction of Tamarind Market with Somalia’s ruin. Its disintegration is symbolic of Somalia’s collapse. Mogadiscio existed as a cosmopolitan city in 10th century AD. Traders came from Arabia, India and Persia to strike cheap bargains at Tamarind Market. Garissa Lodge in Nairobi attests to Somali’s acute entrepreneurialism. Yet there are thousands of Somalis without education in a foreign country depending on menial jobs for survival. Is that incentive to recruit militants?
Cosmopolitanism gave rise to a bourgeoisie class whose haughty and ostentatious lifestyle annoyed the austere rural pastoralists. In 1530-1580, the pastoralists recruited young firebrands and fanned a destructive war to rid Mogadiscio of “foreign elements.”
Then Italy came to colonise. Somalia had one city. One university. One tyrant in Siad Barre. If you wanted a nose consultant, Mogadiscio beckoned! Negligible infrastructure was concentrated in one place. Rural-urban migration exerted unbearable pressure on Mogadiscio. The civil war in 1991, like the 16th century conflagration which left Tamarind in flames had been simmering.
The history of Mogadiscio, its founding, and its collapse, is tied to the history and destiny of the small cosmopolitan community that ran the Tamarind Market. Here is Nurrudin’s sardonic voice:
“The destruction of the Tamarind Market augurs badly if like me, you’ve invested in the metaphorical truth implicit in the notion of tamarind, an evergreen tree of the pea family native to tropical Africa.”
Tamarind is an edible fruit with medicinal value. On the ruins of Tamarind sits Bakhaaraha “Silos” Market. Nurrudin says that a silo prides itself in “separateness,” “intolerance,” “parasiticism” and “unproductive tendencies.” No wonder Somalia is today divided on fault lines. Nurrudin is proposing bringing down Bakhaaraha Market and erecting in its place a unifying monument.
Source: The Star