Hiiraan Online

Humans are a social being therefore, our minds cannot be separated from our society who is the chief architecture of individual’s culture, language and behaviour. Society plays major role in early years of human experience and development, they shape the personality of young person’s future. Therefore you are the nature of the society you born into, they impact on your way of learning, acting and your perception of others.

Tribal and oral-culture societies like Somali society, agents of socialisation such as; family, peers, education i,e, work within the realm of collective social structure. Thus extreme practice of uniformity and conformity is the only desirable social action which determines group maintenance and survival. However the structure of early experience of Somali person forces him/her to conform to the social norms. Those norms include inherited ritual, cultural practices, poem reciprocal, remembering the genealogy of forefathers, the propensity of organised, rehearsed cultural fairytale and the get togetherness and doing set of routine things to direct at those forthcoming generations for cult maintenance purposes. These cults are the cults of dead generation organised by tribal elders who have authority on everyone else. Those practices take place in remote areas where people kept ancestral cults within simple social structure that uses those practice and fosters them.

The Somali socio-cultural dormant sharply constrained any chance of developing an adequate method to change the mind set of our society, therefore changing the structure of Somali mentality is inevitably the stepping stone to build the future of modern Somali society.

Having being analysed the elementary forms of Somali social structure, I want to discuss the risk of the over lapping cultural orthodoxy posses on the possibility of changing Somali personality.

Hence it is worth knowing that, the self in Somali society was subjugated to the powerful group identity, it has no place both inside or outside the realm of the collective unconscious. The absence of self identity have produced a generations of irrational, reason blind and uncritical thinking generations. Because the Somali socio-cultural uniformity had negative impact on how young generation’s behave, identify him/her self, their decision making process and their way of thinking.

Let us look closely the factors that determine the emergence of collective unconsciousness culture;

Culture, Somali culture is something that people perceived as beyond critique, analyses, change and rectification. As part of our identity, everybody must be acting according to what cultural impulses requires from us regardless who you are what you do, when it come to cultural practice everyone is the same, people are equal, do what everybody is doing even if that doesn’t make sense to (Fiqi tolkii kama janno tago) the Somali Faqiih never chooses paradise over his tribe’s wishes.

It is mistake and unfortunate role to be a village skeptic, to say these cultural practices are irrational, nonsensical and false however; anyone who opposes the dominant culture, that person obviously is taking risk to challenge the whole society who readily wants to sacrifice every precious thing to preserve their culture. Since those practices are holding the group together, it is satisfactory to keep people collectively unconscious and within the parameter of introspective group consciousness.

Language is the mirror of the society. Somali literature as many people described is very rich, simple and beautiful worded literature. Similarly Somalis were known by many western writers as the nation of poets. When we say poets we mean poem played very significant role in developing Somali language and enriching Somali literature and oral culture.

When we attribute good things about Somali poem, we must not overlook the cultural environment that produced the poets, the circumstances in which the poem can be chanted about and the area of the poem. For example there are thirteen areas in which poem had been said about in the past, I am not here to eliminate any potential area in which poem can be chanted, but so far this is the thirteen major areas in wider circulation among the poem writers and they are; the praise, diatribe, boast, taunt, provocative, lament, exhortation, advice, curse, philosophy, riddle, humor and love. According to Mohamed Sh Xassan in his book Gurmad Volum 5aad (2006), this is how he described those major areas of poetry chant.

However the dominant features of that literature are the emotional expression character. Huge portion of our beautiful literature as you can extract from those major areas are limited onto to the emotional feeling of our society. Nonetheless, that emotional feeling we share with animals and other species to which the expression of emotional feeling is a matter of biological imperatives which is common to human species and animal.

I think even the smaller bit which talks about advice and Somali philosophy are neither critical nor analytical even when they were in their better moments. Hence those poems are the products of our collective unconsciousness, the limitation of the limitation of physical and mental power principle within the socio-cultural lack of progress impositions. However Somali poet can only exercise around the historical socio-cultural elements of his/her predecessors. As the son of Somali social phenomenon, he merely uses language which is prior to his existence which corresponds to a prior sensible cultural property of his society.

In this critical moment of Somali social history, we need to rethink what we inherited from past generation, everything we got must be subjected to analysis, critique, investigation and correction. After all what happened to us in the years of the civil war, lack of spirit of nationhood and failed state stigma, critical thinking minds of Somali people started to ask where this crisis first initiated? What is wrong with Somali society? Is it possible that our culture is making us behave this way?

The existing cultural constraints are the chief responsible of our stagnation and backwardness. It puts us an infinite regressive position of history and progress, it limits our understanding and way of thinking. Hence we know now that consciousness is the ground of being, if I understand myself rather than my group identity, I put the corner stone of my capacity of critical thinking which widens my horizons, therefore my actions will be guided by my rationality and reason rather than an absurd, ludicrous and irrational culture dictates my future being.  

Nuradiin Askar Ibrahim
e-mail; [email protected] 

Reference

Carl Jung (1068) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2ed edition, Routledge.
Mohammed Sh, Hassan (2006) Gurmad, A Collection of Somali Poems, Scansom Publisher.