Sweet and Sour Milk

One of contemporary Africa’s most exciting novelists is the Somali author Nuruddin Farah, who since going into exile has lived and worked in numerous countries and on several continents (he has recently come to live in Cape Town). Yet Farah writes invariably of Somalia and Africa, although in a global context, and in English.

The novel discussed in this piece is the first in a trilogy of works which Farah titled “Variations on the theme of an African dictatorship”. The dictator directly referred to (Siyad Barre) is the man who held Somalia in a choking grip for decades before the collapse of this society into political anarchy; though the phenomenon Farah investigates is recognised as but one instance in a more widespread malaise.

The eeriness of unanswered questions is the ‘atmosphere’ — textual, political, psychological — that colours this text in its entirety. It opens with the sinister death of a and brilliant young man, Soyaan, a senior government advisor and economist, as witnessed by his loving twin brother, Loyaan.

The latter (a dentist by profession) had been relatively inactive, politically; the dead twin was a member of a small, deeply secret, radical opposition group. The surviving brother inherits the political mantle of the deceased when he challenges the government regarding the cause of his brother’s death, (was he poisoned by government agents to silence him and to intimidate his associates?), and the role posthumously assigned to him, of ‘heroic’ government supporter.

Farah quotes the psychologist Wilhelm Reich in an important epigraph:

‘In the figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument of power.’

In Sweet and Sour Milk, Keynaan, the bullying father and husband, exemplifies this role, beginning with his refusal to allow a postmortem to be conducted to establish the cause of Soyaan’s death.

The appalling opportunism of this father (and of the repressive government he represents) is more fully revealed when he falsely claims that the dead son’s dying words were slogans in support of the regime.

He is rewarded by being reinstated in the police post from which he was sacked for causing a prisoner’s death under torture. This was a scandal hushed up by his marriage to the deceased’s widow as ‘compensation’!

Loyaan struggles with these contortions — familial as much as political — which threaten to engulf his quest to clear his brother’s reputation and to pursue his struggle against the regime.

Spying, threats, torture, ‘disappearances’ and cynical obfuscations of the true state of affairs continue to dominate a context in which familial tenderness (brotherly and sisterly love), social courtesies and trust among those who heroically oppose the dictator and his henchmen, show up like glimmers against a dark backdrop.

Loyaan’s stop-gap term, ‘complications’, chosen by him to ‘explain’ his brother’s mysterious death, turns out to be the most adequate description of an event which was the culmination of intrigues and counter-intrigues. ‘Who is to be trusted?’ is a perpetually nagging doubt in his mind. Yet by the time of his deportation to Yugoslavia (immediately after the seventh-day commemoration of his brother’s burial), Loyaan has challenged the regime’s appropriation of his brother’s loyalty; found and safely secreted some of his most important writings and established contact with his brother’s allies.

He also seems to have unearthed a crucial traitor to the cause of political opposition. Just before his departure, a baby is born to a mother who dies.

The name Soyaan, given to the child, hints at the endurance of the central cause, though the mother’s death bears witness to its tragic cost, as does Loyaan’s probable, impending deportation.

• Farah’s most recent publication is the novel Secrets (1998), published by Arcade.

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