Writers & Readers Week
Mar 15 | Reviewed by Tom Fitzsimons

I LOST track of Nurrudin Farah’s reading on the opening night of Writers & Readers Week, so I was a bit worried about this session.

Then there’s the fact the Somalian-born author has been given so many impressive labels it’s like he’s a decorated war veteran – the most important this, the best African that, the most prolific this, the likely Nobel winner that, and so forth. So there was also this feeling that something brilliant was eluding me.

As it turned out, I found the hour both comprehensible and satisfying. The reading, from Farah’s first book, From a Crooked Rib, was vivid. The informal talking was generally engaging.

Chair James Meffan gave a lengthy introduction to Farah’s career – following him around the trail of African countries in which he has lived, and starting to examine his sprawling, chaotic style of narrative.

Chaos and anarchy then became a central, messy part of the discussion. Farah professed a dislike for order, especially of the kind imposed by dictators, and said he would rather have everything chaotic. Except he also rather liked democracy and kept saying it was necessary on top of the disorder. He then gave a nice anecdote about his own family, saying its four members could never decide what was for dinner without lengthy debate and disharmony.

Meffan decided to ground this discussion, and asked Farah about the situation of endless chaos in Mogadishu, where the city is carved into sections controlled by rival warlords. Farah was not comfortable with the comparison at all, eventually saying that it wasn’t really chaos at all, but a world ruled by absolute pursuit of words like power and money.

So some interesting things were being said, though often in a roundabout way. Farah also talked about his childhood and initial interest in language. A tradition of oral poetry had been in his family for generations through to his mother and it was just expected that he would continue it, he said. As a child, he often delivered poems composed by his mother, from memory. Except he would also make minor changes as he saw fit. That streak of independence did not fade either – costing him a letter-writing job after he failed to transcribe a husband’s threats of beatings for his wife, and, much later, getting him kicked out of country after country as he criticised the ruling dictators.

Farah certainly seems an important author. Meffan praised his extraordinary vocabulary and prolific output, while his works have been greeted for many years as pioneering African literature. It was hard to believe that Farah’s first book languished in critical obscurity for almost ten years – till the publication of his second novel – and has never actually received a review.

He’s also a quite different author to people like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o who have achieved similar acclaim. First, there’s a looser, almost mythological dimension to his prose, and a refusal to sit quietly like a good piece of literature. He’s also quite concerned to highlight the problems in traditional African societies – most obviously, the treatment of women. An ill-advised question from the crowd did have the virtue of drawing him out on this issue. Although rejecting the label of feminist, he said a change to the status of women was a precursor to political development in Africa. He described ongoing practices like infibulations and female circumcision as barbaric and wrong. By contrast, I didn’t find him venting too much spleen about high colonialism, although I suppose that’s pretty much a given in the literary landscape now. Still, I would probably have liked to hear more about Farah’s thoughts on contemporary Africa, and its future direction.

In all, the session was thoughtful, especially if you were interested in post-colonial literature. There were some typically woeful and self-important questions from the crowd and both Farah and Meffan had a tendency to be a bit academic and ponderous about their questions and answers, but those are minor quibbles. Good, important stuff.

» Nurrudin Farah @ NZ International Arts Festival