Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- The Principal Works of Nuruddin Farah as Referred to in The Disorder of Things
- 1 Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method
- 2 Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
- 3 So Vast the Prison: Agonistic Power Relations in Sardines
- 4 Through the Maze Darkly: Incarceration and Insurrection in Close Sesame
- 5 From the Carceral to the Bio-political: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps
- 6 ‘A Call to Alms’: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading
- 7 Trajectories of Implosion and Explosion: The Politics of Blood and Betrayal in Secrets
- 8 Bringing It All Back Home: Theorising Diaspora and War in Yesterday, Tomorrow and Links
- 9 A Woman Apart: Entanglements of Power, Disintegration and Restoration in Knots
- 10 Pirates of the Apocalypse: Where Next?
- Index
5 - From the Carceral to the Bio-political: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- The Principal Works of Nuruddin Farah as Referred to in The Disorder of Things
- 1 Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method
- 2 Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
- 3 So Vast the Prison: Agonistic Power Relations in Sardines
- 4 Through the Maze Darkly: Incarceration and Insurrection in Close Sesame
- 5 From the Carceral to the Bio-political: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps
- 6 ‘A Call to Alms’: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading
- 7 Trajectories of Implosion and Explosion: The Politics of Blood and Betrayal in Secrets
- 8 Bringing It All Back Home: Theorising Diaspora and War in Yesterday, Tomorrow and Links
- 9 A Woman Apart: Entanglements of Power, Disintegration and Restoration in Knots
- 10 Pirates of the Apocalypse: Where Next?
- Index
Summary
The dispute that leads to the war involves a process by which each side calls into question the legitimacy and thereby erodes the reality of the other country's issues, beliefs, ideas, self-conception. Dispute leads relentlessly to war not only because war is an extension and intensification of dispute but because it is a correction and reversal of it. That is, the injuring not only provides a means of choosing between disputants but also provides, by its massive opening of human bodies, a way of reconnecting the derealized and disembodied beliefs with the force and power of the material world.
(Elaine Scarry – The Body in Pain, 1985: 128)Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited and shrunken and is enabled to open out into the truth of the nation and of the world.
(Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth, 2001: 161)THE PROPHETIC FORCE OF FANON'S WRITING HAS ATTRACTED VARIOUS commentators concerned with the peculiarities of postcolonial state formation. In the case of Somalia during the latter stages of Barre's regime, the warnings he issued about the dangers of political nepotism would prove particularly apt. In 1986, the year Maps was published, Barre was returned to power with a purported 99.9% of the vote (Lewis 2002: 255). Fanon imagines precisely such a scenario in ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ (Fanon 2001: 146). Throughout what follows, I argue that his legacy casts a significant shadow over Maps. In Hilaal, Farah has created a pseudo-Fanonian character who researches ‘the psychological disturbances the [Ogaden] war had caused in the lives of children and women’ (M: 157). This recalls The Wretched of the Earth's provocative final chapter, ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ (Fanon 2001: 200–250). Hilaal's most significant case study is his young nephew, Askar, whose fractured narrative reflects the psychic and physiognomic pressures brought about by conflict. Askar's turbulent struggle to come to terms with the politics of identity and affiliation takes place against the backdrop of Somalia's anti-secessionist war with Ethiopia.
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- The Disorder of ThingsA Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah, pp. 123 - 162Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2014