Exploring the Heart’s Secrets in Somalia

The war-torn, famine-ravaged east African capital city of Mogadishu is the setting for “Gifts,” one of the three novels that make up Nuruddin Farah’s “Blood in the Sun” trilogy. Neither a conventional saga with a continuing story nor a telling of the same story from different perspectives in the mode of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” this trilogy, set in Somalia, comprises three separate novels, each with its own story and its own cast of characters, each expanding on a distinct and resonant theme. “Maps,” published in 1987, is a powerful, intensely poetic story of a Somali infant boy, orphaned by war, tenderly raised by an Ethiopian woman who later betrays the nationalist cause he grows up to champion. “Secrets,” published in 1998, mingles realism and myth in its story of a Somali woman who, after years abroad, returns to her native land to seek out her childhood playmate.

Duniya, the heroine of “Gifts,” is a 34-year-old head nurse at a maternity ward in Mogadishu. A model of competence, calm and efficiency, she is a woman who has learned to rely on herself. Her efforts have been made more difficult by the fact that she is a woman in a male-dominated culture, and she is very much aware of this. As the novel opens, she is living with her practically grown-up son and daughter, the twins Mataan and Nasiiba, children from her first marriage, an arranged match, to a rich old man. Duniya’s much younger daughter, Yarey, is the child of her union with Taariq, a talented journalist whose dissipated habits led to their breakup. As a compromise, Yarey lives with neither parent, but with Taariq’s well-off, childless relatives.

Two seemingly unrelated events shape the broad outline of this story. On her way to work one morning, Duniya, despite her dislike of gifts and favors, accepts a ride from an attractive man named Bosaaso. Not long thereafter, Duniya’s older daughter brings home a baby she claims to have found in a rubbish bin. Although she suspects there is more to the baby’s history than her daughter has chosen to reveal, Duniya takes the infant into her care, and Bosaaso is also willing to assume responsibility for the child.

It is easy for Duniya to give the baby unconditional love. But the love that is developing between her and Bosaaso is harder for her to handle. He is a man, he is far richer than she is and he lives in a fancy house equipped with all the latest technological marvels that her children, particularly her daughters, crave. Gifts, Duniya fears, always come with hidden obligations.

The question of gifts goes beyond the personal. The country in which they live, now ravaged by famine, is accepting large amounts of aid from America, Europe and Japan. The hospital in which Duniya works is a gift from the People’s Republic of China. Somalia itself, situated on a strategic trade route, bears the imprint of many cultures that conquered, settled or merely traveled through it. At one point, Duniya and her friends talk of the “traders, Arab and European,” who wandered “the African continent, propagating their faith, making gifts of their deities and beliefs . . . presents the Africans accepted with little question.” The skeptical Duniya, herself a Muslim, is moved to ask, “What was in it for the Arabs to give us their worldview . . . which contradicted our traditional belief systems?”

The significance of gifts is but one of several topics that Duniya and the other characters discuss in conversations that reflect the kind of sophisticated self-consciousness that comes from being exposed to more than one culture. While in no way credulous or superstitious, Duniya understands the importance of symbols and the value of myths in giving depth and meaning to life. The growing sympathy between her and Bosaaso reveals itself not only in their actual meetings, but in their dreams.

Although the problems faced by Somalia are the background for Duniya and Bosaaso’s story, the primary focus is on the characters’ personal histories, their emotions, perceptions and thoughts. Farah has a gift for writing about seemingly ordinary feelings and events in a way that recovers their essential strangeness. As Duniya’s guardedness gives way to her affection for Bosaaso, we are told: “A long instant passed before she realized that his presence had a pleasant effect, and she was not feeling all that vacuous; rather she felt as if she were filled with aspects of him.” Writing in English, which is not his first language, Farah brings a fresh and unusual approach to his descriptions.

Born in 1945, Farah left his native Somalia in the late 1970s and did not return until some 20 years later. Although concerned with the various political, social and economic questions confronting his countrymen, his fiction is not designed solely to expose parlous conditions or propose specific solutions. Imaginative, introspective, psychologically acute, linguistically inventive, Farah weaves together myth, dream and realism to create literature that is truly world-class.