The Ultimate Study Guide to Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts – Postcolonial Aid, Somali Dictatorship, and Female Resilience
This newsletter is prepared on Nuruddin Farah, one of the most significant Anglophone‑African writers of the contemporary era. Often tilted for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Farah’s work offers an unflinching look into the tragic turn of events in postcolonial Somalia.
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This study guide is developed to walk you through his exiled life, the historical context of his nation, his major trilogies, and a detailed analysis of his pivotal novel, Gifts, published in 1993. Whether you are a university student, a researcher in postcolonial literature, or a reader seeking to understand the literary manifestations of state collapse, this newsletter will serve as your roadmap.
Who is Nuruddin Farah?
For decades, the exiled author Nuruddin Farah has carried Somalia, which he calls “the country of his imagination,” throughout a nomadic existence that has taken him across Africa, Europe, and the United States. Born in 1945 in Baidoa, then part of Italian Somaliland, Farah grew up speaking Amharic, Arabic, Italian, and English, a multilingual foundation that would later enrich his literary voice. His father worked as an interpreter for the British governor, while his mother was an oral poet, and young Farah used English textbooks while also taking Qur’anic lessons.
Farah’s life changed irrevocably after his second novel, A Naked Needle from 1976, contained satirical and critical remarks against the regime of military leader Mohammed Siyad Barre. The dictator issued a death sentence against Farah, forcing him into a life of exile that has lasted ever since. Farah once described the psychic pain of severing ties with his homeland in haunting prose: “The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby… It became the neurosis from which I write.”
Despite this trauma, Farah has earned a rightful and distinguished place among Anglophone‑African writers and the international writing community. He won the prestigious Neustadt Prize for Literature in 1998, often called the equivalent of the Nobel, and has been nominated several times for the Nobel award itself.
Farah writes in English largely because he owned only an American typewriter, and his efforts to write in Somali after it received an official script in 1972 were curtailed by censorship. His first novel, From A Crooked Rib, appeared in 1970 and, as its title suggests, concerns uneven gender equations and patriarchal structures within the Somali family unit, telling the story of Ebla who runs away from her village to avoid being forcefully married to an old man.
Throughout his career, Farah has produced eleven novels, one non‑fictional study of the Somali diaspora titled Yesterday, Tomorrow – Voices from the Somali diaspora, and countless articles, essays, broadcasts, and interviews, all of which bear testimony to his enduring engagement with his homeland.
The Historical Context –
To understand Farah’s novels, one must first understand the ruins of the Somali state. In 1960, British and Italian Somalilands were merged to form the democratic Republic of Somalia. However, democratic rule did not last long. After President Mohammed Egal was assassinated in 1969, army general Mohammed Siyad Barre staged a coup and seized power. The despotic and autocratic regime of Barre, which lasted for twenty‑one years from 1969 to 1992, was a devastating phase for Somalia. Barre resorted to a divide‑and‑rule policy, pitting one clan against another while imposing rigid censorship to suppress information from the unsuspecting masses.
Eventually, the clans and their militias ousted Barre from power during 1991, as his regime became increasingly authoritarian, resulting in civil war and genocide. The United States led United Nations forces intervened during the 1991 crises but failed to resolve the issue, and the forces gradually withdrew.
Somalia was abandoned by the international community and has not had a central governing authority to this day. The US‑backed Transitional Federal governments have not had any success either. The Islamic Courts Union and later Al Shabaab regained control from these bodies, though in 2006 the Transitional Federal Government collaborating with Ethiopian forces managed to quell Al Shabaab.
Farah’s novels are a literary chronicle of these exact events. He writes to counter what he calls the falsities propagated by the Barre regime, determined to preserve the true history of his nation for posterity. All his novels were later banned in Somalia and read only in smuggled copies.
The Three Trilogies – A Thematic Evolution
Farah has written three sets of trilogies to date. The trilogy mode has helped him have a prolonged engagement with crucial themes relating to Somali dictatorial politics, nationalistic rhetorics, developmental debates, border issues, media discourses, and external intervention.
The first trilogy bears the overall title Variations on the theme of an African Dictatorship, produced between 1978 and 1983, with the subtitle Truth versus Untruth. It comprises Sweet and Sour Milk from 1978, Sardines from 1981, and Close Sesame from 1983.
These novels deal with the resistance put up by a group of ten intellectuals against Siyad Barre, referred to as “the General” or “the Generalissimo” in the novels, and his repressive policies. The Barre regime, characterized by its rigid censorship, suppressed a great deal of information from the unsuspecting masses, and Farah was determined to write the true history of his nation, countering the falsities propagated by the government.
The second trilogy, labeled the Blood in the Sun trilogy and often called the “body novels,” deals with specific historic events that caused a rupture in the body‑politic of Somalia. This trilogy comprises Maps from 1986, Gifts from 1993, and Secrets from 1998. Maps deals with the border war between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1978, the tussle for the Ogaden region by both nations. Secrets is largely Farah’s response upon visiting Somalia and being shocked by Somali lineage obsessions.
Gifts, which will be analyzed in depth later, examines how developmental assistance in the form of foreign aid has actually defeated the economy of the country, leading to an erosion of cultural values. The pity, Farah notes, is that in Somalia this development aid had been part of the problem and not part of the solution as asserted by most developmental experts and analysts.
The third trilogy is the Past Imperfect trilogy, written between 2004 and 2011. Here, diaspora‑returnees – Jeebleh of Links, Cambara of Knots, and Malik of Crossbones – revisit Mogadishu for various reasons and become privy to the various competing factions in post‑collapse Somalia. The warlords have taken control of Mogadishu in Links, the first book, while the Islamic Courts Union became the power centres in Knots, inventing and imposing new traditions especially for women.
In Crossbones, Farah tries to unearth piracy rackets to bring out the real stories of who the real pirates were. All three books historicize Somalia’s post‑collapse era, starting from the abrupt withdrawal of the US troops in 1993 and the UN forces in 1995 in Mogadishu, to the infighting that followed much later between the Transitional Federal Government and the hard‑line Islamist factions.
Beyond the fiction, Farah’s non‑fiction work Yesterday, Tomorrow – Voices from the Somali diaspora, published in 2000, collects numerous interviews conducted by Farah with Somali diasporic communities settled in Italy, Canada, and other European countries, throwing light on the status of Somali refugees and immigrants and the issues and challenges they face in their host countries. In his articles “Of Tamarind Markets and Cosmopolitanism” and “The City in my Mind,” Farah expresses his shock and distress at the ruin and destruction of Mogadishu, formerly known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, and laments the death of the spirit of cosmopolitanism that once characterized the city due to intolerance on the part of the Somalis.
A Detailed Analysis of the Novel Gifts
The novel Gifts is set in the 1980s, a period known as “the lost decade,” when most African states were suffering from widespread economic recession. During that time, Somalia was fully dependent on outside aid, a mere satellite of the West.
The central protagonist of Gifts is Duniya, a middle‑aged nurse who works at the Chinese‑donated Maternity Benaadir Hospital, a facility with hardly any amenities. The nurses at the hospital lament about how a major power shortage that lasted for several days had occurred when they were right in the middle of a delivery.
In the novel, one nurse recalls that they were just two nurses, both recently graduated, with no doctor on call, and it was a miracle that the mother and baby survived because she and her colleague pulled at the wrong limb.
Duniya’s colleagues also observe that among all the foreign donors, only the Chinese donors could be trusted when they extended offers of lifts to women. It was safer to travel along with them because they did not travel by cars but by vans.
Farah writes that the modesty of the Chinese as a donor government was truly worthy, with no pomp, no garlands of see‑how‑great‑we‑are. The colleagues also discuss how scarcity of essential commodities can make life increasingly complicated, especially for women, as they are prone to all kinds of risks.
Petrol shortages, power failures, or the unavailability of public transport can only be defined as a double curse for women. Duniya herself hesitates before she goes out in her work clothes because the chances of falling an easy prey to men were high in a nurse’s uniform.
Farah explains that Duniya needed no one to remind her that African men often viewed nurses as easy‑going flirts who were considered fun and were invited to orgiastic parties. There is an acute scarcity of water, baked bread, newspapers, and even sugar, though all these items are freely available on the black market.
Gifts is set against such a background with a tough and resilient protagonist, Duniya, who resists gifts and teaches her three children the same. Through Duniya’s story, we see Farah scolding Somalis for their reliance on external assistance for their sustenance, and he is critical of Western nations who undermine African institutions and local industries by dumping their goods and services under the pretext of charity.
The old proverb, “Do not look a gift horse in the mouth,” becomes irrelevant in a modern global context, where giving and receiving between the so‑called First World and Third World countries does indeed have political, economic, and cultural repercussions, as reflected in the novel.
The real inspiration to write Gifts came after Farah read a newspaper report about a ship loaded with charity rice which docked at the Banjul harbour. The local population preferred the high‑quality rice of the donors to their own locally grown food products, thus reducing the demand for their own products in the market.
Moreover, the theoretical framework for Gifts is based on sociologist Marcel Mauss’s English version of The Gift, which explicated social theories on reciprocity and gift exchanges, an influence that Farah himself acknowledges. Newspaper clippings at the end of almost every chapter situate the text within the North‑South dichotomy and are full of information about all kinds of aid pouring into Africa and Somalia from European and Western donors, showing them mired deep into the dependency groove.
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