Reduced to Rubbish: Trauma and Migrant Identities in Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother is a fictional depiction of the lives of the Somali immigrant community displaced by civil war following the ousting from power of President Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia in 1991. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of dislocation, this article considers Ali Farah's diasporic imagination as presenting the reader with a scenario where Somali immigrants fail to identify themselves with Somalia as a place they can call home. Instead, they strive to reinvent themselves as “a country in exile”. I read Ali Farah's narrative as particularly effective in creating words and images that convey the wounds borne by Somalis as they leave their natal home, and as they try to make sense of their interstitial selves in Europe and North America. These wounds are both physical and psychological, and lead to the alienation and traumatisation of the dispossessed bodies. I reference Homi Bhabha's concept of “DissemiNation” to explore how the trope of the scattering and gathering of Somalis is imagined in Ali Farah's semiautobiographical novel.