Private and Public Secrets: Family and State in Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets

A marked feature of Nuruddin Farah’s first trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship was a penchant for refracting political strife through the prism of domestic relations and positing the family as a negative model and source for developments in the nation at large, a tendency which is still evident in his recent writing. In Farah’s non-fiction book about Somali refugees, Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000), a former high school principal traces her nation’s collapse into gun-slinging civil anarchy back to the imbalance of the patriarchal family, notably its glorification of male prowess from an early age, and in the novel Secrets (1998), the third volume of his second trilogy, the grandfather Nonno claims that the looming civil strife ‘‘would not be breaking on us if we’d offered women-as-mothers their due worth, respect and affection’’. In this second trilogy the focus shifts from biological to adoptive families and from filial and sibling relations to the orphaned child, a key figure who poses searching questions about the origins of identity and the relative merits of ‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘illegitimate’’ families and of involuntary ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘blood’’ ties and freely chosen emotional bonds (calling into doubt the values invested in these terms). These changes notwithstanding, the family-nation nexus remains a constant and continuing thread in Farah’s fiction, whether the household model is the traditional genetic one of the first trilogy or the adoptive quasi-family (which is seen to generate stronger devotions and fewer dysfunctions than its biological counterpart) in the second. In the latter sequence the mirroring of civil by domestic discord and the hazarding of explanations