Sobre Sonhos e Identidade em Maps

Dreams and Identity in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah
Author(s): Jacqueline Bardolph

Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 163-173
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Dreams and Identity in
the Novels of Nuruddin
Farah
Jacqueline Bardolph
INuruddin Farah has written seven novels so far.

The other prominent artist in Somalia is the famous Mohammed Abdulla
Hassan (1856-1920), the warrior-poet who fought colonial power and wrote
political poems (see Sheik-Abdi). Critics have noted the continuity between
the man the British called the "Mad Mullah" and the novelist with his
indictment of arbitrary rule, particularly in his first trilogy, "Variations on
the Theme of an African Dictatorship" (Sweet and SourMilk, 1979; Sardines,
1982; and Close Sesame, 1983). Yet, even though recent events in Somalia
have given added interest to a political and historical reading of his novels,
it is interesting to observe how, although Farah writes in English, he estab-
lishes a continuity with the aesthetic and rhetoric modes of his country's
poets in the oral tradition.1 This essay is not going to dwell on the repre?
sentation of political reality in the Horn of Africa, but on the presence and
function of dreams in his novels.
If one takes only the last two books, Maps (1986) and Gifts (1992),
which are meant to be part of a second trilogy with Secrets, one is struck by
the prominent place taken by dreams in each, in a rather different manner
however. Maps is the growing-up story of Askar, first as a boy in the Ogaden
with his foster-mother Misra, then as an adolescent in Mogadiscio. At the
same time as he discovers the "territory of pain" connected with the neces?
sary separations that lead to manhood, he becomes aware of the border
conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia. The two themes, the personal and
the political, are woven in a complex manner, all the more striking as the
narrative sequences follow one another in the first-, second-, and third-
person pronouns, "I," "you," "he." The ten chapters, plus one "Interlude,"
are divided into sections: three sections tell of Askar dreaming and dis-
cussing a dream with his foster mother or uncle, and six of them consist
entirely of a dream sequence of up to five pages, with no commentary,
introduction, or conclusion. The beginnings are very abrupt, the variety of
situations of enunciation a clear example of the indeterminacy around the
protagonist's identity in the whole of the text:
And he was running and running, he was breathing hard and
running. (42)
You were very old and your skin had started to sag and so you had
it altered?that is you exchanged your old body for another, one
which belonged to a young woman. (59)
164 Research in African Literatures
Standing against the morning wall of sunshine, two oblong lines of

light, each solid as a hem and clearly visible as the border of a
dress. (128)
There was a flood. / And you floated. You floated, heavy as a
corpse, asleep to the end of the world. (205) I was eating, with
great relish, a slice of the sky and it was most delicious .... (213)
He was in a garden which was lush with foliage and plants with
memories of their own. (235)
The accounts are fairly elaborate: they have strong unity, include coherent
dialogues, and present some of the bestiary of tales, or recognizable sym-
bols and allegories. As such, they are in line with the presentation of Askar's
enigmatic birth: is he a potential cultural and national hero, like the "Mad
Mullah" who was Sheik and Sayyid with the book and the spear,.since he is
Askar (the soldier) and also endowed with a gift of vision?his "stare"? at
birth? They would thus fulfil the function of heralding a marvelous future
in the line of epic narratives. Yet they are not completely similar to the well-
constructed prophetic dreams as used in ancient literary traditions. They
present some of the elusiveness that is characteristic of real-life occur-
rences: they are fragmentary, absurd; their lack of coherence seems to bear
the mark of a puzzled reconstruction, of the effort one accomplishes on
waking up to establish a kind of narrative while remaining true to the expe?
rience of the night. And as for the examples that are narrated in an indi-
rect mode and discussed with Askar's uncle or foster mother, they give rise
to questions more than to firm interpretation within the world of the novel.
Gifts is a very different book, with little of the experimental complexity
of Maps. The plot is straightforward romance, the account linear, with an
old-fashioned summary of contents before each chapter. Yet the impression
of psychological realism, that of a Somali "sitcom," is tempered by the
frequent evocations of dreams. This time, it functions differently. There are
short accounts of one paragraph, whereas Maps proposes up to five pages
for a dream sequence. Many of them are the starting point ofa chapter, but
sometimes also a secondary beginning within a chapter after some asterisks.
This time, the reader has access to the inner life of two dreamers, the hero?
ine Duniya and Bosaaso, the man she loves. To some extent, their dreams
overlap and have similar images and mood, for instance in Duniya's dream
which starts the book and Bosaaso's at the beginning of chapter nine:
Duniya had been awake for a while, conscious of the approaching
dawn. She had dreamt ofa restless butterfly; ofa cat waiting atten-
tively for the fretful insect's shadow to stay still for an instant so as
to pounce upon it. (1)
While taking his siesta, Bosaaso saw a handsome-feathered heavy-
footed bird, a cross between a hawk and an eagle, for which he had
no name. (85)
Sometimes the name of the dreamer is clearly indicated, at other times
there is uncertainty about the status ofa sentence, particularly when it is at
the beginning of a chapter: what is represented, imaginary life or reality?
Jacqueline Bardolph 165
Which character is the center of perception in the opening

paragraphs?for instance, the woman who turns out to dream that she is
dreaming? "A woman lay asleep in the scanty shade of a fig tree, dreaming"
(146). Or again, the first lines of chapter fourteen: "A woman in her mid-
thirties is watching a sunset in a dream setting" (164), or an even more
impersonal example, in chapter sixteen: "The scene opens in darkness,
then a spotlight is directed on a woman standing in a river" (199). Most of
these short dreams are related within the family and commented upon.
Their ominous or prophetic value is understated, or even undermined by
the plot, as, for instance, when Duniya dreams of a dead baby after the
funeral of the foundling, a baby who plays an important part in the story.
Compare this with Sweet and Sour Milk when Beydan, in her sleep, foresees
the birth of her son and her own death (SSM 215): we see that in the
later novel the mode is more secular, the reference to the epic mode more
ironical.
In spite ofthe difference, the comparison ofthe two latest books brings
out similar features, and evokes many other sequences in the previous nov?
els. On a first obvious level, it is clear that the many and varied mentions of
dreams are meant to be the representation of a certain cultural reality.
Salman Rushdie said that his novels had to deal with faith in one way or
another because belief was an essential component in the life of the char?
acters of the Indian sub-continent. In the same way, Farah represents a cer?
tain African society where men and women take it for granted that dreams
are an important part of life. He shows them preoccupied all day by the
vision brought by the night, trying to share its mood, or to elicit interpre-
tation as part of the daily intimate exchanges within the family. He under-
lines the plurality of codes available within his culture for such comment.
For Fatimah bint Thabit, the most traditional woman in Sardines, the dream
she has about her son's future is taken as an oracle, as a matter of course
(S 143). A woman like Misra in Maps, aware of both Oromo and Somali
traditions, has two sets of handed-down responses and comments. The old
Deeriye in Close Sesame is sad he could not fulfil his role during the long
years of his detention: "... [H]e was not present to comfort them when they
were frightened in their dreams" (120). He takes his grandson Samawade's
demands for interpretation very seriously. Questioned similarly by Askar,
his Uncle Hilaal eventually offers to look for clues in psychoanalysis.
The characters are modern and also shaped by several world views, by
Islamic texts and pre-Islamic beliefs, tales, poems, The Arabian Nights, and
for some of them contemporary media in European languages. What they
have in common is a preoccupation with significance, the certainty that
some sense is to be found if one can read signs correctly. Tradition helps to
ascertain the meanings of nightly visitations in conjunction with other signs
in daily life that can be considered as ominous, or even with the help of var?
ious rituals that induce vision. In many instances, the narration of a dream
by one of the protagonists is completed, as it were, with an attempt to read
the future or the present from another source: for instance, in Maps, Misra
reads the destiny of the country by examining meat, and the ceremony
of Mingis, an incantatory rite meant to elicit responses from the world of

spirits, is also described at length.
The importance they give to visions and possible omens is a feature of
all Farah's characters, although there are nuances according to their level
of instruction. The exception is A Naked Needle, which represents a sort of
Stephen Dedalus in Mogadiscio, with the intellectual debates of the privile-
gentsia; it is the one novel that has no dreams, but a great number of refer?
ences to a variety of European texts. On the other hand, as is to be
expected, characters closer to rural life, like Ebla in From a Crooked Rib and
Misra in Maps pay a great deal of attention to what nightly visitations can
portend. The old Deeriye in Close Sesame is in many ways a modern man,
who took an active part in the fight against Italian domination. His inner
world is also nourished by his memories and by his constantly listening to
the cassettes ofthe Koran or the Sayyid's poems. He is close to a certain tra?
dition in that he deliberately attempts to produce dreams in order to con-
fer with his dead wife. He does not resort to "incubation" in trying to obtain
portentous dreams by sleeping in a sacred place, as is done in many cul?
tures, and particularly in Islamic ones, but he does so by immersing himself
through his earphones in the rhythm of his favorite sourates.2 "There aren't
any collective dreams," Samater reminds Atta in Sardines (186); the young
Askar learns there is no fusion with Misra in the unconscious: "Dreams sep-
arated you. You shared everything else?but not your dreams" (M 64). Yet
the circulation of images and comment fertilizes the imagination of all
dreamers, as Deeriye recognizes after listening to his grandson:
.. . [T]he visions (maybe because he himself had sinned), the dreams
had now come back to him through his grandson who spoke his words, who
saw them and who became his voice, he told himself; and he could see
signs which indicated that from now on his visions, dreams would
return to him; his Nadiifa too. {CS 121)
All such examples are not treated in an external anthropological manner,
but rather from the inside, in a matter-of-fact way: visitations, omens,
strange nocturnal scenes with their cryptic messages are all part ofthe daily
experience of living.
There is no ironical distance from such practices; neither is there the
feeling that the answers given propose a definitive meaning. The characters
are not presented as superstitious or credulous. In fact, they are eager to
analyze, on their own or more often with close family or friends, and the
reality of this imaginary life is taken for granted as one of the roads open
to the understanding of troubled times, a different kind of logical appre-
hension of the world that does not exclude Cartesian logic and rationality
in other aspects of life. This aspect of the presentation of dreams could be
said to be part of the sociological presentation of a Somali society that is
open to modernity in its very own way. But beyond the role they play in giv-
ing depth and verisimilitude to a wide range of characters, dreams fulfil
another function in the structure and narrative strategy of the novels. It is
striking to see, first, how the chapters in Nuruddin Farah's books are orga-
nized by the cycle of day and night. Apart from the un typical A Naked Needle,
which, like Joyce's Ulysses, presents one day in the life of the intellectual
hero from dawn to sleep, the rhythm of his other works is established by a
strong pattern of repetition. The narration in the first novel, From a Crooked
Rib, is linear. At the beginning of each chapter, Ebla either wakes up (8, 14,
39, 71, 100, 131) or crosses a threshold, two very simple ways of indicating
progression, well-suited to the unplanned picaresque journey ofthe young
woman; the conclusion of the sections shows the characters asleep (7, 12,
24, 27. .. ). In the later novels, we are far from the apparent naivety of this
tale in the presentation of sleep. Sometimes, the internal focus on the mind
ofa character is a mimetic rendering of states half-way between wakefulness
and sleep:
Duniya woke up to a cabalistic quietness in which she was not sure
if she imagined Taariq's voice asking if she would like a cup of tea.
But what about the foundling? And where was Taariq? For a sleepy
instant, everything was real as a dream being dreamt. (G 115)
Hedged in with soft whispers and the weak, reassuring light from
the lamp, Deeriye woke. He saw Mursal and Zeinab; the setting had
changed (they were in Mursal's house) and Yakuub was not there.
Was he dreaming? Had he seen it all in a dream? Had his nap
turned into a long sleep in which he had dreamt about Mukhtaar's
death? What was real? and what time was it? Was it dusk? or Dawn?
What day was it? What date? (CS113)
Several times, the moment of falling asleep in Deeriye's "catnaps" in Close
Sesame or Duniya's siestas in Gifts is not indicated; the reader who identifies
with them feels the moment of surprise when they wake up, and has to read
retrospectively the last as be paragraphs and images longing to a dream
sequence.3 There is more talk than action in these books, and it would
seem that the several types of displacement or journeys undertaken by the
characters are paralleled by the cyclical displacement between the realm of
the night and daylight consciousness.
The characters wake up and fall asleep, and they are also shown lying
down a great deal of the time; all the protagonists are seen taking stock of
who they are at dawn, during a siesta, or at night. They are in bed for vari?
ous reasons: they can be sick like Askar (M), recovering from circumcision
like Askar or like Ebla, dying like Soyaan (SSM), expecting a child; or else
the central consciousness is that of an infant, or a very old man. The place
is a private space for meditation away from action and heat, but it is very
often shared with others. Lovers are shown sharing a couch, naturally, but
other types of intimacy occur: Ebla shares a modern spring mattress with
her cousin before and after she has her baby (CR 133) and sleeps for a
while on the same bed as her brother in the room where the widow also lies,
and the fusional years of Askar and his mother Misra are troubled only by
the unwelcome presence of either of her two lovers. Sleeping, like dream?
ing, is not a completely solitary affair.
The territory defined by the bed and the horizontal position are at the
core of the books: the mental space of each novel is repeatedly organized
from the central consciousness of a man or a woman in a bed, which
presents a whole range of mental activity, from dream and nightmare to

half-dream, day-dreaming, memorizing, and organized reflection. The texts
dwell particularly on the fringe experience, the moments when the mind
tries both to analyze reality and to revive the experience of the night:
"Duniya awoke with a start and she remained restless for some time, turn-
ing and tossing in her bed, in utter discomfort. She had dreamt of a dog, of
indistinct breed, ugly and short-muzzled like a bulldog . . ." (G 129). The
characters deliberately create these marginal states. Loyaan (SSM) is a rest?
less sleeper, frightened perhaps of giving in to oblivion and death like his
brother Soyaan who died in his sleep. He cultivates the marginal position
on the edge of consciousness; he drifts away at the same time as he looks at
the sky through the holes in the roof. Askar similarly tries to cultivate this
type of ambivalent perception, mixing the reality of the sky and the visions
of sleep, as he places his bed "right under the opening a bomb had made
in the roof so he could keep his eye on the sky" (M115).
We thus see the centrality of the dreaming experience in the time and
space organization of the novels. The dreams foregrounded in this manner
in fact fulfil an important function. It is naturally possible to analyze and
interpret each one with the clues given by the texts, through various possi?
ble cultural readings or even in a psychoanalytical exploration of the
"unconscious" of the text.4 The critic is tempted to connect the images
from the fictional unconscious minds of the characters and the images in
the narration. He or she is tempted to connect the metaphorical network
within one book with the rest of Farah's works, seen as a whole text with the
logic of the narrative unconscious, and is also tempted to bring to the text
whatever key is at his or her disposal, from the repertoire of coded mean?
ings in Islamic tradition to the list of symbols to which Freud or Jung
ascribed universal values. As that is a stimulating but risky endeavor, it
appears safer to examine the formal role such dreams play in the pattern
of the books first.
The place of dreams in the narration is a good revealer of the way they
function in the general economy of the novel. In Gifts the dreams at
the beginning of each sequence remind the reader of the little vignettes in
italics that precede each chapter in Sweet and Sour Milk: "Like a baby with a
meatless bone in his mouth, a bone given him by his mother to suck while she is in the
kitchen minding thepot which has now begun to sing..." (7). They seem cryptic,
unconnected with the plot. In one way they act as fables or animal tales,
obliquely referring to the political power games exposed through transpar?
ent symbols in the rest ofthe novel (see Wright; Bardolph). And at the same
time they belong to the world of dreams, particularly with the insistence on
the archetypal relation between mother and infant, the "good mother" or
the "devouring mother." This ambivalent link evokes the most intimate,
personal fantasies of many characters, but the formidable phallic mother is
also, as the novels repeatedly remind us, the ogress of Somali tales, the
beached whale that is a female image of the monstrously overblown state
power {SSM 227). By comparison with the little prose poems of Sweet and
Sour Milk, it becomes obvious that Duniya's dreams in Gifts are also the
place where personal and political imagination converge?again not just

that of the character but that of the text.
The comparison between the books Sweet and Sour Milk and Gifts shows
another interesting collocation: in the first one, each dream vignette in ital-
ics is followed by a paragraph devoted to the description of nature: the sky,
the clouds, the sun, the dust. The cosmic elements that to Askar are the
mark of "reality" are animated by complex metaphors that humanize or ani-
malize them: "It had lain low on the horizon. When grazing for a freer
space, the moon had collided with a herd of clouds and had developed
bumps dark as a wound past healing . . ." (M84). The connection with the
figurative system of the dreams is obvious. At the same time, such elemen-
tal imagery seems extremely detached from the human activity and emo?
tions represented in the dreams and in the plot. The juxtaposition of
dream sequences?the inner landscape, the "camera oscura" where the old
Deeriye (CS) projects his memories and musings?and of such a detached
representation of cosmic order can be found in all the books, even if it is
not typographically as systematic as in Sweet and Sour Milk. It inevitably
reminds one of similar narrative sequences in the most experimental texts
of Virginia Woolf, particularly The Waves, where the internal poetic mono-
logue of the characters is repeatedly confronted with the evocation of a
splendid indifferent nature with a Darwinian scale of time, out of propor?
tion with human preoccupations. The effect produced is similar: the images
offered by dreams are pivotal. They are the key to the integration ofthe per?
sonal, the political, and the cosmic in each novel, in a mode of thinking that
is not only linearly logical but that also works through analogy.
Maps, more explicitly than the other novels, takes reflection on the
nature of reality, the nature of an elusive sense of self and identity, as one
of its subjects. It connects the personal theme, the story of an insecure ado?
lescent, and the political theme: what is Somali identity or nationality, what
is the reality of maps? The dreams are at the core of this reflection as they
provide the images and the emotions that bring the questioning alive. Each
account works as a new starting point, providing key metaphors and similes
that will be developed in the plot, directly or indirectly. Some create a
mood, others can be interpreted as allegories. Maps is in the continuity of
the preceding novels in that it examines the elusive problem of identity, the
enigma of freedom and belonging, but in it Farah goes further in address-
ing the philosophical question of reality. Some philosophers from mediae-
val Islam had a theory that dreams were part of a world of forms or shapes,
a third mode of knowledge half-way between abstract thinking and sensory
perception, the world of objects and the spiritual world.5 This conception
does not oppose reality and dream as mutually exclusive, in the way estab?
lished by thinkers like Descartes and by modern scientific rationality. It uses
the visions of the night as a key to a better understanding of personal and
collective destiny, as a gift, whether from djinns or angels, that demands
interpretation. The dreams function here as this intermediary space of
the narrative. Each book explores the frontiers with reality. In Close Sesame
visions can be madness, close to fits of dizziness or absences: "My life is land-
marked by absences I cannot account for: naps; daydreams; and just before
the seizures there are the few seconds during which I cross into a world
whose logic is unknown to any living soul" (CS116). Yet they can prove pos?
itive, as the tearless comment that is made after his death at the end of the
book: "Here lies a dead hero whose vision and faith in Africa remained
unshaken" (CS207).
In Sardines the explicit comments of characters compare the dreams of
the night and the dreams that represent the wishes for a better future, as
Medina says of her daughter Ubax: "I want her to live her life like a dream.
I want her to decide when to wake up, how to interpret her dreams ..."
{S 16). The dream is not opposed to reality but in the mental world repre?
sented in Farah's stories, it is the key experience that can help to construct
meaning and give shape to the essential reality?or paradoxically, the only
reality of the fiction.
The dreams are the key element in the decoding of the texts, in that
they demand interpretation from the reader. From one novel to the next,
the images become more complex: from the simplicity of Ebla's dreams?
"I dreamt I was trampled by camels" (134)?to the complex poetic con?
struction of Maps, the images become more elusive, with several levels of
ambiguity. Nothing is given or taken for granted, no single meaning to be
taken from any one of them, either through the codified cultural symbols
each reader has access to or through the most easily recognizable arche-
typal images listed by psychoanalysts. The readers from various cultural
backgrounds are all, one way or another, teased and baffled. Networks of
meaning are suggested, a specific area for each book that the title explicitly
indicates. But one has to work at making sense of it all alongside the char?
acters, trapped in an elusive sense of self, between represented reality and
represented illusion. Is the image of the hawk the ancient code evoking a
cruel tyrant? Are we to apply Freud's principles, for instance, and decide
that "the skull of the old man who raped his own daughter" (M 207) is an
inverted image of Askar's own incestuous feelings towards his foster-
mother? Is Loyaan's vision of a one-armed beggar meant to be taken as an
image of castration (SSM)}
As psychologists have shown, narrating a dream is akin to the art of writ?
ing poetry: the coherence comes from the telling itself, whatever the nature
ofthe original experience. All the dream narratives here are mimetic ofthe
whole process of fiction writing itself. They are to an extent a metafictional
representation ofthe process of imagination. They have no more logic, no
more and no less reality than the whole reality created in the mind of the
reader as he progresses from chapter to chapter. It is as if we were shown
the ropes of creation as each cluster of images from the unconscious of the
text fertilizes a new stretch of narrative. The game of hide-and-seek with
reality played by Farah as he uses traditional modes is thus also postmodern
playfulness, an exploration ofthe paradoxes of fiction writing, in the man-
ner of Borges.
But the Somali novelist is no postmodern aesthete, dwelling on the
ultimate arbitrary character of all narratives. He will not let us rest on
the soft pillow of doubt, since his object is not just to question the very
possibility of meaning. The self-referential element is not a solipsist or
circular game, a refuge from action in the enchanted world of fables. The
temptation is there; the cosy moments of dawn before assuming the duties
of verticality are to be treasured as a kind of refuge. Dreams, like art before
full elaboration, are often compared or paralleled in the novels with tradi?
tional tales, poetry, and marvelous fiction, but the gift of vision is not to
be squandered in purely escapist diversion. We are reminded that
Scheherazade spins marvelous tales every night in order just to sur?
vive another day:
Was it simply to save herself from that monstrous authoritarian
murderer of a king who would have dispatched her to her creator?
Did she in any way gain expressive articulable humanity in the
telling of the story nightly? (S 24)
The originality of Farah is that he dramatizes the way in which dreams
are also part of the apprehension of the real world in its personal and social
dimension. In Gifts, the most realistic of the novels, this is clearly shown in
the way each chapter is organized: it begins with a dream and ends with a
full-length quotation ofa newspaper article, usually concerned with the var?
ious aspects of international aid to dependent countries. What takes place
in between, the loves, quarrels, discussions, the everyday battle to survive, is
given shape by the dialectic movement between the two texts. Gifis gives for?
mal visibility to the process that is present in all of Farah's works. There is
no binary opposition between the two modes of perception of the world,
the poetic, analogical mode of dreams and the prosaic factual newspaper
cuttings, but continuity. Real life, modern life, with all its difficulties and
disorder is assessed and invented every day by people eager for meaning, or
as Rushdie wrould say, with a "lust for allegory." If the novels written in
English establish such a living continuity with the riches of oral Somali
poetry, it is essentially through this device of represented dreams. They are
the personal and social unconscious of the text, the sources of its main
images and emotions; in the reader's mind they create a mode of ques-
tioning that in some of its aspects is specifically Somali, but also accessible
to all, even when the poetical tropes seem ambiguous or inconclusive: we
all work together at meaning.
Farah has written a play, entitled Yussufand his Brothers (1982), in which
the protagonist is among other things an image of the artist Like Yussuf in
the Koran, or Joseph of the Bible, he is set apart from his brothers, sepa-
rated by exile, or by the very nature of his calling. Yet he fulfils his destiny
because he can interpret dreams for them, a task given to poets and holy
men. In his novels, Farah turns each reader into a dreamer and an inter-
preter of dreams. Fictional dreams here give thematic unity to the plot,
linking the personal to the social and political levels. They connect the
philosophical questioning on the nature of reality and self as seen by
various traditions: this African writer does not oppose modernity and super-
stition, but looks for coherence, complementarity, an on-going creativity in
the effort to understand the world. In short, the dreams are the
main device intended to give aesthetic unity to these ambitious novels by
allowing the creativity of the reading act, the necessary floating attention
that liberates images from the unconscious, the open-ended character,

the uncertainty that is fully creative as in the text by Conrad he has chosen
to quote:
All is illusion?the words written, the mind at which they are
aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands that will
hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the lines. Every image
floats vaguely in a sea of doubt?and the doubt itself is lost in an
unexplored universe of uncertitude. (qtd. in Maps 133)
NOTES
1. For a complete presentation of Farah's novels, with particular emphasis on the

political evolution, see Wright.
2. On the practice of "incubation," and more generally on the role of dreams and
their interpretation in the Islamic tradition, see several contributions in Caillois
and von Grunebaum.
3. Margaret Lawrence has used the same device very effectively in representing the
troubled mind of an old woman in The Stone Angel. Her collection of Somali oral
literature connects her quite obviously with Farah.
4. The "unconscious of the text" is not to be assimilated either with that of the
characters, the narrative persona, or even the author. For this concept, see
Bellemin-Noel:
De ce qu'il y a un effet de desir dans le texte, il ne s'ensuit pas que cet

effet peut etre isole comme une chose, meme au titre d'une signifka-
tion objective. Cela tient au statut du texte, a savoir celui d'un frag-
ment de discours dont le sens n'est jamais acheve, qui produit du sens
a chaque (re)lecture. Mon inconscient de lecteur ne s'impose pas, il
se prete aux possibles du texte; le sens secret du texte se n'expose pas,
meme a force de (mauvais et bons) traitements, il s'offre aux con-
nivences de mon ecoute. (194)
The fact that there exists an "effect of desire" in the text does not
mean that this effect can be isolated as a mere thing, even as repre?
senting an objective meaning. This is due to the status of the text,
which is a fragment of discourse the meaning of which is never com-
pleted, and which keeps producing significance with each (re)read?
ing. My unconscious as I read does not impose itself, it is open to the
inherent possibilities of the text; the secret meaning of the text cannot
be exposed, not even when one submits it to various treatments, good
or bad; it lends itself to the connivance of my reading.
5. For this concept of 'Alam Al-Mithal see Rohman.
WORKS CITED
Bardolph, Jacqueline. "Women and Metaphors in Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour
Milk and Sardines." Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Somali
Studies. Ed. Thomas Labahn. Hamburg: Buske, 1984. 424-45.
Bellemin-Noel, Jean. Vers Vinconscient du texte. Paris: PUF, 1979.
Caillois, Roger, and G. E. von Grunebaum. Le reve et les societes humaines. Paris:
Gallimard, 1967.
Farah, Nuruddin. Close Sesame. London: Allison and Busby, 1983; Saint Paul:
Graywolf, 1992.
_. From a Crooked Rib. Lond: Heinemann, 1970.
_. Gifts. Harare: Baobab; London: Serif, 1992.
_. Maps. London: Picador, 1996.
_. A Naked Needle. London: Heinemann, 1976.
_. Sardines. London: Heinemann, 1982; Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1992.
_. Sweet and Sour Milk. London: Allison and Busby, 1979; Saint Paul: Graywolf,
1992.
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964.
Rohman, Fazlur. "Le reve, 1'imagination et 'Alam Al-Mithal." Caillois and von
Grunebaum 407-17.
Sheik-Abdi, Abdi. Divine Madness: Mohammed Abdulla Hassan (1856-1920). London:
Zed, 1993.
Wright, Derek. The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies,
1994.

Sobre Sonhos e Identidade em Maps

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Dreams and Identity in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah

Author(s): Jacqueline Bardolph

INuruddin Farah has written seven novels so far.

Standing against the morning wall of sunshine, two oblong lines of

Which character is the center of perception in the opening

of Mingis, an incantatory rite meant to elicit responses from the world of

presents a whole range of mental activity, from dream and nightmare to

place where personal and political imagination converge?again not just

that liberates images from the unconscious, the open-ended character,

1. For a complete presentation of Farah's novels, with particular emphasis on the

De ce qu'il y a un effet de desir dans le texte, il ne s'ensuit pas que cet

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