Reviewed by Lidwien Kapteijns
Author: Cristina Ali Farah. Little Mother: A Novel, translated from the Italian by Giovanna Dellezia Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto. Introduction by Alessandra Di Maio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Xxvi + 235 pp.
This novel presents the experience of Somali refugees in Italy in the first fifteen years after their dispersal (1991-c. 2006) as a network of interconnected and crisscrossing personal stories and histories. It has three narrators, who each take the word in three chapters. The first is Domenica-Axad, the daughter of a Somali father and Italian mother, whose story chronicles her struggle to claim and grow into an identity that is both Somali and Italian and not a truncated version of either. The second major character is Barni, a midwife, who grew up with Domenica as her paternal cousin and whose narrative deals most explicitly with the mutual distrust and resentment that divides Somali refugees in the wake of the civil war violence. The third narrator is male. He is the kind-hearted but bumbling Taageere, whose story of divorce and (eventually) a new marriage to Domenica highlights the incapacity of (some) Somali men to live up to what the women in their lives need from them in their new environments.
All nine chapters are monologues in which the narrators weave back and forth between Mogadishu 1991, the chronological beginning and narrative axis of their physical dispersal, and the evolving present that, at the novel’s conclusion, spans more than fifteen years and ends with the decision by Domenica and Barni to jointly raise Domenica’s son. Within the tight and intricate structure of the novel, the narrators freely associate to tell their life stories, which, as they contain and intersect with other refugee lives, form the dynamic unstable, and ever-moving bubbles of Somali diasporic existence. Thus the meandering monologues and the wide range of characters that connect them become the narrative vehicle by which Cristina Ali Farah represents Somali refugee experiences as she sees and interprets them.
In this depiction, the novelist appears to favor her female characters. Although these latter include strong and independent women as well as overly obedient wives reduced to unhappiness by controlling husbands, the male characters are (and, as the story evolves, remain) more invariably flawed. Barni, the midwife, gives the following explanation for this:”It’s so difficult for our men to invent a role for themselves. To redefine themselves. To adapt. To accept themselves. To humiliate themselves. Because you see, for us women, in the end, those fixed points, our home, our daily life, motherhood, the intimacy of our relationships, they are like little signposts that save us from getting lost” (pp.29-30). Indeed, the hopeful ending of the novel derives from women’s solidarity and their commitment to raising their children without bitterness. As Domenica puts it: “And I say that what happened happened and there is nothing we can do about it, except stop, listen, and change direction” (p. 11).
In the novel women prove to be at an advantage not only in overcoming trauma and adapting to the new conditions of life in exile but also in coming to terms with the violence of the past. Barni’s story shows most explicitly how she deals with the tendency among Somali refugees to categorize each other as either friend or enemy on the basis of their clan backgrounds and to identify each individual with the violence perpetrated in the name of his/her clan back home. Having found refuge in Italy, Barni married a young man from across the divide of the communal violence of 1991. This meant ignoring the objections of family members who saw the young man she loved simply as a member of the enemy clan. However, when Barni and her husband, after several years of marriage, separate, his rationale is the same as that of the earlier detractors of their marriage, except that now he accuses her of being of the wrong clan. He could no longer share a bed with me, Barni writes, because of “all the murders we – my genealogy – had committed” (p.144). Barni rejects the simplistic dichotomies that underlie such collective blaming and reflects: “us and you, murderers and victims, victims and murderers, who is who, if all you have to do is switch perspectives” (p.144)? From hindsight she believes that her young husband’s real reason for leaving her was “his long humiliation, his guilt at not being able to support his own wife, his revulsion at being dependent on a woman” (idem).
Another example of how Barni struggles with, and moves beyond clan resentments is her relationship with Ardo, a Somali girl she meets on a commuter train. Barni starts out distrusting and resenting Ardo, who appears to be wearing the custom-made golden earrings young gunmen had forcefully taken from her just before she had to flee Mogadishu. Thus she associates Ardo with ‘the other side,’ the side that was responsible for the expulsion and death of many of her relatives. When the earrings had been taken from her in Mogadishu in 1991, Barni had been on her way to deliver the baby of a friend – a friend she never reached and whose fate she still does not know. It is not until she is called upon to deliver Ardo’s baby that she is able to let go of her distrust and rancor. She writes (p. 158): “That baby was washed, washed of all resentment. We had settled our debt with the nabsi” (that is to say, with guilt and punishment). That Ardo had obtained the earrings by accident and had no association with the gunmen who took them is something that, in the story, comes to light only after Barni’s change of heart.
Through the multiple narratives and perspectives of the novel, the author is able to juxtapose sharp criticisms of Somali refugee life with a generous understanding of its painful challenges. As a result, this novel has much to offer to Africanist scholars. It speaks to the burdens of growing up with a hyphenated (Somali-Italian) identity in a context in which being Somali became synonymous with statelessness and international undesirability; to how Somali refugees struggle with the legacy of communal violence and ongoing civil war, and to the complexities of changing gender relations. However, through the Somali example, the novel also offers insight into the material and psychological challenges of African lives in exile more generally. It goes perhaps without saying that the stories Cristina Ali Farah tells in this novel include hilariously funny ones – such as when Taageere’s first wife uses a Somali wadaad (or community-level religious figure) to talk him into divorcing her by long-distance telephone. There are many real-life tragic-comic episodes like this.
The translators and Indiana University Press have done an excellent job in making the novel accessible to non-Somali specialists. In addition to the glossary, which was part of the original Italian edition, they included a list of the names of the main characters and provided footnotes where Somali poetry is interwoven with the narrative. Di Maio’s introduction is helpful in situating the novel in its post-national, Italian-language literary context, though it ignores the novelist’s important gestures towards truth and moral reconstruction in the aftermath of the communal violence of the Somali civil war.
Among the rising generation of Somali novelists, Cristina Ali Farah is one of its most subtle thinkers and greatest writers. This novel comes highly recommended.
The book Little Mother by Cristina Ali Farah is available at AMAZON.
Lidwien Kapteijns
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA, U.S.A.
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This review was first published in the Canadian Journal of African Studies 46, 1 (2012): 146-148
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2012.659581).
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