Nuruddin Farah écrivain (17 octobre 1999)

Le texte ci-dessous est la retranscription d'une allocution que j'ai prononcée il y a sept ans déjà lors de la Table ronde "Somalie", qui s'est tenue le dimanche 17 Octobre 1999 à 11 h 15 au Salon de la Plume noire, à Paris. J'intervenais aux côtés des grands spécialistes que sont Mohamed Abdi et Didier Morin. Il s'agissait d'une intervention destinée à un public francophone, qui peut servir de très brève introduction à certaines caractéristiques du style de Nuruddin Farah.

 

Nuruddin Farah écrivain

1. Volutes et méandres.

Je ne veux pas ici entrer dans les détails et dresser un tableau stylistique exhaustif. En un quart d'heure, ce serait déraisonnable de penser le faire. Aussi vais-je procéder par métaphores. Un des premiers effets de l'écriture de Farah sur le lecteur est une impression de langueur, comme si le style se contorsionnait, épousait des formes serpentines ou aériennes.

C'est pourquoi je parle de volutes et de méandres. Métaphore particulièrement pertinente pour les passages descriptifs, où les analogies ne sont jamais imposées brutalement, mais plutôt disposées progressivement, proposées. Mais cela est vrai, globalement, de la syntaxe, de l'architecture de la phrase dans l'écriture de Farah.

Lecture d'extraits :

• Née de la côte d'Adam, p. 22 (traduction de Geneviève Jackson, Hatier, 1987)
• Dons, p. 133 (traduction de Jacqueline Bardolph, Le Serpent à plumes, 1998)

 

2. "Exploding in the face of the reader…"

Le caractère explosif de l'écriture, du style, du travail du corps dans l'écriture, est revendiqué par Medina dans Sardines : "Good writing is like a bomb. It explodes in the face of the reader."

La phrase, attribuée à un personnage complexe et ambigu, a souvent été commentée comme allant à contre-courant de la pratique d'écrivain de Nuruddin Farah. En effet, le style de Farah n'est pas convulsif, ni frénétique. Mais la métaphore de la bombe n'est pas nécessairement analogue à la métaphore du sprint. Il me semble que les volutes et méandres dont je viens de parler s'accommodent sans contresens de cette dimension explosive. L'art de poser des bombes est justement de faire en sorte qu'elles soient inattendues. L'explosion n'a lieu qu'une fois qu'un cadre a été établi. L'explosion vise à déjouer l'harmonie trop équilibrée de la composition.

Lecture d'extrait :

• Secrets, pp. 378-79 (traduction de J. Bardolph, Le Serpent à plumes, 1999)
  

Cette explosion ne rejette pas le lecteur : le style convoque le lecteur, puis le provoque. L'exclamation qui ouvre et clôt le roman peut se lire également comme une ex-plosion : "Un cadavre, trois secrets! "

 

3. L'allitération - les traces de l'oral ?

• Like a dry weed in the wind, blowing along with the breeze, light and skinny ; a dry weed nodding in approval to the forceful wind blowing about ; a dry weed bowing. (Sweet and Sour Milk, p. 33)
• When I looked at my nails, they had dandruff under them, traces of eczema, a trail of it, the untreated patches of dry disease. (Secrets, p.48 )

Alternance ou enchâssement rythmique des dentales que Jacqueline Bardolph a réussi à rendre dans sa traduction, malgré un appauvrissement inévitable que compense une autre allitération en [-ex] :

En examinant mes ongles, j'y trouvai des pellicules, des traces d'eczéma, toute une ligne de zones affectées par la desquamation. (Secrets, p. 78)

Plus difficile à rendre, l'allitération filée, ici en [s], qui n'est pas sans rappeler les contraintes formelles du gabay, principal genre de la poésie somalie :

The wind in the apartment was straggly with a scatter of aromas, strong fragrances pointing to a most disharmonious state of mind, smells as distinct as mountain air, as aristocratic as sandalwood, or as specific in their intensity as Arabian skin oils. (Secrets, p. 181)

L'air dans l'appartment était dispersé dans un éparpillement d'arômes, de fortes fragrances qui indiquaient un état d'esprit sans harmonie, des odeurs aussi distinctes que l'air de la montagne, aussi aristocratiques que le bois de santal, ou aussi spécifiques dans leur intensité que les huiles dont les Arabes s'enduisent le corps. (Secrets, traduction française, pp. 271-72)

Nuruddin Farah on Exile

" For me, distance distils, ideas become clearer and are worth pursuing. I like to place an intellectual and a physical distance between myself and my writing. "

From "In Praise of Exile", in Third World Affairs, 1988, p. 181.

 

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" Yes, distance distills! Here I have in mind the salubrious sort of distance that made me appreciate not Somalia itself, but versions thereof, a memory more real than the concrete physicalness of a building, a remembrance more spacious than the open fields I had grown up in. And time was to be relived in the recall of past seasons, in the bright hues the days put on, in the very colors the nights wrap themselves up in; time was to be smelled in the odor of the foods I consumed, and seen in the clarity of the tears onions made me shed as I chopped them up, as I browned them in a sizzle of a saucepan! "

From "A Country in Exile", in Transition, Issue 57, p. 5.

 

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" My novels, so to speak, are about states of exile: about women shivering in the cruel cold, in a world ruled by men; about the commoner denied justice; about a torturer tortured by guilt, his own conscience; about a traitor betrayed. "

From "In Praise of Exile", in Third World Affairs, 1988, p.182 .

 

N.B. pour les francophones : l'article de Nuruddin Farah, "A Country in Exile" a été publié en traduction française dans le numéro 24 de la revue Vacarme et précédé d'un entretien entre l'auteur et Michel Agier.

Quelques liens pour les francophones

Avant que ce site-ci ne fasse autorité (ce qui ne devrait pas tarder :)), on peut toujours glaner quelques articles intéressants sur la grande Toile mondiale :

• Article de la Wikipedia francophone
• Notes prises par VS lors de la rencontre entre Nuruddin Farah et ses lecteurs à l'E.H.E.S.S. (19 mai 2006)
• "La blessure du nom propre", article d'Abdourahman A. Waberi (que je salue amicalement!) dans le Monde diplomatique (juillet 2000)
• Recension de Hier, demain par Tirthankar Chanda (L'Humanité, 13 décembre 2001)

Bonne lecture !

À suivre / To be cont'd

Ce site va se construire progressivement, d'une part avec rigueur, d'un autre côté par sauts et gambades. Aux notes très construites répondront des petits billets plus papillonnants, signes de mes butinages dans l'oeuvre de Nuruddin Farah.

La partie "sérieuse" (ou solide) sera plus en évidence, car elle se signalera par des liens permanents dans la colonne de droite. Dans un futur très proche, je veux 1) mettre en ligne une bibliographie de sources secondaires 2) une liste de liens (ou Webliography) 3) créer des fichiers PDF correspondant à mes articles de critique publiés ou à paraître (sous droits réservés).

Soon to come on the Nuruddin Farah Weblog : a Webliography, secondary sources on Nuruddin's work (books and articles), as well as my own published research articles as PDF files.

 

Aujourd'hui, je me suis encore perdu à feuilletter l'édition sud-africaine de Links, fort différente de l'édition Riverhead reprise en Penguin...

Vamoose, 2

Leafing through my hardback copy of Secrets, I have not found the quotation that I was looking for and have even found out that the very quotation I was thinking of ended with basta and not with vamoose! So much for memory. However, I do know that the expletive of Spanish derivation has been used by Nuruddin Farah in one of his novels, because it is in his work that I learnt the word !

I'll go on searching... 

 

I rephrased my question. I said, "Could you, Kalaman, get up sufficient enthusiasm to absolve yourself of your and Sholoongo's pledge ? Might you not produce a sliver of sperm, bang, bang, zoom, and then basta?" (Secrets. Chapter 5. Arcade, 1998, p. 113. Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1999, same page number)

 

Selected Bibliography

Works and articles by Nuruddin Farah

Fiction

• From a Crooked Rib. London: Heinemann, 1970.
• A Naked Needle. London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Sweet and Sour Milk (1979). Saint-Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Sardines (1980). Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Close Sesame (1983). Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Maps. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
• Gifts (1992). London: Serif, 1993.
• Secrets. New York: Arcade, 1998.
• Links (2003). New York: Riverhead, 2004.

 

Nonfiction

• Yesterday, Tomorrow. New York: Cassel, 2000.

 

Drama

• A Dagger in Vacuum. 1969.
• A Spread of Butter. 1978.
• Yussuf and His Brothers. 1982.
  
   

Articles

• "News of the World", in The Guardian, December 4, 1979.
• "Do You Speak German?", in Okike, n° 22, 1982, pp. 33-38.
• "The Creative Writer and the African politician", in The Guardian, September 7, 1983, p. 11.
• "The Life and Death and Words", in African Times, May 4, 1984, p. 12.
• "A Tale of Tyranny", in West Africa, September 21, 1987, pp. 1828-1831.
• "Why I Write", in Third World Quarterly, 10.4, 1988, pp. 1591-1599.
• "In Praise of Exile", in Third World Affairs, 1988, pp. 181-182.
• "Grim Requiem for a Bishop in Mogadishu", in The Guardian, August 18, 1989.
• "Childhood of my Schizophrenia", in Times Literary Supplement, November 23-29, 1990, p. 1264.
• "Fear is a Goat", in The Guardian (Lagos), June 1, 1990, p. 9.
• "A Country in Exile", in Transition, n° 57, 1992, pp. 4-8.
• "Praise the Marines? I Suppose So.", in The New York Times, December 28, 1992.
• “A Night in the Life of Nuruddin Farah", 1994. (German translation published in the Swiss journal DU. Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, Vol. 11, n° 1, Janvier 1995.)
• "Educating Africa", 1994. (German translation published in the Swiss journal DU.)
• "Siyad Barre: A Death Unmourned", 1995. ( German translation published in the Swiss journal DU, Vol. 11, n° 3, March 1995.)
• "Bastards of Empire", in Transition, n° 65, 1995, pp. 26-35.
• "The Women of Kismayo", in Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 1996, p. 18.
• "Hating Them. A Review of Keith B. Richburg 's Out of America", in London Review of Books, September 18, 1997, p. 18.
• "Celebrating Differences: the 1998 Neustadt Lecture", in Focus on Nuruddin Farah: the 1998 Neustadt Prize, special issue of World Literature Today, Vol. 72, n° 4, Fall 1998.
• "A Review of Keith B. Richburg 's Out of America", in Konch, May 1999.

 

(to be completed)

Vamoose !

La liste de discussion AWAD A Word A Day, à laquelle je suis abonné depuis de nombreuses années, m'envoie aujourd'hui l'étymologie et un exemple en contexte du mot vamoose. Je suis certain qu'on le trouve dans Secrets (dans mon souvenir, au cours d'une conversation entre Nonno et Kalaman). À vérifier.

Guillaume Cingal

Interview #9 : Nuruddin Farah on Exile

Several central characters in your work are expatriates who return home after living in the West. Their lives abroad are somehow unfulfilled. Do you wish to return to Somalia one day?

I’ve heard it said time and again by Somalis that their lives remain unfulfilled until they return to the land of their birth. It is fair to suppose that I employ the detached ‘vision’ of the expatriate who returns after a long absence, because they manage to focus better. Also, because they have are in a position to remember what was there before, memory being central to the telling of all stories. Do I wish to return to Somalia? Of course I do. There is nothing that will give me as much pleasure as a visit to Somalia, followed by a final move to Mogadiscio.

Interview #8 : Nuruddin Farah on Voices

The narrative, style and tone of the three novels ranges from serious to lighthearted, realistic to dreamlike, linear to fragmented. Why do you tell the stories in such different voices?

I would like to give everyone the chance to be heard, even if I disapprove of the positions they take. It is for this reason that I tell the stories in the different narrative voices of the characters so that a balance is maintained. I am sufficiently democratic to insist that a person is the position he or she assumes, no more and no less. Maybe the stories told in my novels are but a multiplicity of ideas, each idea represented or put forth by a speaker.

Now it is altogether a different matter when you ask about the ‘you,’ ‘I,’ and ‘he’ pronouns in Maps. Let me say this and briefly too: from my early years, I’ve always had a problem when it comes to pronouns, and I am more than certain I would run into further trouble if I were to attempt to meddle with them. I suggest that we let the pronouns in Maps be and that we …you … I enjoy the novel for what it is!

Interview #7 : Nuruddin Farah on Blood

You named your trilogy Blood in the Sun. Blood is certainly everywhere in Maps, though less prominent in Gifts and Secrets. How does blood tie the novels together?

From the earliest times, the magic of creation was seen as residing in the blood women retained in the womb and which was thought to "coagulate" into a baby. So blood is where we all began, blood our ancestor, blood our kinship, blood, the thicker the better, our immediate family unit.

Interview #6 : Nuruddin Farah on taboos

Your characters violate Islamic as well as universal taboos, engaging in bestiality, incest, pedophilia, and murder. Why this interest in breaking taboos?

It is an interest so much in breaking taboos as turning, say, the collapse of Mogadiscio to bear, in a metaphorical sense of the upheaval that is at the root of the crisis in Somalia. In other words, it is worth our while to ask ourselves the question why it is people are shocked less by the cruelty they commit against one another and more by reading about explicit sex, or incest or a man ‘mating’ with a beast — things that are commonly done.

Interview #5 : Nuruddin Farah on Animals

Throughout the trilogy the boundary between animals and humans is blurred. Why do animals have such a prominent place in your work?

It is common for our poets to use animal imagery, maybe as result of the Somalis’ daily proximity to animals with which we share the same space, occasionally the same room. The camel, among poets, is alluded to as the "Mother of man," metaphors such as this frequently serving as a leitmotif in the tradition. That I collapse the boundaries between the animal and the human world is due to the way in which Somalis, as Muslims, see the animals, extensions of themselves, companions in this world. (There is a verse in the Koran which goes that "No kind of beast is there on the earth, nor fowl that flies with its wings ----but is a community like you!)

In addition to this, it is possible that my four-year sojourn in India as a student in my early twenties has made me appreciate the closeness between animal and human imageries, thereby making my life richer and more fulfilled. In Hindu mythology, Hanuman is seen as a beneficent guardian spirit and is viewed as a model of devotion.

Interview #4 : Nuruddin Farah on civil war in Somalia

Although many foreigners think of Somalia as a place of intense internecine strife, the conflicts in your stories are not blood feuds between family clans. How is the Western view of the country distorted?

Even though I am aware that it is seldom wise to generalize, I would none the less argue that when foreigners speak about Somalia, a great number of them fail to pay heed to the multiple versions of the Somali reality. Foreign scholars and journalists alike see the current crisis in the country as a one-single issue, describing it in a kind of shorthand, namely "clan conflict"! The crises unfolding in Somalia are as complex as the politics of any other nation, even if one reduce the crisis to one that has been brought to the by social injustices, by colonialism, by nationalism gone to seed, and by a twenty-one year old dictatorship, that of Siyad Barre. In other words, Somalia is a country resplendent with contradictions, not a one-single issue land!

Interview #3 : Nuruddin Farah on Somalis

The Somalia described in your novels is enriched by many different traditions—pre-Islamic, Islamic, and Western. Who are the Somalis? What unites them as a people?

For almost nine centuries, Somalis have been in constant communication with the Middle East through Islam; with the Indian subcontinent through trade; and with Europe as a consequence of our country being partitioned into spheres colonized by Italy, Britain and France, not to mention the two other Somali-speaking "spoils" that were gifted to neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya. Somali being a spoken language but not a written one meant that we could only be educated in foreign languages. This resulted in a great number of us becoming polyglots. In my immediate family, we are able to communicate, read and write in the languages of our colonial masters, in addition to Russian and German where two of my brothers did their postgraduate studies.

I feel there is something forward-looking about knowing other languages and there is something outward looking about studying other cultures so one could read the classics in the original. Reading A THOUSAND & ONE NIGHTS and then Dostoievski, Victor Hugo and other European classics enriched my understanding of my own culture. Moreover, coming from a small, poor country in Africa, I’ve found it worth my while to receive what the world has on offer and along with it the knowledge that eventually made the world larger, greater and more varied, confident that my life would become all the richer.

Interview #2 : Nuruddin Farah on Women

Misra, Duniya, and Sholoongo are strong women by any standards, but even more striking in a patriarchal Muslim society. Were there women in your life who served as models for any of these characters?

By way of apology, maybe because I feel that I transgressed into a literary territory that was my mother’s before I inveigled myself into it, I’ve said elsewhere that everything I’ve written is a tribute to the strength and wisdom with which my mother inspired me during my young years. Besides I tend to be attracted to strong women who can take the authority of their voice and use it effectively in order to defend their position, if only because I see women as a symbol of the subjugated self in everyone of us. I take it as given: that in every man there is a woman, and that in every woman there is a man, that there is a child in every adult. And that it is necessary to create the space in which everyone is free. I take it as given, too, that the society as a whole cannot be described as ‘democratic’ until every man, woman and child is liberated from the constraints of male-stipulated system of subjugation, especially of women. To achieve this, you need strong women.

Interview #1 : Nuruddin Farah on writing

Who or what influenced you to become a writer? Why did you decide to write in English, rather than in Somali, Amharic, or Arabic?

In 1968 I began work on From a Crooked Rib, my first published novel in preparation for a reflection on the politics of gender in Somali society long before feminism became a byword. Moreover I remember receiving a letter from the British publisher who asked me if I was a man or a woman. Soon after its publication in 1970, I got used to receiving letters addressed to me as Ms or Mrs. Farah, and for a good while I was at a loss as to whether I should disabuse them of their assumption by telling them that I was after all a man.

Suffice it for the moment to say that I emulated my mother, an oral poet, who exercised a towering influence on me during my pliant teens when I displayed my initial interest in writing. I used to watch her compose her poems, used to watch her, with utter fascination, as she paced back and forth in a room with a door pushed to so she would have all the peace in the world. It was a great joy to me when, on re-emerging, she spoke the completed poem aloud to herself, a great joy for me to eavesdrop on her. On occasion, she would ask me to learn it by heart so I would be the one to deliver it to a rhapsodist who would chant it to the audience for which the poem was intended.

I decided to write in English, given that Somali, my mother tongue, had no standardized orthography in 1965. And if I chose to write in English and not in Arabic or Amharic, the other foreign languages in which I received my formal education, it was because of a fortuitous purchase I had made, that of an American typewriter, which, I felt, helped me write like a song.

 

Note : This is the first instalment in a series of FAQs, for each of which Nuruddin wrote an elaborate answer a few years ago. So, these are to be considered as the fragments of a kind of "ideal interview" concerning questions that are most often put to Nuruddin.

Débutant ce site

Je marque d'une pierre blanche la naissance de ce nouveau site personnel consacré à l'immense écrivain somalien Nuruddin Farah. Ce site sera bilingue (anglais/français), mais il pourra évidemment accueillir, selon la demande, des textes dans d'autres langues.

Il y a plusieurs années, j'avais créé un site, qui a fini par s'enfoncer dans les limbes de la Toile. Dès que j'aurai récupéré les fichiers anciens, je les mettrai en ligne ici, afin de donner un peu de chair avant des "notes" plus récentes.

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Je... mais qui est je ? I am I, répondrait facétieusement Nuruddin...

Je, donc : Guillaume Cingal, auteur de la seule thèse de doctorat française consacrée à l'oeuvre de Nuruddin Farah, et, depuis 2001, traducteur de ses romans. Je suis aussi maître de conférences en littératures anglophones à l'Université François-Rabelais (Tours) et auteur de deux autres blogs personnels, depuis respectivement juin 2005 et février 2006.

Comme je viens de finir la traduction de Links, je me lance dans cette nouvelle aventure sur la Toile. Une fois cette note écrite et publiée, je cesserai de dire je pour m'effacer derrière le Il de Nuruddin.