Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- The Principal Works of Nuruddin Farah as Referred to in The Disorder of Things
- 1 Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method
- 2 Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
- 3 So Vast the Prison: Agonistic Power Relations in Sardines
- 4 Through the Maze Darkly: Incarceration and Insurrection in Close Sesame
- 5 From the Carceral to the Bio-political: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps
- 6 ‘A Call to Alms’: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading
- 7 Trajectories of Implosion and Explosion: The Politics of Blood and Betrayal in Secrets
- 8 Bringing It All Back Home: Theorising Diaspora and War in Yesterday, Tomorrow and Links
- 9 A Woman Apart: Entanglements of Power, Disintegration and Restoration in Knots
- 10 Pirates of the Apocalypse: Where Next?
- Index
6 - ‘A Call to Alms’: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- The Principal Works of Nuruddin Farah as Referred to in The Disorder of Things
- 1 Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method
- 2 Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
- 3 So Vast the Prison: Agonistic Power Relations in Sardines
- 4 Through the Maze Darkly: Incarceration and Insurrection in Close Sesame
- 5 From the Carceral to the Bio-political: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps
- 6 ‘A Call to Alms’: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading
- 7 Trajectories of Implosion and Explosion: The Politics of Blood and Betrayal in Secrets
- 8 Bringing It All Back Home: Theorising Diaspora and War in Yesterday, Tomorrow and Links
- 9 A Woman Apart: Entanglements of Power, Disintegration and Restoration in Knots
- 10 Pirates of the Apocalypse: Where Next?
- Index
Summary
[The global doctor] is too busy feeding rice to hungry mouths to listen to what these mouths are saying. Words do not concern him. He turns his attention to murdered populations, not to eloquent voices, to the transparent language of complaint, not the opaque tongues of individual nations. The bodies he cares for are disembodied.
(Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss – Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power and Ethnics, 2008: 45–46)[Somalia] was one of the most generously aided in the world but the donors were having a negligible impact on either the policies of the regime or the capacities of the country. Supply-driven aid carried donors’ trademarks and the landscape was littered with some of the starkest relics of aid failure: broken tractors, silted pumps, fuel-less turbines, vacant schools, darkened hospitals, and crumbling new roads to nowhere. Typical of ‘capacity-building’ was a large bilateral programme at the National University of Somalia, worth more than the total national education budget. The main beneficiaries were the expatriate professors from the donor country who enjoyed lucrative six monthly tours of duty in the capital.
Somalia began to implode in the late 80s …
(Stephen Browne – ‘Aid to Fragile States: Do Donors Help or Hinder?’, 2010: 165)WHEN VIEWED IN RELATION TO FARAH'S FICTION AS A WHOLE, GIFTS IS something of an anomaly. Set against the backdrop of the kind of post-Ogaden-War misery depicted by Stephen Browne, it interweaves reflections on everything from the apocalyptic realities of famine in the Horn of Africa to the complicity of international aid agencies and global donors. If this provides the foundation for later novels, where new worlds of disorder are explored in all their macabre complexity, it is the love story element, unconventional as it is, that sets Gifts apart. More than a simple leavening of the text, I argue that Farah's decision to foreground Duniya and Bosaaso's burgeoning relationship, seen in conjunction with their all-too-brief adoption of an unnamed foundling child, has more interrogative significance. In this chapter, I explore how and why a dialectical relationship exists between narrative reflections on both the complicities and complexities of global aid, with Somalia as a compelling case study, and the equally complex unfolding of Gifts’ central romance.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Disorder of ThingsA Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah, pp. 163 - 197Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2014