Sage of Somalia.

• Author: Bayoumi, Moustafa
• Position: Nuruddin Farah

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

WHEN HE WAS ONLY twelve years old, Nuruddin Farah--the celebrated novelist and sage of Somalia--executed his first act of literary sedition.

Growing up in Kelafo, a town in the Somali-speaking land of Ogaden (a disputed territory ruled by Ethiopia), Farah attended two schools as a boy, a local one largely supported by his father and an American missionary school. By a young age, he mastered several languages, including Somali, Arabic, Amharic, English, and Italian. Since he could read and write at a time when many could not, he would occasionally hire himself out as a scribe for money.

One day, an elderly man approached young Farah, requesting he write a letter to his estranged wife. The man was a brute who used to beat his wife. She had fled to her relatives in a nearby town and was demanding a divorce. The husband dictated a rancorous letter to Farah, telling him he would never grant her request and, instead, threatening to break every bone in her body if she didn't come home immediately.

Sensing the terrible injustice of the situation, twelve-year-old Farah decided to sabotage the man's plans. He listened to the husband but wrote a very different letter, which stated that the husband would divorce the wife if she didn't return within days and didn't stop complaining about the abuse. He then had the man affix his thumbprint to the letter.

Six months later, Farah discovered that the wife, assuming she was divorced, had married another man, who treated her well and with whom she eventually had a son. When the first husband learned of the second marriage, he took the woman to court, where Farah's letter was produced and her divorce recognized. Farah saved the woman from further harm, but his father, knowing what his son had done, forbade him from writing letters for others again.

Fortunately for us, Farah's writing career didn't stop there. Since the 1970 publication of From a Crooked Rib--a sensitively told story from the point of view of a poor Somali woman--Farah has continued to produce expansive, textured, and challenging fiction. He has composed three major trilogies about the various tragic stages of Somali life and has garnered a number of prestigious international awards. His name repeatedly gets mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Unlike the influential Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who believes postcolonial African authors should write in their native tongues, Farah writes in...