经济学人下载:索马里之子-来自非洲的声音

New fiction新小说

Somali son索马里之子

A voice from Africa来自非洲的声音

Sep 17th 2011 | from the print edition

Crossbones. By Nuruddin Farah. Riverhead; 389 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com
《死亡髅骷》；努鲁德因．法拉着；河之源出版社；389页；27.95美元；请到Amazon.com购买

NURUDDIN FARAH went into self- imposed exile from his native Somalia in 1976, during the 22-year dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre. He now lives in Cape Town and Minnesota and writes in English. Yet the ten novels that have earned him recognition as a sophisticated voice in modern fiction—and one of Africa’s most important writers—are all set in Somalia. They combine an intimate dissection of power within the family with a strong dose of scepticism about the machinations of national and global power.

穆罕默德·西亚德·巴雷在巴西的独裁统治持续了22年，此间的1976年努鲁德因．法拉自我放逐，离开祖国索马里。法拉现在住在开普敦和明尼苏达，并用英语写作。然而他的10本小说背景都设在索马里，这10本小说让他赢得了人们的承认，他被看作是现代小说中不落俗套的声音，也被尊为非洲最重要的小说家之一。这些小说深入剖析了家庭内的权力，并结合了对国内和势力和国际势力阴谋的强烈怀疑。

In his third and latest trilogy, “Past Imperfect”, Mr Farah proves a penetrating interpreter of the chaos that ensued when Siad Barre was ousted by warlords in 1991. In the concluding novel, “Crossbones”, which has just been published in America, a Somali-American professor named Jeebleh goes back to the capital, Mogadishu. A Dante expert, Jeebleh had first returned to his homeland in the mid-1990s after 20 years abroad—just as the author did—to find rival strongmen jostling in the Italianate city’s infernal ruins, a scene that was described in the trilogy’s opening volume, “Links” (2004). Ten years on, he finds white-robed men with beards and whips imposing order. These Taliban-inspired “religionists”, as Mr Farah calls them, had already made an appearance in the second book, “Knots” (2007), foisting “body tents” on women. These female targets include Cambara, an actress and one of the author’s many robust heroines, who has returned from exile in Toronto to reclaim her family home from its squatting warlords.

在他第三部也是最新一部的三部曲《过去不完善》中，法拉尖刻地直现了1991年西亚德．巴雷被军队将领推翻时索马里随之陷入的混乱。三部曲的最后一部《死亡髅骷》刚在美国出版，书中索马里籍的美国教授吉伯莱回到了首都摩加迪沙。吉伯莱是研究但丁的专家，在海外漂泊20年后，他曾在20世纪90年代中期首次返回自己的祖国（刚好与作者雷同），发现敌对的铁碗人物们在意大利风格的城市废墟中彼此冲撞，犹如置身地狱一般，这个场景在三部曲的首部《纽带》（2004）里描述过。十年后的再次归来，他发现白袍男子手拿芒刺和鞭子强迫人们听命。这些受塔利班启发的“宗教分子”，法拉这么称呼他们，已经在第二部《结》（2007年）一书中露过面了，他们把“身体帐篷”强加给妇女。这些女性标靶包括女演员卡姆芭拉，她是作者笔下许多精力充沛的女主人公之一，流亡在多伦多的她返回索马里，想把她家住宅从霸占它的军队将领手中收回来。