From a Crooked Rib

by Nuruddin Farah

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  PART TWO

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART THREE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Glossary of Some Somali Words

  FOR MORE FROM NURUDDIN FARAH, LOOK FOR THE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FROM A CROOKED RIB

  NURUDDIN FARAH is the 1998 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and has been described as ‘one of the finest contemporary African novelists’ by Salman Rushdie. Farah was born in 1945 in what is now Somalia (what was then the Italia Somaliland), in Baidoa, and grew up in Kallafo, under Ethiopian rule in Ogaden. The ethnically and linguistically mixed area of his childhood contributed to his early fascination with literature. He spoke Somali at home but at school learned Amharic, Italian, Arabic and English. Farah worked in the Ministry of Education in Somalia before leaving for India to study philosophy and literature. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, was published in 1970; it has since achieved worldwide cult status, admired for its empathetic portrait of a Somali woman struggling with the restraints of traditional Somali society. It was followed in 1976 by A Naked Needle. Farah’s next three novels, Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983), form the trilogy known collectively as Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. Upon the publication of Sweet and Sour Milk, which won the English Speaking Union Literary Award, Farah became persona non grata in his native Somalia. In exile, Farah began what has become a lifelong literary project: ‘to keep my country alive by writing about it’. The Variations trilogy was followed by the Blood in the Sun trilogy, which consists of Maps (1986), Gifts (1992), and Secrets (1998). His most recent novel, Links, was published in 2004. Farah lives in Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife and two children.

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  First published by Heinemann Educational Books 1970

  Published in Penguin Books (UK) 2003

  Published in the United States of America by Penguin Books (USA) 2006

  Copyright © Nuruddin Farah, 1970

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHERS NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Farah, Nuruddin, 1945-

  From a crooked rib / Nuruddin Farah

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09764-9

  1. Somalia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9396.9.F3F76 2006

  823’.914—dc22 2005058670

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For

  Hawa & Adam Bihi

  & Waveney Charles

  PART ONE

  ‘God created Woman from a crooked rib;

  and any one who trieth to

  straighten it, breaketh it.’

  A Somali traditional proverb

  Prologue

  He could only curse. That was all he could do. Other than that, he could give advice, but now he cursed.

  He squatted on the ground. On the dirty ground, his feather-weight body lay. He couldn’t weigh more than sixty pounds. He grasped a rosary very tightly. On close examination, one would think that he was seeking support from the string. His arms were stretched forward and his buttocks were resting on his heels. He had no shoes on. He was an old man—about eighty, or even ninety. He could have been even more than that, and he could possibly have been less. At the time when he was born, nobody bothered about the date of birth of a child. A child would be one year old, even if his birthday fell on the last day of spring. Spring was what counted. The three months of spring meant everything: for human beings as well as for animals. Weddings were arranged in spring; wars were undertaken; blessings of the Saints were sought; tribal fights were either started or ended. Spring, therefore, meant everything. It meant happiness; it meant green pasture for the cattle; it meant a great quantity of milk from the cattle, which also meant agricultural prosperity for some. Spring was a semi-god.

  The old man squinted to see who was coming towards him. It was his grandson—the brother of Ebla, who had run away or had eloped with a man, nobody knew for certain. The young boy also squatted on the ground, rubbed his hands on his uncovered lap, then let his hand go through his dark, wavy, unwashed hair which was full of dandruff. He was about sixteen, but, being the only son of a family whose mother and father had both died long time ago, hard labour had aged him. He had a piece of cloth to cover his rough body—rough, because nothing protected it from the sun or the thorn-bushes which he walked over when herding the camels.

  ‘She has gone away. We know that for certain,’ the young boy said.

  The old man kept silent: maybe he was meditating. The young boy looked sorrowfully down at the ground. The old man counted the beads of his rosary. There were ninety-nine of them, which represented the names of God. He was totally emaciated. His colleagues in this world had reported back to God a long time ago. The people in the area wondered if he would ever die. When spoken to, he would narrate in the minutest detail the story of the war between Sayyed Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, the Somali Warrior, and the British. He talked of it as if it were a duel between the Sayyed (the Sayyed only, mind you) and the British. The Sayyed
did this. The Sayyed did that. The Sayyed killed Corfield. The Sayyed negotiated with that tribe, who were rebels. The Sayyed eradicated the rebels afterwards. He would recite to you almost all the poems of the Sayyed. That was the only thing which could revive his enthusiasm in his past life—otherwise, he had no feeling. He could not hate nor could he love anything or anybody any more. He had lost his sense of pride, even before his only son—the father of Ebla and the young boy—had passed away. He had exchanged his pride in life for silence—or reticence.

  But now he could not keep silent. He was an old man, and his main duty was to give advice; to refer to the days before the others were born; to talk about the rainy season to come; to say what one should do and what one should not say; to lecture on the worship of the Almighty, to whom, he, an old man, had devoted his life many years ago.

  Although nobody cared what he thought, the old man had many things to say, to the middle-aged as well as to the youngsters. The latter group were not as attentive to his word as the former, maybe because the young blood in them made them vigorous and rebellious.

  Ebla’s sudden departure had killed many things in him, although he did not know why. He had witnessed women of her age running away from their families into the bosom of a man to get married. He had seen many such incidents. He had done it himself. Or rather his wife had done it for his sake. But what made it quite sinister was the fact that he had nobody else to look after him. He had loved her more than he loved anybody else—when he had the power to love. He loved her more than he loved his eyes. ‘May the Lord take me away if Ebla dies before myself,’ he had said several times before, in private and in public. And he really meant it. Her brother was indifferent towards him. ‘But he is only a young man,’ he thought. ‘And it is possible that he will know what a grandfather is for, when he has grown up.’

  The old man pursed his lips and became nervous. He shivered in spite of the heat and his soft flesh quivered as if beaten by the wind. He gripped the beads of the rosary tightly. ‘Alhamdulillah. Istagfurullah. Subhanallah,’ he prayed. He repeated and repeated and repeated the words. They aged with him. He must have said them more than a hundred billion times. But they were on the tip of his tongue today, conveying no message, other than the vibration of his vocal chord and his breathing. He thought it over from the time he heard that Ebla had gone away; must he or mustn’t he curse her? He again gripped the beads of the rosary. The string snapped under the old man’s weak fingers and the beads ran away—and into the hot sand.

  The young boy stooped to collect the beads for him. But the old man silently shook his head. He motioned to the young boy to go away.

  The old man very softly and quietly said his curse. ‘May the Lord disperse your plans, Ebla. May He make you the mother of many a bastard. May He give you hell on this earth as a reward.’

  The boy ran away, and told two other old men about his grandfather. When they came, they found him lying on the ground. He could have been dead, he could have been alive; but no one went near him.

  He was an old man, no doubt. And either could have been possible.

  1

  A dwelling. It was a dwelling, like any other dwelling in the neighbourhood. Not in the least different. The number of human beings in the encampment was ten times less than that of the cattle. It was the dwelling of a certain Jes (a unit of several families living together). It seemed to be unique and, in a way, it was. Every place has its unique features. And this place had more than one.

  In the dark, the huts looked more or less like ant-hills, maybe of an exaggerated size. The huts were made of wattle, weaved into a mat-like thing with a cover on top. They were supported by sticks, acting as pillars. Each had one door—all of four feet high. It was a portable home, to be put on the hump-back of a camel when the time came for moving to a pastoral area farther up or down, to the east or the west. It was the portable hut, unlike the stone house or mud hut in a town.

  The lives of these people depended upon that of their herds. The lives of the herds also depended upon the plentiness or the scarcity of green grass. But would one be justified in saying that their existence depended upon green pasture—directly or indirectly? Yes: life did depend on green pastures.

  Ebla was a member of this Jes. She had been on the move with them from the time she was born. Her father and mother had died when she was very young. In fact, she couldn’t remember vividly anything about them. She had always been entrusted to the care of her grandfather, who was himself an invalid, though not such a bad one as all that. He always got through to the people, and was very much respected. And his word was very much listened to.

  For a woman, she was very tall, but this was not exceptional here. She stood six feet high. She would have been very beautiful, had it not been for the disproportion of her body. She could not read nor write her name. She only knew the Suras, which she read when saying her prayers. She learnt these by heart, hearing them repeated many times by various people. She thought about things and people in her own way, but always respected the old and the dead. Her mother and father meant more to her than anybody else, except her grandfather, who was responsible for her upbringing.

  Ebla became disappointed with life many times—in people more than a dozen times. But these occasions were not grave: the circumstances were minor, at least in the way she approached them. To her, a refusal did not matter. Neither would a positive answer make her pleased. But acceptance of her opinions, both by her relations and her would-be husbands, did make her pleased. She thought of many things a woman of her background would never think of. Translated, Ebla roughly means ‘Graceful’ and she always wanted her actions to correspond with her name.

  Ebla had been toying with the idea of leaving home for quite some time. However, she did not know whether this was to be a temporary change of air—in a town—or a permanent departure. She loved her grandfather, but maybe she mistook pity for love. Anyway, it was only when she thought of her grandfather that she felt the wringing of her heart and a quick impulse not to leave him.

  Problems are created by people, Ebla thought, still lying on her mat in the hut. But there is no problem without a solution. Maybe it is good that I should stay to take care of my grandfather, to see to it that he dies peacefully and is buried peacefully. But should I think of someone who does not think of me? It is he who has given my hand to the old man, exchanging me for camels.

  She let her hand touch the mat on which she had been lying awake the whole night. It was the same mat on which she sat to talk to many of her suitors, in the dark. In this same hut—or in another one: maybe in a different area, twenty or thirty miles farther up or down, in one direction or another. She sniggered at what some had said to her. She enjoyed talking to others. But none of them was an old man like Giumaleh, the one to whom fate had handed her over. It was yesterday morning that her grandfather had accepted Giumaleh’s proposal. He was an old man of forty-eight: fit to be her father. Two of his sons had alternately courted her. But only the younger one was very keen on her. Probably he did not propose because his elder brother had not yet got married. At least, that was the hint that he gave—not to Ebla in person, but to friends. Gossip goes around swiftly: women hear a lot and talk a lot, and tell many lies. But Ebla did not believe a word of it. Obstinate, they would say, maybe hammering the word on her had made her that way. Maybe in a way she was obstinate.

  She closed her eyes and imagined herself in the same bed with Giumaleh. Horrible. She just could not imagine it without going absolutely berserk. It was madly terrifying. The way things were, nobody seemed to care whether they harmed one another. Everybody for himself. No one gave a damn if something he did was inconvenient to others. One came out of one’s mother’s womb alone. One tried to solve one’s problems alone. One died alone, isolated. One was put in a grave, and left behind under the ground. As soon as the corpse had been put in the grave and everyone had headed for his home to mourn, it was said that the dead heard the sound of people. Even th
e sound which was made by their feet. That is what the prophet and great saints had said.

  Soft warm air blew the door to and fro: very comforting. ‘It makes one pleased,’ she thought, ‘the wind blowing things like that.’ Actually what served as the door was a piece of cloth hanging from above the ceiling just to hide those inside. It would be inconvenient to be inside those huts with nothing to hide you.

  Ebla stood up and dusted her robe, a very big robe wrapped around her body. A piece of it hung on her back, to serve as a baby-carrier or even as a vessel, or a shoulder-cover—or for countless other purposes.

  She was very much worried, not for herself, but for her grandfather. She could not dismiss the thought just by shrugging her shoulders. She was not that type. She was a woman, a responsible woman of eighteen, going on nineteen.

  Ordinarily, she was not a weak-minded girl. Not once in her life had she stopped doing anything because it would harm others. But this time, it was different. It was too much for her, far too much. She could not bear to think of waiting to get married to Giumaleh. To be in the doldrums—or to disappoint everyone, especially her grandfather? If she stayed, she thought, she would always be in low spirits. And if she went what would happen?

  Yes. What if she went?

  Something rang in her mind. But where would she go to? And to whom? And with whom?

  Next to her, her friend, a girl of her own age, was snoring in her sleep. But she looked absolutely dead. Ebla stood up. Her left arm was asleep. She massaged it with her right hand. The edge of her robe lay underneath her friend’s knee. Ebla tried to give it a tug without waking up her friend. At first she appeared to have woken up. Ebla stopped, motionless for a while. But the friend had put more of Ebla’s robe underneath her body. Decidedly (and come what may, she thought) she pulled her robe. Thank God! The robe pulled out. And the friend still lay asleep, as if undisturbed.