Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART 1
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
PART 2
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
PART 3
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Chapter 27.
Chapter 28.
PART 4
Chapter 29.
Chapter 30.
Chapter 31.
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
AN INTRODUCTION TO Links
About Nuruddin Farah
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
FOR MORE NURUDDIN FARAH, LOOK FOR THE
Praise for Links
“It is a looking-glass world that the Somalian novelist Nuruddin Farah takes us through in his novel.... [T]he story of a longtime Somalian exile exploring his country’s disintegration is . . . a work of realism.... Only the setting is miasmic, pocked with shell holes and quicksands and drift-high in seeming monsters and freaks who are humans entirely, as Farah is artist enough to make us see, caught in monstrosity and freakishness.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“It’s easy to see why Nuruddin Farah’s name keeps coming up as a likely recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature.... [Farah’s] strange and compelling books don’t just keep you awake. They haunt you. . . . Like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, writers to whom he can be favorably compared, Farah poses questions that, once asked, never go away.”
—Newsweek
“A terrifying window into a lawless country ... a political thriller for a nation with no politics but anarchy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A nuanced tale of lives wrenched apart both by civil war and by foreign meddling.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Farah . . . has said he hopes to reclaim Somalia through his writing. With Links, he accomplishes that mission with blinding intensity.”
—TimeOut New York
“Intelligent and complex.... [Farah is] the literary voice of his country on the world stage.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Unsparing in its portrait of a land overwhelmed by poverty, war and corruption.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“This is the slightly abstract, slightly surreal territory where several Nobel laureates hang out, writers like Singer, Márquez, and Saramago, and it’s no coincidence that Farah has been held up in their company. . . . [Links is] a haunting exploration of the desire to help and the attendant costs of doing so.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“A masterful tale ... A harrowing story of moral and physical disintegration in a once-gracious city.... A searing portrait of one of Africa’s worst killing fields, by one of her most distinguished writers.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Stunning, timely ... Farah skillfully delineates the emotional transformations that take place in Jeebleh as he becomes accustomed to his changed homeland . . . the publication of this beautifully written book should be one of the year’s literary events.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Links creatively provides an insightful social commentary and analysis of Somalia’s civil war.”
—Sunday Times (Johannesburg)
“Farah . . . has given us a masterpiece of resourcefulness, of hope that cannot be kidnapped or destroyed just because the individual is worth less than the clan. What makes Jeebleh’s journey through the living remnants of Mogadiscio especially immediate is Farah’s condensation of narrative, his coifed prose with not a word out of place. The reader is led as if through a maze where there is never a dead end, yet never an exit and the limits are not so much the solid walls of Mogadiscio’s crumbling infrastructure, but the emotional and familial links which determine in which direction the guns, and limits, are pointed.”
—African Review of Books
“Supremely powerful meditation on violence, evil, and the possibilities of human redemption ... This is a significant novel by an important novelist.”
—Booklist
PENGUIN BOOKS
LINKS
Nuruddin Farah is the author of eight novels, most recently the Blood in the Sun trilogy: Maps, Gifts, and Secrets. His novels have been translated into seventeen languages and have won numerous awards. Farah was named the 1998 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (The New York Times). Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he now lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of American by Riverhead Books,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2005
Copyright © Nuruddin Farah, 2003 All rights reserved
Originally published by Kwela Books, South Africa, in a significantly different form.
Links / Nuruddin, Farah.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54847-9
1. Mogadishu (Somalia)—Fiction. 2. Americans—Somali—Fiction.
3. Political refugees—Fiction. 4. Somali-Americans—Fiction. 5. Mothers-—Death—Fiction.
6. Abduction—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9396.9.F3L
823’.914—dc22
The image on the title page is an aerial photograph of the Somalian Coast.
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 material, Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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FOR ABYAN, KAAHIYE, AND MINA,
WITH ALL MY LOVE
If you don’t want to be a monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species, the image of your relations. Or else have progeny that make you the first link in the chain of a new species. For m
onsters do not reproduce.
MICHEL TOURNIER
The individual leads in actual fact a double life, one in which he is an end to himself and another in which he is a link in a chain which he serves against his will or at least independently of his will.
SIGMUND FREUD
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state!
WILLIAM BLAKE
PART 1
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
...
“For we have reached the place ...
where you will see the miserable people,
those who have lost the good of the intellect.”
(CANTO III)
“Your accent makes it clear that you belong
among the natives of the noble city.” . . .
My guide—his hands encouraging and quick—
thrust me between the sepulchers toward him,
saying ... “Who were your ancestors?”
(CANTO X)
“They said he was a liar and father of lies.”
(CANTO XXIII)
DANTE, Inferno
1.
“GUNS LACK THE BODY OF HUMAN TRUTHS!”
Barely had his feet touched the ground in Mogadiscio, soon after landing at a sandy airstrip to the north of the city in a twin-engine plane from Nairobi, when Jeebleh heard a man make this curious statement. He felt rather flatfooted in the way he moved away from the man, who followed him. Jeebleh watched the passengers pushing one another to retrieve their baggage lined up on the dusty floor under the wings of the aircraft. Such was the chaos that fierce arguments erupted between passengers and several of the men offering their services as porters, men whom Jeebleh would not trust. Who were these loiterers? He knew that Somalis were of the habit of throwing despedida parties to bid their departing dear ones farewell, and of joyously and noisily welcoming them in droves at airports and bus depots when they returned from a trip. However, the loiterers gathered here looked as though they were unemployed, and were out to get what they could, through fair or foul means. He wouldn’t put it past those who were armed to stage a stickup, or to shoot in order to get what they were after. He was in great discomfort that the Antonov had landed not at the city’s main airport—retaken by a warlord after the hasty departure of the U.S. Marines—but at a desolate airstrip, recently reclaimed from the surrounding no-man’s-land between the sand dunes and low desert shrubs, and the sea.
Jeebleh observed that after retrieving their baggage, the passengers congregated around the entrance to a lean-to shed, pushing, shoving, and engaged in acrimonious dispute. A minute later, he worked out that the shack was “Immigration,” when he saw some of the passengers handing over their passports, and the men inside receiving the documents and disappearing. If the lean-to was the place to have his passport stamped, who, then, were the men inside, since they had no uniforms? What authority did they represent, given that Somalia had had no central government for several years now, after the collapse of the military regime that had run the country to total ruin?
Turning—because the man spoke again, repeating his remark about guns—Jeebleh saw the stranger’s late-afternoon shadow, and decided that he and the man had never met before. If they had, he would have remembered, because this man boasted a mouth that wasn’t much of a mouth, with a pair of lips that appeared tucked away, virtually invisible. He was very tall and unnaturally thin. Jeebleh couldn’t help wondering to himself whether the man hadn’t been looking after himself in the style to which he had once been accustomed, or whether he had always been thin. But seeing his dignified posture and the way he carried himself, Jeebleh couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive and prosper in the conditions of Mogadiscio, described to Jeebleh by Somalis in the know as cloak-and-dagger, man-eat-man politics. The man was probably educated, and perhaps had held a high position during the former brutal dictatorial regime, whose popular overthrow had led to the ongoing strife. Or he may have been a well-regarded academic at the National University, now to all intents and purposes defunct.
“What do guns lack?”
The man repeated, “They lack the body of human truths!”
Jeebleh thought: There you are! For it was no accident that the first sentence spoken to him by a stranger began with the word “guns.” This was emblematic of the civil war vocabulary, and times being what they were, he was sure he would have many opportunities to listen to everyone’s take on guns and related terms.
He looked away, and his gaze fell on two youths with missing limbs, asking passengers and onlookers alike to take them to an outlying shack where they might make telephone calls, or escort them to a depot not far away where they could get transport to the city. He quickly averted his eyes, turning his full attention back to the man. Jeebleh felt weak, and sensed vaguely that something wasn’t right.
“Everyone calls me Af-Laawe,” the man said.
Jeebleh was embarrassed for his lack of manners in not shaking the man’s extended hand, and for his own failure to reciprocate and introduce himself.
Af-Laawe continued, “You need not bother yourself, because your reputation precedes you. So let me welcome you home, Jeebleh!”
The sun moved in a dazzle. And as though in a daze, Jeebleh looked about, certain that at a conscious level he was not sufficiently prepared for the shocks in store for him during this visit, his first to Mogadiscio in more than two decades. He would have to adapt to the new situation. He reminded himself that he had felt a strange impulse to come, after an alarming brush with death. He had nearly been run over by a Somali, new to New York and driving a taxi illegally. He hoped that by coming to Mogadiscio, the city of death, he might disorient death. Meanwhile, he had looked forward to linking up with Bile and, he hoped, meeting his very dear friend’s niece Raasta, who had lately been abducted.
“How do you know who I am?”
“I’m a friend of Bile’s,” the man responded.
“How is Bile doing?”
“It depends on who you talk to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bile has many detractors, people who associate his name with terrible deeds!”
“Are you one of his detractors?”
The question seemed to throw Af-Laawe off balance, and he fell silent. In the meantime, Jeebleh made sure he had his carry-on and his shoulder bag, in which he kept his documents, firmly between his feet. Distrustful of the thin man’s motives, he tried a different tack to come to grips with his discomfort about everything since his arrival. “Did Bile know I was on this flight?” he asked.
“Maybe Nairobi rang to alert me.”
“You speak as though ‘Nairobi’ were someone’s name,” he said, and waited for Af-Laawe, who was proving hard to pin down.
Af-Laawe was clearly happy to steer the conversation away from Bile. “Some of us think of the cities we know very well and where we’ve lived as intimate friends.”
Jeebleh knew what he meant, knew that in moments of great anxiety, one may mistake the self for the world. But he explicitly checked his precautionary measures, pulling his shoulder bag and carry-on onto his body. He had his few clothes in his shoulder bag. On advice from friends in Kenya, where he had spent a couple of days, he had left a bigger suitcase in Nairobi, depositing it at the left luggage of his hotel. He had brought more books than clothes with him to Mogadiscio, assuming that reading material would be more difficult to come by in a city ruled to ruin by gunrunners.
Now he massaged his right shoulder, which was giving him cause for worry, because one of the bags contained many hardcover books—gifts for Bile, who would appreciate them, he was sure. Jeebleh had stashed away much of his cash, a few thousand U.S. dollars in large denominations, in his wallet. He had to bring his money in cash, as there were no functioning banks here. “Tell me more about Bile’s detractors.”
“He still runs The Refuge.”
“What is to criticize about running a refuge?”
“Our country is full of detractors, out to defame the name of anyone ready to do good things,” Af-Laawe responded. “Bile has his fair share of detractors because he is successful at what he’s doing. As a people, we have the penchant for envying achievers, whom we try to bring down to where we are, at the bottom.”
“But tell me more about Bile. Why so much detraction?”
“People question the source of the money with which he set up The Refuge.”
“How did he get the money?”
“His detractors speak of murder and robbery.”
“Bile murdering and robbing?”
“Civil wars have a way of making people behave contrary to their own nature,” Af-Laawe said. “You’d be surprised to know what goes on, or what people get up to. At times, it’s difficult to tell the good from the bad.”
“Not Bile!”
“You have heard about his niece?” Af-Laawe said. “That she’s been abducted, rumor has it, by men related to the people Bile has allegedly murdered and robbed? Supposedly, the kidnappers have said they won’t set his niece and her companion free until he has given back the money he stole, or confesses to having committed the murders.” Af-Laawe watched silently as Jeebleh stared at him with so much distrust spreading over his features.
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