Gifts

Maps, which I wrote about recently, is the first in one of Nuruddin Farah’s several trilogies. Gifts is the second volume. As I wrote earlier, a fundamental theme of Maps is the topic of identity both individual and national. Gifts, though written in a completely different style, continues Farah’s focus on that theme. Where Maps was not at all plot-driven, Gifts is far more conventionally plotted and told. The protagonist, Duniya, is a single mother with teen-age children trying to find her place and her way in a country and a society where she confronts a number of serious challenges. The title is Farah’s second theme: the meaning(s) involved in giving and receiving and Farah casts a wide net, taking in everything from show more individual, tangible gifts between people to intangible gifts to international aid from the “first world” to the “third world.” Indeed, one of Farah’s point is how pervasive the “simple” act of making a gift is in any society. Farah acknowledges his reliance on a scholarly work: in the 1950s, a French academic, Marcel Mauss, wrote an essay that is still enormously influential. The Gift examined what it means to give or accept a gift. To oversimplify greatly, Mauss contended that gifts carry extensive meaning and motives on the part of both the giver and the recipient. Mauss believed that, among other things, gifts had the effect of strengthening bonds (and thus, for example, helping to construct society), not despite but rather because of such motives (such as the implied obligation to reciprocate). So, the question of what is meant by the giver of a gift permeates this book—as does the obverse: what does accepting a gift “mean”? In addition, colonialism, civil war, ethnic conflicts and more are never far from Farah’s attention. On a far more mundane note, the writing here is unaccountably mediocre (Farah always writes in English). For reasons I cannot discern, Farah frequently insists on inserting metaphors that are awkward—or worse: “He searched for words with the clumsiness of a man with very fat fingers trying to undo a subtle knot.” “The one good thing this humiliation was achieving for her was that she was becoming heavy like a club-foot, no fear of flying away from weightlessness.” “Then Hibo’s tongue, thick as a slice of gorgonzola, lay inert in her mouth.” Still, despite the writing, Farah’s insights and his presentation offer a great deal to think about, not the least of which is that the way we handle gifts (whether as giver or recipient) and how that basic act is inextricably tied to our identity, a theme in all of his works. show less

Given its setting—Somalia in the mid-1980s—Gifts is a strikingly upbeat, almost comic novel. Farah is determined to present a portrait of his country and its people which contradicts many Western preconceptions about it. Through the story of Duniya, a nurse and the once-widowed, once-divorced mother of three children, Farah depicts a country which has been hindered, not helped, by foreign aid—a people whose future may lie in refusing, not accepting, gifts. Farah's prose has an admirable deftness of touch, and I'll definitely be seeking out works of his in the future.