1 Nuruddin Farah, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, comprising the following novels: Sweet and Sour Milk, London: Allison and Busby, 1979; Sardines, London: Allison and Busby, 1981; and Close Sesame, London: Allison and Busby, 1983.

2 Nuruddin Farah, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora, London: Cassell, 2000, pp.70-72; Nuruddin Farah, Secrets, New York: Arcade, 1998, p.243. Further references to the novel are given in parentheses in the text. Secrets is the third volume of the trilogy Blood in the Sun. The two previous volumes of the trilogy are Maps, London: Picador, 1986, and Gifts, London: Serif, 1992.

3 Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine, “How Can We Talk of Democracy?: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah”, in Derek Wright, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002, pp. 43-4.

4 Nuruddin Farah. Interview in Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasen-brock, eds, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992, p. 59.

5 Alden and Tremaine, “How Can We Talk of Democracy?”, pp. 30-31.

6 Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine, “Reinventing Family in the Second Trilogy of Nuruddin Farah”, World Literature Today, 72, 4 (1998), 766.

7 Jacqueline Bardolph, “Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah’s Two Trilogies”, World Literature Today, 72, 4 (1998), 731.

8 This point has been noted in Said S. Samatar, “Are There Secrets in Secrets?”, Research in African Literatures, 31, 1 (2000), 142.

9 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators, New York: OUP, 1967, p. 171.

10 Alden and Tremaine, “How Can We Talk of Democracy?”, p. 29.

11 Michael Eldridge, “Out of the Closet”, World Literature Today, 72, 4 (1998), 771.

12 Readings along the following and similar lines can be found in these reviews and essays: Sheila Farr, review of Secrets, Seattle Times, 24 May 1998, p. M2; Scott Malcolmson, “Family Plot”, New Yorker, 15 June 1998, pp. 78-9; David Rathbun, “Telling ‘Secrets’ ”, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 5 July 1998, p. 14F; Ousseina Alidou and Alamin Mazrui, “Secrets: Farah’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ ”, Research in African Literatures, 31, 1 (2000), 122-8; Francis Ngaboh-Smart, “Secrets and a New Civic Consciousness”, Research in African Literatures, 31, 1 (2000), 129-36; Alamin Mazrui, “Secrets: The Somali Dispersal and Reinvented Identities” in Derek Wright, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002, pp. 615-36, 661-78.

13 The sex scenes in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?, New York: Doubleday, 1972, are equally graphic, but laden with symbolic resonances.

14 See Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine, Nuruddin Farah, New York: Twayne, 1999, p. 74; Ngaboh-Smart, “Secrets and a New Civic Consciousness”, 130; and Mazrui, “Secrets: The Somali Dispersal and Reinvented Identities”, p. 620.

15 Eldridge, “Out of the Closet”, 770.

16 Alden and Tremaine, “How Can We Talk of Democracy?, pp. 27-9.

17 Readings along these and similar lines can be found in Stephen Gray, “Family Secrets”, Worldview, 12, 1 (1998), 86-9; Alidou and Mazrui, “Secrets: Farah’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ ”; Ngaboh-Smart, “Secrets and a New Civic Consciousness”; and Mazrui, “Secrets: The Somali Dispersal and Reinvented Identities”.

18 Ngaboh-Smart, “Secrets and a New Civic Consciousness”, 132.

Private and Public Secrets: Family and State in Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets

Abstract