Mogadishu as lost modern: In conversation with A Naked needle. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. Somali Italian poet and novelist. She writes full-time and has published two novels, Madre piccola and II comandante del fiume. Email: crisubax gmail. I met Nuruddin Farah for the first time in Rome: a city to which I had only recently moved. At the time I was only a student and the thought of becoming a writer had not yet even occurred to me.
I am, for this reason, convinced that it was this first meeting with him and my passionate reading of all of his books that sparked an uncontain-able inward desire to investigate, through literature, the tragedy that had befallen Somalia. Nuruddin chose not to leave the African continent; he chose, for many years, not to renounce his Somali passport courageously facing the never-ending interrogations, risks and humiliations faced by his countrymen at every border and transit point.
My first novel began to take shape in response to a question that is posed by Nuruddin in Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. In his non-fiction book the obvious protagonist of the piece is the present: the point where the past converges with the foundations of the future. The present is represented in the title of the work by a comma: time in the balance; indefinite. Perhaps it is in the present that we might find the key to unlock the vicious circle in which Somalis and everyone who has had anything to do with them especially Italy, the former colonial overlords of Southern Somalia now find themselves entrapped.
The present invites us to take responsibility for our actions and stop trying to pin the blame on others. My novel, Madre piccola is a story centred on the diaspora in which three narrative voices are intertwined.
Each narrative voice tells its own story twice, once to an interlocutor from a shared cultural context and once to an interlocutor external to its cultural context.
