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Inward Mapping as a Socio-Political Engagement: Nuruddin Farah's <Blood in the Sun> Trilogy

Nuruddin Farah's <Blood in the Sun> trilogy, made up of Maps(1986), Gifts(1992), and Secrets(1998), provides us with the narrator's inward mapping of outer world. The epigraph from Socrates m Maps-"Living begins when you start doubting everything that came before you"-epitomizes the cognitive reflection of narrators throughout the trilogy. Setting Farah's novels away from other modernist occasions in the contemporary African literature, the meditative inwardness takes a noteworthy and unique stand as a means to register the ravaged reality of Somalia and to convey the fiery indictment of the cause and effect of its devastation. The narrators as primary characters do not withdraw from their self-defined identity, that is, personal authenticity, but strive for their own engaged surplus in contemplative mapping, gift exchange, and safe-guarded secrets in each novel of the trilogy. These personal ruminations allow the narrators to come to terms with Somalia's harsh landscape of reality beyond their comprehension and control, and to proceed to a re-articulation of the grounds for a possible individualized negotiation with the socio-political conditions. The last reflective inquiry of the trilogy calls for the meaning of the blood to be realigned with interpretative mediation rather than tribal and national ethos. This line of personal and metaphoric endeavor serves as a positive confrontation between the inner authenticity and the sturdy realities. Differentiated par excellence from the Modernist Western literature of disillusionment, Farah's literary engagement in claims of both the inner and outer world has yet room for a further examination for its genuine resonance and potency amid socio-political disarrangements.