Cristina Ali Farah. Little Mother.
Shook, David
Cristina Ali Farah. Little Mother. Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi &
Victoria Offredi Poletto, tr. Bloomington. Indiana University Press.
2011. 264 pages. $22.95. ISBN 978-0-253-22296-1
Cristina Ali Farah, born of a Somali father and an Italian
mother, spent her early years in Mogadishu, Somalia, with occasional
visits to family in Italy. Having fled the country as a teenager because
of the civil war, she eventually settled in Rome. Though she writes in
Italian, her prose is obviously colored by the African oral tradition,
and includes frequent refrains from popular poets like Cabdulqaadir
Xirsi Siyaad and Maxamud Cabdullahi Ciise.
The novel is divided into chapters narrated by a wide range of
interconnected Somali narrators, including the book's namesake
little mother--the calque translation of the Somali term for
"aunt." The story is a contemporary Somali one, focusing on
the friendship between two cousins, Barni and Dominica Axad, both exiled
in Rome. The nonchronological narrative begins in their 1970s childhood
and continues into the present day, when the biracial Axad gives birth
to a child conceived with another exiled Somali she knew in childhood.
All narrators use conversation to tell their stories. Some speak to
vague listeners, as in the first chapter of the book, in which a young
Axad details her daily life with childish enthusiasm, and others to
better-defined listeners, like Barni's chapter in one-sided
dialogue with a reporter. The intentional one-sidedness generates a
repetitive, overlapping collection of narratives--in Axad's own
words, "a tangled mass" of experience and memory.
Ali Farah's experience as a poet is obvious, as the
conversational narrative is liberally peppered with dense imagery, which
often ends narrative sections by evoking the book's larger themes.
This section, from the first chapter, does just that: "One day mom
slips the two pounds of sugar in her white cloth bag ... then she takes
a photograph of me on her red Vespa with my schoolbag slung across my
shoulder. Perhaps the sugar got into the film, because we ended up with
a photo of me smiling surrounded by giant shapes of trapped
ants."
Ali Farah's translators have decided to leave certain
expressions in italicized Somali, with a glossary provided at the end of
the book. Though that decision often emphasizes the foreignness of a
text without expanding its linguistic range, here it is employed
strategically, with a special focus on words coined during the Italian
colonialization of Somalia. The translators frequently replicate the
subject-less sentence structure of Italian, which, in turn, enables them
to replicate the conversational tone of the novel to great effect.
Little Mother is a complicated book, with its glossary and index
of major characters, but a worthwhile one, a striated thread in
"that tangled mass" that is the Somali diaspora
experience.
David Shook
Los Angeles
