A Naked Needle (1976) by Nuruddin Farah: one day in revolutionary Mogadishu

The book

A Naked Needle is the second English-language novel by Nuruddin Farah, after From a Crooked Rib. It was published by Heinemann in July 1976 as number 184 of the African Writers Series, at a launch at the Africa Centre in London (Wikipedia). It is the only one of his novels that he wrote while living in Somalia.

How it was written

Farah came back to Somalia in 1969 from India, where he had studied philosophy and literature at Panjab University. The coup of October 1969 brought Mohamed Siad Barre to power at the head of a military government that declared itself socialist. Farah at first supported it, but by 1971 he was questioning whether the revolution was working. James Currey accepted the manuscript for the African Writers Series in 1972. The publisher's readers found the first draft too obscure, and it went through several rewrites over three years (Wikipedia). The period is described on The Siad Barre era, 1969 to 1991.

The story

The novel takes place over a single day in Mogadishu. Koschin, a teacher who studied in England and a passionate believer in the 1969 revolution, is waiting for the arrival of Nancy, a woman he met in London who has agreed to marry him. His superiors at the university do not share his faith in the revolution, and rather than compromise he resigns. Through conversations with friends who have already married foreign wives, he wonders how Nancy will fit into Somali society. He wanders the city, and the book names and describes many of its districts and streets (Wikipedia). Koschin tries to keep himself free of social, political and personal obligations (Encyclopedia.com). See Mogadishu.

Themes and critics

Farah wrote it, according to accounts of its making, as a response to the misuse of power he saw around him and to the need for national unity. Farah questions the revolution without denouncing it: Koschin weighs its good and bad sides and takes a "wait and see" stance, which sets the book apart from Farah's later novels that oppose the Barre government more directly. Critics have compared Koschin to Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's early novel, because of his long intellectual debates; Farah had written a thesis on Joyce (Wikipedia).

The literary scholar Simon Gikandi reads Koschin's loneliness and detachment as a kind of opposition. He points to Koschin's refuge in books and art, the novel's references to the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, and stories within the book of state violence told by its victims (Encyclopedia.com). In The Guardian in July 1976, Jonty Driver called it "a witty, wordy, hilarious celebration of a modern African dilemma". Farah said in a 2019 interview that the novel preserves the Mogadishu of its time, so readers can see which streets had which names and what they looked like (Wikipedia).

What it meant for its author

By 1976 Farah was studying theatre in Britain. When he telephoned his brother from Rome on his way home, he was told it was not safe to return because of the novel. He was warned he would be jailed, and he remained outside Somalia until 1996 (Wikipedia; Encyclopedia.com). His next novel, Sweet and Sour Milk, was written in exile.