From a Crooked Rib (1970): Nuruddin Farah's first novel

The book

From a Crooked Rib is the first novel by Nuruddin Farah. It was published in November 1970 by Heinemann as number 80 in its African Writers Series (From a Crooked Rib, Wikipedia). Farah wrote it in about six weeks in 1968 while he was a student in India; it was accepted in August 1969 and he rewrote much of it at proof stage (Wikipedia).

The story

Ebla, a young woman in a nomad family in the Ogaden, runs away when her grandfather promises her to an old man in return for camels. She stays with a cousin in a town, who plans to marry her to a broker, so she runs again, to Mogadishu, with a young man named Awill. When she learns Awill is unfaithful, she takes a second husband, who treats her as a paid woman. She comes to the view that women are treated like cattle in the countryside and in the city alike, and decides to act for herself. The novel ends with Ebla pregnant and unsure who the father is (Wikipedia).

How it has been read

Farah described the novel as being about "male oppression of women and women's struggle against this domination" (Wikipedia). Critics have also read Ebla's story as an allegory of Somalia's colonial history and its nationalist politics (Wikipedia).

Reception has been mixed. Some critics called Farah a "rarity in African literature" for his portrayal of women; the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta questioned whether a man could write a woman's view so convincingly; and Elsa Dixler, in the New York Times in 2006, called it "a young writer's novel" with an "intermittently shaky point of view" (Wikipedia).

Ban and translations

In 1972 the Somali government banned the book after a dispute with the censorship board, and the ban lasted many years (Wikipedia). It has been translated into Slovene (1978), French (Née de la côte d'Adam, 1987), German (1994), Swedish (2009) and Somali, as Feedh Qalloocan, translated by Abdisalam Hereri (2016) (Wikipedia).

Where to read it

• Lending copy: Internet Archive
• In a library: WorldCat

Related pages

• Nuruddin Farah
• Somali authors and their books