“In these unsettling times,” Nuruddin Farah writes, “Everyone’s fate, actions, dreams, hates, and aspirations were seen, understood, and interpreted in stark political contexts; distrust was the order of the day, and everyone was suspicious of everybody else…. In a civil war, there were no progressives and no reactionaries; everyone was a victim, seldom a culprit.”

In Links, Farah’s novel of a Somali man who returns to his homeland after spending 20 years in exile, American readers find a vivid portrait of a situation of which most of us know strikingly little. Outside of seeing Black Hawk Down and reading news reports of the horrendous violence that followed the collapse of its long-standing dictator in 1991, we have not had to think about Somalia in quite some time. We haven’t had to imagine life in a country where there has been no government for 15 years, where anarchy really is the rule of the day. We haven’t had to picture all the innocents whose daily activities take place amidst the crossfire of warring clans. We haven’t had to empathize with the thirst for blood the follows the horrendous murder of a loved one. We haven’t had to feel ourselves being pulled into the cycle of violence, with death begetting death, begetting death. Sitting comfortably in our luxurious homes, we Americans haven’t had to face the stark realities of life in the land of Somalia.

And having been exiled in New York City for 20 years, Farah’s protagonist, Jebleeh, hasn’t had to face it either. But then a Somali-driven taxi cab almost kills him, and with death on his mind, he knows that it’s time to return home. Ostensibly, his purpose is to find the lowly grave of his mother and rebury her in the kind of tomb she deserves, but he also hopes to find the recently-abducted niece of his best friend, a little girl who all of Mogadiscio considers to be a miracle child: “people believe that anyone in her proximty is safe from the harms of the civil war…She is seen as a symbol of peace.”

The book begins with Jeebleh landing at the airport, and it follows him as he learns how much the city of his youth has changed. From the young teenagers carrying machine guns, to the battle-wagons that serve as taxis for VIPs, to the crowd that merely watches a boy beat a pregnant dog with a stick, everywhere Jeebleh looks, he sees something that tells him that the people of Somalia had “the inability to remain in touch with their inner selves or to remember who they were before the slaughter began.”

Farah does a wonderful job of describing what life must be like in Mogadiscio today. It is a violent world, where everyone is guilty by association. At one point, Jeebleh’s ancestral clan tries to get money from him so that they can buy more guns and protect themselves, but he turns them down. Later that night, the son of one of the clan elders is killed by a security guard while waiting in secret for Jeebleh, whom the boy was preparing to assasinate.

“Will there be other deaths because of this?” Jeebleh asked.
“That can’t be helped!”

Later in the book, Farah writes, “No one living in a country in which a civil war is raging is deemed to be innocent. Here in Somalia too everyone is potentially guilty, and be accused unfairly of crimes they’ve committed only by association. If you are a member of the same clan family as a perpetrator of a crime, then you’re guilty, aren’t you?”

I only had one issue with the book: Farah is not a subtle writer. Everything is telegraphed onto the page. Remember the abducted little girl and the line about her being a symbol of peace? The line I quoted is near the end of the book, but from the very first pages, it is clear that the character is little more than a symbol for the peace that the clans have for so long robbed from Somalia. The only surpises Farah leaves for the reader are when he fails to understand when his writing has achieved some sort of momentum, so instead of letting the book flow, the reader is all of a sudden jarred by an out-of-place description of a book on a shelf or a strange, seemingly non-sequential turn in a conversation.

From the get-go, I didn’t care at all about the characters, from the main character, Jeebleh, to the abducted girl, Raasta; from the grieving mother, Shanta, to the wicked step-brother, Caloosha; from the best friend, Bile, to the lost father, Faahiye. I didn’t even care about the Irishman-in-exile, Seamus, who does the yeoman’s work of describing Somalia from the inside as an outsider (ever the Irishman).

But that isn’t to say that Links is a bad book. Because we know so little about Somalia, because we understand so little about living under anarchy, because we can imagine so little about an epidemic of violent death in our streets, Links is a valuable book. Farah starts each section with a selection from Dante’s Inferno, and it is a fitting choice for this modern description of life in hell. As the second selection for the Nearing Mactan book club, it is exactly what I hoped it would be: a portrait of a world that lays beyond the borders of my reality.