Awash with SIM cards and zealots, AK47s and thousands of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Somalia has seen fierce gunfights and horrifying bomb blasts — leaving wrecked metal, twisted flesh and broken dreams in their wake.

In his latest novel, Crossbones, Nuruddin Farah, the famous Somali novelist, evokes the fear, desperation and despondency that stalks the fragmented country — a place even good people are unable to steer away from self-destruction.

In his memoir Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie narrates a heartwarming moment when he approached Farah for counsel. Rushdie wanted advice on how to depict a country lost to him (Rushdie was on the run, in self-exile from his native India, and was probably afraid he would forget the land of his birth).

“I keep it here,” Nuruddin Farah said, pointing to his heart.

True to his word, Farah the novelist, dividing his time in exile between the US and South Africa has written 11 novels, all set in Somali-speaking lands and the novelist says he does so to “keep my country alive by writing about it.”

He says that when he left his beloved Somalia for exile, “The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby. It became the neurosis from which I write.”

Farah has carried Somalia in his heart — rotten sometimes but still beloved.

“A crooked stick will have a crooked shadow,” says an old proverb. When writing about Somalia, Farah usually writes about an imperfect country driven by relentless violence, sometimes in a pained if not tearful voice. Crossbones is the last instalment of a trilogy aptly entitled Past Imperfect. The trilogy is set in the civil war that erupts when Somali strongman Siad Barre is ousted.

The other two titles in the trilogy are Links (2004) about the battle between Somali insurgents and the US Marines, and Knots (2007) in which a Canadian-Somali actress arrives in Somalia as the warlords have been “vanquished by bearded men in white robes.”

Links was obviously inspired by events on October 3, 1993, when 120 US soldiers were dropped into the heart of Mogadishu. They were in a mission to kidnap the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, who had been killing United Nations workers.

Two of the US Black Hawk helicopters used for the mission were shot down. Surrounded by hundreds of Somali militia, the American troops were besieged. In the fight that ensued, 18 Americans were killed, 70 were wounded and 3,000 Somalis were either dead or wounded.

Crossbones focuses on the rise of Islamists at a time when Somali piracy was at its peak. The book is set in Somalia at the time of the rise of Al Shabaab, the Islamic militant group affiliated to Al Qaeda. Crossbones has fictionalised the Al Shabaab with it brand of extremism.

Crossbones is a story of loss, and lives blighted by war. The narrative centres on the lives of two brothers — Malik and Ahl. Born in the West, Malik travels to Somalia as a freelance journalist to write about the ongoing civil war.

As a journalist, Malik probably knows of the news adage, “if it bleeds, it leads” and most Americans and Europeans like hearing about the “bloody wars in Africa” that will sell newspapers and improve TV ratings. Malik’s elder brother, Ahl, makes a journey to Puntland in search of his lost stepson, who is believed to have joined the Islamic militants.

Farah has a talent for shedding light on dark places. In Crossbones, shootings are sudden, sometimes with no good cause, probably because that is how things really are in Somalia.

It’s a volatile place as a narrator describes it. “In Somalia, crowds form quickly, maybe because people are hungry in many ways: Hungry for news, good or bad; hungry and also hopeful that they stand to gain by standing close to where something is happening, to where two people are talking. But crowds change into mobs at the sound of a clarion call.”

Farah is brutal in his prose. “What a dastardly city!” one character cries, upon hearing bad news, “What an accursed country!”
Somalia, as depicted by Farah in Crossbones, is a place of grief. Farah is not alone in this depiction, though.

In his book, The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia, James Fergusson argues that the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Shabaab turned the country into “a zone of total grief.” As if that were not enough, that grief did not stay at home — it has been exported to neighbouring countries. Kenya has borne the brunt of terror-related activities linked to Al Shabaab.

Farah, in all his 11 novels, cannot be accused of being optimistic about Somalia; his only saving grace is that he writes about an enduring people. Bad things happen in the troubled country, but Somalis struggle on, sometimes unbowed. With Amisom forces and Kenya Defence Forces pacifying huge swathes of Somalia and neutralising the insurgents, maybe Somalia’s narrative of “the most dangerous place on earth” will change.

Before that happens, however, Farah and other Somalis should remember the words of Lou Holtz, “It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it.” There has been a lot of grief in Somalia, but as the Nigerians say, “No condition is permanent.”

The writer is the CEO, Phoenix Publishers.

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