An understated Somali tells his country’s story

What most Americans know about Somalia can be summed up in three words: “Black Hawk Down.” But thrilling as Mark Bowden’s book and Ridley Scott’s movie were, they didn’t tell us much about life in that African nation before or after the ill-fated U.S. incursion in 1992-93 to assist famine relief efforts. What remains with us is an image of battle disconcertingly like the one in the movie “Zulu”: a few brave, disciplined Western soldiers holding off dark-skinned hordes whose screaming and gesticulating offer little clue to their thoughts and feelings.

Bowden’s book did incorporate some Somali points of view, but little of this survived the translation to film, except for a memorable scene in which a dazed old man walks through the carnage carrying a dead boy in his arms. It was left for Nuruddin Farah, the dean of Somali novelists, to remedy our ignorance, which he attempts to do in “Links,” a story that is restrained to a fault and as nuanced as Scott’s movie was explosive.

Farah’s protagonist, Jeebleh, was a political prisoner in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, under the rule of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-91), but for years he has lived in New York with his wife and children. He’s a professor -- a Dante scholar; fitting quotations from the “Inferno” preface the chapters. Though “known for his tough stances and rational behavior,” he’s a gentle soul, unprepared for the violence and chaos he finds in Mogadishu when he returns soon after the Americans have pulled out.

Jeebleh feels guilty about having left his mother in Somalia and now wants to find her grave. Then other tasks present themselves. Somebody has kidnapped his niece Raasta, a “wonder child” whose precocious calm has comforted refugees in a safe zone run by two old friends who studied with Jeebleh in Italy: Bile, a doctor, and Seamus, an Irish worker for international aid agencies. The safe zone is in south Mogadishu, separated by clan warfare from the north side, where Caloosha, a man who tormented Bile and Jeebleh as children and probably had them jailed under the dictator, flourishes as a “security consultant” to one of the two warlords who rule Mogadishu.

Jeebleh vows to find Raasta and her playmate, Makka, who has Down’s syndrome. And maybe he should take revenge on Caloosha. But whom should he trust to help? Trust, he discovers, is in shorter supply in Mogadishu than food or undamaged buildings. An obliging funeral director, Af-Laawe, meets him at the airport, though Jeebleh hasn’t told anyone he is coming. He lands just in time to see giggling, qat-chewing militiamen kill a 10-year-old boy for target practice. Af-Laawe installs Jeebleh in a hotel in north Mogadishu, where most members of his clan live -- but before long an intruder is found slain in his room. Jeebleh hears an ugly rumor about Af-Laawe: The mortician, who claims to bury the city’s unclaimed dead for religious reasons, is harvesting their organs for sale overseas.

Jeebleh visits Caloosha and gets an unconvincing promise of help in recovering the kidnapped children. But every move he makes seems to offend somebody and put him in danger. He rejects an appeal from clan elders for money to repair the militia “battlewagons” and intervenes when he sees a warlord’s son torturing a pregnant dog (after which a “muscleman” injects Jeebleh with a disorienting drug). Finally he moves to south Mogadishu for a joyful reunion with Bile and Seamus, only to find even their friendship corroded by the suspicions arising from civil war.

The heart of Farah’s novel is, surprisingly, talk: a series of long and intricate discussions in which the three men, Raasta’s mother, Shanta, and others confront the collapse of Somali society, the loss of humane values and the chances, if any, of reclaiming them. The men, of course, are atypical, cosmopolitan and educated; they quote W.B. Yeats and Thomas Jefferson. Even the slippery Af-Laawe has interesting things to say, as does the driver of a militia truck on which Jeebleh hitches a ride.

“I must apologize for the behavior of our countrymen,” the driver tells Jeebleh, “who do not know what is good for them, or how to say thank you to those who mean them well. Our moods swing from one extreme to another, but we haven’t the courage to admit that we’ve strayed from the course of moral behavior.”

No, intelligence isn’t lacking, nor insight, but Jeebleh finds that civil war has pulverized Somalia down to the family level, fracturing relations between husbands and wives. It’s to sidestep these more delicate and painful matters that he and his friends discuss the U.S. intervention. They conclude, as “Black Hawk Down” did, that American soldiers fought well, but they add that U.S. leaders “saw everything in black and white, had no understanding of or respect for other cultures.... They were also let down by their intelligence services, arriving everywhere unprepared.”

Seamus’ view is even harsher: “They came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia, in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf.... Iraq and Somalia had one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows. Christ, they were uppity, but they never lost their focus -- the prime-time performance.”

On and on the talk goes, until “Links” seems becalmed and we’re in danger of missing the things that do happen: the slow reknitting of relationships, the easing of paranoia, the beginnings of an effort to rescue Raasta, an effort that eventually finds Jeebleh in the most unprofessorial position of dickering to hire an assassin.

Farah, whose previous novels include “Maps,” “Gifts” and “Secrets,” has written a deliberate anti-thriller here. Much that we expect -- shootouts, false leads, multiplying difficulties -- fails to appear. Instead, he keeps us off balance with his formal but idiosyncratic English, his startling metaphors. (Farah began his literary career before Somali became a written language in 1972.) The talk, the soft, seemingly futile resistance of words to bullets, is what counts. Language is at the core of Jeebleh’s problem, too. Should Jeebleh think of himself in terms of the American “I” or the Somali “we”? Should he consider Somalis “we” or “they”? What about enemies like Caloosha? Can he meddle in the affairs of the country of his birth without being sucked once again into the quicksand of its troubles? *