Dionysius’ Ear: Nuruddin Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk

Abstract

Nuruddin Farahs Sweet and Sour Milk responds to the inverted order of African dictatorship. For where the nineteenth-century novelist observed social life, the Somali intellectual is observed by the postcolonial state. Farah elaborates a literary form that seeks to map this inversion: his characters are beleaguered social scientists and dissident intellectuals who seek a social knowledge hidden by the state. Sweet and Sour Milk embraces a modernist experimentalism, not to valorize the erosion of knowledge, but to critique the absence of hard facts and sociological data. Farah reinvents realism for the African novel, pugnaciously mapping what the dictatorship would conceal.