Love in a State of Fear: Reflections on Intimate Relations in Nuruddin Farah's Dictatorship Novels

Abstract

Romantic love, shot through with passion and the erotic, has extremely rarely been the focus of the study of African oral traditions or a theme considered in African literature criticism. This situation prevails despite the fact that love is a powerful catalyst in most oratures and literatures in both indigenous and European languages from the period of their origins. This lacuna in scholarship is partially addressed through foregrounding the love which seems to be a ubiquitous but erased presence in African novels through an analysis of the dictatorship novels of Nuruddin Farah. The novels studied are Sardines (1981), Close Sesame (1983) and Gifts (1992). Farah’s novels foreground a number of dominant ideas about love but also unique conceptions about intimate relationships in the context of an authoritarian postcolonial state where the dictator himself demands a form of love and love itself holds the threat of becoming a form of dictatorship