Links By Nuruffin Farah Sparknotes

I just finish reading the novel Links by Nuruffin Farah, and it is an intriguing story. The characters and incidences in this book are depicted vividly by Farah and at times, I began to believe that they were more than just fictions. I know that Links is a work of fiction that is set against the backdrop of actual events; however, the situations described in the book were very realistic. While reading this novel, the main character Jeebleh took on the role of a liaison between myself and the political crisis of Mogadishu (referred to as Mogadiscio in the novel) that dominates the narrative. The journey that Farah takes the reader on in his story is one that creates links between the individual and the artistic determination as well as links between the novel and the nation state. The nation state of Somalia acts as a political determination of individualism while the novel takes on the role of a medium that is used to symbolically represent the current social and political concerns of the nation state.
The lived experiences of Jeebleh’s life in the streets of the city and the circumstances he faced in the unsettling times brought up old memories from my past experiences of living in different cities in Nigeria. Links does a wonderful job at tracking Somalia’s history in the 19th and 20th centuries. I especially like how Farah employs Jeebleh as a device to describe the history of Mogadishu. For example, when Jeebleh recalls at one point how many times the land had been invaded, conquered, and colonized, it seems to me like that the facts being stated are from actual events that took place in the history of