Desire under the tribe in Nuruddin Farah’s A Naked Needle and Ken N. Kamoche’s “Secondhand Wife”

Abstract

This paper will address the notion of desire in Ken N. Kamoche’s “Secondhand Wife” and Nuruddin Farah’s A Naked Needle; it will be centered on the idea of men’s and women’s sexual desire as caught between being controlled and willing to be free. Desire will be studied as being controlled by the tribe in Kenya and Somalia, which channels men’s and women’s desire into pre-made forms. These channels of desire approved by the tribe are contested in Kenya and Somalia by both men and women. Desire is then situated between collective manipulation and individual freedom. On the one hand, desire will be linked to the idea of power relations that is desire as a tool to establish and support the power of the tribe. Desire is no longer a matter of natural instinct and feeling but that of a constructed dialectic of power. On the other hand, desire under the tribe is also about a refusal of the tribal control of desire and a yearn for liberating desire, which manifests itself in different manners such as the refusal of restrictions on marriage with non-Muslims in Somalia, the rejection of arranged marriage for both men and women, or prostitution as the body avenging itself through itself.