Farah Bakaari is a scholar of 20th and 21st century African literature. She joins Berkeley English after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, questions of comparison, political theory and the novel as well as the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Bakaari's writing has appeared in Journal for the African Literatures Association, Representations, Diacritics, Global Networks, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry as well as popular outlets, like Africa is a Country, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Geeska. She serves on the Executive Council of the African Literature Association and is a member of the UC Berkeley Editorial Advisory Board of Critical Times. She has previously served on the editorial board of Diacritics. She is a founding member and an editor-in-chief of the digital little magazine Mid Theory Collective. Bakaari was born and raised in Somaliland.
Welcome to UC Berkeley English! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your research, and what drew you to the field and/or UC Berkeley?
Thank you, Dana! I am delighted to be here. I was born and raised in East Africa. I start here, in the proverbial beginning to say, if it weren’t obvious already, that my becoming a scholar of African literatures is an aberration of sorts, an accident really! I began learning the English language in high school when I entered the American schooling system (though I wasn’t yet living in the U.S.), and from that point on my education included almost no study of African literatures or arts. As far as I can recall, I was formally assigned a total of two African novels in my entire educational career. In college I wanted to be a political economist. In my African politics class, the professor gave us an extra credit assignment where we could write a book report on an African novel. I picked Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born because it was short, and I was always short on time. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember the feeling, which was nothing short of spellbound. I continued to think about that novel. I knew I did not understand it, but also that understanding it better was the key to many other questions I had about the history of the novel, about postcolonial theory, about politics of time, about my life and the place I grew up in. Fast forward to several years later, I began graduate school, where I found myself returning to Armah’s novel in one of my first-year graduate seminars. After the semester ended, I continued to think about it. And when the time came for me to declare my subfield specialization, I happened to be working on article version of that seminar paper, so I said I would do African literature because by then I had many more questions. This is all to say, sometimes your life takes an entirely different path than planned because at 20 you read a 183-page novel for extra credit, and you realize you want to spend a decade thinking about it.
I am delighted to join Berkeley English and to be arriving on campus around the same time as a cohort of other junior scholars working in the African humanities. I look forward to meeting them all, learning about their work, and finding ways to collaborate across fields. It is an exciting time for African humanities at Berkeley!
I saw you’re teaching a course called “The African City” this semester. What excites you about teaching this course and how has it been so far?
Yes, I am teaching English 90, which I understand is where the seminar sequence in the English major begins. It is a class designed around close reading, which is really exciting because I have been thinking and writing a lot about close reading lately. The course takes up the African city as a site where class, gender, sexuality as well as national and regional identities are re-negotiated and imagined anew. African cities are dynamic complex sites – sites of extreme contradictions and rapid growth as well as rampant inequality – so the class pays special attention to the creative modes of world- and self-makings that African urbanites employ to make sense of their experiences. We just started reading Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole which follows a Nigerian-American’s brief visit to his hometown of Lagos after living in New York City for 15 years. Over the course of the semester we will read works that explore other African metropolises, including Cape Town, Accra, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Cairo. The students are outstanding! I have been telling everyone I run into that Berkeley undergrads are unlike any other undergrads I have encountered. I am so impressed by their curiosity, hard work, and eagerness to learn and push themselves.
I was fascinated by your article in Representations, “Qabyo: Anticolonial Temporality and the Poetics of Ruination,” and how you reframe the discussion of metaphors that Somali poets have used (from Maandeeq to Qabyo) to conceive of “the anxieties of independence and the founding paradoxes of the Somali state." Is a “poetics of qabyo,” or more broadly these kinds of relationships between metaphor and state foundation, something you’re still engaged with in your research?
Yes, I’d say the relationship between aesthetics and politics is something that is at the heart of all my work, and so are questions about time. The Representations essay, which came out of a symposium held at Berkeley in the fall of 2022 was interested in how twentieth century Somali poets were thinking about the anticolonial project. I was particularly interested in how the anxiety of independence and the disillusionment of its aftermath were themselves wrapped up in questions about form. What is the appropriate form with which to tell the story of the African postcolonial state? In my current book project, which is focused on African historical novels of the last decade or so, we see that this question has not only endured but gained renewed urgency. The novels I am looking at betray similar kinds of anxiety about and a desire for form with which to interpret, transmit, and/or recover a sense of the historical and in turn offer new metaphors for the duress of the present. And so, the poetics of ruination or qabyo remains central to this project, but I move away from the ruins of revolution and towards the political imaginations of the those who find themselves as its heir and must learn to live in the ruins.
What do you enjoy when not immersed in academia/campus life? Anything you’re particularly excited about exploring in the Bay Area?
I am a rather mediocre runner and hiker. I love walking and generally enjoy being outside in nature, so I look forward to exploring the outdoors more. I am also an amateur baker, though I haven’t been able to do much of that since moving here. I love theatre and jazz, and I’m really excited that finally I live somewhere where I can easily attend live performances. Last month, I saw an excellent production of Every Brilliant Thing at Oaks Theatre. I look forward to learning more about Bay Area theatre scene!
Are there any projects you’re working on that you’d like to share with the UC Berkeley community?
I am working on a monograph, tentatively titled Ruinous Time and Historical Imagination in Contemporary African Literature, which takes up the historical turn in the contemporary African novel. I am also working on a few other things. It is exciting to be teaching English 90 because I am thinking quite a bit about close reading these days. I am finishing up writing an essay on evaluating close reading for a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly. I am working on two pieces on Abdulrazak Gurnah: one is on the relationship between free indirect discourse and nascent sovereignty and the other is about men and masculinity in Gurnah’s novels. When I am not writing, I am often editing. I am a founding member and the editor-in-chief of the almost one-year-old digital little magazine Mid Theory Collective.