Oceanic Kinship and Coastal Ecologies: More-than-Human Encounters in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s "A Dhow Crosses the Sea"

Abstract

This article examines the representation of Somalia’s coast and its ecological crisis in a recent short story by the Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, “A Dhow Crosses the Sea.” Here, imaginaries of the ocean and the coast are activated as a major domain of struggle between the fraught and fractured nation state of Somalia, its deep historical entanglements in the Indian Ocean and on the Horn of Africa, and its colonial and migratory pasts and presents. With its pronounced focus on cross-oceanic kinship networks and affective, communal ties, I argue that “A Dhow Crosses the Sea” can be read as a plea for a precariously balanced kinship, as an account of the inextricable link between humanity and non-human actors which in Ali Farah’s short story become increasingly interrelated and interdependent. By connecting contemporary ecological vulnerabilities to colonial legacies and by bringing to light how the failing ecosystem of Somalia’s coast is contingent on the country’s deep historical entanglements with other nations, the multi-modal text of “A Dhow Crosses the Sea” mobilises a narrative of precarious and contingent ecological solidarity that takes into account not only simple one-way routes from Somalia to Italy, but instead a global web of criss-crossed relations between humans, animals and nature.